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Site, nonsite, Website: Technologies for perception

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Site, nonsite, Website: Technologies for perception

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SITE, NONSITE, WEBSITE:
TECHNOLOGIES FOR PERCEPTION

by

Aurora Tang

____________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2010

Aurora Tang
Copyright 2010

ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Michael Ned Holte and Matthew Coolidge for their generous advice,
insight, and interest in this project. I feel extremely fortunate to have had the privilege
and pleasure of working with both of you in this context.

My gratitude goes to Joshua Decter, Rhea Anastas, Elizabeth Lovins, Gloria Sutton, and
Dean Ruth Weisberg of the Roski School of Fine Arts for their academic support.

Thank you to Rand Eppich, Robbert Flick, Sarah Simons, and Daniel Weinberg for their
conversation and support, extending beyond the scope of this thesis process.

I am grateful to Suzaan Boettger, Nancy Holt, Robert Morris, and the staff at the Getty
Research Institute, James Cohan Gallery, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and
Visual Artists and Galleries Association, Inc. for their assistance in helping me obtain
material for my research.

Thank you to my colleagues, friends, and family, especially my father, whose
commitment to “inner space” has informed my pursuits of nonspace.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ii

List of Figures iv

Abstract v

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: This Island Earth 5

Chapter 2: Aerial Art and the Site and Nonsite Dialectic 22

Chapter 3: Navigating Nonspace 51

Conclusion: Making Sense of the Spiral 74

Bibliography 77

iv
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: View of rising Earth about five degrees about the Lunar horizon
(“Earthrise”), December 22, 1968

12
Figure 2: View of the Earth seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward
the moon (“Whole Earth”), December 7, 1972

16
Figure 3: The Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968-Spring 1970

18
Figure 4: Robert Smithson, Airport Site Map, 1967

34
Figure 5: Robert Smithson, Texas Airport, 1966

38
Figure 6: Robert Smithson, Nonsite (Pine Barrens), 1967-68

44
Figure 7: Robert Smithson, A Surd View For an Afternoon, 1970

48
Figure 8: Robert Smithson, Stills from “Spiral Jetty”, 1970

53
Figure 9: Spiral Land Art, June 2, 2007, Google Sightseeing screen shot

65
Figure 10: Spiral Jetty, July 13, 2006, Google Earth

67
Figure 11: Spiral Jetty, July 13, 2006, Google Earth

68
Figure 12: Spiral Jetty Sunset, July 13, 2006, Google Earth screen shot

69

v
ABSTRACT

American artist Robert Smithson’s site and nonsite dialectic (based on the relationship
between his abstract artworks in the indoor gallery and their corresponding physical sites
outdoors) utilizes the aerial perspective and other sensorial phenomena to both orient and
disorient the viewer, relocating his or her focus back and forth between the normative
corporeal perspective and more unfamiliar peripheral viewpoints. With the advent of
Google Earth technology in the 2000s, users explore the surface of the terrestrial globe,
including Smithson’s earthworks, through the digital interfaces of the internet. With the
addition of these networked virtual spheres, the site and nonsite dialectic, developed
during the Apollo and Whole Earth years of 1968 to 1972, is reinterpreted as a site,
nonsite, website “trialectic.” While the mechanical is updated by the digital, the
conceptual mechanisms persist, providing the tools to navigate these distinct, yet
converging realms and find order amidst the disorder.

1
INTRODUCTION

Thank you for your interest in “aerial art.” The strange thing about aerial
scale is that it has a way of expanding to vast global magnitudes, only to
contract into an infinitely small point. Everything visible is lost in that
point. Even the solar system is abolished or at least made to seem like
nothing more than a dot…these points have a way of multiplying and
causing in me a consciousness of endless disparity.
1

In 1966 Robert Smithson was hired as an artist-consultant to “program” the site of
the future Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Air Terminal. His proposal for the terminal
grounds was a collaboration in which he invited artists Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and
Robert Morris to join him in the installation of four new earthworks for the airport’s
vacant areas. This “aerial art” was designed to be viewed from various perspectives, such
as from above in an airplane or from below the ground, and would be videotaped and
transmitted to television screens in a “terminal museum” located inside of the airport’s
terminal. In addition, a concurrent exhibition was to be staged at Dwan Gallery in New
York, which would provide gallery visitors access to the developments of the project.
Smithson’s comprehensive proposal was developed with the aims of reconsidering the
concept of scale and of the air terminal itself, as well as the visual rhetoric with which the
site may be viewed. Although never realized, the aerial art proposal would serve as a
crucial forerunner to his site and nonsite dialectic, a conceptual device that would allow
viewers to experience both his indoor nonsites and corresponding outdoor sites
simultaneously, through a reconsideration of the inner in relation to the outer. The
nonsite would complement the site, extracting a portion of the exterior site and presenting

1
Robert Smithson, letter to Mr. Develing, 1968, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 1185).

2
it in an interior context, setting up a back and forth dialogue between the two and
distorting normative bodily concepts of space and scale. Although scale is often
understood in terms of range, measurement, or level, its scope is not limited to the extent
or relative size of something, but moreover, as Smithson maintains, is an issue of
perception. Not only a condition of the visual, scale is concerned with “how your
consciousness focuses.”
2

In the catalogue essay to the 1983 exhibition “Robert Smithson: A Retrospective
View” curator Robert Hobbs proposes that in order to analyze the handling of space in
Smithson’s work, one must first understand the “revolutionary” spatial concepts brought
about by the larger cultural impact of outer space travel, as well as of the inauguration of
the U.S. interstate highway system in the 1950s.
3
By the late 1960s the Apollo missions
had brought back the first high-resolution color images of the earth taken from outer
space, altering previously understood notions of scale and perception. These “Whole
Earth” images contributed to a more global view of the world, as they allowed
individuals to locate themselves in the planet, and within the universe. Around the same
time as the Apollo lunar program, a number of projects from various disciplines emerged,
also interested in the concept of scale, including the Whole Earth Catalog, Charles and
Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten, and the work of Smithson. Currently, internet and satellite-
based innovations such as Google Earth are providing updated modes of imaging,

2
Eva Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert
Smithson,” 1969-1970, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 203.
3
Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: A Retrospective View (Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson
Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1983), 12-13.

3
systematizing, and experiencing the world, further altering notions of time and distance,
and subsequently speed.
Technology has the potential to alter visual perception. Derived from the Greek
word “technologia,” the systematic treatment of an art, “technology” today usually refers
to the scientific and the mechanical. Although I do address technology in this manner, I
am moreover considering technology in broader terms, as a technique or device for
altering the world or the experience of the world.
4
The aerial image, Smithson’s nonsite,
and the Google Earth digital globe may each be viewed as cultural forms brought about
by technologies concerned with the disembodied perspective—aerial photography, the
site and nonsite dialectic, and networked satellite imaging and global positioning
systems, respectively. In altering human scale and perception, each device has the
potential for both orientation and disorientation. Akin to optical devices such as the
microscope or telescope, the aerial photo, nonsite, and Google Earth interface examine, in
varying degrees, a portion of a larger entity. However, in directing attention to a focal
point, whether macro or micro, the segment is extracted from its existing context,
eliminating familiar corporeal frames of reference.
The three conceptual mechanisms, aerial photography, the site and nonsite
dialectic, and networked satellite global positioning systems, converge in an analysis of
networked users’ engagement with Smithson’s earthworks through the digital interface of
the internet. Google Earth, with its capacity for both surveying and “sightseeing” the

4
Rebecca Solnit offers this definition of technology in her book on photographer
Eadweard Muybridge. See Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and
the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2003), 114.

4
earth’s surface, bridging the macro and the micro, has become a cultural phenomenon,
with impact akin to that of the Apollo images of the Whole Earth years. In considering
Smithson’s remaining earthworks through the framework of Google Earth, Smithson’s
site and nonsite dialectic may be reinterpreted as a site, nonsite, website “trialectic,” as
suggested by Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
5

This thesis does not intend to offer a comprehensive study of aerial photography,
the still nascent Google Earth interface, or Smithson’s body of work.
6
Rather, this text
considers Smithson’s utilization of the aerial perspective and other visual and sensorial
phenomena as conceptual mechanisms for perception, as employed in his aerial art and
nonsite works, and subsequently in their recontextualization. While the mechanical is
being replaced by the digital, which, too, will eventually recede to obsolescence, the
conceptual mechanisms of technologies largely remain the same.

5
Jeffrey Kastner, “True Beauty: Jeffrey Kastner talks with Matthew Coolidge about the
Center for Land Use Interpretation,” Artforum International (June 2005): 286-287.
6
Cornelia Butler writes, “the danger with an artist like Smithson is finding his influence
everywhere." See Cornelia Butler, “A Lurid Presence: Smithson’s Legacy and Post-
Studio Art,” Robert Smithson, ed. Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler (Berkeley: The
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in association with the University of
California Press, 2004), 236; due to its immense scope and array of existing and potential
readings, a complete study of Smithson’s work is not feasible. However, several
publications have made substantial contributions, including Robert Smithson: A
Retrospective View, by Robert Hobbs; Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, by
Ann Reynolds; and Robert Smithson, edited by Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler,
amongst others, cited in this document’s bibliography.

5
CHAPTER 1: THIS ISLAND EARTH

By the help of our modern knowledge we may imagine the approach to the
earth as it would appear to one of us if he were permitted to fly like
Raphael through inter-stellar space. It would first become visible as a
mere point of light, then as a remote planet appears to us; after that it
would shine and dazzle like Venus; then we should begin to see its
geography as we do that of the moon…we should distinguish the white icy
poles, the vast blue oceans, the continents and larger islands glistening like
gold in the sunshine, and the silver-bright wandering fields of cloud…On
a still nearer approach we should see the earth as from a balloon, and the
land would seem to hollow itself beneath us like a great round dish, but
the hills would be scarcely perceptible…At length, after touching the solid
earth, and looking round us, and seeing trees near us, fields spread out
before, and blue hills far away, we should say, “This, at least, is
landscape.” It is not the world as the angels may see it from the midst of
space, but as men see it who dwell in it, and cultivate it, and love it.
7

With the advent of flight came the notion of the aerial view, offering humans an
elevated and oblique perspective and an extended purview.
8
Joseph-Michel Montgolfier
and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier’s invention of the hot air balloon in 1783 brought about
the possibility of flight. Shortly after the development of photography came the birth of
aerial photography in 1858, when Félix Nadar successfully captured the aerial view in his
bird’s eye photographs of the newly transformed city of Paris. As photographic
technology progressed, cameras became more advanced and compact, allowing them to
be tethered to a variety of aircrafts differing in size and aerial range, including balloons,
kites, carrier pigeons, airplanes, and space shuttles. The aerial view, made possible by

7
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Landscape (London: Seeley and Co., 1885), 3-4, quoted in
Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space (New
York: Hastings House, 1969), 12.
8
Vittoria Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” in Intimate Metropolis:
Urban Subjects in the Modern City, ed. Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina
Lathouri (New York: Routledge, 2009), 242.

6
these various vehicles of flight, allowed for an expanded and transformed view of the
world. Aerial photography provided an enlarged panoramic view, but moreover, as
Vittoria Di Palma suggests in her chapter “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,”
enabled a new framework and perception of viewing and thinking about the landscape.
From the air, details below become indiscernible, while expanses unfold before the
viewer. The aerial view, especially the vertical view, renders the three-dimensional flat
and topographic features as “superficial patterns of color, line, and texture. From above,
objects reveal an entirely different aspect, and well-known landmarks and landscapes
become defamiliarized.”
9

Monck Mason also observes this flattening effect in his 1838 text Aeronautica;
or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of Aerostation: Comprising an
Enlarged Account of the Late Aerial Expedition to Germany, noting that from high
altitudes “the whole face of nature…appears to have undergone a process of general
equalization,” thus, allowing one to view for the first time, “a picture of nature on the
vastest scale, both as to size and magnificence, in the construction of which none of the
complicated laws of linear perspective are involved.”
10
Mason describes aerial viewing
as an optical phenomenon, with the ability to transform and distort the subjects below,

9
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 243.
10
Monck Mason, Aeronautica; or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of
Aerostation: Comprising an Enlarged Account of the Late Aerial Expedition to Germany
(London: F. C. Westley, 1838), quoted in Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global
Intimacy,” 244-245.

7
rendering the familiar indiscernible.
11
Furthermore, he observes that the shifting scales
produced by changes in altitude may make it difficult to decipher what one sees. He
recalls his flight as tinged with a sense of uncertainty that increased as he drifted further
from the landmarks that had served as familiar reference points.
12
Lost in a state of
disorientation, he was unsure where he was, where he was going, and what he was
looking at. When he descended back towards the earth’s surface, the “faint
hallucinations” below would “insensibly extend themselves in space, strengthening their
outlines, and becoming more definite” and recognizable in their forms.
13

American balloonist John Wise had a similar experience of confusion-ridden
wonder when he embarked on his 132
nd
hot air balloon ascension in 1852. While flying
over Chillicothe, Ohio, Wise took note of the effects of the aerial view when sailing over
some inscriptions (or “earth art”) in the region’s soil. He was curious about the
markings, initially taking them to be mathematical figures or hieroglyphics. He asked
himself, “Could it be a delusion?”

