Spring 1994
Volume 20, Number 3

Robert Smithson's Picturable Situation: Blasted Landscapes from the 1960s
by Ron Graziani

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"In the October 1967 issue of ARTFORUM, Robert Smithson wrote a brief letter to the editor in response to Michael Fried's attack on minimalism: Fried's now- notorious article "Art and Objecthood" had appeared in the previous issue of the same publication. This letter unceremoniously claimed that Fried was "the first truly manneristic critic of 'modernity.'" For Smithson, Fried's account of minimalism had "set the critical stage for Manneristic Modernism," providing as it did a "ready-made parody of the war between Renaissance classicism (modernity) versus Manneristic anti-classicism (theater)." This caustic appraisal was more than just one of the Bowery boys taking a potshot at the crumbling hegemony of American modernism. Smithson felt the "syntax of his delivery" made Fried a "more interesting adversary" than many of the critics coming to terms with the contemporary art of the 1960s. Indeed the image of freedom that Fried so cogently defended in "Art and Objecthood" presented a compelling challenge to Smithson's artistic preference for what I call an aesthetics of confinement...

My analysis of the current status of the postmodern/ Smithson connection will reconsider the theoretical parameters that structured Smithson's artistic practice. This pursuit will relocate the success of Smithson's art within a continuum by reattaching it and its public success to the artistic category of the picturesque- sublime. With Fried's continued success, Smithson's letter to the editor-- which charged Fried's aesthetics with trying to resist the reality of the 1960s with an ontology that was no longer adequate to the task-- seems the appropriate, albeit arbitrary, vanishing point in that perspective. Yet, by using ingredients from the category of the picturesque- sublime, this essay will attempt to reposition Smithson's work while redifferentiating the Octoberist/ Smithson relationship. I will also suggest how the significant aesthetic discourse (or anti-aesthetic discourse) of the Octoberists is no less autonomous of or resistant to-- in the Derridean sense of membership without participation-- what their achievements are inscribed within..."