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North America

Robert Smithson
Forking Sprawl

Forking Sprawl by Robert Smithson is a drawing in ink and pencil on paper that illustrates an unrealized earthwork that was intended to be constructed in Germany by the late artist. From both an aerial and side view, it depicts the installation of a series of jagged pieces of slate in the shape of appendages that fork out front a central point. Smithson’s handwritten notes on the drawing detail instructions that the earthwork should be “built on a flat open plain near a slate quarry” with the slate fragments becoming “higher towards the center”. The work’s composition references the morphology of rivers, roots, branches, and veins, mimicking how these naturally occurring entities tend to spread out from a central point. Always incorporating natural systems and occurrences into the formation of his monumental sculptures, Smithson observed: “Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished.”1 Emphasizing the infinite potential bound up in the natural world, Forking Sprawl hauntingly demonstrates Smithson’s claim, as the work itself was also never finished. The plans for this earthwork are stylistically similar to other plans, sketches, and process drawings of the same period, during which time Smithson visited the Southern Coast of Florida for several weeks to develop the also unrealized earthwork Forking Island (1971). Featuring mark-making similar to Forking Sprawl, the work is also composed of a maze-like collection of tangents. Plans for the work were documented in drawings and paintings rendered on mirror, an often-used material in Smithson’s practice.

 1. “Cultural Confinement”, 1972 in Jack Flam (ed.) The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, University of California Press, 1996, p155.

Robert Smithson is best known as a major proponent of Land Art, visiting quarries, industrial sites, and abandoned wastelands in New Jersey and its surrounding states throughout the late 1960s. He would go on to work in the deserts of the Southwest, with his seminal Spiral Jetty, a land sculpture made of mud, salt crystals, and basalt rocks, produced on the northern shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake. While his early work largely consisted of paintings and drawings, he later began to produce Minimalist sculpture before producing more monumental work, moving earth and land in order to create interventions that would alter the landscape. Alongside his visual practice, Smithson wrote a number of theoretical texts outlining the influence of temporal considerations and the relationship between a work of art and the surrounding environment to his work.