Casting a Glance

Robert Smithson with Leonor Antunes, Nairy Baghramian, Daniel Boyd, Tony Cragg, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, An-My Lê, Steve McQueen, Julie Mehretu, Ana Mendieta, Delcy Morelos, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Tavares Strachan, Álvaro Urbano

In 1968 Robert Smithson pronounced: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson invites eighteen artists from the gallery to dance with Smithson, to think with, against, and beyond Smithson’s art and ideas. 

From his early 1960s drawings confronting the crumbling ideals of European Modernism with a queer sensibility, to his searing critiques of industrial capitalism and attention to geological timescales, Casting a Glance positions Smithson as both provocateur and visionary. He called for artists to infiltrate corporations, championed the agency of all earth-beings, and gravitated toward the exhausted edges of suburbia over the charismatic metropolitan centers. Smithson’s innovative conception of the site/Nonsite dialectic, his redefinition of what sculpture could be, and his conviction that art is a philosophical encounter with the Earth’s surface converge in this vibrant dance among artists. 
 
A selection of rarely seen works by Smithson—chosen in collaboration with the artists—offers a journey into his radical imagination.

Image: Robert Smithson gathering material for Nonsite “Line of Wreckage,” Bayonne, New Jersey (1968). Photograph: Nancy Holt

© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York