Acquiring History
The 50 Year Legacy of Robert Smithson’s
Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University
August 4 – September 26, 2020
KSU Downtown Gallery • 141 East Main Street, Kent, Ohio
Students Foster Creative Research
Fifty years ago, one of the most influential artists of the last hundred years did a short artist’s residency at Kent State University at the behest of students who were interested in his work. These students found a way to make the visit happen, and then worked to make sure they were able to create a project, together, that would be both interesting and inform the visiting artists’ practice.
The years have changed the Partially Buried Wood-shed, but the important research and legacy of this project, prompted by a group of Kent State students, remains, and endures. The concepts and ideas generated during a cold week in January 1970, now half a century ago, fostered conversations and further research that is perhaps a more valuable legacy than the work itself.
Students are at the heart of everything we do at this University. This exhibition has been curated by myself and my Graduate Assistants, Simon Tatum and Marissa Tiroly. It is critical to recognize the important role our students have, had and will have in proactively fostering an atmosphere supportive of transformative creative research.
Anderson Turner
Director, School of Art Collection and Galleries,
Kent State University
August 2020
Robert Smithson,
Douglas Moore, Photograph, 1970
School of Art Collection 75.9a
Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed (1970)
Lisa Le Feuvre, July 2020
For over five decades Robert Smithson’s (1938-73) work and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown. He rethought what art could be, and where it could be found. Through writing, earthworks, sculpture, film, photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture, Smithson demonstrated that art can be a means to explore how we might try to understand our place on the planet, with all of its complexities. This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Partially Buried Woodshed, a sculpture created by Smithson in January 1970 on the campus of Kent State University. Like many of Smithson’s artworks, Partially Buried Woodshed is an artwork rooted in site and dispersed through time. Its influences can be felt across a half-century of art-making.
Smithson was invited to Kent State by sculpture students and Brinsley Tyrrell, Professor Emeritus of Art. Partially Buried Woodshed was not the work Smithson intended to make when he accepted the invitation. In late 1969 his mind had been on temporal sculptures made from gravitational flows and pours. The first, Asphalt Rundown, was made in October 1969 in Rome; two weeks before arriving on campus he completed Glue Pour in Vancouver. Smithson’s plan for Kent State was to make a mud flow, an idea he had investigated in a number of recent drawings. In 1970 sculpture was generally understood as something fixed in time and space, often monumental, and certainly not expected to change. As the sculpture students knew, Smithson was interested in proposing something completely different. He was invested in a definition of sculpture that was timebound and precarious, that would not claim monumental status, instead collaborate with entropy.
Smithson arrived in January, and Ohio was much colder than he had expected. The idea for a mud flow was just impossible, he caught the flu, and was ready to go home to New York City. The students insisted he stayed, and Smithson described an idea he had long wanted to make: a sculpture where he would bury a building. The students set about finding something that would fit the bill. They suggested a woodshed that sat on the eastern part of the campus, contrasting to other modern buildings. It was perfect. On January 22 Smithson requested twenty-two truckloads of earth be moved from a construction site on campus to beside the woodshed. Using a backhoe, the dirt was poured on top of the woodshed to partially bury the building. When the central beam cracked, the process was complete. This marked the close of the first chapter of Partially Buried Woodshed and the start of the second when, to use the words of the students professor Brinsley Tyrrell, the sculpture began to acquire its own history. That very day Smithson donated the work to the university, specifying “nothing should be altered” in the surrounding forty-five foot area, that the inevitable weathering should be allowed to take its course, that the contents of the shed were a part of the work, and that Partially Buried Woodshed should be considered permanent.
