fully buried

We are now recounting the events of Tuesday 10 August. A day that promised to be like the one that preceded it: lots of reading and stimulating intellectual thought.

From the outset though the signs were ominous. I awoke to the first rain storm for months and decided to work at home rather that risk pneumonia with a bike ride to the library. This didn't seem like much of a problem as i had a shelf stacked with books many of which promised to offer vital clues in the search for a dissertation. As with the week before i decided to pick an artist and consider their work rather than getting too mixed up in theory first thing.

The man under the spotlight was Robert Smithson a figure whom looms large over 60's/70's conceptual art and continues to be a major influence for contemporary practitioners. Indeed Smithson had been a figure i had referenced many times and was relatively familiar with his earth works and particularly Spiral Jetty. Such work, as Erin Hogan tells us in the rather enjoyable Spiral Jetta, can be hard to see first hand. So like Long Smithson's work is rarely experienced in person and we rely on the photographs of the work for information on the piece. So the photograph is playing a very prominent role once again.

But the crucial difference is the level of transience in the work. Long's work is fleeting in the extreme and without the camera would often exist for no one but Long. Where as Smithson's work can still be visited (albeit with a degree of difficulty and ideally a 4x4). For this, and surely other reasons, the significance of the photograph doesn't seem to crop up in the writings on Smithson. Instead the writing i encountered focused on the existential nature of work and grand themes such life, death, entropy and religion. While undoubtedly interesting this was not the sort of information i was interested in. After ploughing through essay after essay i began to be throughly disheartened and a bit frustrated. The photograph is the very thing through which we encounter this work. That this goes unrecognised left me feeling a little annoyed.

books books books

By the time the afternoon rolled in i was done with Smithson and the morning had been far from productive. A change of scenery was badly needed to i braved the conditions and headed to the library. This was a little more productive. I read some good essays by Criag Owens and Rosalind Krauss. Owens' discussion of the social nature of art production was interesting. By the late 60's artists are beginning to recognise that exchanges between art and the viewer do not just take place in the gallery but in society as a whole. It is this recognition that art does not just take place in galleries that led to Smithson, Long et al to venture out into the wild. This is oversimplified but Owen's writing did help give a bit of background information on the emergence of site specific practices

Krauss discussed sculpture generally and some of the key features of Modernist work. As far as i could tell this roughly comes down to modern sculpture being an object that takes no heed of the place it is in. This is an object is isolation and does not attempt to reach out and engage with any issues beyond it's immediate confines. This is clearly quite different to site specific work

All this was useful but rather served to set the scene for what i will be looking at. So while definitely useful it did not leave the library feeling enlightened and content. Instead i had a lingering feeling of frustration. I've had this a lot over the 3 years of study and such days are inevitable but still disappointing.