he loved the displacement of properties, entropy, and the erosion and renewal of nature. its all related to time. artists tend to trap time, and freeze moments into an artwork, but Smithson thought artists were estranged from their own time and needed to expand away and into real time - where the forces of nature dictated things and not some constrained studio space.
He said, "The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art."
Smithson matters because of Spiral Jetty if nothing else. It recalls history - it has always reminded me of the monkeys tail on the Plains of Nazca - and like this it is prone to weather, and shares a sense of whimsy.
