Yes! This is what I look like — sometimes — and the desk lamp, plants, and shelves are the same (hubby has no beard). Many of the books around me are editions of esoteric volumes that Robert Smithson had owned; a big part of my research was finding and reading these. Decades ago, after giving my first academic lecture as a graduate student at University of California Berkeley on the sources of Earthworks, I tore this cartoon out of the June 18, 1979 issue of The New Yorker. Through moves from Berkeley to NYC, typewriter to computer, graduate student to professor emerita, Edward Koren’s cartoon has remained an inspiration. Mr. Koren kindly gave me permission to share it.

University of Minnesota Press, April 2023

An expansive and revelatory study of Robert Smithson’s life and the hidden influences on his iconic creations

The Passions of Robert Smithson

This biography of the major American artist Robert Smithson, famous as the creator of the Spiral Jetty, deepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Integrating extensive investigation and psychological acuity, Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story and, with it, symbolic meanings across the span of his painted and drawn images, sculptures, essays, and earthworks up to and beyond the Spiral Jetty to the circumstances leading to what became his final work, Amarillo Ramp.

While Smithson is widely known for his monumental earthwork at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Inside the Spiral delves into the arc of his artistic production, recognizing it as a response to his family’s history of loss, which prompted his birth and shaped his strange intelligence. Smithson configured his personal conflicts within painterly depictions of Christ’s passion, the rhetoric of science fiction, imagery from occult systems, and the impersonal posture of conceptual sculpture. Aiming to achieve renown, he veiled his personal passions and transmuted his professional persona, becoming an acclaimed innovator and fierce voice in the New York art scene.

Featuring copious illustrations never before published of early work that eluded Smithson’s destruction, as well as photographs of Smithson and his wife, the noted sculptor Nancy Holt, and recollections from nearly all those alive (and some now gone) who knew him, Inside the Spiral offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. With great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language, this biographical analysis provides an expanded view of Smithson’s iconic art pilgrimage site and the personal experiences and shared art history that brought him to its peculiar red water.

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Reviews:

“For anyone who has had interest in the work of Robert Smithson in the past this is a must read. There are revelations that will come as a complete surprise, revelations that are so thoroughly researched and documented that any prior understanding of the artist will be changed and expanded. Boettger goes deep into his family history and makes connections between events that occurred even before Smithson was born; to his Catholicism, his early career as a painter - who knew? - and to the ultimate implications for his work as a primary founder of the earthworks movement. Read this book and you will never see Spiral Jetty the same.” Steven S., an Amazon reviewer

Suzaan Boettger, an art historian, has written a scholarly tour de force about the Catholic artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) . . . Boettger’s book is suavely written, and loaded with quotations from artists and writers, some friends of Smithson, and from books and intellectuals that “influenced” or “echoed” his ideas. Donald Kuspit, White Hot

More than 10 years in the making, Suzaan Boettger’s biography of Robert Smithson has something for everyone—artists, art historians, art critics, psychiatrists, and art collectors. It’s a whale of a book, full of startling revelations, scathing critiques of the New York art world, and examinations of Smithson’s entire body of work from art historical, philosophical, religious, psychoanalytical, and literary points of view. Matthew Kangas, Sculpture

As Suzaan Boettger persuasively argues in her biography of Smithson, Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson, the Sphinx-like monument [Spiral Jetty] — like Smithson’s other land art, sculpture and painting — secretly poses a riddle, with its answer buried in the artist’s life history. Arthur Lubow, The New York Times

Inside the Spiral is one of the most informative and well written biographies I have ever had the pleasure of reading. To use the American vernacular, Suzaan Boettger can write like “hot-damn”! Robert Maddox-Harle, Leonardo

[Boettger] is an art historian gifted with an unusually acute interest in and perception of detail, an ability often exercised in relation to, say, Bellini and Michelangelo, but very rarely by critics and historians of contemporary art. Her powers of description and evocation are particularly revelatory in her accounts of Smithson’s religious paintings, making those passages required reading for anyone wishing to engage with Smithson. It is a rare achievement to invite the reader into a process of looking that combines careful scrutiny while maintaining the sense of indeterminacy and multivalence of an artwork. . . In Boettger’s account, Spiral Jetty isn’t just the most iconic of contemporary visual artworks, it’s also a piece of alchemy, a theological mystery — an abyss leading into the mystery of the self.” John Rapko, SquareCylinder

