ROBERT SMITHSON AND THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

"Robert Smithson and the American Landscape is a social history of the earthworks and their critical reception. Providing a close analysis of Smithson's own writings and artworks. Ron Graziani demonstrates how his earthworks were part of an aesthetic and civic fault line that ruptured in the 1960s. Smithson's humanized environments were a powerful indictment of the modernist sense of art and nature. Moreover, Graziani shows how Smithson's earthworks formed part of what was called the "new conservationism" in the late 1960s and how they gave material form to the contradictions of a sociological issue that was inseparable from its economic legacy."--BOOK JACKET.