Robert Smithson (1938-1973)

The notion of the map is crucial to Smithson's work. Many of his essays are constructed as travelogues, with the map operating as a key component - a specific object in which a particular place is diagrammed, approximated and rendered into symbolic language. If the map is a two-dimensional space, the non-site is, as Smithson has described it, 'a three-dimensional map of the site.' Like the map, it offers a synthesis between representation and abstraction. It depicts something beyond, intertwining the here with that which is there - or at least somewhere.

Susan Kandel, The Non-site of Theory, Frieze Magazine, issue 22, May 1995.