By Robert Smithson
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Smithson, Robert
setName: label: See more items in
content: Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers
label: See more items in
content: Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers / Series 4: Writings
unitdate: label: Date
content: circa 1959-1973
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives of American Art
identifier: label: Identifier
content: AAA.smitrobe, Subseries 4.1
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents note
content: Writings by Smithson consists of 73 handwritten and typescript outlines, essay drafts, and lectures Smithson wrote from the 1960s to 1973. The majority of these writings explore his thoughts on contemporary art and artists. Through the theoretical frameworks that incorporate history, linguistics, aesthetics, literature, and media studies, Smithson examines historical and contemporary art's evolving concepts of interpretation and meaning, and specifically, the effect capitalism, nature and the environment, minimalism, and conceptual absences were having on his own art.

Essays of note include "The Crystal Land" (1966), "Cultural Confinement" (ca. 1972), "Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectical Landscape," (ca. 1973), "Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan" (ca. 1969), and "See the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey" (1970).

The subseries also includes six notebooks that record project ideas, fragments of essays, and letter drafts; a series of 21 poems written by Smithson on Christian/religious themes; and miscellaneous handwritten and typescript notes on art and film. Notebooks I and VI include notes by Nancy Holt.