What are the ethics of art history? What are the ethics of insinuation? For the Dispatches column, Travis Diehl reviews Suzaan Boettger’s biography of a seminal earthworks artist, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson, published in 2023 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Robert Smithson, Untitled, 1962. Pencil and crayon with collage on paper, 24 x 18 in. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery . © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
As both Narcissus and Snow White knew, it is a wounded self—a sense of insufficiency—that draws one to endlessly seek oneself reflected in a mirroring surface to confirm that one exists and is appealing.
–Suzaan Boettger, Inside the Spiral
On Suzaan Boettger’s 31st birthday, on her way to deliver her first lecture in art history, she stopped to check her mailbox. Inside was a copy of The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt. The book’s publication date was the next day, and she had ordered it weeks before, yet here it was, a sign: the subject of her lecture was earthworks. The coincidence, Boettger writes, “confirmed my sense of being bonded with [Smithson] and initiated a series of ‘coincidences’ benefiting my research.” This was 1979. Forty-four years later, the author’s art-historical journey has produced Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson.
Robert Smithson, Untitled, 1962. Mixed media with collage on paper, 24¾ x 18 in. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery. © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
The book is billed as the first biography of the artist. It offers unprecedented details about his personal life, from his family in Passaic, New Jersey to his death in a plane crash in Texas. “My integration of circumstances of Smithson’s biography is not to prevail over but to augment analyses of him as a cerebral innovator,” she writes. “His public intellectuality has been examined extensively; his early history, not at all.” But the book has a narrower agenda. Boettger portrays Smithson as secretive, haunted, manipulative, and career-bent. He calibrated his image as a brainy SoHo cowboy, she argues, to obscure his inner turmoil.
Smithson’s secrets are three: a nine-year-old brother, Harold, who died of leukemia one year before he was born, making Smithson a “replacement child”; a deep Catholic faith; and sexual attraction to men as well as women. As Boettger has it, while Smithson hid his true self from the macho, atheist art world, he couldn’t help but encode these fixations and grand themes in his artwork, even at its most austere. Boettger is often convincing. Among Smithson’s unpublished papers, for example, is a letter to a dealer in Rome who gave him his first painting show: “Don’t be afraid of the word ‘religion.’ The most sophisticated people in Manhattan are very much concerned with it.” (They weren’t.) Many of these grandiose early works, bloody scenes of the Passion, effect what Boettger calls “a perverse kind of worship, not reverence for Christ’s divinity but identification with his agony,” and contextualize Smithson’s pervasive use of “red” and “blood” in the Spiral Jetty earthwork, essay, and film. And Boettger seems to be the first to report that Smithson and Nancy Holt were married in a Catholic church; Holt chose to convert.
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Mono Lake, 1968/2004. Video still. 8mm film and Instamatic slides transferred to video, color, sound, 19 min. 54 sec. © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Elsewhere, though, the book wades into its morass of facts and conjectures in an ad hominem way, as if to finally, posthumously win an argument against the famously competitive Smithson. The author takes the artist’s interest in numerology to extremes. To demonstrate how Harold’s loss figured into Smithson’s chilliest minimalism, she explains that “The Cryosphere’s [1966] six radiants multiplied by six units equal thirty-six, Harold’s death year, and which per numerology, the digits (three plus six) add to nine, Harold’s age at death.” As proof that Smithson had some concept of the multiplicity (and duplicity) of the self, she notes that “eight books in Smithson’s library [as cataloged after his death, at least] have ‘self’ in their title.” Boettger doesn’t say Smithson was wrong to be “a visual artist and literary essayist; a vanguard artist who was covertly Catholic; an intellectual who privately read Jung, alchemy, and the occult; who was attracted to both women and men; and who felt himself to be existentially connected to an absent sibling.” Rather, his sin seems to be dissemblance, burying his traumas under mounds of pretentious words (a strategy figured, she suggests, by his Partially Buried Woodshed [1970]—a work, writes Boettger, comprised of “twenty loads of dirt on the roof of a campus storage cabin, an arbitrary number that must have been symbolic: numerologically, twenty (two plus zero) sums to two, suggesting the second broken house he experienced.”)
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson on Christmas Day, 1963. © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York.
Boettger’s paranoid reading enriches Smithson’s life and work against the apparent wishes of its subject (and his widow). This relentless analysis can feel (as she writes of pre-Giuliani Times Square) “very, very, very tawdry”—less probing scholarship than an attempt to out him as a repressed, conflicted bisexual. We know Smithson’s unexhibited drawings burst with Day-Glo beefcake as well as cheesecake (and dinosaurs, and cars)—but so what? “What is that newlywed thinking as she looks at the camera with a wry smile, the arm of her husband of six months flung across her shoulder yet not clasping her?” writes Boettger, in a caption to a portrait of Holt and Smithson from Christmas of 1963. “He looks away, perhaps refusing to accommodate a parent’s desire for a smile and sign of their unity.” The book leaves behind the ethics of art history for the guilty thrills of insinuation.
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Mono Lake, 1968/2004. Video still. 8mm film and Instamatic slides transferred to video, color, sound, 19 min. 54 sec. © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
In fact, after 400-odd pages, what sticks out isn’t Smithson’s buried themes so much as the tips of subjects Boettger declines to pursue. The artist’s psychedelic experiences likely influenced his work profoundly—at the very least, drugs provide a dialectical glue to bind the Catholic pageantry, out-of-body agony, and pagan magick latent in his pseudoscientific sermons on entropy, micro-macro shifts, and mirror displacements. In the acknowledgements, Boettger thanks Holt for the wealth of information she disclosed over many hours of interviews, and also for what she revealed by occluding. Yet the author seems willing to take Holt at her word when she puts the number of Smithson’s peyote trips at a respectable “four or five.” Boettger dwells on the inventory of his library but ignores his record collection, although, as Francis Halsall writes, Smithson favored “music made by people taking drugs to make music to take drugs to.”
Robert Smithson, Untitled, 1962. Ink on paper, 24 x 18 in. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery . © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.
Boettger passes over some of the druggier minor works. The ranty Mexican travelogue Hotel Palenque [1969–72] rates a footnote; Mono Lake is mentioned but not the video Mono Lake, in which Smithson and Michael Heizer can be seen drinking Coors and scrambling around in the dirt. Holt completed the piece in 2004 from footage the couple shot in 1968 during a two-month trip with Heizer through California and Nevada. It was, writes Aurora Tang, a formative moment for all three artists. Each would return to the area to make their most famous work. But there’s nothing untoward in Smithson’s relationship with Heizer, one imagines—not even in their falling out—since he doesn’t figure in Boettger’s book except in lists of earthworks artists or acquaintances. More importantly, these works could have lent Inside the Spiral a better sense of its subject’s dialectical, playful side. Smithson’s search for authenticity, which the author seems to read as hypocritical, is in fact neither consummated nor failed, but plies the byways in between.
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Mono Lake, 1968/2004. Video still. 8mm film and Instamatic slides transferred to video, color, sound, 19 min. 54 sec. © Holt/Smithson Foundation. Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood” [1967] is another omission—although Smithson’s rebuttal in a letter he wrote to Artforum displays it all: his ornate Catholic doubt, his wit and belligerence, his sense of hellfire. The letter starts with an epigraph from the puritan Jonathan Edwards, ends with the mescaline-flavored image of “a subdivided progression of ‘Frieds’ on millions of stages.” Smithson understood the inquisitional mode. “Every refutation,” writes Smithson, “is a mirror of the thing it refutes.” X
Travis Diehl is Online Editor at X-TRA.