11
Mason, Aeronautica; or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of
Aerostation: Comprising an Enlarged Account of the Late Aerial Expedition to Germany,
15.
12
Mason, Aeronautica; or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of
Aerostation: Comprising an Enlarged Account of the Late Aerial Expedition to Germany,
69.
13
Mason, Aeronautica; or, Sketches Illustrative of the Theory and Practice of
Aerostation: Comprising an Enlarged Account of the Late Aerial Expedition to Germany,
62.

8
No, I was only moderately high then—3000 feet. I viewed it and
reviewed it, and it must be in the soil, if it is not actually a raised line in
the form of a bank over the general level. On my return home I learned
from the citizens that there are traces of ancient fortifications thereabouts,
and this at once revealed the mystery…The appearance of these outlines in
the soil shows how the power of vision is increased by looking down upon
the earth from balloon height…It is not an uncommon thing to notice this
remarkable phenomenon of vision when sailing over the earth.
14

Similarly, in 1928 O.G.S. Crawford, archaeology officer of the official British Ordinance,
explained the phenomenon of aerial vision by comparing it to looking at a printed image
through a magnifying glass. Peering through the lens, the print appears as a “meaningless
maze of blurred dots.”
15
When the magnifying glass is removed and the print is viewed
from a distance, the dots become discernible imagery. The observer on the ground is
akin to the user of the magnifying glass, and the aerial observer or camera resembles the
individual viewing the print from a distance.
16

--

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available—once
the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes plain—a new idea as powerful as
any in history will be let loose.
17

The advent of outer space travel heightened the possible purview of the aerial
view, and the airborne camera led to the spaceborne camera. In 1959 the Atlas missile
carried a camera 700 miles above the earth, returning photographs featuring the curvature

14
John Wise, 1852, quoted in Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and
Outer Space, 68.
15
O.G.S. Crawford, Wessex from the Air, 1928, quoted in Newhall Airborne Camera:
The World From the Air and Outer Space, 68.
16
Crawford, Wessex from the Air, 68.
17
Fred Hoyle, 1948, quoted in Oran W. Nicks, This Island Earth (Washington, D.C.:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1970), 4.

9
of the planet.
18
Later that year, the Explorer VI paddle wheel satellite was launched into
orbit with a camera in tow, bringing back what the New York Times reported on
September 29, 1959 as the first television pictures of the earth from outer space. While
the images were black and white, low resolution, and “admittedly crude,” the civilian
space agency deemed the experiment a success, demonstrating television’s capacity to
transmit data from unmanned vessels in outer space.
19
In addition to shifting ideas of
perception and scale, this all-encompassing image of the earth contributed to a new sense
of globalism. At the first International Globe Conference in Vienna in 1962, Trans
World’s chief officer, Paul Dengler, used the term “air-mindedness,” a play on “open-
mindedness,” to describe the notion of a global unity that would overcome American
isolationism and provincialism, and instead lead to a better understanding of “the
consequences of the daily shrinking process of time and space on our globe.”
20
This
vision of a unified global community, alongside the emerging environmentalism and the
Apollo lunar program, would come to be known as Whole Earth.
In 1966 the Lunar Orbiter I captured the first high-resolution black and white
photograph of the earth in its entirety, as observed from the environs of the moon. As
Beaumont Newhall discusses in his 1969 text Airborne Camera: The World from the Air
and Outer Space, this fundamental “long shot” of the earth became a sensation—“For the
first time we no longer looked down upon the Earth, but at the Earth—and we realized

18
Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and Outer Space, 113.
19
Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and Outer Space, 114.
20
Dennis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the
Apollo Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no.
2 (June 1994): 281.

10
that every astronomical photograph taken through a terrestrially-based telescope is indeed
a space photograph—from spacecraft Earth.”
21
This was followed by the first color
pictures of the entire earth, captured by the U.S. Navy satellite DODGE (Department of
Defense Gravitational Experiment) on July 25, 1967. However, the satellite images’ poor
resolution prevented their widespread publication.
22
At the time, the quality of images
from orbiting satellites paled in comparison to photographs taken by the human hand
using a film camera.
The following year, on December 21, 1968, the first manned mission to the moon,
the Apollo 8, was launched. Astronauts Colonel Frank Borman and Captain James A.
Lovell Jr., and lunar module pilot William A. Anders photographed the earth as they
entered lunar orbit. As the crew circled the hidden side of the moon, they watched the
earth recede in size until it disappeared. Then, suddenly, the earth reappeared. Colonel
Borman recalls the awe-inspiring moment, “Even out at the Moon, the deep blue of the
Earth is the only color you can see in the Universe.”
23
Unlike the satellite images
returned from the DODGE satellite the prior year, the Apollo 8 images were much higher
in resolution and were taken by the human hand instead of a satellite, “implying a human
eye behind the camera and thus a ‘witness’ whose images testified to the veracity of the
recorded event.”
24
Therefore, although automatically-generated images of the entire
globe from space existed before the Apollo 8 launch, those captured during the 1968

21
Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and Outer Space, 118.
22
Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” 275.
23
Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and Outer Space, 122.
24
Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” 278-279.

11
mission are largely viewed as the first photographs of the earth from outer space “as it
really is,” implying an objectivity or documentary nature associated with film
photography.
25

Furthermore, unlike the DODGE images, Apollo activity was highly publicized.
Prior to the widespread appearances of Apollo imagery in print publications, the missions
were witnessed by mass television audiences. “To most observers, the fascination of
these pictures was the opportunity they provided to see the world ‘in the round’ for the
first time, as a majestic blue-grey sphere, floating cloud-cloaked against a backdrop of
stars.”
26
Taken from a distance of 240,000 miles, the photographs provided the most
detailed images of our planet from outer space at the time.
27
The Apollo images,
especially the NASA photograph AS08-14-2383, View of rising Earth about five degrees
above the Lunar horizon, more commonly referred to as Earthrise, were widely
disseminated, and the Apollo 8 mission was largely lauded as a success. [Fig. 1]
Geographer Denis Cosgrove notes that the celebratory nature of the mission was
heightened by its scheduled dates coinciding with the winter holiday season. On
Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968, the crew did a live television broadcast from lunar
orbit, featuring pictures of the earth and moon as seen from Apollo 8. He proposes the
mission’s overlap with the holidays helped engage a large global television audience,
enabled by newly implemented satellites, as well as employed the optimism, harmony,

25
Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” 278-279.
26
Charles Sheffield, Man on Earth: How Civilization and Technology Changed the Face
of the World – A Survey from Space, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company,
1983), 6.
27
Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and Outer Space, 122.

12

Fig. 1. View of rising Earth about five degrees above the Lunar horizon, NASA Photo
AS08-14-2383 (“Earthrise”), December 22, 1968.

13
and message of “peace and goodwill to all mankind” often associated with Christmas.
28

This act of turning important events into public spectacles designed for large international
television audiences has been viewed as a characteristic feature of postmodernism.
While Cosgrove does not suggest causation, he notes that the dates of the lunar Apollo
space flights and of Whole Earth photography, 1968-1972, correspond with the period
often considered as the critical moment in the emergence of postmodern society, a time
when new literal vantages on modernity emerged.
29
The photographs provided global
audiences with an image of a “living Earth”
30
that touched Americans with “the true
reality of our situation: the oneness of mankind on this island Earth, as it floats eternally
in the silent sea of space.”
31
Major Anders’ recount of the mission makes evident the
Christmas associations, as well as the unified, environmentally conscious Whole Earth
vision of the planet at the time,
If you can imagine yourself in a darkened room with only one visible
object, a small blue-green sphere about the size of a Christmas-tree
ornament, then you can begin to grasp what the Earth looks like from
space…all of us subconsciously think that the Earth is flat or at least
almost infinite. Let me assure you that, rather than a massive giant, it
should be thought of as the fragile Christmas-tree ball which we should
handle with care.
32

28
Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” 281-282.
29
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 10.
30
Frank Borman, quoted in Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-
Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” 282.
31
George M. Low, foreword to This Island Earth, ed. Oran W. Nicks (Washington, D.C.:
Scientific and Technical Information Division, Office of Technology Utilization,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1970), IV-V.
32
William Anders, quoted in Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-
Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” 284.

14
The Apollo 8 crew was celebrated as Time magazine’s 1968 “men of the year.” The
magazine, featuring the now iconic image of the earth as seen from outer space on its
cover, recognized the astronauts for their technological achievements, but moreover for
uniting Americans and enlarging their view of our planet.
33
Cosgrove also recognizes the
Apollo 8 photographs’ function in shifting and widening perceptions of the globe,
particularly Western views of the earth, challenging “received notions of continental
scale by exaggerating precisely those regions [that] normally appear so small on world
maps, and so correspondingly insignificant in Western geographical consciousness.”
34

Furthermore, in the December 25, 1968 edition of the New York Times, Archibald
MacLeish embraced the groundbreaking significance of the Apollo 8 mission and
photographs,
For the first time in all of time men have seen the earth: seen it not as
continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or
three, but seen it from the depths of space; seen it whole and round and
beautiful and small.
35

33
Time, 1968, quoted in Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-
Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” 284.
34
Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” 284.
35
Archibald MacLeish, New York Times, December 25, 1968, quoted in Cosgrove,
“Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” 283; MacLeish’s sentiment is reflected in R. Buckminster Fuller’s
introduction to Gene Youngblood’s 1970 text Expanded Cinema, in which Fuller writes,
“We are all astronauts. Always have been.” See R. Buckminster Fuller, introduction to
Expanded Cinema, by Gene Youngblood (New York: Dutton, 1970), 20.

15
Newhall states that aerial photography, including space photography, “is the best means
we have for measuring the planet, observing the inaccessible, making invisible visible
and immensity perceptible,” and “[making] the miracle of flight tangible.”
36

The image of Apollo 8’s Earthrise and the subsequent and also iconic Whole
Earth photograph, View of the Earth seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the
moon, NASA photograph AS17-148-22727 from December 1972, are definitive of “a
historical moment in which the curtain opened on the theater of the world.”
37
[Fig. 2] In
1970 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released This Island
Earth, a hardcover bound volume of images and texts aimed at disseminating the results
and benefits from the nation’s space program, especially the “sobering realization of
man’s place in the universe.”
38
In the text’s foreword, George M. Low, NASA’s Acting
Administrator, is optimistic of the Apollo images’ potential to change the way in which
time, distance, and space would be understood during the Whole Earth years. In leaving
our planet, humankind acquired a new and valuable way to appreciate it. “The world of
the 1970s will be vastly different from the world of the 1960s, and many of the changes
in it will result directly from the new perspective that we have suddenly acquired.”
39

Oran W. Nicks, Acting Associate Administrator of the Office of Advanced Research and
Technology and editor of This Island Earth, further stresses the implications of the

36
Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World From the Air and Outer Space, 122.
37
Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space
Photographs,” 273-274.
38
Nicks, preface to This Island Earth, VI-VI; page X of the book indicates that it was
published “for sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office, Washington, D.C. 20402—Price $6.00.”
39
Low, foreword to This Island Earth, IV-V.

16

Fig. 2. View of the Earth seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon, NASA
Photo AS17-148-22727 (“Whole Earth”), December 7, 1972.

17
resultant changing concepts of scale. While “the new art of space exploration has many
rewards…few are as profound as the rich new perspective we have gained about the
planet Earth,” which will continue to shift, and continue to enlarge the scale of man’s
aspirations at great speed.
40

Furthermore, this new perspective brought about by advancements in space travel
and technology directly contributed to President Richard Nixon’s 1970 statement
expressing optimism that the 1970s would be remembered as the time when America
“regained productive harmony between man and nature.”
41
This confidence also
reflected the advocacy of a unified planet under collective custody. Such a position
would come to be a basis for The Whole Earth Catalog, which was published regularly
from 1968-1972, a period that would come to be known as the Whole Earth years.
Founder Stewart Brand describes The Whole Earth Catalog, which featured various
Apollo images on its covers, as a synthesis of the “rugged individualism and back-to-the-
land movements of the Sixties counterculture” and the bourgeoning global community of
the time, in “an integrated, complex, challenging, thought-provoking, and comprehensive
worldview.”
42
[Fig. 3] An item was considered for inclusion in the catalogue based on
the following criteria: it must be “useful as a tool,” “relevant to independent education,”

40
Nicks, preface to This Island Earth, 4.
41
Nicks, preface to This Island Earth, 4.
42
The Whole Earth Catalog, “History of the Whole Earth Catalog,” Whole Earth,
http://www.wholeearth.com/history-whole-earth-catalog.php (accessed January 8, 2010).

