Robert Smithson worked at two scales at once. Out in the desert he moved tonnes of rock; in the gallery he showed maps, photostats, mirrors and boxes of gravel that pointed back to those distant places. The gap between the two, which he called site and nonsite, is the most useful idea he left to designers. Every wayfinding system, exhibition and infographic faces the same problem: how do you represent somewhere the viewer is not standing?
A note on images: none of the Robert Smithson works held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art is flagged public domain, so this guide describes his work in text only. For historic maps and prints cleared for reuse, browse the museum maps collection in the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Robert Smithson?
Britannica records that Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey, on 2 January 1938, and describes him as an American sculptor and writer associated with land art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection records give the same birthplace and record his death in 1973 at Amarillo, Texas. According to Britannica, he died on 20 July 1973, aged 35, in a plane crash while surveying the site for Amarillo Ramp, which was completed after his death by his wife, the artist Nancy Holt, with Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi.
His career lasted barely a decade, moving from drawing to mirrored sculpture, essays, earthworks and film.
A career in key works
- Demons and Angels (1962). A pen-and-ink drawing in the Art Institute of Chicago from his early, figurative period.
- Mirrored and crystalline sculpture (1965–67). The Met holds Three Mirror Vortex (1965, stainless steel and three mirrors) and Mirrored Ziggurat (1966). The Art Institute of Chicago holds Discontinuous Aggregates (1966), a run of stainless-steel units painted with aluminium paint, about 27 feet long in total.
- Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica (1966). A photostat at the Met, an early sign of his interest in maps and remote sites.
- “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967). A photo-essay published in Artforum in December 1967, according to the Holt/Smithson Foundation and the scholarly literature. It presents ordinary infrastructure in his home town as “monuments”; the photographs are held by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo.
- A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968). Painted wooden bins of limestone, with gelatin silver prints and typescript, now in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which has owned it since 1979, according to the Holt/Smithson Foundation.
- Mirror displacements (1969). The Art Institute of Chicago’s Chalk-Mirror Displacement sets double-sided mirrors like spokes in a chalk pile about 10 feet across. The Met holds photographic records of outdoor versions, including For Bern Snow—Mirror Displacements for the Alps and Untitled (Zig-Zag Mirror Displacement), as well as Island of Coal.
- Asphalt Rundown (1969). A truckload of asphalt poured down the slope of a quarry outside Rome in October 1969, made for his exhibition at the L’Attico gallery, according to the Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.
- Partially Buried Woodshed (1970). Made on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, which the Holt/Smithson Foundation lists as his last realised “flow” piece.
- Spiral Jetty (1970). Built in April 1970 at Rozel Point on the Great Salt Lake, Utah: a counterclockwise coil about 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide, made of black basalt, earth, salt crystals and water, according to Dia Art Foundation, the Holt/Smithson Foundation and the Getty. Dia records that the work was donated to it in 1999 by Nancy Holt and the Estate of Robert Smithson. His film of the same name, also 1970, is held as 16mm film on video by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
- Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971). Made in a sand quarry near Emmen in the Netherlands for the Sonsbeek exhibition, and now protected as a provincial monument by the Province of Drenthe, the Holt/Smithson Foundation reports.
- Late projects (1973). The Met holds Bingham Copper Mining Pit—Utah / Reclamation Project, a photostat with a plastic overlay drawn in wax pencil, and Smoke Tree Sprawl with Cactus Circle, drawn in pen on a found manila envelope.
What to look at in Robert Smithson’s work
The spiral as a total form. Spiral Jetty works from the air, from the shore and on foot. One unbroken line organises a vast setting. The same spiral returns in Spiral Hill at Emmen, paired there with a broken circle.
Site and nonsite. A Nonsite is a set: bins of real rock in the gallery, a map or aerial photograph showing where it came from, and a typed text. The Franklin piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago shows the format. Together they describe a place the viewer cannot see.
Mirrors that split and repeat. In Chalk-Mirror Displacement the mirrors divide the chalk into wedges while their reflections seem to restore the whole pile. Outdoors, mirrors laid on snow or rocks fragment the view into tiles of sky and ground.
Overlay drawing. Many of his drawings mark up maps, photostats or photographs. The Bingham reclamation project at the Met literally places a plastic sheet over a mine photograph and draws the proposal on top: a working designer’s mock-up as finished art.
Entropy and the unmonumental. The Art Institute of Chicago notes, citing the scholar Robert Hobbs, that his drawing Trailer Partially Covered with Asphalt (1970) uses what Smithson called “monumental inaction”, the idea that ordered systems drift into disorder. The Passaic essay makes the same point with humour. Decay, sediment and slow change are part of the design, not a failure of it; Spiral Jetty itself is submerged or exposed as the lake level changes.
Technique: photostat, film, text and bulldozer
Smithson treated every medium as a way of documenting or proposing a place. He drew in graphite, crayon and felt-tip pen, often on graph paper or over printed images, as the Art Institute of Chicago’s study sheets for Chalk-Mirror Displacement and Island of Stairs (both 1969) show. He used photostats, a photographic copying process, for proposals such as the Antarctica monument. He published essays and photo-essays, and he shot films, with Nancy Holt credited as cinematographer on records of Asphalt Rundown. For the earthworks, basalt, asphalt, earth or sand was placed with trucks and earth-moving equipment.
The common thread is the system: a work exists as a site, a set of documents and a text, each pointing to the others. That is close to how minimal and conceptual artists of his generation thought about instructions and series; compare our guides to Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, and to Gordon Matta-Clark, who also used buildings and sites as raw material.
How designers can borrow Robert Smithson’s ideas
- Design the nonsite. When a project is about a place, such as a tourism campaign, a museum exhibit or a property brand, pair three kinds of evidence: a physical sample or texture, a map or aerial view, and a short factual text. Let each do one job.
- Find the one line. A single spiral, ramp or curve can organise a whole layout or site plan. Try reducing a complex brief to one gesture that reads at thumbnail size and at full scale.
- Annotate, don’t just illustrate. Draw directly over maps, photographs and plans.
- Use mirroring to fragment and rebuild. Reflected and repeated slices of one photograph can create pattern without new imagery, much like his mirror displacements.
- Plan for change. Choose materials, colours and layouts that age well or are meant to weather.
For historic cartography to practise overlay drawing on, start with our guide to old maps. Smithson’s works, writings and films are in copyright, so borrow his methods, not his images.
Where to see Robert Smithson’s work
Spiral Jetty is at Rozel Point, Utah, and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation; Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is near Emmen in the Netherlands, and Amarillo Ramp is in Texas. In museums, look for his mirror works and drawings at the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, the Franklin Nonsite at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Spiral Jetty film at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Frequently asked questions
What is Robert Smithson known for?
He is known for Spiral Jetty (1970), a counterclockwise coil of basalt and earth about 1,500 feet long in the Great Salt Lake, and for gallery works called Nonsites that pair bins of rock with maps and photographs of their source.
What is a Nonsite?
It is Smithson’s term for a gallery work that represents a distant place through material taken from it, plus maps, photographs or text. A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968), at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, is one example.
Can you still visit Spiral Jetty?
Yes. It sits at Rozel Point on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah and is cared for by Dia Art Foundation. Depending on the lake level, it may be submerged or fully exposed.
Can I use Robert Smithson’s artwork in my designs?
No. He died in 1973 and his works, writings and films are in copyright. You can learn from his methods, such as site-and-nonsite pairing, overlay drawing and mirroring, and apply them to your own material.
