Marian Goodman Gallery, London
An exhibition of unrealised fantasy islands by the land artist whose career was cut short by an untimely death
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Robert Smithson and his partner Nancy Holt were leading figures within what became known as land art, using the raw stuff of nature in situ as a sculptural medium. In the US, their fellow travellers included Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria, whose works gouged great trenches into wild rock or solicited lightning strikes. (In Britain, the tendency translated into the comparatively gentle, perambulatory art of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton.)
There’s no escaping the chutzpah – one might even say arrogance – required to work at this scale. The masterpieces of land art – of which the most famous is Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) on Great Salt Lake in Utah – are situated in inhospitable, and, at times, inaccessible locations. This is art with a dose of extreme sports. The hazards involved were real: Smithson died in a light-aircraft crash aged only 35 while surveying the site for what would be his final earthwork, Amarillo Ramp (1973).