18

Fig. 3. The Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968-Spring 1970.

19
“high quality or low cost,” “not already common knowledge,” and “easily available by
mail.”
43
The catalog was meant to function as an easily accessible and affordable tool
towards independent education and is often considered the precursor to the Google
internet search engine.
44

This changing, global view of the world is also reflected in Charles and Ray
Eames’ Powers of Ten film. The film, which was released in 1977 but had been in
development at least as early as 1968, explores the concept of scale, which provides the
perspective to consider what is seen in terms of its relative size.
45
Knowledge of scale
also provides a sense of humanity’s place in the universe and can encourage non-linear
thinking.
46
As illustrated in Powers of Ten, the scale from the molecular to universal has
been exploded in both directions. The miniscule may be magnified to resemble the

43
Stewart Brand, “The Function of the Whole Earth Catalog.” The Whole Earth Catalog,
Fall 1968,
http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/197/the.function.of.the.whole.earth.catalo
g (accessed January 8, 2010); see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture:
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 103-118.
44
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios famously concluded
his 2005 Commencement address to Stanford University with a reference to The Whole
Earth Catalog, which he proposes is the forerunner to Google. He describes the
publication as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came
along; it was idealist and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” Steve Jobs,
“Text of Steve Jobs’ Commencement address (2005),” Stanford University News,
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html (accessed February 26,
2010).
45
Although the Powers of Ten film was created in 1977, it is based on Boeke’s 1957 text
Cosmic View. The preliminary sketch Powers of Ten: A Rough Sketch for a Proposed
Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of the Universe indicate that
the Eames had conceived of the idea at least as early as 1968. See Di Palma, “Zoom:
Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 257-261 for a discussion of Powers of Ten.
46
Lucia Eames, “For Educators,” Powers of Ten,
http://powersof10.com/index.php?mod=education (accessed January 8, 2010).

20
maximum.
47
Buckminster Fuller also addresses technology and the resultant changing
notions of scale in terms of time and space during the Whole Earth years. In his
introduction to Gene Youngblood’s 1970 text Expanded Cinema, he writes,
To children born in 1970, trips to the moon will be as everyday an event as
were trips into the big city to me when a boy. The total distance covered
by an average human being in a total lifetime up to the time I was born
was 30,000 miles. Because of the great changes since my birth, I have
now gone well over one hundred times that distance. The astronauts
knock off three million miles in a week. The airline hostess is out-
mileaging my hundred-fold-greater mileage than all the people before me.
All this happened in my lifetime.
48

The air and spaceborne camera and photograph enable the expanded purview and
understanding of humans’ relationship to their local, global, and universal environs. This
aerial perspective and perception reached a culmination in the Whole Earth years of
1968-1972, and would continue to develop in the Google Earth years of the 2000s. As
Fuller alludes to, during the crucial Whole Earth years, mankind’s perception of the
world transformed to a degree perhaps only previously experienced with the development
of the railroads approximately a century prior. While the construction of the trans-
American railroad was an occasion experienced by the entire nation that changed the
scale of the continent,
49
opening up the nation for Americans, the outer space exploration

47
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 254.
48
Fuller, introduction to Expanded Cinema, 31-32.
49
Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
(New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 58-59; although not central to this thesis, it is
noteworthy to consider Smithson’s Spiral Jetty earthwork’s geographical proximity to the
Golden Spike National Historic Site (approximately fifteen miles southwest of Golden
Spike), a visitor’s center and monument commemorating the nation’s first
transcontinental railroad.

21
and photography of the Whole Earth years placed humankind into the purview of the
world and the universe at large.

22
CHAPTER 2: AERIAL ART AND THE SITE AND NONSITE DIALECTIC

The changing notions of scale during the Whole Earth years extended beyond the
sciences and into nearly all other realms, including the arts, in varying degrees. The
structures and earthworks created by a number of artists, such as Robert Smithson, are
suggestive of the shifting concepts of space during the mid 1960s and early 1970s. In his
1966 text “Entropy and the New Monuments” Smithson notes the large size in which
several of his contemporaries were working in. He identifies Donald Judd, Robert
Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Flavin as artists engaged in a new kind of monumentality
corresponding with the architectural concepts at the time.
50
In “Notes on Sculpture, Part
2,” however, Morris proposes that monumentality does not necessary denote scale, but
that “large-sized objects exhibit size more specifically as an element,” and “it is the more
conscious appraisal of size in monuments that makes for the quality of ‘scale.’”
51
Art
historian Pamela M. Lee notes that scale is often conflated with the notion of size when
viewing earthworks. Rather, she maintains that scale is concerned with the concept of the
sublime, or “the intricacy and infinity of nature,” as is addressed in Smithson’s work.
52

50
Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 1966, in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 10.
51
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 1966, in Continuous Project Altered
Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 13.
52
Pamela M. Lee, Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 260; Di Palma notes that in 1712 Joseph Addision
acknowledges this sense of sublime as “being overwhelmed by the intricacy and infinity
of nature,” and as being generated by “contemplating an expansion and contraction of
scale.” See Joseph Addison, “On the Pleasures of the Imagination,” in The Spectator,
July 2, 1712, quoted in Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 256.

23
The spectacle of the moon landing would factor into Smithson’s work, regardless
of his personal feelings towards the Apollo lunar program and its general reception. In a
postcard to Smithson dated June 13, 1967, artist Mel Bochner draws parallels between
Smithson’s advertisement for Dwan Gallery’s 1967 exhibition “Dwan Gallery New York
at Dwan Gallery Los Angeles,” which features imagery of a single astronaut figure in a
barren moonscape, to the future moon landing, despite preceding it by roughly two
years.
53
Ann Reynolds draws a comparison between Smithson’s 1969 trip to the Yucatan
and the 1969 moon landing, suggesting that in both cases there was no audience at the
site, yet viewers could experience the event through the subsequent feedback of
imagery.
54
Furthermore, she considers Smithson’s September 1969 cover for Artforum,
which features a photograph of First Mirror Displacement from his essay “Incidents of
Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” alongside the August 9, 1969 Life magazine cover,
featuring the first color photographs of the moon landing ever published. Both images
focus on the ground, which is marked by the residual evidence of human presence—
shoeprints and a flag or mirrors—casting heavy shadows. Reynolds also notes that both
photographs were taken with the camera angled to eliminate the horizon line. Comparing
the two magazine covers, she suggests a possible rhetoric between the two images.
55

However, while the similarities are striking, it is uncertain whether or not this was the

53
Mel Bochner, postcard of sand dune in the evening on outer Cape Cod, June 13, 1967,
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution. (unmicrofilmed); Smithson received several other postcards
from artist friends with moon landing imagery, including a holographic postcard from Sol
LeWitt depicting Japanese astronauts on the moon.
54
Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 182.
55
Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere, 167-168.

24
rationale behind Smithson or Artforum’s selection of the magazine cover image. Due to
the proximity of both publication deadlines, it is unclear whether or not one publication
informed the other.
Rolf-Dieter Herrmann’s article for the special May 1978 “Robert Smithson” issue
of Arts Magazine places Smithson’s early monumental outdoor works, namely his
proposal for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport, in the context of the Whole Earth
ideology. The article cites Smithson, stating, “the biggest airport in the world” became
“a speck in the Texas prairie,”
56
—“but a dot in the vast infinity of universes, an
imperceptible point in a cosmic immensity, a speck in an impenetrable nowhere.”
57

Herrmann suggests that such statements evoke the artist’s intention to “offer the starting
point for a reflection on what we are and who we are within the context of the entire
universe,” thus, insinuating Whole Earth implications.
58
However, instead of interpreting
the air terminal proposal as a manifestation of humanity’s desire for a broader
cosmological perspective and understanding of the individual’s place within an ordered
whole, Smithson’s assertions seem to refer to the aerial view’s potential to distance and
disorient, rather than situate the viewer. He makes it explicit that he does not embrace
the “brotherhood” aspect of the Whole Earth ideology,

56
Rolf-Dieter Herrman, “In Search of a Cosmological Dimension: Robert Smithson’s
Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Project,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 9 (May 1978): 111-112.
57
Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” 1969, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed.
Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 116.
58
Herrman, “In Search of a Cosmological Dimension: Robert Smithson’s Dallas-Fort
Worth Airport Project,” 111-112.

25
I don’t like people who are cosmological, but in a sense it can be
distancing, mental distancing where you can imagine moving away; if you
get away far enough from any large-scale object it diminishes. There’s
always this sense of reducing something in scale…like through the
airplane, which cuts down distances.
59

Furthermore, while a note in his 1969 calendar stating “watch moon shot”
60
indicates that
Smithson planned to partake in the viewing the moon landing on television, he describes
the public cultural event as a “kind of forced exuberance.”
61

In his 1969 conversation with Dennis Wheeler, Smithson implies that he
considered the view of a unified planet humanistic and problematic in its central focus on
human body and achievement.
62
Instead of situating the viewer at the center, the aerial
view may be seen as disorienting, eliminating the familiar human scale and shifting the
normative center. Returning to Hobbs, he suggests that outer space exploration presented
the idea of an infinite “congealed void”—a void that was not open or free. Rather than
considering outer space as a new frontier to be conquered, Hobbs maintains that this
“nonspace” “made man appear helpless and immobile.”
63
This notion deemphasizes the
humanistic aspect of outer space exploration that was central to the Whole Earth

59
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
210.
60
Robert Smithson, calendar, 1969, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 534).
61
Bruce Kurtz, “Conversation with Robert Smithson,” 1972, in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 268.
62
In his response to a July 20, 1966 questionnaire from Irving Sandler for potential
inclusion in a future publication, Smithson suggests art’s association with the humanities
is problematic, as “humanism confuses and subverts all consciousness of art by opposing
“life” to “art.” See letter to Irving Sandler, 1966, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 879).
63
Hobbs, Robert Smithson: A Retrospective View, 12-13; see Chapter 3 of this text for a
brief discussion on the notion of the frontier in the American West, outer space, and
cyber space.

26
ideology.
64
Furthermore, in a 1969 letter to Gyorgy Kepes, Director of the Center for
Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and collaborator
for the United States section of the X Sao Paulo Bienale, Smithson informs Kepes that he
will be withdrawing from the exhibition because he feels that his work does not fit the
context of the show, which “celebrate[s] the power of technology through art.” Rather,
Smithson explicitly states that he does not share the technological optimism and “team
spirit” of the astronauts.
65
Instead of illuminating and revealing the abyss of outer space,
“as rockets go to the moon[,] the darkness of the Earth grows deeper and darker.”
66

An April 17, 1969 letter from then Artforum editor Philip Leider directed
Smithson’s attention to a New Yorker article on preparations for the forthcoming moon
landing, suggesting salient parallels between aspects of the Apollo program and
Smithson’s practice. Leider proposes that the terminology used by NASA is akin to “the
kind that characteristically appears quoted at the head of various parts of [Smithson’s]
essays.” Furthermore, he likens the astronaut’s process of collecting rocks from the
moon’s surface, mapping their collection locations, and photographically documenting

64
Although Smithson would later become involved in various land reclamation projects,
he did not adopt the environmentalist attitude of the Whole Earth ideology. In his 1971
interview with Gregoire Muller, he states, “Unlike Buckmister Fuller, I’m interested in
collaborating with entropy.” See Robert Smithson, “…The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms,
is a Cruel Master,” 1971, interview with Gregoire Muller in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 256.
65
Robert Smithson, “Letter to Gyorgy Kepes,” 1969, in Robert Smithson: The Collected
Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 369.
66
Smithson, “Letter to Gyorgy Kepes,” 369.

27
them to Smithson’s site and nonsite projects.
67
This was a comparison that Smithson
himself acknowledged, describing the moon landing as “a very expensive non-site.”
68
In
Smithson’s 1969 text “Aerial Art” he writes, “just as our satellites explore and chart the
moon and the planets, so might the artist explore the unknown,” implying that he
considered the exploratory function of outer space exploration in relation to the role of
the artist.
69
However, his mention of the satellite, rather than the astronaut, suggests that
his focus was on the mechanical rather than human explorer.
As illustrated by Powers of Ten and other cultural phenomena indicative of the
effect of the aerial or space view, size came to be understood in terms of its relative scale
during the 1960s and 1970s.
70
While size is fixed, context determines an object’s scale.
In a 1971 text Smithson writes of the increasingly peripheral nature of the measured unit,
citing Richard Serra’s film Frame as a contemporary work exposing the contradictions
and problems with measurable distances,
71
a topic Smithson himself would explicitly

67
Philip Leider, letter to Robert Smithson, April 17, 1969, Robert Smithson and Nancy
Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3833,
1237).
68
Kurtz, “Conversation with Robert Smithson,” 268; Smithson’s spelling and
capitalization of “nonsite” is inconsistent. This text uses the “nonsite” spelling, except
except when Smithson’s direct quotations state otherwise.
69
Smithson, “Aerial Art,” 116.
70
Smithson’s undated notes about the Exclusion Principle, listing miles to the edge of the
known universe to the human eye’s retinal wall, in varying degrees, parallel the imagery
in the later Powers of Ten film. See Robert Smithson, “Exclusion Principal,” Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution. (3832, 716).
71
Robert Smithson, “Art Through the Camera’s Eye,” 1971, in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 373.

