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“History decays into images [...]”
Dr. Boettger's vivid and absorbing paper about Robert Smithson links us to an abundance of psychoanalytic ideas. We read of grief and mourning in Smithson's work. We learn about a life devoted to writing and art. We are also introduced to Robert Smithson's early paintings, which are depictions of a psychic relationship to a sibling he never met. Her paper expands our thoughts about the complexities of mourning, especially in the life of the replacement child. As we are faced this year with the convergence of pandemic losses and the pressing need to reexamine historic losses, Dr. Boettger also develops our thoughts about grief and the complexities of mourning.
I'll begin exactly where our presenter does in her 2010 book about land art, entitled Earthworks. The subtitle, Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, takes me to days of undergraduate study in New York when we demonstrated frequently to protest the carnage of the Vietnam War. We counted our country's losses weekly. In the mid-sixties, the pop artist and sculptor Claus Oldenburg dug a trench in Central Park. He informally titled it Hole. It measured six feet long and seven feet deep. Was it a minimalist “hole,” a fundamental shape which Oldenburg sculpted in negative space? Or, was it a grave pit which signified the tragedies of the war? This tension, between creation and mourning, is a central theme in Smithson's work and is the topic of this discussion.
We learn that Robert Smithson's body of work was audacious and dark. The critic Peter Schjeldahl called it “poetically sublime” (Schjeldahl, 2004, p. 198). The paintings have deeply religious and spiritual qualities. The blood and suffering they depict can be seen as psychic representations of the dead Harold