“Interspersed quotes and writings from Smithson himself contextualize historian Suzaan Boettger’s voyages into each stage of his life, including the fact that he was a prolific painter, despite never identifying as such, and he incorporated themes of queer sexuality into drawings throughout his career, helping to piece together a much fuller picture of the artist.” Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Hyperallergic 

“Inside the Spiral pays rare attention to (and generously reproduces) Smithson’s early work, an interpretive quicksand of Catholic mysticism, Aztec mythology, and Jungian symbols. . . Boettger’s book may be read as both an entropic text and a generative one, as it magnifies the meanings of her subject’s life and work while reducing it to the “all-encompassing sameness” of his unnamable etiology. . . .That his art appears larger after reading Inside the Spiral is as much a credit to his own capacious imagination as it is to Boettger’s ingenious attempts to contain it.” Zack Hartfield, Artforum

“The book is billed as the first biography of the artist. It offers unprecedented details about his personal life, from his family in Passaic, New Jersey to his death in a plane crash in Texas. ‘My integration of circumstances of Smithson’s biography is not to prevail over but to augment analyses of him as a cerebral innovator,’ she writes. ‘His public intellectuality has been examined extensively; his early history, not at all.’ But the book has a narrower agenda. Boettger portrays Smithson as secretive, haunted, manipulative, and career-bent. He calibrated his image as a brainy SoHo cowboy, she argues, to obscure his inner turmoil. . . Boettger is often convincing.” Travis Diehl, X-TRA

Another “theme that will entice Smithson enthusiasts is how Christianity, astrology, and alchemy manifest in his work, particularly later in his life since he had commented that he was uninterested in mysticism. The extensive information to the contrary . . .[is] among the reasons Boettger suggests that his relationship with the Spiral Jetty should not only be looked at in terms of the scientific aspects evident in Smithson’s sources but must also be situated in terms of his larger psychological persona.” Amy Ione, Leonardo

“An important intervention of the book is the link it makes between Smithson's art and his family history of loss that prompted his birth and shaped his intelligence. The artist configured his personal conflicts within his art, with depictions of Christ's passion, science fiction rhetoric, occult imagery, and conceptual sculpture.” Widewalls

“Boettger shows how, having made what would have been, from a historical perspective, an infelicitous entrance into artmaking, Smithson rewrote his history and chose a better one. And yet, as she is at pains to point out, Smithson’s underlying preoccupations remained consistent, and the disavowed early paintings still illuminate his renowned sculpture and earthworks.” Barry Schwabsky, Spike #76

“Suzaan Boettger’s long-awaited Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson reveals fascinating and hitherto unexplored aspects of Smithson’s earliest formation, including his status as a 'replacement child' for a dead older brother, while her fearless exploration of the artist’s Christological bent, his hermeticism, and his difficult navigation of sexuality yields nuanced psychological insight. Unburdened by academic jargon, the work is supported by extensive reference to Smithson’s writings, notes, interviews, library, and other records, of which Boettger has long been recognized as the foremost scholar." Judith Rodenbeck, University of California, Riverside, author of Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings

"This book sheds important new light on Robert Smithson. Meticulously researched and wide-ranging in scope, it explores the intricate connections between Smithson’s personal history and his art. While revealing a great deal of new information about Smithson’s life and psychology, Suzaan Boettger also engages with his art in a focused and detailed way and writes about individual works with great perceptiveness. Readers will come away from this book with a fresh and enlarged understanding of Smithson’s life and art." Jack Flam, City University of New York, editor, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings

"Only someone who has immersed themselves in the life and art of Robert Smithson for years could have written a biography as deep and engaging as Inside the Spiral. Suzaan Boettger illuminates the artist’s religious thought, examines the complexities of his gender identity, and takes a psychoanalytic lens to his sources and esoteric symbolism, bringing coherence to our understanding of this remarkably complicated artist, his body of work, and his writings. A monumental achievement." Jonathan Fineberg, University of the Arts, author of Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain

