Robert Smithson: Time Crystals

Hotel Palenque in Situ

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Robert Smithson’s artwork entitled Hotel Palenque(1969/1972) involves thirty-one chromogenic-development slide transparencies and an audiotaped lecture by the artist, which was originally presented to architecture students at the University of Utah. The Guggenheim (New York) ‘holds’ Hotel Palenque, but the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) presented a recreation of it in a dark Melbourne gallery, a minimalist space with a projector, a curtain, and three simple leather viewing benches. It formed part of Time Crystals: Robert Smithson, an exhibition co-curated by Amelia Barikin (University of Queensland) and Chris McAuliffe (Australian National University). The exhibition was first exhibited at the University of Queensland Art Museum, and later at MUMA, where Hotel Palenque shared space with better-known Smithson artworks such as Spiral Jetty(1970) and Rocks and Mirror Square II (1971).

The exhibition included ephemera from Smithson’s life and praxis: wide-ranging writings, books, diagrams, sketches and letters, largely pulled from the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers at the Smithsonian’s American Art Archives. Presented in expansive showcases, they lent detail to Smithson’s substantive, complex personal narrative. The artist somehow made himself present as an outcome of the curated materials’ strategic placement in this, Smithson’s first Australian retrospective. One wonders why it took so long.

Smithson’s place in contemporary art history is significant; his collected works speak to global audiences. In Land Art, Smithson’s most successful works extend Duchampian traditions of conceptual art presented not in galleries but in the field. They transcend even the idea of conceptual art itself, being supported by peripheral, more ‘auratic’ facets (in the words of Walter Benjamin) of what an artwork actually ‘is’ or can be seen to be. Time Crystalsplaced strong emphasis... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Rocks and Mirror Square II, 1971. Basalt rocks and mirrors, 36x220x220cm irregular. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1977.
© Holt-Smithson Foundation/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2017.

Stills from the Spiral Jetty Film, 1970. Panel A. Gelatin silver photographs, three panels: each with twelve photographs, each panel 66x111.8cm; overall 66x345.4cm. Collection: The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway. Photograph Morten Thorkildsen. © Holt-Smithson Foundation/VAGA. Licensed by Viscopy, 2017.