Speculative Geometry: Robert Smithson’s glass jars, satellites and material aesthetics

ABSTRACT

Through solo work (into ecological, geophysical and technologically produced systems), and in his collaborative work with Nancy Holt (manifested in writing, films, performance and plastic forms), Robert Smithson frames duration as allegorical, entropic, iconic, heteroclitic and heterotopic. Made from his contemporaneous technological cultural field, Smithson’s art practice in the 1960–1970s is noted for its contribution towards redefining the field of conceptual Earth and Land art practice. Smithson’s work also can be considered in terms of its contribution to a twentieth-century quantum understanding of speculative aesthetic practices, wherein a philosophy of temporality considers complexity in material processes. In this short article, I investigate Smithson’s mode of speculation on durational properties, as a method indicative of his geometric system, made visible through his ecology of technology.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• duration
• modal
• methodology
• Smithson
• speculative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Prof Felicity Colman is Research Chair in Film and Media Arts at the Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focus is in screen media forms, creative philosophies, communication models, and feminist epistemologies. She is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (Columbia University Press, 2014), Deleuze and Cinema (Berg, 2011), and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers ((McGill-Queens University Press/ Routledge /Acumen, 2009), and co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars, 2007).

Notes

1. To claim this is not without its problems, but Smithson’s insistence on the validity of the spiral, amongst other geometries, makes a compelling case for this framework. For a deep historical discussion on geometry, see Serres (2000, 9–26).

2. In using the word ‘unit’ in this paper, I am drawing from its quantum sense, defined by Neils Bohr’s expression of the physical nature of quantum movement in predictive and experiential epistemological terms (Plotnitsky 2006, 1–3; Barad 2007, 97ff).

3. Smithson reference two kinds of satellites in his work: Sputnik 1 and the Sequential Collation of Range (SECOR). Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was a 58 cm diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. Geodetic SECOR 1962–1969 was an all-weather geodetic survey system which was in operational use for over three years, establishing a global survey network. It used the successive positions of artificial satellites in space to determine locations on the earth’s surface with exactness over long distances.

Experiments with SECOR, together with the Navy’s Timation, provided the technical basis for the GPS Navstar system. http://www.astronautix.com/craft/secor.htm