Smithson’s gift agreement, signed in a local bar called The Loft, was full of questions about the definition of sculpture. When the heavy earth would inevitably transform the crack in the beam to a break as time passed, would that be “inevitable weathering?” Or should preventative action be taken before that point? Less than four months later Partially Buried Woodshed, and Kent State University, underwent seismic change. On May 4 a campus protest against the war in Vietnam initiated National Guard soldiers firing sixty-seven bullets in thirteen seconds at unarmed students, killing Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder, as well as wounding nine others. Soon afterwards the words MAY 4 KENT 70 were spray-painted on the woodshed. Smithson’s earthwork became a monument to these tragic events. In 1971 Smithson embraced this history, submitting a photograph of Partially Buried Woodshed to an exhibition of peace poster designs that showed the statement on the lintel. There were yet more changes. On March 28, 1975 the woodshed was set on fire. The arsonist was never identified, and half the building was destroyed. The following January, the University committed to the care of the work. In 1982 the central beam finally broke. In January 1984 the remaining parts of the structure were removed by the university without explanation, leaving Partially Buried Woodshed the ruin that it is today.
When Smithson shared with Tyrrell his wish that the sculpture would acquire its own history he could not have known what the future would hold, only that it would happen. The intangible changes of personal and political histories, of scholarship, of memories, and of storytelling have kept this artwork in the present even though the sculpture has physically nearly disappeared from view. Partially Buried Woodshed is a ruin: not a romantic ruin, but a ruin that has risen into being. The power of ruins lies in their ability to simultaneously memorialize the past and point to future disappearance. Fifty years after that cold 1970 January, Partially Buried Woodshed continues to circulate through ever-developing ideas, its existence resonating loudly from here, the campus of Kent State University.
Lisa Le Feuvre is Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, which exists to continue the creative and investigative spirit of artists Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-73). In Fall 2020 the Foundation launches its Research Fellowship Program, and welcomes applications from researchers based at Kent State University.
See www.holtsmithsonfoundation.org for details.
Interview with Brinsley Tyrell, Professor Emeritus, Kent State University
— Simon Tatum, current graduate student, Studio Art (Sculpture) MFA’21
June 2020
Simon I wanted to focus more on the practical matters about putting the project together and how the project is perceived now. So, let’s just start by talking about Smithson’s invitation to the campus. I believe I read in a text from a past catalogue covering the Woodshed project, that Smithson was invited to campus by a student, a graduate student but it was you who really supported Smithson coming to the campus…
Brinsley Well, it was not a graduate student, it was an undergrad student. He (the undergraduate student) was in my class, and he was talking about how they had this university activity fund and they would bring actors, musicians, and other things in, and why did they never bring an artist in?
So, I told him, well go and ask them. And, you know, that is the kind of remark that a teacher could usually make and the student would not think anything about it, but he (the student) did. And he said they would love to bring an artist in but they don’t know who to invite. And I said, well, who would you like to invite? And he said, Smithson. And I told him, well why don’t you ask him then.
And he did. He told them (the university grant administrators) that he wanted to bring in Smithson, and he asked Smithson to come and Smithson said yes.
S Wow, so tell me back then… I know that Smithson’s legacy now is huge, and I know that his career was probably thriving by the time this all happened… but back then did he already have that rock star career?
B Well, it was just taking off… and he was writing a great deal in… Oh, I think it was Artnews, and he was getting a lot of publicity. And he was with Dwan Gallery, which was a very highly regarded gallery.
So he, I mean the student, I think he thought of Smithson less because of the person and more because he had seen and was interested in the work. And at that point he (Smithson) was tipping truckloads of concrete or ash fault down a hillside and photographing them. And when he got to Kent, the University was going to put him up in a dormitory. And I said, well if he would rather be put up with me, then I would be happy to have him stay at my house, and he would be welcome. And he did, he came to my house and stayed with me for about a week.
S Oh wow, that is very sweet.
B And, (chuckle) I distinctly remember, the whole class was sitting in my living room and circled around sitting on the floor, and he was probably sitting in a chair, and they had been clever, they had found out what it was that he had liked to drink, and I think it was Gin, and they got him a bottle of it.
And I had said to them beforehand, that if Smithson comes to the university then it would be much more interesting, if an artist does come to visit, that they have him do a project. They have him make something, because it is much more interesting and you learn more
when you see that artist working rather than just talking to you.
S Sure, absolutely
B So he said that he would really like to have a truck load of mud, tip it and have it roll down a hill and photograph it. Well, the problem with that is that it is January in Ohio.
