Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson

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An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithsons life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

This first biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithsons story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to the Spiral Jetty and beyond, to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.

While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his familys history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christs passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.

Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithsons destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those who knew him throughout his life, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern arts most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithsons iconic art pilgrimage site and the experiences and works that brought him to its peculiar blood red water.

Reviews

"Only someone who has immersed themselves in the life and art of Robert Smithson for forty years could have written a biography as deep and engaging as Inside the Spiral. Suzaan Boettger illuminates the artists religious thought, examines the complexities of his gender identity, and takes a psychoanalytic lens to his sources and esoteric symbolism, bringing coherence to our understanding of this remarkably complicated artist, his body of work, and his writings. A monumental achievement."Jonathan Fineberg, University of the Arts, author of Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain

"Suzaan Boettgers long-awaited Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson is the first biography of this 'enantiomorphic' artist, whose oeuvre encompassed geological and sacred time alongside the moment of the snapshot, the 'dematerialized' theorizing and mapping of the non-site alongside the absolute site-specificityviewable from outer spaceof the Great Salt Lake. Boettger reveals fascinating and hitherto unexplored aspects of Smithsons earliest formation, including his status as a 'replacement child' for a dead older brother, while her fearless exploration of the artists Christological bent, his hermeticism, and his difficult navigation of sexuality yields nuanced psychological insight. Unburdened by academic jargon, the work is supported by extensive reference to Smithsons writings, notes, interviews, library, and other records, of which Boettger has long been recognized as the foremost scholar."Judith Rodenbeck, University of California, Riverside

"This book sheds important new light on Robert Smithson. Meticulously researched and wide-ranging in scope, it explores the intricate connections between Smithsons personal history and his art. While revealing a great deal of new information about Smithsons life and psychology, Suzaan Boettger also engages with his art in a focused and detailed way and writes about individual works with great perceptiveness. Readers will come away from this book with a fresh and enlarged understanding of Smithsons life and art."Jack Flam, editor of Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings

"Boettgers incorrigible fixation on her otherwise singular subject has produced an indispensable book for the study, from the inside, of such a major American artistic personality."The Brooklyn Rail

Author Bio

Suzaan Boettger, a widely published scholar, arts journalist, and critic based in New York City, is the author of Earthworks: Art and Landscape of the Sixties. She is professor emerita of the history of art at Bergen Community College.