Originally a painter, Robert Smithson became known as a sculptor from 1964 and was seminal to the development of Land or Earth art. While Richard Serra and other sculptors of the second generation of Minimal artists were trying to avoid anything of a pictorial nature in their work, Smithson also wanted to counter the appropriation of art by museums, art historians and curators, as well as commercial galleries. He worked on projects in the ‘real’ world of mines and quarries, his Sites, and used portable elements and perhaps diagrams and photographs for his gallery or Non-site pieces (implying out-of-sight).

The juxtaposition of nature and human construction reappears in one of Smithson’s Non-site works, Rocks and mirror square II 1971. The concept is simple: four low walls of mirrors on the floor are made into a square, with rocks of basalt buttressing the sides inside and out. Such simple elements set off a number of reverberations in the contested arena of sculpture after Minimalism. These include the vacant centre of the work where the floor shows through, the square format echoing Ad Reinhardt’s famous Black paintings of similar dimensions,^[i] and the artificial/natural dichotomy of the materials. In Rocks and mirror square II the artist incorporates basalt rocks gathered in the countryside near Patterson, New Jersey^[ii] with manufactured elements such as flooring material, back-to-back rectangular mirrors, even the reflections of visitors’ feet, as part of the installation.

Michael Desmond, Christine Dixon and Bronwyn Campbell

^[i] Robert Hobbs et al, Robert Smithson: Sculpture, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1981, pp 139–40.

^[ii] According to John Weber, the rocks were collected by Smithson in August 1971. Correspondence with the National Gallery of Australia, NGA file 76/511 f.8.