B Chuckle… yes, and mud is not going to slide down a hill.
So, he sort of said, well, if he can’t do that then he will go back to New York… And we all said, Oh, good lord, isn’t there something that you have always wanted to do… and he said, well he has always wanted to bury a building… and we said, right, we will try to get you a building. And somehow, they did it. And until this day I am not sure how they managed it… but by 9 o’clock in the morning they had permission to use the building, we had permission from the university to collect the dirt that the university was digging out of the foundation of a new building or construction project, and we had a bulldozer.
S Wait, well, was the building something that had already been on campus? Was it an existing building that was already on West campus or something that was brought over?
B There was an old farm, on the corner of that part of campus, and the university had just bought the farm with the intension of tearing everything down and putting in a new building. And this was the old woodshed that was in the back of the farm… And it was scheduled to pulled down anyway, so there was nothing to lose, so they were okay with it. But who arranged that I don’t know…
Whether it was one of the students or… well, it was the students who went off to see whether this thing could happen, so presumably someone went to someone to sort this arrangement out. Anyway, 9 o’clock in the morning we had permission to do all of this. Smithson sat around and did lots of drawings about how he wanted it to be. And then he got the flu… and he was in bed for two days… and then a lot of the rest of us got flu, too, (chuckle) and it was freezing dam cold… He wanted most of the wood out of the woodshed, because it was stacked solid… and we spent ages lugging all this stuff out…
S Could you tell me for a moment about the drawings for a moment?
B Yeah, he did those drawings, or most of those drawings anyway, before we did the woodshed, he may have done one or two afterwards too… and he wanted to pile dirt into one corner of the woodshed until the main beam (the structure support beam) cracked. That was the sort of stopping point. When the main beam cracked we were stopping. That is what we sort of did. And then we later sat down after doing this, in my living room, and I said “what do you want to happen to it now?” And he was talking a lot about entropy. And he said that he wanted it to acquire its own history and to be left alone… and I said, “well I don’t see how I can go to the university and
argue why this woodshed with a pile of dirt on the corner should be kept…” can you get the gallery to put a monetary value on it? Because I can go and argue money. So, they (Dwan Gallery) sent this beautiful formal letter…
I am not sure if Anderson has got it…
S He does.
B But, well anyway, it said that the woodshed was valued at $10,000 dollars. And you can go to a university administrator and argue this $10,000-dollar art object without arguing aesthetics… And they did not say that they would not accept it into their collection, but what they did say was that they would not tear it down or bulldoze it until they needed the land for a new building. Which was pretty safe for the university because they already had a building planned…
S Ahh, okay, that makes sense, so when the liquid crystal building was being built, when the designs for it came out, then there started to be some tampering with it?... because there was the fire, and ahhh, which had one affect, but then there was another clean up afterwards that was done by university landscaping, right?
B Hahaha, it was a hugely controversial piece, there were all kind of letters in the Beacon Journal and the Record Courier all the time… with lots of faculty members saying clean up that piece of garbage, it is an eye sore, and then lots of artists saying, my god nooo, that is an important piece of art… And I don’t think University knew what to do about it. So, it did not do anything… Which is exactly what it should have done… it should do nothing. I don’t think the university never understood that it should do nothing… accept that they did, at one point, I think there was Paris Lawn Company Magazine or something that phoned up the university and said they wanted to come out and make a film of the buried woodshed… and the university was a bit like Oh my god, what the hell… so they went and neatened it up! And they went and planted these little Christmas trees… and the big evergreen trees that are there now are those Christmas trees.
S That is so funny!
B yeah, it was funny.
S It does seem in line with that big state school university stereotype to always try to keep the campus tidy.
