So the second value of the Archives’ tape is that it offers not just procedural information on Smithson’s work but a self-analysis of his process. The mental and the material, in a sense inform each other.” to develop a reflection in terms of the physical world, so that these two things could coincide. There is this preoccupation, in other words, that you develop these mental structures, and then I was trying. “A world view in terms of being entropic. Ignoring Cummings’s dismissive remark, the artist adroitly turned to describing a thematic continuity and his artistic goal: But he seemed not to fully comprehend either what his subject was doing or, as Cummings put it, “all the different bits of nomenclature that the critics are developing out of somewhere”-such as “process art, earthworks.” The latter term was originated by Smithson five years earlier in his “Air Terminal Site” article in Artforum (June 1967). Chianti.” His excitement indicates the importance to him of that hue, but we must go to his essay on the Spiral Jetty to learn what it called up: “My eyes became combustion chambers churning orbs of blood.” Interviewer Paul Cummings, a specialist in twentieth-century painting and director of the AAA oral history program, had the prescience to select Smithson, at 34, for the famed repository. It includes loose talk on the pragmatics of building his two big projects, Spiral Jetty in Utah and Broken Circle/Spiral Hill in the Netherlands, enlivened by frequent exclamation such as: “You can’t believe how red the water is. The new material highlights the last phase of the artist’s professional life, from 1969 to 1972. First, its coverage ranges from Smithson’s birth to just a year before he was eulogized in a High Requiem Mass sung in Latin, following his death on July 20, 1973, in the crash of a small plane while making the Amarillo Ramp. (I discovered a 1968 Smithson interview by curator and editor Willoughby Sharp, and it debuted under the title “Degrees of Disorder” in the December 1998 issue of Art in America.) But the Archives’ oral history project is distinctive in three ways. The artist was increasingly sought for interviews. These esoterica were spiced with sardonic observations and quotations from literature and science fiction. Smithson gained recognition, starting around 1966, for sculpture both highly conceptual and inventively materialized, and for idiosyncratic essays mixing commentary on new forms, scientific and geological data, and fantasy narratives. Agnes Denes on the Pyramid's Emblematic Power
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