Underground Before Earthworks: Robert Smithson’s Concealed Paintings

20 Oct 2023 6-7.30pm

Overview

What are the implications of Robert Smithson’s oxymoronic titles of paintings, Black Grass, Self-Less Portrait, and Buried Angel? In the last, why is the phallic channel erupting pink plumes – darkening the sky – and in another, the thick bursting stem against lurid red a Flower called Vile? And why hasn’t the history of art known that the American artist famous as the creator of the magisterial earthen Spiral Jetty in The Great Salt Lake had, in the early 1960s, painted?

Art historian Suzaan Boettger will discuss paradoxes she discovered, decrypted, and deciphered in research for her book Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson published by the University of Minnesota Press. In the course of extensive investigative and interpretive work on Smithson’s art, correspondences to a disguised self unmasked his imagery as autobiography, mandating a biographical contextualization, the first for this artist.

Suzaan Boettger is an art historian and critic in New York City and Professor Emerita at Bergen Community College, New Jersey.  Dr. Boettger is the author of the history, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties and most recently, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson. Acclaimed as “definitive, particularly in its investigation of the artist’s unconscious as well as conscious motives,” and “a monumental achievement,” Inside the Spiral is the first biography of the American artist, expanding his reputation beyond Smithson’s magisterial Spiral Jetty in The Great Salt Lake, Utah, and radically altering his art historical, personal, and sexual identities.

Organised by Charles Booth-Clibborn and The Research Forum
 

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