B yes, exactly, like my god there is a film crew coming, tidy it up… Which I don’t think Smithson would have liked… but I do think he would have liked the fact that great big pine trees are sitting there now as a result of that… and they have become part of the land… what he said to me was that he wanted it to acquire its own history, he wanted it to … you know the word entropy comes up again… he wanted it to go back to nature, which it kind of did… and despite the fact that there was that fire… which I and the then director of the school of art, spent all day out there when the ground crew were cleaning up (after the fire) fighting
to keep it, the main structure, and arguing over every piece of wood. Because if I did not do that then the whole thing would have been cleaned up…
S Okay, yeah…
B The ground crew wanted to get rid of the whole thing… concerned about safety… Nobody knows who set the fire, but some did think it was ground crew, trying to get rid of it, but can’t prove any of that… And then eventually, If I am right, 14 years after we did (the buried woodshed project), which would have been 1984, someone had phoned me up and said… hey did you know that the woodshed had finally been cleared up?
B Evidently, the main beam had finally collapsed and the shed had fallen down, and the ground crew were finally able to cleared it up… which I thought was a little poetic because the university had never known that they were being given this important piece of artwork, and it did not know that it had lost an important artwork… If that makes any sense?
S I guess it had been there without any sort of… real appreciation? That goes back to that idea of entropy…
B Yeah, of course the powers at be, the administration did not have any real appreciation for the project, they thought it looked like an eye sore… But I really saw this project as a week-long trip with the class, working with this artist and really trying to understand what it was he was trying to do… and when we finished the piece… I kind of thought, well, okay, that is done… we have got the letter from Dwan (Dwan Gallery) and we know it won’t be cleared up… and I don’t remember the timing, but maybe a year later, I was in New York, and I went into the Whitney Museum of American Art… and there was a whole gallery devoted to hug, great photographs of the buried woodshed…
S Oh wow! So that is how they (Smithson’s Gallery) did it…
B And I thought to myself… What! This was
little classroom room project… That we had
all sweated our guts out for… and now suddenly, it is a nationally famous work of art… good lord!
S Yeah! Wow… and was that a kind of strategy by… because Smithson died how many years after the Woodshed project?
B 1972… Ahh, you know, I was talking to Marissa (Marissa Tiroly), and she was calling it land art… And I was saying, well that is what it is called now. But the word had not been coined then…
S Ahh, right!
B We thought we were doing a conceptual piece… Smithson thought of it as a conceptual piece… and I think it was the first of his… well, I would now use the term land art… it was the first of his permanent things.
S Yes, okay… because most of his things before then were being recorded and given to hi gallery as photograph or video recordings, no?
B Yeah… they were photographs, and then they were cleared up… and if we did not have that letter from Dwan (Dwan Gallery)… it would have happened to the woodshed. It would have been photographed and bulldozed as they bulldozed all the other farm buildings on that campus corner… and I went there, a
couple of months ago… and it is interesting, because it now looks like the woodshed was up on a hill, but it wasn’t… the land was all flat there. And it just shows you that there has been so much road work and construction around it, that it is now on a hill…
S Yeah, okay, because the land scape has changed so much around it.
B Correct.
S Yeah, that was something that impressed me… I don’t think it was the early photographs, but maybe the photographs taken of the project years later… but looking at the photographs then, verses what it has turned into now… yes, it is quite outstanding… to see how much has changed on that part of campus in the last 20-30 years…
B Well, you know, 3 months after that happened (buried woodshed project), May the 4th happened…
S Yes
B Someone scribbled May the 4th on it… I know there has been some thought that it was a political artwork, but I suppose it came one when May the 4th was written on it… If May the 4th had not have happened… then that building that is there now (KSU Liquid Crystal Building) would have been put there and the woodshed would have vanished… but because May the 4th happened, all the funds for the university construction dried up because all the politicians in Ohio hated the university…
S Oh wow!
B So the promise that they would not bulldoze it until they needed to build another building sort of became important…
S Right! Wow, that is interesting… Well, and I wanted to talk about its legacy and its impact on students… and faculty that have come since the project happened… Something that I found interesting was that in past catalogues… I think in the late 80s or early 90s… they did a project that was really focused on faculty or graduate students, I believe, that had made project that could somehow be tied into a dialog that the woodshed started…
B Yeah…
S And even now, there are graduate students… that ahhh, have interventions with the work, whether it be video, photograph or performance or something like that… umm what are thoughts on that growing legacy? I also think it is interesting when feel refer to making a homage to that space, because ahh what it is now is so much different than what it stared as… So for me now, it seems like a peculiar thing, when people talk about this homage to this special site, when the site has changed so much… you know?
