The artist and writer Robert Smithson, famous for his austere and monumental “Spiral Jetty” unfurling in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, died at 35 in a plane crash in 1973. Teresita Fernández was born in Miami in 1968. By the time she was in art school, Smithson was well installed in the canon as a theorist of minimalism and a pioneer of the large outdoor sculptures that he termed “earthworks.”
Now, Smithson and Fernández, a 2005 MacArthur fellow known for sculptural clouds of fragmentary materials like glass and graphite, share equal billing at Site Santa Fe in a survey of their often materially varied work. More than 30 pieces by Fernández, representing 30 years, are juxtaposed with roughly the same number of Smithson works, made in the last decade of his life. The artists share long engagements with deep time, geology, civilization — and, above all, landscape, defined as culture overlaid on land.
Their perspectives on these grand themes are sympathetic. Their tones often clash: his mercurial and brainy, hers formal and meditative. But the show, curated by Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, the executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, isn’t a refutation. It’s a careful response to the patriarchal legacy of landscape art, which Smithson both embodied and critiqued.
At least one Fernández piece takes up Smithson’s legacy explicitly. Her “Nocturnal” series of splattered graphite reliefs offer a monochrome on the tropes of Hudson School-type American landscape painting, all gorges and waterfalls and palpable light. One example is titled after Smithson’s so-called pour works — cascades of glue and asphalt dumped down hillsides like chemical Niagaras, which were his caustic riff on the same tropes.
Smithson supplemented his artworks with arcane essays on ruination and entropy. Fernández seems invested in elemental elegance‚ letting materials like charcoal, graphite, glass and silver speak for themselves.
The different temperaments of their work also comes across in the two films on view. Smithson’s essayistic “Spiral Jetty,” which includes documentation of the earthwork’s construction, pans over dead specimens behind museum glass, and over a map of Utah, while the artist reads from Samuel Beckett. Fernández’s “Cuajaní,” 2024 (directed with Juan Carlos Alom), depicts dwellings in the jungle, life among life. A pair of hands hold a fossil.
The show stresses work that Smithson made in Mexico, including his series of photographs of square mirrors scattered among roots and dunes on the Yucatán Peninsula. (For that matter, Utah, site of “Spiral Jetty,” was formerly part of Mexico.)
Smithson was willing to play the settler anthropologist. In “Hotel Palenque,” a pseudo-academic slide lecture that he delivered at the University of Utah in 1972, reproduced here with the original audio synced to a slide projector, he explains the “purpose” of a hotel’s ruined features with deadpan authority, flipping through snapshots of exposed rebar and unfinished walls. He praises a suite of caved-in outbuildings, for instance, as a smart provision for travelers who want to sleep under the sky.
Smithson’s cynicism can be hard to gauge. In the lecture, he casually exaggerates Mayan sacrificial rites to the corn gods. He sounds flip, too, when he calls the hotel Mayan ruins. But this joke is central to his thinking: He often discussed human industry, the unbeautiful way we gouge and rearrange the earth, as something like a geologic process — a brute fact.
Fernández seems to admonish us for a self-wrought disaster. The striking sepia mosaic “Caribbean Cosmos (Earth),” 2023, offers a satellite view of a coastline menaced by spiraling storms.
Then there’s the frank message of Fernández’s “Island Universe 2,” from 2023, a mosaic of the continents made of charcoal fragments, arranged in an elongated Pangaea with Antarctica on the left and Australia at right, flattening the implied hierarchy of north and south.
Fernández portrays the interconnected globe as a scorched Earth. But that vision, too, can be sublime.
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