Thursday 3 September 2009

leaning strata

once again, (until i can somehow work into my budget the money to buy a new digital camera so that i can photograph my own work), works i admire by inspirational artists in my fledgling art/design career.
probably THE founder of the movement towards a supposed "anti-architecure" (although never categorising his work under any such banner) robert smithson was actually at one point a lecturer at university to gordon matta-clark (who took his teachers mantle and made it his own.) unfortunately, australian libraries don't usually carry a lot of books on the lesser-known artists of the world, so i struggled to delve much further into his body of work, aside from probably his best known work, "spiral jetty" (a 1500 foot rock coil in the utah salt lakes, that become more or less exposed depending on the weather and how the tides were - google it!)
although better known for his works that involved the rearrangment of natural landscapes, i actually had the pleasure of seeing a smithson retrospective at london's tate modern in 2005?, where upon i discovered that smithson also had an impressive body of gallery works too. anyone who has seen any of my work can understand why the geometrically-mathematical nature of smithson's "leaning strata" (1968) particularly appeals to me.
check also the book that accompanied his touring retrospective exhibition, "robert smithson" published by Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004.

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