EXHIBITION-RELATED PROGRAMS

Talk “Robert Smithson: Site/Nonsite - From Spiral Jetty”

MAM Screen 017: Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson Related Program
Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation available

We will invite Konishi Nobuyuki, Professor of Aichi University of the Arts, who has long studied Robert Smithson, as guest speaker for this talk program focusing mainly on the activities of Robert Smithson.

Robert Smithson’s film Spiral Jetty (1970) opens with the sound of a respirator, and an image of a solar flare. It is the film version, so to speak, of Spiral Jetty the 500m-long land art at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, but not merely a record of its creation. Editing of the film commenced in a New York studio immediately after completion of the land art, imbuing it with multiple layers of meaning, and giving it a story and a vital spirit of sorts. The text “Spiral Jetty” adding a detailed explanation of the work was to be written two years later. Thus, Spiral Jetty exists thrice as site, film and text, each adding meaning to the others across different media and representing a peak in the composite works that Smithson achieved developing his “site/nonsite” dialectic with its natural back and forth between the two.

At this program, we will look at aspects of Smithson’s polymorphic creativity focusing on both the periods before and after Spiral Jetty, in an attempt to discover the contemporary possibilities of that work.

Appearing

Konishi Nobuyuki (Professor, Aichi University of Arts; art critic)

Discussant

Martin Germann (Adjunct Curator, Mori Art Museum)

Date & Time

19:00-20:30, Tuesday, March 7, 2023 (Doors open: 18:30)
* Mori Art Museum will close at 17:00 and MAM Screen 017: Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson will reopen at 18:30 only for those with bookings.
* The talk will be followed by a screening of MAM Screen 017: Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson (total duration is approx. 70 min).

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Konishi Nobuyuki

Professor, Aichi University of the Arts, art critic.

Recent Essays:
“Robert Smithson: From Crystal Structure to Non-Site,” The Bulletin of Aichi University of the Arts, 2020
“Introduction to ‘Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers, 1905-1987, bulk 1952-1987’ in Archive of American Art,” The Bulletin of Aichi University of the Arts, 2017
“Rebooting Robert Smithson: Sculptor (Part2),” The Bulletin of Aichi University of the Arts, 2015
Translation:
Robert Smithson, “Hotel Palenque,” The Bulletin of Aichi University of the Arts, 2018
Joint Translation:
Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of The Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, GETSUYOSHA LIMITED, 2021
Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, GETSUYOSHA LIMITED, 2019
Rosakind Krauss, Hal Foster... [et al.], Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, TOKYO SHOSEKI CO., LTD., 2019
Joint Work:
Edited by Koji Tagi and Teruo Fujieda, Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art in Japan, TOKYO SHOSEKI CO., LTD., 2007