Word: smithson
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Dates: during 1966-1966
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...Nothingness Isn't Negative." Two artists who master the minimum: Tony Smith, 54, whose 11-ft.-high Amaryllis is a black steel construction that bends like the Japanese art of origami, or paper folding, and Robert Smithson, 28, whose Alogon, also of black steel, cantilevers from the wall like a sawtooth set of staggered boxes. Their works are as unsettling as a spastic octopus sculpted by Michelangelo might have been...
Modular, faintly suggestive of children's blocks, Smith's and Smithson's sculptures seem like statements in the vocabulary of boxy, urban housing. Yet in accentuating the negative, they make symbolism out of skeletal form. "Art needs more thought and less manual dexterity," says Smithson. "Nothingness isn't negative-the drive to reach the moon is a preoccupation with desolate nothingness. But it's involved with the idea of exploration." Their search is to find poetry in emptiness...