28
address in his 1972 essay “The Spiral Jetty.”
72
For Smithson, “bigness isn’t scale,”
73
and
“measure and dimension seem to break down at a certain point.”
74
“Although you are
conscious of the scale,” in terms of size, Smithson stresses its significance lies in “how
your consciousness focuses.”
75
Referring to a series of hypothetical islands, terminating
in a conceptual Island of Broken Glass, Smithson elaborates on the concept of scale in his
work,
This island might appear big, but in fact it’s very tiny, so that you have
this telescoping back and forth from both ends of the telescope; you can
conceive of it as a very large work, like one particle on the island might be
conceived as being a gigantic tumulus…The particle on the island takes on
an enormity. Whereas the island itself is just a dot.
76

Smithson’s thoughts regarding the scale of the island stem from his interest in the
crystalline form. When magnified, “the scale of a raw crystal is abstracted to the point
where you get a crystal lattice,” which is “extended to the latitudes and longitudes of the
world, so that you’re drawing lines and grids over the world…this is a certain kind of

72
In “The Spiral Jetty” Smithson writes about walking along the coils of the Spiral Jetty
earthwork, “After a point, measurable steps…descend from logic to the “surd state.” See
Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” 1972, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings,
ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 147.
73
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
203.
74
Patricia Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 1969, in Recording Conceptual
Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim,
Siegelaub, Smithson, and Weiner by Patricia Norvell, ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia
Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 132.
75
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
203.
76
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
203; for more on the Island of Broken Glass see Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations
Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,” 1969-1970, 203.

29
abstract consciousness which sets up a way of dealing with raw material and mental
experience.”
77
“It’s a matter of perception. It’s how you perceive.”
78

Around the time of the Apollo lunar missions, Smithson is noted for beginning to
work in multiple sizes and mediums outside of the gallery, with perception as a central
concern. His bourgeoning skepticism concerning the traditional gallery space contributed
to his drift away from the white cube and towards more neglected or remote locales as
exhibition spaces. In 1966 Smithson considered the fringes of an airport grounds as the
site for a series of sculptural works to be executed by him and a selection of his more
likeminded contemporaries. On June 17, 1966 Smithson spoke about the notion of the
city as a crystalline network at the Yale School of Art and Architecture Alumni Day
Convocation symposium on “Shaping the Environment: The Artist and the City.”
79

77
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
203; when magnified to a certain degree, the crystal appears as a spiral lattice. This spiral
form reappears in Smithson’s work. Smithson references the role of the mental and
physical spiral in Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and
Robert Smithson,” 1969-1970, 200.
78
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
200; Smithson’s attention to scale, rather than size, differs from that of his contemporary
Michael Heizer, whose work is often viewed alongside Smithson’s earthworks. William
L. Fox, who has spent a significant amount of time with Heizer, writes, “Heizer
insists…that he doesn’t work with scale, but with size. And size has always mattered to
him.” See William L. Fox, Aereality: Essays on the World From Above (Berkeley:
Counterpoint, 2009), 36-37; Rene Descartes defines perception as “not a vision, but
solely an inspection by the mind.” See Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, 2 vols, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch
(Cambridge, 1984), vol. 2, 21.
79
“Alumni Day Convocation: School of Art and Architecture, Yale Arts Association,”
June 17, 1966, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution (3837, 779-781).

30
Walter Prokosch,
80
an architect from the New York architectural firm Tippetts-Abbott-
McCarthy-Stratton (hereafter, TAMS) responsible for the two billion dollar site selection
for the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport, was in attendance and found Smithson’s city
as a crystalline network analogy consistent with the firm’s early modular airport
designs.
81
Prokosch approached the artist on behalf of TAMS, seeking his counsel in
“trying to figure out what an airport is.”
82
Smithson accepted TAMS’ offer to collaborate
on the development of the air terminal, which was forecast to be the largest commercial
facility to be built at one time, and shortly thereafter began working as an artist-
consultant for the airport project.
83
This entailed meeting with two architects on a
monthly basis beginning in July 1966 and continuing for about a year.
84

80
Spelling of the architect’s name varies, also listed as both “Walter Prokosh” and
“Walther Prokosch” in correspondence with Smithson. See Letters from Walter
Prokosch, 1966-1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 902, 999).
81
Ernest Schwiebert, telephone interview by Suzaan Boettger, March 20, 1998.
82
Paul Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American
Art/Smithsonian Institution," in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 290; although Smithson provides 1965
as the year of the symposium, Reynolds points out that his dates are off by one year. See
Reynolds, "Notes to Pages 133-145," in Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and
Elsewhere, 272.
83
“Section Thru Terminal Module: Basic Design Concepts,” Robert Smithson and Nancy
Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3835, 233);
the initial development of the airport was to include gates for 100 aircrafts and parking
for 10,000 cars.
84
In a letter to Herrmann dated July 31, 1970, Smithson mentions that he worked with
TAMS “for about a year” before the firm lost its contract for the airport. See Herrmann,
“In Search of a Cosmological Dimension: Robert Smithson’s Dallas-Fort Worth Airport
Project,” 110; furthermore, a letter from Walter Prokosch, dated August 29, 1967, states
that Smithson’s agreement with TAMS terminated in June 1967 due to lack of funds
designated for artist-consultant services. Although Prokosch writes that he hopes the
firm’s new October 1967 contracts with the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth will include
funds for Smithson’s services, TAMS eventually lost their contract for the airport. See

31
In December 1966 and January 1967 TAMS presented Terminal Area Concepts,
Dallas Fort Worth Regional Airport as a progress report for the upper management of the
airlines serving the region. The presentation contained no written text. Comprised of
“largely self-explanatory” visuals, the slide-talk included maps, charts, diagrams, and
Smithson’s drawings.
85
In one drawing he outlines his own visual concepts atop a
photocopy of the airport's layout plan. These drawings put forth Smithson's central
contribution to the master plan, a proposal for the commission of four new earthworks
devised specifically for the airport grounds.
86
Each of the works was to be situated near
ground level in the clear zones at the airport’s periphery, where they would not disrupt
the flights entering and exiting the terminal. Smithson’s early ideas for the air terminal
would involve the spiral form, indicative of his interest in the crystalline that would
continue to persist throughout his work. The drawing in the Terminal Area Concepts
document roughly plots out the sites for four possible earthworks, describing the works
loosely as a "square of red rocks," "spiral of blue rocks," "rectangle of yellow rocks," and
"low mounds of white sand."
87
In Smithson’s 1972 interview with Paul Cummings, he
states, “I wanted to do a spiral, actually, a triangulated spiral made out of concrete. And

Letters from Walter Prokosch, 1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-
1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 999).
85
TAMS, “Terminal Area Concepts, Dallas Forth Worth Regional Airport,” 1966, Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution. (3835, 236-239).
86
Smithson specifies these sculptural works as “earthworks.” However, the term
“earthworks” was not widely adopted until after the October 1968 exhibition “Earth
Works” at Dwan Gallery in New York.
87
Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American
Art/Smithsonian Institution," 291.

32
then there were also other projects—there was another spiral of a kind of reflecting pool,
in other words, a basin.”
88

The spiral form represents a way of thinking about a site. One begins the journey
through the spiral at the outer edges, considering the site in broad spatial and temporal
terms. Following the tightening coils, one gravitates towards a central focal point. From
this point, one has nowhere to go, but turn back and make ones way through the
corkscrew in reverse. The process repeats in a dizzying cycle. The individual remains in
transit, neither existing completely in the center nor on the edges, but in the in-between
realm of the nonspace. One mirrors back and forth between the outer and the inner, in a
circuitous flow, always in flux. This nonspace may be interpreted as chaotic, but also as
stasis, as the path and space traversed remain consistent. This rationale, of finding
stability in movement, or order amidst disorder, may be applied to other sites, beyond the
air terminal. Smithson, responding to a report that the Mariner camera returned images
that revealed Mars to have a mirrored surface, comments, “Sometimes I think the whole
universe is a Hall of Mirrors. Reflections reflecting reflections.”
89
This spiral mode of
thinking would continue to develop and become both a figurative and conceptual model
in his work.

88
Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American
Art/Smithsonian Institution," 291.
89
Robert Smithson, Letter to Sallie, undated, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 750).

33
Smithson’s ideas about the spiral in relation to the air terminal would continue to
shift, away from the literal spiral form.
90
Although Smithson drafted several plans
independently, many of which are undated, what is understood to be his final proposal
involved collaborations with his colleagues Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris,
in which each artist would install an earthwork for the airport’s periphery.
91
[Fig. 4] All
of these works were to reflect the changing materiality of the site and its physical
elements, as well as make evident the rarely seen processes of its construction—the
transitory phase, a type of nonspace, between the undeveloped land and the bustling
airport that was to soon occupy the site. In his June 1967 Artforum article “Towards the
Development of an Air Terminal Site,” Smithson writes, “land surveying and preliminary
building, if isolated into discrete stages, may be viewed as an array of art works that
vanish as they develop.”
92
Thus, the works would play with the addition and subtraction
of site materials. In his editorial introduction to LAQ from April 1968, Smithson
identifies borings, or the process of removing material to reveal holes, as central to the

90
In his 1969 conversation with Dennis Wheeler, Smithson speaks on perception in
relation to the airfield, “It’s how you perceive…some of my early designs for the outer
perimeter of the airfield took a spiral form. But those were totally in terms of an intuition
that was leading up to this, so that this wasn’t carried out.” See Schmidt, ed., “Four
Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,” 200.
91
In a letter dated January 6, 1967 a TAMS representative makes the following request of
Smithson, “I would regard it as a great help if you could let me know the names of a few
of your colleagues who you feel might have something to contribute.” Letter from
TAMS, 1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 947).
92
Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” 1967, in Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996), 58.

34

Fig. 4. Robert Smithson, Airport Site Map, 1967, pencil on paper, 19 x 24 inches. Art ©
Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

35
terminal proposal. His aerial art aimed to reveal their aesthetic value.
93
For the terminal
project Andre would propose using explosives to construct a hole or crater at the terminal
site.
94
In addition to Andre’s manmade crater, LeWitt would instruct someone to bury a
concrete cube, Morris would manipulate the earth into a circular mound,
95
and Smithson
would construct a series of seven square asphalt pavements.
96
The earthworks would be
installed or executed prior to any major construction of the air terminal facility, allowing
the artists to call attention to the fringes of the airport construction by using seemingly
unusable land in four different ways.
97
Thus, Smithson suggests that the idea was to
"program" the landscape, defining the limits of the air terminal site using new approaches
to existing conventions of airport landscaping. He hoped to both accommodate and
reveal the visual conditions of the air terminal as a working facility through artwork that
would directly address the invisible materials and processes that were involved in the

93
Robert Smithson, “Editorial Introduction, LAQ April ’68,” April 1968, Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution. (3835, 230).
94
Smithson, “Editorial Introduction, LAQ April ’68,” (3835, 230); portions of this text
also appear in Smithson’s “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” in the
June 1967 issue of Artforum.
95
Morris suggests a reluctance and skepticism towards the air terminal proposal in his
email correspondence with the author of this text on January 16, 2010.
96
Robert Smithson, "Proposal for Earthworks and Landmarks to be Built on the Fringes
of the Fort Worth-Dallas Regional Air Terminal Site," in Robert Smithson: The Collected
Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 354-355;
Morris addressed the notion of scale in his 1966 essay “Notes on Sculpture Part 2.”
Diverging from Smithson, who “envisioned the body as itself mutable relative to a
consciousness that made it possible for multiple “wholes” to be perceived even within the
confines of a single object,” Morris considered the viewer’s body as the constant to
which scale was gauged. See Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part 2,” 13; also see Karen M.
Rapp, “Not the Romantic West: Site-Specific Art, Globalization, and Contemporary
Landscapes,” PhD diss, Stanford University, 2009, 213.
97
Smithson, "Proposal for Earthworks and Landmarks to be Built on the Fringes of the
Fort Worth-Dallas Regional Air Terminal Site,” 354-355.