B Yes, I … In my mind the piece was no longer a work of art when the center beam fell down and the remains of the building were cleared up…
In my mind it is now an archaeological site… there are a lot of people who say no, the foundation is still there and so the site still exists… which I do not really agree with…
When we did it, was just when conceptualism was coming to the fore…
It was this sort of revolutionary idea that it did not matter what the design was, it was
the idea that counted… you know, which has become pretty standard since, it was not at the time… It was fairly revolutionary… but my, you know, I am not a conceptual artist, but I appreciate its importance… Um what is interesting to me was that it was so controversial till it fell down. And it seems, it feels like the moment it fell down the university became very loving about it…
S Why do you think that is?
B You know they preserved the site and built a road that bends around it…
S Right.
B And at the time, for about 14 or 15 years, it was a real embarrassment to the university that it didn’t really know what to do about it… and to the university’s credit, because it did not know what to do about it, it did nothing, essentially.
S Okay.
B Which was far better than everyone else that bulldozed Smithson’s projects…
S That is very true…Yeah, I suppose, what it came down to for the woodshed, was that it did not match the sort of aesthetic that needed to go with the university brand…
B You know, that what was so interesting is that university administrators who were forced to leave it alone thought that it was this sort of embarrassment on campus, meanwhile international art magazines are covering the woodshed and talking about it… but what does a university do about that? I mean, I can see that it was a bit of a dilemma for them… As I say, they should take pride in the fact that they did not do anything, well besides for planting those trees when Paris Company was coming… You know, but I take solace in the fact Smithson wanted the thing to acquire its own history and that, to me, is part of the history, and the fact that the trees grew and became magnificent trees because they were on the land is real entropy…
S Yeah, yeah, that sounds great… And I am just curious, because I am sure by now you have seen lots of student projects that might referenced or done something with the site… Is there anything that you have seen, during your time at the university that you thought was an interesting conversation with the work? Besides the whole event of the May 4th being written on it and the whole history of the work being there…
B Well, for years, someone would always call me up in January, when it was freezing cold and ask me could we interview you at the Smithson woodshed… and I would come out (chuckle)… there in the middle of a snow storm and stand out there for twenty minutes and tell them about it… So, my views are a little colored by that!
B But you know, the sort of interest by students comes and goes, you get a period of time when people seem really interested in it… And then you have a few years when no one seems to notice it much. But, it became one of the seminal works of Robert Smithson, and he was one of the seminal artists for conceptualism art… so it became this important thing… And it was sort of interesting I thought, that one of the art historians seemed very interested in it when we did it… But over the years, if you are a contemporary art historian then you have to deal with it because it is in all the books.
S Right, right. Well that’s great… Well I think that covers all the questions I had. It is interesting that note you gave about these sorts of waves of interest. Because I have recently been speaking with a graduate student, Matt Kurtz, who I think has already spoken to you?
B Yeah, he did.
S Yeah, and he mentioned to me, that when he was here for his undergraduate degree, that no one seemed to speak very much about the woodshed, but now that he is here for his graduate program, more people seem to know about it… did you think that has to do with the anniversary? But it is interesting to see how these waves of interests blow in and out… and I do think that it is interesting that you have this repeat of the story from time to time…
And reminding people of the project, especially with that visual of you retelling the story out there during the winter… I am sure that Robert Smithson would have a laugh about that… because that is quite funny.
B … Yeah, well, I viewed it at the time, I mean I think my comment to the student, Robert Swick, of why don’t you go and ask them why they don’t bring in visual artists seems like an off the cuff comment that you could say to a student in a class… Except he did it!
S And that made all the difference.
