"The earth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other—one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects. One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing." (Smithson 82) Written at the end of the 1960s and published in Artforum, these compelling and often-quoted words are the declaration of a clash and a secret correspondence: tensions and alliances between the way we perceive things and the way the things around us— elements, forces, processes—work. The author of these lines, which are taken from an essay titled “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), was Robert Smithson, one of the first land artists. In spite of his short life—he died in an airplane crash at the age of 35 in 1973—Smithson’s influence on the contemporary art scene is huge: not only did he contribute to changing the physical ratio of art (his gigantic Spiral Jetty is both an icon and a program of this artistic movement), but his works and ideas also triggered a reconfiguration of the conceptual categories of the debate. In fact, if perception is “entangled within the unresolvable, continually oscillating interplay between cognition and materiality—both inexorably verging on imminent collapse” (Boettger 132), Smithson’s theoretical considerations implied that, though not unproblematically, mind and matter are contiguous to one another, and that our cognitive and creative processes follow the same rules as the earth’s geological dynamics. In the dawning age of ecological crises and ecology of mind, art and the natural world were essentially entwined, their interaction being the necessary key to a mutual understanding.

Editorial: Creative Writing and Art --- Special Focus Issue on “Artistic Ways of Understanding and Interacting with Nature”

IOVINO, Serenella
2015-01-01

Abstract

"The earth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Various agents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other—one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comes to earth projects. One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing." (Smithson 82) Written at the end of the 1960s and published in Artforum, these compelling and often-quoted words are the declaration of a clash and a secret correspondence: tensions and alliances between the way we perceive things and the way the things around us— elements, forces, processes—work. The author of these lines, which are taken from an essay titled “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), was Robert Smithson, one of the first land artists. In spite of his short life—he died in an airplane crash at the age of 35 in 1973—Smithson’s influence on the contemporary art scene is huge: not only did he contribute to changing the physical ratio of art (his gigantic Spiral Jetty is both an icon and a program of this artistic movement), but his works and ideas also triggered a reconfiguration of the conceptual categories of the debate. In fact, if perception is “entangled within the unresolvable, continually oscillating interplay between cognition and materiality—both inexorably verging on imminent collapse” (Boettger 132), Smithson’s theoretical considerations implied that, though not unproblematically, mind and matter are contiguous to one another, and that our cognitive and creative processes follow the same rules as the earth’s geological dynamics. In the dawning age of ecological crises and ecology of mind, art and the natural world were essentially entwined, their interaction being the necessary key to a mutual understanding.
2015
6
2
157
160
Ecocriticism; Environmental Art; Environmental Humanities
Iovino, Serenella
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/2318/1603228
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