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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Robert Smithson is in fashion, in a hair-shirt kind of way. Excited reverence has marked the art-world response to a retrospective of his work that opened in Los Angeles last year and is now at the Whitney. This may seem odd, given that Smithson, the mystagogical dandy of postminimalism, who died in a plane crash in 1973, at the age of thirty-five, was a sculptor who made exactly one good sculpture: "The Spiral Jetty" (1970), a coil of rocks and dirt made with earth-moving equipment, in a remote bay of the Great Salt Lake, which few people have seen except in handsome but inevitably misleading photographs. (Underwater for many years, it reemerged in 2002.) I paid my own first visit recently, jolting over rudimentary dirt roads. The piece is initially disappointing: a rather dainty geometrical figure that, at about a hundred and fifty feet across, is too small--not by a lot, but fatally so--to hold scale against the sun-stunned, distantly islanded lake, amid hills that are strewn with black basalt boulders. (It is within sight of another, truly huge jetty, the site of long-derelict facilities that were once used for extracting oil from some still seeping, odorous tar pits. Smithson, who loved ruins, wrote about it in connection to his...
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