36
construction of the physical air terminal, but were not explicitly visible in the completed
airfield. The earthworks would highlight the unseen aspects of the airport. Through their
placement on the fringes, the works would define the perimeter of the terminal site.
When “the limits are there…there is no pretending that there is something there that isn’t
there.”
98
By addressing the relationship between the interior and the exterior, Smithson
calls attention to the unseen processes and the nonspace in between.
The four works of aerial art, a term explicitly referencing the role of the aerial
view in his work, would address multiple, shifting perspectives and notions of scale. In a
1969 conversation with Dennis Wheeler, Smithson explains his rationale in using the
designation “aerial art,” “I did want to accent the idea of getting above in an airplane and
viewing things in that way…It is a kind of rubric, but at the same time it connotes a
certain kind of scale consciousness which I wanted to get across.”
99
All four works
would be built at a size comparable to that of the major buildings to be constructed at the
terminal site. Morris and Smithson’s works were to be viewable from above by airplane
passengers during take-offs and landings, while Andre and LeWitt’s contributions would
exist as subterranean works.
100
As one ascends and views the air terminal campus from
above, the three-dimensional structures flatten, a phenomenon analogous to that which
the balloonist Nader described and the Apollo crews were experiencing. The views from

98
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
203.
99
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
210; Smithson explains that he used the words “aerial art” to make it clear to the rest of
the TAMS team that the structures were his proposal for the terminal site.
100
Smithson, "Proposal for Earthworks and Landmarks to be Built on the Fringes of the
Fort Worth-Dallas Regional Air Terminal Site,” 354-355.

37
the ascending or descending airplane would begin to assume similar forms to the airport
layout plan; both essentially "grids superimposed on large land masses."
101
An airplane
window would thus function as a simple grid system through which the vista it looks out
on becomes “only surfaces and lines,” akin to the latitudes and longitudes of the crystal
lattice.
102
Evidence of this flattened aerial view appears in Smithson’s drawings of
several U.S. airports as viewed from above, which were included in another set of printed
airport plans, titled Texas Airport. These drawings depict the three-dimensional airports
as simplified, black and white, two-dimensional images with a striking graphic quality.
[Fig. 5]
Although his final proposal did not include the spiral in its material form, it would
remain as a conceptual model to bridge the inner and the outer, highlighting the nonspace
in between and giving visibility to the invisible. Smithson suggests that the
“correspondence between the outer and the inner point is very essential to the idea of
scale.”
103
While “there’s a big gap between what’s outside and what’s inside,” he
conceived of a method of bringing the external earthworks, situated at the fringes of the
air terminal site, into the interior of the terminal itself through the aid of the current
electronic technology.
104
“The terminal was there, yet there was no evidence of these
things out there, so I thought of putting television out there and transmuting these things

101
Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American
Art/Smithsonian Institution," 291.
102
Robert Smithson, “The Monument: Outline for a Film,” 1967, in Robert Smithson:
The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
356.
103
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 126.
104
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 126.

38

Fig. 5. Robert Smithson, Texas Airport, 1966, Photostat and pencil, 18 x 25 inches. Art ©
Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

39
back in, and telescopes.”
105
A system of television cameras would transmit the outdoor
images to monitors located in a proposed "terminal museum" inside of the terminal.
106

This museum would function as “a kind of miniature universe, that sort of fit into [his]
concerns of mapping.”
107
When the earthworks are accessed from inside the terminal
museum, or when the site is viewed as a flattened abstract grid from an elevated aircraft,
the visual language of one domain, the traditional art gallery, is integrated into the
viewing conditions of another, the air terminal.
108
In doing so, Smithson sets up a
situation in which the outdoor site of the actual earthworks and the indoor site of the
terminal museum meet in a visual convergence of the nonspace. Furthermore, his
inclusion of telescopes in the terminal museum would extend focus out to the cosmos.
Smithson's network of sites would provide travelers with multiple views and points of
entry to the terminal's earthworks, each producing a different perspective or image of the
conceptual “artificial universe” of the airfield.
109

Although the convergence of multiple perspectives and scales in the terminal
museum would provide a broader experience of the terminal grounds, it could also lead to

105
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
212.
106
Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere, 137;
Reynolds suggests that the identification "terminal museum" was a deliberate double play
on the word "terminal" in regards to the museum's physical location inside of the air
terminal and also in regards to "its status as the "final" museum." It is also interesting to
note that Smithson’s final moments were spent in the air, as he died in an airplane crash
while surveying sites in Texas for his Amarillo Ramp on July 20, 1973. Holt, Serra, and
others would complete Amarillo Ramp.
107
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
212.
108
Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere, 137-138.
109
Smithson, “Aerial Art,” 117.

40
a sensation of disorientation, generated from an altered sense of scale, space, and time.
Smithson describes the intersecting perspectives and scales as “highly artificial and
purely mental,” creating “disaster zones of the mind.” He speaks of these mental
disasters in nonspace as chaotic and contradictory “polarities that never quite met but
were in correspondence with each other.”
110
Smithson’s writing itself is as
overwhelming and dizzying as the spiraling experience that he describes,
All these different kinds of degrees of abstraction became a kind of wreck
of precision, it went out on tangents; these spiraling progressions that I
did. It was all a sort of product of a kind of jeopardized map
making…[the nonspace is] bringing chaos and order into very close
quarters. It’s a very precarious range to operate in; it’s fraught with all
kinds of disasters but the disasters are sort of frozen, in other words they
are arrested, the disasters…the arresting aspect, this stasis within all this
flux…
111

He would continue to return to these convergences in his subsequent writings on the site
and nonsite dialectic.
Smithson would also propose a concurrent indoor exhibition at Dwan Gallery in
New York, which would provide gallery visitors a glimpse of the actual development of
the site in Texas. When asked about his feelings towards exhibiting his outdoor works in
the gallery context Smithson returned to his thoughts on limits, “I like the artificial limits
that the gallery presents…my art exists [physically] in two realms—in my outdoor sites
which can be visited only and which have no objects imposed on them, and indoors,

110
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
212.
111
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
212; see Edward S. Casey, “Mapping with Earth Works: Robert Smithson on the Site,” in
Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005), 3-26.

41
where objects do exist.”
112
The exhibition, “Aerial Art,” was to be a four-person show
featuring Andre, LeWitt, Morris, and Smithson that was scheduled to take place in
September of 1967. A map of the terminal site would be enlarged and used to cover the
approximate twenty-foot by ten-foot gallery floor. Models of the earthworks would be
built to scale and positioned on the large aerial map. Photographs of the construction
process, which would be installed in an adjacent gallery, would further supplement this
scaled model.
113
Although Smithson’s terminal proposal was abandoned in June of 1967
when TAMS lost funds for his artist-consultant services, and subsequently for the entire
airport contract, Dwan Gallery had attempted to purchase land around a small terminal in
the Pine Barrens environs in southern New Jersey for the four artists’ aforementioned
proposed aerial art.
114
Although Andre, Dwan, Morris, and Smithson had traveled to the
Pine Barrens area to scope out potential project sites, no land was acquired or projects
realized.
115
A letter from Prokosch, dated December 21, 1967, indicates that Smithson
had been in correspondence with the Airport Board regarding a proposal to use the

112
Liza Beaer and Willoughby Sharp, eds., “Discussion with Heizer, Oppenheim,
Smithson,” 1970, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 244.
113
Smithson, "Proposal for Earthworks and Landmarks to be Built on the Fringes of the
Fort Worth-Dallas Regional Air Terminal Site," 354-355.
114
In April 1967 Virginia Dwan made several inquiries about purchasing a small parcel
of land in the Pine Barrens plains area. See Letters to Town Clerk from Virginia Dwan,
April 21, 1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 967-971).
115
This trip to the Pine Barrens is included in Smithson’s “The Monument: Outline for a
Film” from 1967, in which he outlines a proposed film featuring several aerial shots and
changing camera angles—the artists travel in a station wagon from Virginia Dwan’s
apartment to the Pine Barrens and then to a flying saucer convention and to a gallery
opening for the Pine Barrens earthworks. See Robert Smithson, “The Monument:
Outline for a Film,” 1967, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 356.

42
Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport as a reference for an “Airport Sculpture” exhibition
that was to tour Europe in the spring of 1968;
116
however no exhibition featuring
Smithson and his cohorts’ aerial art was to come to fruition.
117
Nevertheless, he would
later return to the Pine Barrens to create his first designated nonsite. Furthermore, the
concept of multiple, simultaneous perspectives and presentations of aerial art in the
Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Terminal proposal of 1966 would lead to Smithson’s formal
development of the site and nonsite dialectic in 1968. Smithson’s use of multiple access
points and the spiral as both an aesthetic form and conceptual mechanism, relaying the
interior’s relation to the exterior, as demonstrated in the proposal for the terminal, would
prove fundamental to his later earthworks and nonsite projects and writings.
In a series of discussions amongst Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Dennis
Oppenheim in December 1968 and January 1969, Smithson recalls his first nonsite,
which was situated at the small hexagonal airfield he had previously visited with Andre,
Dwan, and Morris in search of a location for their aerial art,
Initially I went to the Pine Barrens to set up a system of outdoor
pavements but in the process I became interested in the abstract aspects of
mapping. At the same time I was working with maps and aerial
photography for an architectural company. I had great access to them. So
I decided to use the Pine Barrens site as a piece of paper and draw a
crystalline structure over the landmass rather than on a 20 x 30” sheet of
paper. In this way I was applying my conceptual thinking directly to the

116
Letter from Walter Prokosch, December 21, 1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3832, 1017);
Prokosch’s letter states that while the Board approved the European exhibition, such
permission did not constitute any commitment by either the Board or by TAMS, and that
“all the effort would be at the expense of the artists.”
117
Robert Morris, e-mail message to author, Jan 16, 2010.

43
disruption of the site over an area of several miles. So you might say my
non-site was a three-dimensional map of the site.
118

The hexagonal airfield and its early nonsite would be further referenced in the textual and
sculptural components of A Non-Site (an indoor earthwork) from 1968,
31 sub-divisions based on a hexagonal “airfield” in the Woodmansie
Quadrangle—New Jersey (Topographic) map. Each subdivision of the
Nonsite contains sand from the site shown on the map. Tours between the
Nonsite and the site are possible. The red dot on the map is the place
where the sand was collected.
119
[Fig. 6]

Smithson included the described sculpture, a hexagonal structure mounted on a low
platform containing sand from the site, in his second solo exhibition with Dwan Gallery
in March 1968. Looking down on the sculpture provided an aerial view of the work, in
which the structure assumes a two-dimensional appearance, akin to that experienced by a
passenger in an aircraft sailing above the actual Pine Barrens terminal and earthwork it
references in New Jersey. In the press release for the Dwan exhibition Smithson refers to
this visual compression as a result of “Infra Perspectives.”
120
His press release further
describes the nonsite in terms of visual effects of the aerial view, stating, “in Non-site
you can see how a place was reduced to a dot.”
121

118
Liza Beaer and Willoughby Sharp, eds., “Discussion with Heizer, Oppenheim,
Smithson,” 244.
119
Robert Smithson, A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, 1967-1968, Collection
Virginia Dwan. The sculpture is also referred to as Non-Site (Pine Barrens).
120
Robert Smithson, press release for Robert Smithson’s second solo exhibition at Dwan
Gallery, New York, March 2-27, 1968, in Robert Smithson: Mapping Dislocations, ed.
Elyse Goldberg and Julia Sprinkel (New York: James Cohan Gallery, 2001), 34.
121
Smithson, press release for Robert Smithson’s second solo exhibition at Dwan
Gallery, 34.

44

Fig. 6. Robert Smithson, Nonsite (Pine Barrens), 1967-68, wood, aluminum, sand, 66
inches in diameter. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York,
NY.

45
The visual conditions of the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport proposal—the
relationship between inside and outside, views from the air and on the ground, and two-
and three-dimensionality—converge in A Non-Site (an indoor earthwork), and thus, also
in his concept of the site and nonsite.
122
Smithson writes about this “range of
convergence” in relation to the site and nonsite in his 1972 text “Dialectic of Site and
Nonsite,”
The range of convergence between Site and Nonsite consists of a course of
hazards, a double path made up of signs, photographs, and maps that
belong to both sides of the dialectic at once. Both sides are present and
absent at the same time. The land or ground from the Site is placed in the
art (Nonsite) rather than the art placed on the ground. The Nonsite is a
container within another container—the room. The plot or yard outside is
yet another container. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional things
trade places with each other in the range of convergence. Large scale
becomes small. Small scale becomes large. A point on a map expands to
the size of the land mass. A land mass contracts into a point.
123

The nonsite corresponds to the site, and vice-versa, and neither is complete without the
other. The range of convergence describes the nonspace that links the site and the
nonsite, where signifiers reference, but do not wholly occupy, either pole. The nonsite
may be viewed as the subtraction of the site into an art context, and therefore, viewers of
the nonsite are simultaneously being referred back to the site. In “A Provisional Theory
of Non-Sites” from 1968, Smithson explains A Non-Site (an indoor earthwork),
A Non-Site (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture
that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in J.J. (The Pine Barrens
Plains)…the former function[s] as a three dimensional picture which
doesn’t look like a picture…Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens
and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could

122
Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere, 159.
123
Robert Smithson, “Dialectic of Site and Nonsite,” in Gerry Schum, ed., Land Art
(Hanover: Fernsehgalerie, 1969), n.p.

