Robert Smithson

Du New Jersey au Yucatán, leçons d’ailleurs

This book examines the work of Robert Smithson, a major figure in American art in the second half of the 20th century. Focusing on a selection of his essential works and concepts, Ann Reynolds establishes the coherence of Smithson's thought and production. She gained access to Smithson's socio-cultural environment, sources of inspiration and daily practice via his correspondence, diaries, notebooks and, most importantly, his library, which were bequeathed to the Archives of American Art by his widow, Nancy Holt. This copious material enabled the author to reconstruct his creative conceptual and physical environment. Reynolds' painstaking approach ties into what she calls the "blind spots" that lie at the very core of the conventional view of culture. Fascinated by the “elsewhere” and the peripheries, Smithson deplored the cultural hegemony of the New York “white cube” art scene and turned his attention to investigating faraway places and neglected sites instead. And yet, as Reynolds shows, his questioning of artistic boundaries and normative places of culture cannot be reduced to geographic decentralization, for it begins by shaking the very foundations of seeing, an enterprise which the modernist aesthetic had raised to preeminence in artistic debates and institutions. This book is far more than a monography, for it offers a profound reflection on the role of archives, the writing of contemporary art history and the shakeup of an aesthetic paradigm by Smithson and his peers.

Author: Ann Reynolds

Translated from the English by Anaël Lejeune and Olivier Mignon
Original title: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2003.

Graphic design: Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier

Published in 2014
In French
15.5 x 22.7 cm
384 pages
ISBN : 978-2-930667-09-6
EAN : 9782930667096

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