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Robert Smithson is well-known for his earthworks and his other artistic investigations of landscape, entropy, and time. He's remembered less well for his writings, which are also unusual and provocative. The first piece of his that I read was Strata : A Geographic Fiction, a piece which originally appeared in issue #8 of Aspen, the "multimedia magazine in a box."
I'm currently reading Smithson's Collected Writings, and was particulatly interested in an interview in which he describes his approach to his writing process.
He begins by comparing his writing to Virginia Duran's artwork Glass Strata, "very dense and kind of layered up," and goes on to clarify:
"I thought of writing more as material to sort of put together than as a kind of analytic searchlight"
"I was interested in language as a material entity ... just as printed matter—information which has a kind of physical presence for me."
"I was always interested in Borges' writings and the way he would use leftover remnants of philosophy ... kind of taking a discarded system and using it, you know, as a kind of armature ... another construction on the mires of things that have already been constructed"
Sunday, September 19, 2004
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