46
be that “travel” in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the
two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural
meanings and realistic assumptions.
124

Even when a viewer visits the original site, he or she is unable to experience the work in
its entirety, as the portion that has become the nonsite has been removed and placed in an
art context.
125
Smithson proposes that if one embarks on a “fictitious trip” to the original
site of the nonsite, that “trip” becomes “invented, devised, [and] artificial,” to the extent
that “one might call it a non-trip to a site from a Non-site.”
126
The photograph or other
nonsite may isolate and extract certain moments or material from the site, but once these
elements are removed, they come to represent “a very ponderous absence” or hole in the
site.
127
Thus, neither an encounter with the site or nonsite elicits a complete experience of
the place, resulting in a back-and-forth exchange between “no place” and “someplace.”
128

Therefore, an individual viewing A Non-Site (an indoor earthwork) at Dwan Gallery is
physically at the gallery in New York, but is conceptually transported to the Pine Barrens
airfield in New Jersey.

124
Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” 1968, in Robert Smithson:
The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996),
364.
125
Hobbs, Robert Smithson: A Retrospective View, 15.
126
Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” 364.
127
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 129; Andre’s earth mound for the air
terminal may be considered in these terms. The hole from which the earth was extracted
for the mound is the site; the recontextualized material, reformed into the earth mound,
thus becomes the nonsite.
128
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 131.

47
Smithson’s repeated use of the word “trip” is significant.
129
While the new
spacecrafts, aircrafts, and automobiles reduced the amount of time it took to physically
traverse long distances, the relatively widespread use of mind-altering substances during
the 1960s and 1970s enabled a different sort of travel through mental trips.
130
Both types
of trips provide a means of traveling distances, though one is internal and the other is
external, and as Smithson states in his description of his photo-essay “Incidents of
Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” “distance has a lot to do with [the] scale [of the
pieces].”
131
In the first draft to “A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey”
Smithson connects drug-induced internal trips with external space travel, suggesting
artists’ “massive” use of substances such as LSD may have been tied to a loss of faith in
aeronautics, which further implies his antagonism towards the Whole Earth ideology.
132

129
For a discussion of physical travel in Smithson’s work, see Ann Reynolds, “Travel as
Repetition,” in Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere, 123-191.
130
The chronology compiled by Alan Moore in the catalogue Robert Smithson: Drawings
alludes to Smithson’s experimentation with drugs such as peyote and speed. See Alan
Moore, “Chronology and Selected Exhibitions,” in Robert Smithson: Drawings, ed.Susan
Ginsburg (New York: The New York Cultural Center, 1974), 31-32; however, in Robert
Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings, Eugenie Tsai notes that Nancy Holt
felt that Moore’s chronology exaggerated Smithson’s drug use. Rather, Holt felt that
Smithson had his own interior supply of “hallucinogens.” Therefore, Moore’s references
to Smithson’s substance use were removed from the chronology revised by Chernetzsky,
Hobbs, and Holt in Robert Smithson: Sculpture. See Eugenie Tsai, Robert Smithson
Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),
42-43.
131
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 125.
132
Robert Smithson, “A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey” in Jan. 10,
1970-Sept. 19, 1970 + Monuments of Passaic 1
st
draft notebook, 1970, Robert Smithson
and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
(unfilmed); Smithson’s archives also include the undated “Giorno Poetry Systems: Throw
Away Your Glasses” press release, which encourages individuals to “get high, throw
away your glasses,” as “sight without glasses will take you on a life trip,” and “another
kind of sight” is developed. “Giorno Poetry Systems: Throw Away Your Glasses” press

48

Fig. 7. Robert Smithson, A Surd View For an Afternoon, 1970, ink on paper, 8 ½ x 11
inches. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

release, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution. (3837, 783-784).

49
Akin to the substance-induced trips, Smithson’s sites and nonsites aimed to
produce a sensation of disorientation and dislocation. [Fig. 7] Smithson refers to this
mirroring in “Dialectic of Site and Nonsite,” asking, “Is the Site a reflection of the
Nonsite (mirror), or is it the other way around? The rules of this network of signs are
discovered as you go along uncertain trails both mental and physical.”
133
His 1969
conversation with Wheeler further alludes to this,
Smithson: …Here you are confronted with both a mental and a physical
manifestation that purports not to be there, so that it’s an effacement
through the physical properties of both mind and matter…the nonsite idea
here is this container and it has the limit of my mental experience plus the
physical point.

Wheeler: So if someone was to walk into the gallery and face the object
and the collection of things inside, when they’d call it minimal they are
missing the notion of scale too.

Smithson: Even if there was the notion of the inside and the outside; in a
sense it’s the containment within the containment of the room…With the
nonsite the experience goes beyond, outside the gallery. It doesn’t really
go beyond it, because you are thrown back into that space.
134

These ideas directly trace back to the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Air Terminal
project, as further suggested by Smithson’s 1972 interview with Paul Cummings, in
which he traces his application of mapping and the crystalline structure to areas of land to
the terminal project, “I was dealing with grids superimposed on large land masses, so
that the inklings of the earthworks were there.”
135
Although the terminal project was
never conceived, Smithson suggests that his time spent as a TAMS consultant was

133
Smithson, “Dialectic of Site and Nonsite,” n.p.
134
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
204.
135
Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American
Art/Smithsonian Institution," 290-291.

50
extremely productive in that it “got [him] to think about large land areas and the dialogue
between the terminal and the fringes of the terminal…between the center and the edge of
things…part of the dialectic between the inner and the outer,” which would serve as the
foundation of his site and nonsite dialectic and seminal works.
136

136
Cummings, "Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American
Art/Smithsonian Institution," 296; in his 1969 interview with Dennis Wheeler Smithson
writes, “I got interested in the earthworks as a result of that airport project. The nonsites
came as a result of my thinking about putting large-scale earthworks out on the edge on
the airfield.” See Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert
Smithson,” 212.

51
CHAPTER 3: NAVIGATING NONSPACE

In the text “Aerial Art” Smithson likens the projected Dallas-Forth Worth
Regional Air Terminal complex to the universe at large. Although “everything in the
known universe isn’t entirely visible” to the human eye, optical tools and techniques can
help aid in ones interpretation of space.
137
The art in the terminal project would be
“remote from the eye of the viewer the way a galaxy is remote from the earth,”
138

however, “there is no reason why one shouldn’t look at art through a telescope,” which
was proposed to be included in the terminal museum.
139
An airplane window, a
microscope, and a telescope may all be considered as visual framing devices, each
capable of providing a distinct context and perspective of a given subject. Vittoria Di
Palma suggests that although telescopes and microscopes differ in terms of what they
do—enlarge small objects and bring distant objects closer, respectively—both “introduce
the possibility that there is much to see outside of the scope of quotidian earthbound
human vision, and by doing so, position technology as central to this expansion of the
visual realm.”
140

This use of technologies, such as the aforementioned visual devices, to provide
different ways of viewing, bridging the inner with the outer, is exemplified in Smithson’s
separate, but interrelated Spiral Jetty earthwork, film, and text.
141
Through these three

137
Smithson, “Aerial Art,” 117.
138
Smithson, “Aerial Art,” 117.
139
Smithson, “Aerial Art,” 117.
140
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 251.
141
See Smithson’s “The Spiral Jetty” essay, in which he describes the disorienting
sensations experienced when creating the Spiral Jetty earthwork, “My dialectics of site

52
Spiral Jetty works, the conceptual spiral is rendered literal and material. The spiraling
crystal lattice is reinterpreted in different mediums and scales—the 1,500 foot by 15 foot
coiled earthwork, the 32 minute 35mm film, and essay all refer to the networked, self-
reflexive crystalline form. In the film, Smithson visually emphasizes the changing sense
of scale implicit in the use of these various visual tools. The film, which “recapitulates
the scale of the Spiral Jetty” and “gives you a way of perceiving the scale of
sculpture,”
142
shifts between macro views of salt crystals, aerial views of the earthwork as
a whole, and grounded views of Smithson running along the jetty.
143
[Fig. 8] In his 1972
essay “The Spiral Jetty,” he writes,
The scale of the Spiral Jetty tends to fluctuate depending on where the
viewer happens to be. Size determines an object, but scale determines
art…Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of
perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with
an object or language that appears to be certain. For me scale operates by
uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. On eye
level, the tail leads one into an undifferentiated state of matter. One’s
downward gaze pitches from side to side, picking out random depositions
of salt crystals on the inner and outer edges, while the entire mass echoes
the irregular horizons. And each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty
in terms of the crystal’s molecular lattice. Growth in a crystal advances
around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screw. The Spiral Jetty
could be considered one layer within the spiraling crystal lattice,
magnified trillions of times.
144

The notion of technology as providing a lens through which to view things at
different scales from the normalized perspective of the human body, with the potential to

and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state...” He also notes his texts on the “scale of
centers” and “scale of edges” and the resultant disorientation. Smithson, “The Spiral
Jetty,” 146, 150.
142
Robert Smithson Interviews, 1971-1973, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (unmicrofilmed).
143
Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” 151.
144
Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” 147.

53

Fig. 8. Robert Smithson, Stills from “Spiral Jetty”, 1970, 12 mounted gelatin-silver
prints, framed, 26 x 44 inches. Art © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.

54
detach the viewer from the subject, is reflected in Jonathan Crary’s discussion of
technology’s ability to relocate vision to a plane distinct from that of the observer, or in
Smithson’s terms, to the “other” realm of the nonspace. Crary writes, “most of the
historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in
which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a
‘real’ optically perceived world.”
145
The view as seen from the human eye is distinct
from that of the mechanical eye of the microscope, telescope, or camera, and he proposes
that photography has changed the way in which we perceive and frame the world. “Ever
since the invention of the photograph, we’ve seen the world through photographs and not
the other way around…we see through cameras rather than around cameras.”
146

Smithson suggests photography can function as a tool for directing human vision,
providing “a way of focusing on the site.”
147
Crary reflects this in his proposal that
optical devices generate techniques for “imposing visual attentiveness, rationalizing
sensation, and managing perception,” and thus discarding classical notions of vision.
148

However, while these instruments can be seen as providing a lens that can direct
ones visual attention, conversely, they can be viewed as obstructions that literally disrupt
the physical space between the viewer and the subject, “decorporealizing” vision and

145
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, 2.
146
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 128.
147
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 128.
148
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, 39.

55
distorting visual perception and self-referential place.
149
The nonsite may be compared to
the camera obscura, as both devices play with the notion of transporting the exterior to
the interior, of inverting and perhaps concealing and mystifying “truth.”
150
With the
camera obscura, the image of the external place (the site) is brought into the internal
confines of the camera body (the nonsite). Crary’s description of the camera obscura’s
mechanical process further supports this analogy with the site and nonsite,
The two-dimensional plane on which the image of an exterior presents
itself subsists only in its specific relation of a distance to an aperture in the
wall opposite it. But between these two locations (a point and a plane) is
an indeterminate extensive space in which an observer is ambiguously
situated.
151

Neither user of the camera obscura or viewer of the nonsite exists in a single realm—of
the photographic subject or site, or that of the photograph or nonsite—but travels between
the two in a fluctuating and intermediate nonspace. As the camera obscura “duplicates
itself in a mirror,”
152
in the nonsite, the exterior is similarly brought to the interior and
then reflected back out again, oftentimes through the use of mirrored surfaces. Michel
Foucault, speaking on the camera obscura, proposes that such mirroring creates a
dialectic in which “the world abolishes the distance proper to it…overcom[ing] the place

149
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, 39.
150
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, 29-30; although the camera obscura was initially associated with the
representation of truth, Crary notes that this was no longer the case by the beginning of
the nineteenth century.
151
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, 40-41.
152
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (New York: Pantheon, 1973), 18-19.

56
allotted to each thing.”
153
Furthermore, such devices or systems can lead to a
reconsideration of the notion of originality and reality—which is the reality and which is
the projection, and are such distinctions even relevant?
154
The planetarium, which
Smithson frequented and collected reference materials from, may also be interpreted
through the conceptual lens of the site and nonsite dialectic. In the guidebook to the
Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, Smithson, calls
attention to the following statement that reads similarly to his writings on the nonsite,
“we come to realize that many miracles occur within its [the planetarium’s] walls and that
these walls bound a boundless universe.”
155
The planetarium thus becomes the nonsite
for the universe.
Smithson discounts the idea of a fixed reality or veracity in visual sight, proposing
that perception must “decant itself of any kind of naturalism or realism” or “any other
anthropomorphic interests.”
156
This is reflected in his site and nonsite dialectic, a play on
the notion of “sight” and “non-sight.”
157
The nonsite, like the camera obscura, telescope,
or stereoscope, which also factored into Smithson’s earlier work,
158
may be viewed as an
instrument for non-veridical vision, which Crary suggests effectively destroys any

153
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 18-19.
154
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 18-19.
155
“Visiting the Stars,” Guidebook to American Museum—Hayden Planetarium, Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution. (3837, 910); see frames 829-928 for Smithson’s collection of photographs and
ephemera from the planetarium, undated and from 1955-1964.
156
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 129.
157
An undated loose notebook page from Smithson’s archives lists the following words:
“sight, sight unseen, unsitely nonsite, out of site, siteless, blindsite, lost site, farsited.”
Loose notebook pages, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (unmicrofilmed).
158
See Smithson’s Enantiomorphic Chambers, 1965.

