« Design Object, Vol. 1: James Desk | Main | Roy Orbison's "Black & White Night" Re-release »
September 18, 2005
"Time Turns Metaphors Into Things"
The Robert Smithson estate has in fact created what was merely a sketchy idea (pun intended) from Smithson's mind. The NYTimes had some great photographs of the island and this story about its genesis as well as this op-ed piece.
I like Randy Kennedy's discussion of the project in relationship to Christo's Gates and Olmsted's Central Park:
"The Gates" and "Floating Island" are like a split personality: "The Gates" invited public interaction and was, in effect, completed by it; the island, reflecting Smithson's intellectual and generally chilly aesthetic, floats off at a distance, inaccessible, inhabited by no one.
But Smithson's project is just as intimately connected to Central Park, which he regarded, in all its artificial pastorality, as a conceptual artwork of its own. (He revered Frederick Law Olmsted and said that he found him more interesting than Duchamp.) While not nearly as monumental as Smithson's most famous work, "Spiral Jetty," a 1,500-foot-long curlicue of basalt jutting into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the island - which resembles a rectangular chunk of Central Park, neatly cookie-cuttered out - is a further twist on Smithson's career-long fascination with displacement. This generally meant taking art outdoors and bringing pieces of the land back indoors, into galleries. In the case of "Floating Island," the displacement is all outdoors, an exploration of land and water, urban and rural, real and recreated, center and periphery. As a paean to Central Park, it can be seen as a kind of artificial model of an artificial model of nature.
Robert Smithson Website
National Geographic did a great article on Olmsted recently. You can read an excerpt here.
Art | By mcknightattack | 04:43 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://chattablogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/25823
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference "Time Turns Metaphors Into Things":