B Yeah, and from my point of view, it almost accidentally happened… in its origins…
S It does say something about the student engagement as well… Because just the fact that they were willing to work in the dead of winter and they were willing to come together with Smithson’s idea… That sort of engagement is rare to see with any sort of institution these days…
B It is! It was a good group of students… You know, and they literally stood around and begged him to stay and asked “What would you like to do if you could?” And the fact that they had gone out and gotten him his favorite drink, I think it was a bottle of gin or something, sort of got it ahead of time for him… Because I found out that Smithson was a notoriously prickly person…
And he did not do these education things, and he did not like them… And he was known for saying no to things… And you know, I thought at one point we had Richard Serra lined up to come and do a project with us as well… And Richard said that he would come because he heard that Smithson had such a good time.
Which is interesting because Smithson had flu and all that during his time here. But then Serra had been negotiating with Ohio State University for some time about a project and they finally didn’t do it. And Then Serra phoned me up and said I am sorry, I hate Ohio, I am not coming… yeah (chuckle) that was a shame, because if he had come, then we might have been celebrating a Richard Serra piece too!
S Wow! That is interesting to share that too! That shows how once you have engagement and have people working well, then other artists also want to get involved.
Robert Swick
Photograph
ca. 1970
Robert Swick, pictured here, was one of the students responsible for helping to bring Robert Smithson to Kent as a visiting artist. He and other students sought approval from the Director of the School of Art to invite Smithson, made the formal invitation to the artist, and were instrumental in procuring the woodshed and necessary equipment for the project.
School of Art Collection 2012.024
Photograph of the Partially Buried Woodshed during construction
Douglas Moore
Photograph
1970
Robert Smithson, and building contractor, Rich Hemling, stand next to the woodshed to discuss plans before beginning to load 20 truckloads of dirt onto its roof. Although the Partially Buried Woodshed was completed as an alternative project to his original plans, Smithson had long had notions of burying a building to the point where the damage was no longer reversible, and the process of entropy was impending.
School of Art Collection 75.9d
Photograph of the Partially Buried Woodshed during construction
Photograph
1970
Building contractor, Rich Hemling,
operated the backhoe at the direction
of Robert Smithson to load the dirt,
obtained from a campus construction site, onto the roof of the woodshed.
School of Art Collection 2011.038
Photograph of the Partially Buried Woodshed during construction
Douglas Moore
Photograph
1970
After frigid January temperatures barred him from completing his intended mud pour, Smithson, shown in this photograph on the right in a dark stocking cap, holding a notebook, realized another project he’d been considering: to bury a building, and let the process of entropy transform the structure over time.
School of Art Collection 75.9a
Partially Buried Woodshed
Photograph
ca. 1970’s
In a 1973 interview, Smithson likened entropy to the story of Humpty Dumpty. Entropy, the artist stated, is “a condition that is moving toward a gradual equilibrium… You have a closed system which eventually deteriorates and starts to break apart and there’s no way that you can really piece it back together again.”
From “Entropy Made Visible,” interview with Alison Sky
School of Art Collection
Partially Buried Woodshed, January 1970
Partially Buried Woodshed
Glen Apseloff, MD
Photograph
1983
Sometime in 1983, the central beam of the woodshed buckled under the continued weight of dirt on its roof, and the woodshed collapsed.
School of Art Collection
Constructed for Decay: Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed
— Marissa Tiroly, current graduate student, Art History MA’20
Near the corner of Summit and Johnston, in the south corner of Kent State University’s campus, wide parking lots surround a small grassy area. A subtle hill rises from the street, at the peak of which stand several trees, young and old, deciduous and conifer, growing amidst rogue low-lying plants. A crosswalk takes visitors from the parking lots to the sidewalk leading to the Liquid Crystal Materials Science Building, completed in 1996. The section is generally unremarkable from the rest of the campus, an intermingling of grass, trees and buildings, bordered by sidewalks, roads and parking lots.