Inside the Spiral

Nedko Solakov: 99 Fears

Phaidon Press, 2008

I discovered this body of drawings regarding fears, major and minor, by Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov at the 2007 Documenta (exhibitions, Kassel, Germany) and immediately knew they would be a great subject for the book that an editor at Phaidon was interested in my doing for them — and one in which many viewers and readers could relate. Fears is a series of 99 drawings, each one exploring an anxiety stimulated by modern life, real and fantasized, dark or droll, rendered with a febrile hand and captioned in the artist’s self-reflexive, deprecating — not to say, neurotic — style.

When home, as well as studying his work, I researched prior artists’ renderings of fear and incorporated them into my essay for the book, countering the redolent apprehension by titling it “Courage.” Just as we all have intimate fears, which these drawings help confront, we all need public boosts of courage.

Art and the Landscape of the Sixties

Earthworks:

University of California Press, 2002

Here I am in 1991 (unseen in the more constricted cellphone version of this website) doing dissertation research at Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, 90 minutes NE of Las Vegas. That is where I discovered — lizards scurrying over the desiccated earth around my feet in the 115 degree heat — that contrary to most 1960s’ critics, Earthworks were not about a desire for pastoral nature. Or they were, but about the writers’ yearning, not the artists’.

I was fascinated by earthworks – they epitomized the art and spirit of the late 1960s. These telluric works of art both embodied and disrupted contemporary notions of art, nature, society, and their relationship. This first history of this earliest genre of contemporary Land Art shows this by both presenting Earthworks’ artistic lineage and situating that development within the several contexts of individuals' biographies and the social, political and cultural and economic changes in the 1960s. Historians consider the cultural and economic “sixties” to have ended ca. 1973 and this history encompasses Earthworks’ stylistic “life span” of 1966-1973.

Artistically, the development of Earthworks derived from the art world’s increasing attention to sculpture, large or environmental scale work, public art and innovative anti-traditional forms and media. Consistent with other Post-Minimalist work of the late sixties, the motivation was primarily anti-aesthetic and anti-formalist. But in the midst of the Vietnam War, the urban desire for a compensatory experience of the pastoral was so powerful that interpreters naturalized Earthworks’ transgressions by assuming the artists to be friends of the earth and their works continuous with the period’s nascent environmentalism. I address the lack at the time of women earthworkers as a manifestation of both womens’ refusal of the potentially confining association, pre-feminist art consciousness, of ‘women and earth’ and of the unavailability to them of the patronage necessary to make Earthworks. Both male and female patrons gave such support exclusively to male sculptors.

The second issue central to Earthworks, in addition to that of its relation to nature and similarly addressed within a few different chapters, is the works’ position regarding the commodification of art. While the works generally refused the status of portable objet d’art and resisted private ownership, their very creation depended upon private funding. Distinctions need to be made between the counter-moves of gallery dematerialization and economic anti-materialism. Not only did earth art not evade the art market — one could argue that it was a patronage-driven art form. In the early 1970s, the recession stemming from the OPEC oil crisis and the withdrawal from Vietnam constricted funding. A distinction can be established between au naturel Earthworks and the latter intentionally permanent environmental work in unbuilt terrain, Land Art. With Smithson’s sudden death in the summer of 1973, the majority of the conditions that had produced the genre had significantly altered and Earthworks as a historical phenomenon ceased.

“The first in-depth, social-historical study. . . Many simplified overviews of this important moment in American art indulge in the mythic uniqueness of the postwar American avant-guard, but this text complicates the picture in important ways. Boettger writes a European presence back into the groundbreaking group shows. . . She is at her most philosophical when dealing with the phenomenology of dirt and its social otherness.” Maura Coughlin, Art Journal, Summer 2005

“. . .The result is a remarkable combination of insight and intellectual enthusiasm that, rare in a scholarly work, is easily accessible and a pleasure to read.” Library Journal, December 2002

“Boettger has produced a major historical document. While the book is meticulously researched, the writing engages with the timbre of a joyful storyteller.” James Croak, Sculpture Magazine, September 2003