57
concept of a singular reality.
159
Technologies have the potential to expand the perceptual
limits of the naked eye (“never trust a retina!”)
160
and multiply the realms in which we
can engage in.
161
A definitive reality or truth is unknowable.
162

Furthermore, Lev Manovich suggests that the “telepresence” of being engaged in
multiple digital realms eliminates what Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio had considered
a fundamental condition of human perception—spatial distance, or the distance between
the viewer and the object that is being viewed.
163
This contrasts with Marshall
McLuhan’s idea of technology as an extension of the human body. In “The Medium Is
the Message,” McLuhan proposes that the technical device is a bodily appendage, stating,
“our human senses, of which all media are extensions, are also fixed charges on our
personal energies, and that they also configure the awareness and experience of each one
of us.”
164
Smithson is critical of such a position, suggesting that the developments in
space exploration during the Whole Earth years were largely blindly being interpreted
through “a kind of humanistic projection, almost in terms of the kind of McLuhanistic

159
Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, 14.
160
“Part Two,” Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (3834, 160).
161
For an analysis of different types of vision—human, mechanical, and digital—see
William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
162
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 132.
163
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),
174-175; Manovich writes, “For Benjamin and Virilio, distance guaranteed by vision
preserves the aura of an object, its position in the world, while the desire “to bring things
‘closer’” destroys objects’ relations to each other, ultimately obliterating the material
order altogether and rendering the notions of distance and space meaningless.”
164
McLuhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” 34.

58
technology as an extension of man, which kind of gets boring.”
165
Rather, Smithson
maintains that technology is simply a tool—there is “no point in utilizing technology or
industry as an end in itself or as an affirmation of anything.”
166
Although technological
devices can help determine context and eliminate the notion of the fixed measurement,
Smithson suggests that they are distinct from the body and can actually function to
dissociate the viewer from the subject in terms of corporeal scale. While these multiple
perspectives can lead to a broader understanding of the subject, the lack of bodily
reference can lead to the spatial disorientation Smithson alludes to in the “Spiral Jetty”
text and film. The expanded periphery enabled by technological aids introduces the
possibility of a plurality of scales and the reconsideration and questioning of the viewer’s
relative position.
167
Rather than placing the viewer at the center, Smithson considers the
nonsite as the still or central point that his Infra Perspectives, or the viewer’s eye, “rotate
or spiral around.”
168

165
Schmidt, ed., “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,”
210.
166
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 133.
167
Despite the use of mechanical technology, most notably the still and the movie
camera, in much of his work and documentation of his work, Smithson often speaks of
his reluctance towards certain aspects of it. In “Art Through the Camera’s Eye” from
1971 he writes, “Some artists are insane enough to imagine they can tame this wilderness
created by the camera. One way is to transfer the urge to abstraction to photography and
film. A camera is wild in just anybody’s hands, therefore one must set limits. But
cameras have a life of their own…They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour
anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction. Like mirrors they may
be scorned for their power to duplicate our individual experiences.” See Smithson, “Art
Through the Camera’s Eye,” 372.
168
Smithson, press release for Robert Smithson’s second solo exhibition at Dwan
Gallery, 34.

59
Just as aircraft, artwork, and ocular instrument may be considered as aids in the
interpretation or misinterpretation of a subject, current innovations such as Google Earth
are providing updated modes of perceiving space and of navigating the conceptual
spiral.
169
In June of 2005 Google introduced its internet-based application Google Earth,
a digital globe computer interface that makes it possible to view the earth at various
scales. Downloading the free base version of the application allows users to survey the
planet, “zooming from global to local with a few clicks of the mouse”—from satellite
images of the earth taken from outer space to aerial and “street view” images of local
landmarks.
170
Users are invited to instantly contribute content, such as landmarks of
personal interest, to the maps and views on an ongoing basis, resulting in a constantly
changing database.
Google Earth offers a twenty-first century update to the shifting and often
disorienting multiple perspectives exemplified in Smithson’s aerial art and subsequent
works. Although its projection of the earth is fundamentally conditioned by parameters
inherent in the aerial view, Google is in the early stage of incorporating 360-degree
Quick Time Virtual Reality (QTVR)
171
views and is working on integrating more street

169
Manovich identifies Smithson, as well as Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder, and Jenny
Holzer, function as designers of navigable space. See Manovich, The Language of New
Media, 265.
170
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 240.
171
QTVR offers a spherical projection of a site in which the user is able to navigate the
space as though he or she is physically there. It is interesting to note that virtual reality
(VR) technology emerged between 1966 and 1968 when Ivan Sutherland and his
colleagues began research on the prototype of VR. See Manovich, The Language of New
Mediam 102-103, 276-277.

60
views into Google Earth.
172
Navigating the virtual globe is referred to as “flying,”
presenting users with a simulation of accelerated flight. The prospect of soaring around
the globe with a click of the mouse alters geographical time and distance, while also
constructing a user “whose desire for speed, accessibility, and incorporealty seem
presupposed, a viewer who seems to be modeled after a disembodied eye in flight.”
173

Google Earth may be emblematic of a new paradigm concerning the aerial view and
spatial perception, comparable to that of the Whole Earth years. With similar globalizing
effects to those resulting from developments in space travel, Di Palma proposes that
Google Earth is contributing to a new kind of global understanding in which users are
“citizens of the imagined community of Google Earth.”
174

While Google Earth may be seen as creating stability and self-positioning for the
“located but distant observer,” it also has the potential for disorientation, reflecting
Benjamin’s concept of “perception in the state of distraction” and Martin Heidegger’s
‘Bestellbarkeit,” which would come to be understood as “the essence of modern

172
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 240; this begins to address
criticism of the aerial view as the transcendent “God’s Eye,” view. The street view
provides a view from the human body, in addition to the aerial view from above, which
Donna Haraway suggests is a view “from nowhere, from simplicity.” See Donna
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the
Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 195, quoted in Sallie A Marston, John Paul Jones III and
Keith Woodward, Human Geography Without Scale (Tucson: Department of Geography
and Regional Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, Aug 25, 2005), 7; Marston et
al provide an extensive critique of hierarchical scale.
173
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 240.
174
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 241.

61
technology: that total availability of being placed and displaced at will.”
175
The ability to
zoom in and out on a given position on the earth’s surface can result in a displacement
akin to that generated from the expanding and contracting microscope or telescope. Such
devices can eliminate the fixed position of the human body at the center. The limits
become arbitrary, determined by the capabilities of technology instead of the human eye.
Thus, “although this progressive exploration of a sequence of scales begins with the
human body, that body is no longer at the center of that sequence, but merely somewhere
in the middle”—the nonspace.
176
Di Palma suggests “the rapid explosion of scale in two
directions means the parameters and capacities of the body are soon surpassed, resulting
in a flight of fancy that the imagination is unable to comprehend.”
177
Her statement
directly refers to the bodily displacement experienced in early air travel, however, it
could just as easily be addressing Google Earth “flights” or the disorientation from
multiple-approaches to Smithson’s work. Smithson’s notion of the crystalline as “a
glacial and impersonal concept that distains viewing existence from a single portion of
time and space” may also be applied when considering the virtual realm.
178

175
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 242; Samuel Weber, “Mass
Mediauras, or: Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” in Mass
Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994), 79.
176
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 256.
177
Di Palma, “Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy,” 256.
178
Jack Flam, “Introduction: Reading Robert Smithson,” in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xix.

62
The networked computer monitor may be viewed as an optical device that can
flatten, transform, and present multiple perspectives.
179
Similar to Smithson’s aerial art,
the screen presents the subjects at hand as a two-dimensional grid.
180
The airplane
window, television, and computer monitor are all representational screens characterized
by the existence of nonspace, “another virtual space, another three-dimensional world
enclosed by a frame and situated inside our normal space.”
181
The screen serves as an
entrance to the “infospace” of the internet, the “fluid electronic version of space that is a
form of a non-site but is also something else,” beyond representation.
182
The frame thus
separates distinct, but coexisting spaces.
183
Tools are used to try to address humanity’s
desire for proximity; however, in using such a device, the user is placing an apparatus
between him or herself and the desired end result, thus, oftentimes physically and
conceptually distancing the two. Peering through an aircraft window, television, or
computer monitor, the viewer exists in two spaces—the physical space of his or her

179
Manovich views the internet as “a collection of numerous files, hyperlinked but
without any overall perspective to unite them;” see Manovich, The Language of New
Media, 257.
180
See Manovich, The Language of New Media, 94-95 and 103-111 for a discussion of
the screen, which Manovich breaks down into three categories: the classical screen,
which displays still, permanent images; the dynamic screen, which displays moving
images of the past; and the real-time screen, which shows images of the present as they
are taking place. All entities in the site, nonsite, website trialectic may be considered as
real-time.
181
Kastner, “True Beauty: Jeffrey Kastner Talks with Matthew Coolidge about the
Center for Land Use Interpretation” 286-287.
182
Kastner, “True Beauty: Jeffrey Kastner Talks with Matthew Coolidge about the
Center for Land Use Interpretation” 286-287.
183
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 94-103; Manovich outlines surveillance
technology lineage, considering and connecting the military origins of many of the
aforementioned technologies, such as aerial photography, radar, and television, and the
computer screen.

63
human body and the virtual space as seen through the screen.
184
Thus, space may be
viewed as a media type, which, like more traditional media types, such as audio, video,
stills, and text, can now be manipulated and programmed.
185

As David Joselit suggests in his 2005 article “Navigating the New Territory: Art,
Avatars, and the Contemporary Mediascape,” virtual devices and applications such as
Google Earth enable users to occupy multiple places at once.
186
Furthermore, they enable
travel through physically nonexistent three-dimensional spaces, which may or may not
refer to material places. A computer monitor connected to a network becomes a window
“through which we can enter places thousands of miles away.”
187
With such a navigable
virtual space, the user is able “to be away from home, and yet to feel at home, to behold
the world, to be in the midst of the world and yet to remain hidden from the world.”
188

Furthermore, Manovich states that the World Wide Web has drawn comparisons to the
American Wild West, as both are often associated with exploration, homesteading, and
the romanticized notion of the American frontier. In Under an Open Sky: Rethinking
America’s Western Past, William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin write that living
in a frontier area oftentimes evokes the feeling of being “present at the creation of a new

184
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 104.
185
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 251-252; while Manovich proposes that the
internet enabled space to be viewed as a media type for the first time, space may also be
viewed as medium in Smithson’s site and nonsite dialectic.
186
David Joselit, “Navigating the New Territory: Art, Avatars, and the Contemporary
Mediascape,” Artforum International 43, no. 10 (Summer 2005): 276.
187
Manovich, The Language of New Media, 94.
188
Charles Baudelaire, quoted in Manovich, The Language of New Media, 269.

64
world”
189
or conquering the uninhabited.
190
Thus, although Frederick Jackson Turner
declared the end of the frontier in America around 1890,
191
the notion of the frontier was
applied to outer space exploration during the Whole Earth years, and more recently the
analogy has been extended to address the internet.
192
Returning to the foreword to the
1970 NASA publication This Island Earth,
New frontiers have always been a catalyst for civilization’s
advances…Some have feared that the settlement and development of the
western states marked the end of the nation’s youthfulness and that the
fresh, confident outlook might never come again. But now a new frontier
has opened…This frontier provides a renewed stimulus for our nation’s
growth, and does so with noble motivation: exploration of the unknown,
expansion of knowledge, and unselfish sharing of the new for the
betterment of all.
193

The Google Earth enthusiast community Google Sightseeing embraces this
concept of traversing and exploring the terrestrial landscape through its digital
counterpart, taking users on various “tour[s] of the world as seen from satellite” using
Google Earth and Google Maps. Each weekday, the website’s monitors, or “guides,”
present “new weird and wonderful sights” submitted by readers, providing hyperlinks and

189
See Manovich, The Language of New Media, 257, 269; Manovich draws comparisons
between the internet surfer and the flaneur, as well as the explorer.
190
William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking
America’s Western Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 10.
191
See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover,
1996), for an extensive discussion of the American frontier.
192
See Gerard K. O’Neill, 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future (Simon &
Schuster, 1981) for one exploration of the “space as final frontier” analogy, a concept that
is not without its critics; see Nader Elhefnawy, “Space as frontier,” The Space Review,
Feb 9, 2009, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1301/1 (accessed January 20, 2010).
Also, see Suzaan Boettger, “The West as Site and Spirit,” in Earthworks: Art and the
Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 103-127 for a
discussion of the earthworks of the 1960s in relation to the American West.
193
Low, foreword to This Island Earth, IV-V.

