Robert Smithson╦s art is of the world: the land outside; the displaced fragment inside. He consumed geology to enlarge the space of sculpture. He rejected the abstraction of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman that he had absorbed into his own paintings of the late 1950s, and began in 1963 to use geometry in sculpture. His abstraction was not the purist style of his minimalist contemporaries, but was based on the physical nature of crystalsÀsymmetrical structures that defined and contained what might otherwise seem to be chaos. From mapping crystals, he turned to mapsÀgrid structures, mental constructs of matterÀand then invented three-dimensional maps, inside the gallery (which he dubbed "nonsites") and outside in the land (which he referred to as "abstract geology").¹⁰

Ingesting the formalist vocabulary of the moment, he made it speak of the real world: what we can see in nature and what we cannot see, as well as its constantly changing state. He took the abstract container of minimalism and put the world into it. He saw the act of mapping, defining, ordering the universe with geometry as an aesthetic process, one through which he could contain the chaos of the natural or industrial landscape while exposing its internal order. Thus, Smithson absorbed into his art aspects of both chaos and containment.

Smithson was of the avant-garde. He wanted to break down the conceptual frame that confined the definition of artist: "I think the major issue now in art is what are the boundaries. For too long artists have taken the canvas and stretchers as given, the limits."¹¹ Challenging the art system, he asked fundamental questions that redefined the idea of the work of art, what constituted art, and where it can be located. He felt that the concept of museum was constricted by the box that was the gallery, a space increasingly unable to contain art. "Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cellsÀin other words, neutral rooms called ågalleries.╦ A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world."¹²To Smithson, art needed to go beyond the container of the gallery walls and he contributed to a radical repositioning of art, not just as sculpture located outdoors, but as the earth itself transformed into art.

The artist had to construct a new system for his art. Through a dialectical view of the world, he incorporated into his art both sides of the equation: formal abstraction and representation of physical structures in nature, the outward appearance of geography and the hidden forces of entropic change. Inside/outside, center/fringe, the world/the gallery, space/nonspace, site/nonsite, sight/nonsight.

Smithson gave form to this dialectic in his site/nonsites. The process started in an intuitive way, as an emotional, unconscious response to a site in a landscape, reminiscent of the romanticism associated with a painter, but it took on a conceptual and abstract mode of presentation. "The site, in a sense, is the physical, raw reality [. . .] instead of putting something on the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the nonsite, which is an abstract container."¹³ "The nonsite exists as a kind of deep three-dimensional abstract map that points to a specific site on the surface of the earth."¹⁴ So, in the gallery or museum, the actual location (the concrete world) remained invisible, while the conceptual marker (the idea of place) was made visible. Site and nonsite represented, too, the dialectic between the center and the edges. To Smithson, sites had no central focus; they were fringe areas, without boundaries, not contained, open, and constantly undergoing change. The nonsite gives the site focus; it orders space through the imposition of the rectangleÀthe frame. "[Sites] are only closed on the map, and the map serves as the designation,"¹⁵ or another "way to locate a thing is to circumscribe it with a photograph. . . [which] acts as a kind of map."¹⁶