A disturbing intimacy: Robert Smithson and the end of ecology

Abstract

This essay offers an interdisciplinary approach to the critical writings and artistic works of Robert Smithson in light of current discussions on the Anthropocene, and calls for what Timothy Morton defines as an ‘ecology without nature’. By mobilizing scholarly fields such as art history, aesthetics, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, it propose new perspectives on Smithson’s embrace of entropy as a specific form of artistic practice; and his dialectic of Site and Nonsite through which he ‘reclaimed’ polluted industrial sites for his art works. In particular, it focuses on Smithson’s interest in scale as manifested most clearly in the Spiral Jetty (1970). This concern is often analyzed through phenomenological theories of perception that focus on the human subject. Yet, scale can be disorienting in ways that move beyond the category of the human subject, by suggesting the possibility of contact with and an imposition from unseen distant entities that nonetheless feel very close. This disturbing intimacy challenges the divisions between subject and object, human and inhuman, organic and inorganic and offers new insights into Smithson’s practice.