65

Fig. 9. Spiral Land Art, June 2, 2007, Google Sightseeing screen shot, Google
Sightseeing, http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/06/02/spiral-land-art/. (accessed February
24, 2010).

66
images of the destinations on Google Earth.
194
[Fig. 9] Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or
“Spiral Land Art,” as the Sightseers refer to it, is one “bizarre” destination that is popular
with the Google Sightseeing community. The “Spiral Land Art” page includes the
guide’s brief description of the site, the site’s user rating, a Google Maps aerial view of
Spiral Jetty and Smithson’s Spiral Hill, Broken Circle, as well as a link to the work in
Google Earth.
195
Clicking on the hyperlink prompts the Google Earth application, which
launches with a distant view of the planet, reminiscent of the Apollo Whole Earth image,
then spins and quickly focuses in on North America, zooming in on Utah, the Great Salt
Lake, and finally Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. The program automatically “lands” at the
center of the spiral, at a distance of 2.63 kilometers or 1.63 miles; however, the user may
continue to zoom in to a distance of 8 meters or 26.25 feet, which renders the 1,500 foot
long, 15 foot wide counterclockwise coil an indiscernible blue blur. [Figs. 10-11]
The rapidly scalable satellite imagery, immediately reminiscent of Powers of Ten,
is marked with a number of user-generated tags and content. This includes the online
community members’ descriptions of the site, as well as numerous photographs of Spiral
Jetty, which are uploaded to the image-sharing site Panoramio and then linked to various
points on the Google Earth sphere.

[Fig. 12] The Google Earth user can help shape the
surrounding space as he or she moves through it. This user-generated commentary and
content reveals a sense of enthusiasm, curiosity, and novelty only seen in viewers

194
Alex Turnbull and James Turnbull, Google Sightseeing, http://googlesightseeing.com
(accessed January 8, 2010).
195
Visitors have collectively granted the “Spiral Land Art” tour a four and a half out of
five star rating. See Turnbull and Turnbull, Google Sightseeing,
http://googlesightseeing.com/2007/06/02/spiral-land-art/.

67

Fig. 10. Spiral Jetty, July 13, 2006, Google Earth, Google, 2009.

68

Fig. 11. Spiral Jetty, July 13, 2006, Google Earth, Google, 2009.

69

Fig. 12. Spiral Jetty Sunset, July 13, 2006, Google Earth screen shot, Google, 2009.

70
unfamiliar with Smithson’s work. “Great capture…I love these colors and the subject is
unusual to say the least. What is the purpose of the jetty in this spiral form?” a user asks
on the “Spiral Jetty Sunset” page. The next day, the photographer replies with an
abridged description of the work, to which the initial commenter responds rather
earnestly, “Thanks for the explanation…that is fascinating. I’ve never heard of Art in this
form. I’m going to have to Google this Smithson guy.”
196
A Google search for “Robert
Smithson and Google Earth” returns several external websites locating Spiral Jetty in
Google Earth or Google Maps. Other websites offer guides to virtual “Environmental
Art” and “Monumental Land Art” tours. The “Monumental Land Art” itinerary takes
users to the “significant monumental scale works” of the United States, including
Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and City, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter De Maria’s
Lighting Field, and James Turrell’s Roden Crater, amongst others.
197

Other more conscious efforts have been made to introduce Smithson’s work to
new audiences through recontextualization of his work.
198
For example, in 1997, the
Brooklyn-based gallery Pierogi 2000 restaged Smithson’s 1969 Dead Tree. In the
accompanying catalogue, curator Joe Amrhein states that he hopes such a reinterpretation
will “provide an important opportunity to infuse his work with a situation that is tangible

196
Ben Steiner, “Spiral Jetty Sunset,” Panoramio, www.panoramio.com/photo/6093908
(accessed January 8, 2010).
197
Don Seeley, “Monument Land Art of the United States,” Daring Designs,
www.daringdesigns.com/earthworks.htm (accessed January 8, 2010).
198
See Butler, “A Lurid Presence: Smithson’s Legacy and Post-Studio Art,” 225-243 for
a discussion of Smithson’s impact on contemporary art.

71
and vital to a new audience.”
199
The Getty Conservation Institute and Dia Art Foundation
have utilized the internet to provide the conservation and general publics access to
images and multimedia from their documentation efforts. The page “Documenting Spiral
Jetty” on the Getty Conservation Institute’s website includes various aerial and vertical
photographs of Spiral Jetty, a navigable 360-degree QTVR view from the base of Spiral
Jetty, and a time-lapse video of the Rozel Point site.
200

Through these web-based interfaces, new audiences are being introduced to the
earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s, albeit sometimes as a novelty. However, in many
cases, these virtual tours offer the only points of entry to the works, as they are
geographically situated in more remote and extreme environs. Google Earth offers a rare
glimpse at Heizer’s City and Turrell’s Roden Crater, both currently uncompleted, closed
off to visitors, and heavily guarded.
201
Artist Lita Albuquerque acknowledges the
transformative effect that internet technology has had on our experience of and access to

199
Joe Amrhein, foreword to A collection of writings on Robert Smithson on the occasion
of the installation of Dead Tree at Pierogi 2000, ed. Brian Conley and Joe Amrhein (New
York: Pierogi 2000, 1997).
200
J. Paul Getty Trust, “Documenting Spiral Jetty,” Getty Conservation Institute,
http://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications/videos/focus/spiral_jetty.html (accessed
January 8, 2010).
201
The “Monumental Land Art” guide provides the following warning regarding Heizer’s
City, “Do NOT attempt to visit this site without prior permission.” See the following for
personal accounts of failed or difficult attempts to physically access earthworks: Erin
Hogan, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West (Chicago,
The University of Chicago Press, 2008); Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental
Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (New York: Penguin Group, 2006).

72
such monumental land projects, proposing that perhaps “geo-cosmic” art is a more
appropriate term for the works than “land art.”
202

Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation suggests that the
internet-induced sensation of multi-placement and disparate, yet congruent experiences,
may be viewed as an extension of Smithson’s site and nonsite dialectic to a site, nonsite,
website “trialectic.”
203
Through internet-based interfaces such as Google Earth and the
Center for Land Use Interpretation’s online Land Use Database, individuals may “explore
scalable systems where you can look for new relationships, juxtapositions, and contexts
based on where and how you’re looking.”
204
Like the nonsite, this “website” component
does not merely represent the site, but introduces a new aspect or version of it. Each of
these elements, Coolidge suggests, “affects the experience of place,” creating a “fluid
back-and-forth between these three nodes of experience.”
205
Smithson’s statement about

202
Albuquerque made this comment at the inaugural Art + Environment Conference on
October 3, 2008. This conference was transcribed in “real time” and made available
online. See Nevada Museum of Art, “Art + Environment Conference Live Blog,” Cover
It Live,
http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php?option=com+altcaster&task=viewaltcast&altcast
_code=878773ae15&ipod=y (accessed January 8, 2010).
203
Kastner, “True Beauty: Jeffrey Kastner talks with Matthew Coolidge about the Center
for Land Use Interpretation,” 286-287.
204
“The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Land Use Database is a collection of
unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States. Files, photographs, and other
material are kept at the CLUI location in Los Angeles, where visitors can access this
source material, and peruse the Center’s in-house computer database, which has a few
thousand complete and near-complete entries. A selection from this master version is
made available on the internet.” The web-based version of the Land Use Database
presents the sites from the database via a scalable and clickable map, utilizing data from
Google Maps. See Center for Land Use Interpretation, “Land Use Database,” Center for
Land Use Interpretation, http://ludb.clui.org/ (accessed January 8, 2010).
205
Kastner, “True Beauty: Jeffrey Kastner talks with Matthew Coolidge about the Center
for Land Use Interpretation,” 286-287.

73
the site and nonsite dialectic seems apt to describe the current ways in which his
earthworks and other sites are being accessed through Google Earth and other internet-
based interfaces,
The sites are receding in to the nonsite and the nonsites are receding back
into the sites…It’s always back and forth, to and fro, discovering places of
origin for the first time and then not knowing them. And it gives you a
certain sense of exhilaration, I guess.
206

206
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 134.

74
CONCLUSION: MAKING SENSE OF THE SPIRAL

…You’re really going from someplace to no place and back to no place
and back to someplace. And then to locate between those two points gives
you a position of elsewhere, so that there’s no focus.
207

As Lucy Lippard writes, we are living in a “multi-centered society that values
place but cannot be limited to one view.”
208
New technologies are continuing to offer
individuals expanded viewpoints and multiple perspectives. Although the devices may
vary in sophistication and fashion, they each have the ability to orient and disorient, as
suggested in the previous discussions on aerial imagery, the site and nonsite dialectic, and
Google Earth. In presenting the individual with a number of varied perspectives, a more
comprehensive understanding of place is developed. Each technologically-enabled
perspective represents an individual facet of a total embodiment of place, or a collection
of realities. The very nature of technology suggests that humankind will continue to
discover more of these spectatorial portals, providing additional tools to aid in our
understandings (including misunderstanding) of the various digital and terrestrial spheres
we inhabit.
Some fear that the virtual experiences are replacing “real life” human experiences
and interaction. However, these digital interfaces and interactions are not substitutes for
bodily experiences, nor are they mere simulations or representations of physical places.
Smithson discredits the notion of the single fixed bodily “reality,” stating, “everybody’s

207
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 131.
208
Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society
(New York: The New Press, 1997), 9.

75
convinced that they know what reality is, so that they bring their own concept of reality
and start looking…in terms of their own reality, which is inevitably wrong.”
209
Serving
as distinct entry points, the technological helps to reveal these alternate landscapes and
varied realities, encouraging a rethinking of the normative grounded human perspective,
to one that embraces the value inherent in the variable and unfamiliar.
Smithson’s practice remains highly influential and intriguing because it exists in
the nonspace between the inner art world and the outer universe at large. As represented
by his encyclopedic library, his work is the result of a confluence of fields and interests—
including, but not limited to the sciences, popular culture, and art—sited in the context of
the art realm, but spiraling out of art’s confines and into other spheres.
210
The
reemergence and recontextualization of Smithson’s work in the recent years of Google
Earth allows for a reinterpretation of his thinking for new and diversified audiences. In
what is often considered an increasingly complex and networked society, Smithson’s
work provides a conceptual tool to help embrace and interpret the unknown, as well as
the familiar. Like reading Smithson’s writing and work, living in the information age can
be overwhelming, chaotic, and frustrating to navigate. However, when approached as if
traveling the coils of the spiral form, drifting forward and backward, from the center to

209
Norvell, “Robert Smithson: June 20, 1969,” 129.
210
Smithson’s sprawling library suggests his varied interests. See Valentin Tatransky,
“Catalogue of Robert Smithson’s Library: Books, Magazines, and Records,” in Robert
Smithson, ed. Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia Butler (Berkeley: The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in association with the University of California Press,
2004), 249-263.

76
the outer curvature, and back, one may eventually find oneself in a conceptual stasis. It is
within this state of oblivion that the measured bits of disorder may be rendered orderly.
211

211
Undated notebook, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution. (unmicrofilmed).

77
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract American artist Robert Smithson's site and nonsite dialectic (based on the relationship between his abstract artworks in the indoor gallery and their corresponding physical sites outdoors) utilizes the aerial perspective and other sensorial phenomena to both orient and disorient the viewer, relocating his or her focus back and forth between the normative corporeal perspective and more unfamiliar peripheral viewpoints. With the advent of Google Earth technology in the 2000s, users explore the surface of the terrestrial globe, including Smithson's earthworks, through the digital interfaces of the internet. With the addition of these networked virtual spheres, the site and nonsite dialectic, developed during the Apollo and Whole Earth years of 1968 to 1972, is reinterpreted as a site, nonsite, website "trialectic." While the mechanical is updated by the digital, the conceptual mechanisms persist, providing the tools to navigate these distinct, yet converging realms and find order amidst the disorder.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Tang, Aurora (author)

Core Title Site, nonsite, Website: Technologies for perception

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies / Master of Arts

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/14/2010

Defense Date 04/14/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aerial photography,Google Earth,OAI-PMH Harvest,Robert Smithson -- criticism and interpretation,scale,space exploration,technology -- criticism and interpretation

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Holte, Michael Ned (committee chair), Coolidge, Matthew (committee member), Decter, Joshua (committee member)

Creator Email aurorata@usc.edu,auroratang@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2917

Unique identifier UC152542

Identifier etd-Tang-3597 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-308206 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2917 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Tang-3597.pdf

Dmrecord 308206

Document Type Thesis

Rights Tang, Aurora

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu