Robert Smithson (1938-1973)

I did a large spiral, triangular system that sort of just spun out and could only be seen from an airplane. I was sort of interested in the dialogue between the indoor and the outdoor and my own, after getting involved in it this way, I developed a method or a dialectic that involved what I call site and nonsite. The site, in a sense, is the physical raw reality--the earth or the ground that we are really not aware of when we are in an interior room or studio or something like that--and so I decided that I would set limits in terms of this dialogue (it's a back and forth rhythm that goes between indoors and outdoors), and as a result I went and instead of putting something on the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer land indoors, to the nonsite, which is an abstract container (R. Smithson, "Earth," in symposium at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, February 6, 1969).