Iconoclasm is a mercy in Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson, clearing the view of both conceptual artists and their groundbreaking legacies.
Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson
July 5–October 25, 2024
SITE Santa Fe
It’s easy (and sensational) to frame Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson at SITE Santa Fe as a conceptual cage match. In one corner there’s Teresita Fernández, the Miami-born daughter of Cuban exiles who, at fifty-six, has spent thirty-five years making land-based conceptual artwork in an emphatically post-Robert Smithson art world. In the opposite corner is Land Art deity Smithson. The New Jersey-born, white-and-male artist died in a plane crash at thirty-five, three years after completing Spiral Jetty (1970), a curly archipelago on the Great Salt Lake that is one of the most famous artworks of the 20th century.
SITE proposed the intertwined match-up after offering Fernández a solo show—shades of Rocky until you consider that she is the living, veteran artist. She courteously declined to create new artworks for it, instead teaming with Lisa Le Feuvre of the ephemeral Holt/Smithson Foundation to arrange pairings from both artists’ catalogues. I entered the exhibition expecting a clash of titans, but instead witnessed a mercy killing—not of Smithson the artist, but Smithson the icon. The act benefits both artists in divergent ways.
On one of my visits to the show, someone tried to sit on Smithson’s piece to observe Fernández’s.
In a judo-like curatorial move, the curators swiftly roll Spiral Jetty out of the way using Smithson’s 16mm film of the same title and year. The thirty-five-minute piece illuminates the gap between the artist’s intentions and the broader public’s eventual conclusion about the work’s egotism. The crisply restored footage visually fragments Smithson’s monument via tight aerial shots, shifts in scale, temporal reversals, and spoken meditations on stasis and entropy. It lampoons the heroics of modernism, with Smithson jogging the spiral while tailed by a helicopter (his “Tom Cruise moment,” as a friend dubbed it during the show’s opening weekend).
Spiral Jetty’s top-heavy legacy contrasts with the physical reality of the piece, which has been crumbling into the Great Salt Lake since before it was finished. The piece was meant to be an ambiguous object, seeming to hang outside of time but subject to its forces. It underscores one of Smithson’s great weaknesses as an artist: the earth-shattering iconographer eclipsed his subtle (and often irreverent) aims, carelessly imposing a neocolonial paradigm on land-based artistic practice that hangs over Fernández’s generation. It’s a teeth-gritting affair to watch the passages of his video that show the making of Spiral Jetty, as he tears chunks from the lake’s shoreline to create a scar on the land that appropriates Indigenous symbolism.
Smithson’s film is his only piece in the show that doesn’t land in a direct sight line with monumental and largely excellent contributions by Fernández. In SITE’s lobby gallery, her post-Postminimalist wall sculpture Island Universe 2 (2023) hangs like a storm cloud above his late-career Minimalist installation Discontinuous Aggregates (1966). The teal polygons of the latter look like children’s toys beneath her contiguous world map sculpted from fragments of charcoal. On one of my visits to the show, someone tried to sit on Smithson’s piece to observe Fernández’s.
In a 2016 talk and a 2020 essay that inspired this exhibition, Fernández discusses an early sense of kinship with Smithson, springing from their suburban childhoods on far ends of the Eastern Seaboard. Smithson’s illustrated essay “The Monuments of Passaic” (1967), wherein he zigzags the mundane streets of his birthplace seeking glimmers of beauty and eternity, influenced Fernández’s “notion that the landscape is behind or above your head as well as underneath your feet… [which] means that you are an extension of a place as it, in turn, moves through you. You look at the landscape, but that landscape also looks back at you.”
That’s where the parallel starts to skew, as Fernández seeks to artistically distill her own experiences—of Miami as a “movable city,” a historical landing place for Cuban refugees that was hostile to their presence, and of the larger world as rife with power differentials that flow people (or their output) around and then brutalize them for it. Fernández’s logical conclusions as an artist look and feel markedly different from Smithson’s, as seen in a room that directly compares Smithson’s framework of the “site” and “non-site” with Fernández’s concept of the “stacked landscape,” both of which explore the significance of recontextualizing bits of earth.
Smithson’s A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) (1968) consists of tiered wooden troughs filled with quarry stones from a particular mine. An accompanying silver gelatin print offers a chopped-up aerial view of the extraction site that mirrors the triangular form of the sculptural element. Fernández’s Viñales (Reclining Nude) (2015) features graduating concrete pedestals covered in sparkling pieces of malachite from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The piece is directly accompanied by a twelve-foot-long ceramic mosaic depicting a Cuban cave system used as a refuge by fleeing enslaved people from nearby plantations and also connects with Fernández’s video piece Cuajaní (2024), which shows Cuban vistas that look like macrocosms of the Congolese malachite.
“Conceptually… [I was] merging the idea of the Democratic Republic of Congo, this physical piece of the landscape… and overlaying it with this imagined image of the Viñales Valley [in Cuba],” Fernández explained at a talk during the show’s opening weekend. “The more you’re willing to peel back the layers, the more ways you’ll understand that a place is actually many places… and many places in time, at once.”
It only seems fair to ask if some parts of the show are inter-era cheap shots.
The exhibition reveals Smithson’s site/non-site binary for its fixation on destructive parts of industrial and natural flux (splitting, dumping, extracting)—as in 1,000 Tons of Asphalt (1969), a concept sketch envisioning a supersized version of his “pour” sculptures. Fernández’s stacked landscapes are more focused on phases of refinement and dissemination (which can be just as violent but may obscure the past)—as in Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) (2019), an installation made with the purest graphite in the world from a British town that Fernández describes as “like one solid graphite drawing underfoot.” More broadly, the exhibition shows Smithson to be juggling far fewer balls than Fernández when it comes to the sociocultural implications of capitalist and colonial phenomena.
There are two moments that smack of outright warfare in the show. A cosmos-themed room places another sweeping mosaic and a dizzying suspended installation by Fernández across from Smithson’s early-career doodles of the astrological signs and a kitschy spaceman collage. (At the press preview, I asked Fernández to compare her own early-career work to Smithson’s, but she danced around the question.) And on the far end of the exhibition, a room-spanning wall drawing by Fernández bisects a recorded slideshow presentation by Smithson, Hotel Palenque (1969-72), wherein he drops racist remarks about Mexican society and culture. This is where the show’s lack of interpretive wall text (save for a spare introduction) feels like an abdication of curatorial responsibility.
It only seems fair to ask if some parts of the show are inter-era cheap shots. But then I consider how Smithson’s image, like some Shakespearean ghost, has never really died in the art world. If Smithson must be immortalized, the exhibition seems to argue, let us view him not as a god but as a man-boy. He was still artistically maturing, often blinded by privilege, at times casually bigoted—and also whip-smart and scrappy and absurdly influential. Taking it all in at once (i.e. Robert Smithson as stacked landscape) is a humanist approach. It’s also true historical justice, and a way to clear the conceptual passage for contemporary masters like Fernández.
Disclosure: Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and co-curator of Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson is a member of Southwest Contemporary‘s Community Editorial Advisory Board.
