SachsSculptureStudio

shsachs@smcm.edu

Project 3- Site and Installation
ARTIST RESEARCH

Robert Smithson was one of the founders of the idea of earthwork art or land art. He left the gallery setting to try to place his works in the land rather than on the land. His earthworks enabled him to create art in the land outside of traditional viewing spaces. They cannot be owned or seen easily and are known to the public mostly through photographs.

He was very interested in how photography changed how people viewed the world and viewed art. He said “the earth after photography becomes more of a museum”. His photographs serve as documentation of his works but are also artwork in themselves. He thought a lot about the focal points of his pieces and how viewers would see them through rectangular frames (his photographs). Seeing one of his monumental pieces through a photograph pretty much ruins his goal of bringing us out of the gallery setting, but he didn’t care about having people see his works in person anyway. He cared about finding sites, researching them, and actually creating the landscapes. I don’t think he was very concerned with having the public actual ever access them.

Magdalena Abakanowicz’s work, on the other hand, is all about audience interaction. She is obsessed with crowds and creates these spaces full of headless sculptures that the audience is forced to interact with, (“Katarsis” for example).

“I immerse in the crowd, like a grain of sand in the friable sands. I am fading among the anonymity of glances, movements, smells, in the common absorption of air, in the common pulsation of juices under the skin…”.

Her figures are all unique and show evidence of the artist’s hand. Her crowds of ambiguous figures force viewers, as they walk through the space, to compare themselves to the figures in many ways and become part of the piece and active elements of the sculpture. Abakanowicz said: “We must enter, penetrate, become part of.”

So while Smithson’s and Abakanowicz’s works can both be grouped as ‘installation’ art, they are done with completely different intentions. Although it was be amazing to walk through the Spiral Jetty and experience it first hand, that was not Smithson’s intention when building it. His earthworks are to be viewed from the outside, not experienced from within.