In 1970 Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the most innovative and provocative artists of the twentieth century, created the landmark earthwork Spiral Jetty at Rozel Point on Utah's Great Salt Lake. This dramatic and highly influential work forms a coil 1,500 feet long and 15 feet wide and stretches out counterclockwise into the lake's translucent red water. Composed of black basalt rocks and earth, the sculpture comprises the materials of its location: mud, salt crystals, rocks, water. The contributors to this comprehensive publication consider the sculpture in relation to its eponymous companions—a text work and a film. These essays situate this renowned series of works alongside Smithson's critical writings, proposals, drawings, sources, and models. Amply illustrated with archival and new photographs of the Jetty and many comparative illustrations, this book makes evident why Smithson's art and writings have had such a powerful impact on art and art theory for over thirty years.

Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty

GEORGE BAKER

Ann Reynolds

Lytle Shaw

Robert Smithson

Diana Thater

bob-phillips

History

University of California Press

Stan Douglas is a Canadian artist whose work combines traditional cinematic techniques with new technologies to produce remarkable images, often suggestive of repressed memories and forgotten histories. These visually complex works can vary from dramatic contemporary video portraits, to serene landscapes, to large installations which envelop the viewer in a sensual play of sound and images. From his early brief dramas for television depicting uncanny suburban encounters to his spectacular split-screen installation Der Sandmann, Douglas' work is layered with the artist's observations on social alienation and psychological states. Canadian curator and writer Scott Watson surveys the artist's work in relation to late 20th-century aesthetics, politics and psychoanalysis while American artist Diana Thater conducts an in-depth interview on the sources behind Douglas' work. Carol J Clover, an expert on film and Nordic mythology, focuses on the fusion of film, psychoanalysis and fable in Der Sandmann. The Artist's Choice text is by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze from his 1967 essay 'Humour, Irony and the law which reflects on the issues of power and powerlessness also central to Douglas' art. The histories and ideas behind the artist's works are explained through project descriptions, notes and scripts in the Artist's Writings section, alongside an essay on the teleplays of Samuel Beckett and an interview with curator and critic Lynne Cooke.

Stan Douglas (Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series)

Arts & Photography

Scott Watson

Carol J. Clover

Stan Douglas

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

This book documents a year-long exhibition entitled Knots + Surfaces, at Dia Center for the Arts from January 2001 through January 2002, in which Diana Thater presented a large-scale, multiprojection video installation specifically designed to interact with the open architectural space of Dia's third-floor gallery. A charged environment, combining layered projections with a wall of clustered monitors, becomes a metaphorical charting of multidimensional space. Referring to a recent mathematical hypothesis that correlates a complex, six-dimesional spatial model to a map of a honey bee's dance, Thater expands her abiding concern with the intersection of nature and culture. Along with an introduction to both her work and the exhibition by Lynne Cooke, the book will include an essay on Thater's work by Akira Lippit.

Knots + Surfaces

Individual Artists

Dia Art Foundation

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Books by Diana Thater