Robert Smithson : une critique en actes de la photographie

Résumé En

Robert Smithson : a critique of photography by acts. The question of photography’s use for documentary recording, often seen to be at the heart of Land Art, loses its relevance in the work of Robert Smithson. The interplay between the miniaturization effected by photography, reducing boundless distances to the size of a negative, and the approximative localization which it produces, does not allow the artist to believe in the simple veracity of the image. Smithson’s sculptural works bear on the disjunctions which have emerged in the apprehension of american space ; not only does he meet here with the power of the loss of a sense of reality, brought about by an illusionist mediatization, but he also specifies the nature of this loss by going back to its historical roots : the moment when photography was recording the Frontier. By underlining the role of the illusionist image in the loss of the physical sense of this founding element, the Frontier, Smithson makes of photography something more than a mere accessory to his creation. Photography is fully integrated into his works, which play on the materiality of the space as it is experienced physically, and the immateriality of the space represented ; they try to reconstitute the experience of the Frontier, whilst eliminating photography’s seductions and reductions.