This is the view of the site of the Partially Buried Woodshed today, fifty years after Robert Smithson, with faculty and students, realized his vision of burying a building. In comparing the scene today with that shown in the photographs from the 1970’s and ‘80’s, it is clear the area has been re-envisioned with buildings erected, and roads rerouted. A corner of protruding foundation is what remains of one of the few earthworks Smithson created before his death at the age of 35. In a culture that prizes permanence and preservation, the chasm that exists between the Woodshed of the photographs and the site today can feel unnerving, yet it was by design that the work should transform over time, subject to the process of entropy. Physical permanence was never Smithson’s intention for this work. However, over the course of its life, the Woodshed veered from an imaginable process of slow decomposition. Although the structure collapsed naturally, yielding to the weight of the mounded dirt on its roof, disagreements surrounding the work of art’s basic raison d’etre begot an accelerated dismantling of the woodshed until finally the collapsed building was removed.
This divergence from a gradual process of decay invites the question of whether the aim of the work was fulfilled if Smithson’s intention was a continued contemplation of entropy. The answer to this question is a matter of opinion. While never intended as a political statement, the work’s controversy grew with time. Given this history, we might reflect on the place of art in the public sphere, and what responsibilities we have as an audience. With respect to the Partially Buried Woodshed, this essay considers the following: the circumstances under which the work was created, the forces that factor into the entropic process, and issues that arise when works of art are created in the public sphere.
Unlike his other earthworks, this impromptu project began without the prearranged plans in place for a long-term project. Smithson’s original plans for his stay at Kent State as a visiting artist was to conduct a liquid mud pour, continuing his investigation of the nature of time and entropy as explored in his other “flows” such as Asphalt Rundown. However, the inhospitable cold of Ohio’s Januarys hindered any possibility for a viscous mud. With continued prodding by students, Smithson’s contingency plan was to “bury a building.”[1] The project evolved swiftly, propelled in part by motivated student collaborators who, by 9:00 a.m. the following morning, had procured a building, a backhoe, and truckloads of dirt already excavated from a campus building project. The building the students had arranged, an old woodshed, was one of the existing buildings standing on farmland recently acquired by the university, all of which were slated for demolition in preparation for new campus construction. Consequently, the students request to use the woodshed for Smithson’s project was approved by the University as the building were all intended to be razed, and thus the collapse of the woodshed would be inconsequential.[2]
Truckloads of dirt were mounded onto the roof of the woodshed, until the central beam cracked, signaling the initiation of the intended entropic process, the point of irreversibility. Before returning to New York, Smithson stated his wishes for the Partially Buried Woodshed: that the natural process of entropy be allowed to continue and that it be allowed to “age and gain its own history.”[3] Together with Dwan Gallery, a valuation of $10,000 was assigned to the piece along with a statement of donation and instructions for maintenance, declaring the work a permanent installation. While plans had already been made for the development of the farmland, the University agreed the Woodshed could remain until construction were more imminent.
In the succeeding months, however, the tragic shootings on May 4 altered the trajectory of both the University and the Partially Buried Woodshed. An inscription of “May 4, 1970” was spray-painted on the lintel later that year, creating a glaring association of the Partially Buried Woodshed with the events of the shootings. The tragedy of May 4 had repercussions that were felt across the University, precipitating a difficult period in the School’s history, and halting plans for buildings and campus development. Thus the Partially Buried Woodshed was allowed to remain for years despite the painful reminder it bore. Furthermore, while acclaim for the work grew on an international level, in Kent, Ohio and neighboring local communities, resentment and disdain festered. Although its growing distinction led to a show at the Whitney and attracted visitors from across the Atlantic, a large segment of the local community had complained about Smithson’s work before the artist had even arrived in Kent.
In 1975, two years after Smithson’s untimely death, a case of arson left half of the Woodshed charred but standing. Again the controversy over the fate of the Woodshed intensified with growing claims that the fire had rendered the structure unsafe. Art Department Director, Robert Morrow, and Brinsley Tyrrell debated the soundness of the Woodshed at the site for hours, with Tyrrell standing on the roof in demonstration of its sturdiness.[4] Ultimately, the damaged half was removed, and the unaffected half was largely let be. As the years passed, and the artwork grew in notoriety and importance, the debates continued as to how, or if, Smithson’s work should be preserved. The University struggled to determine appropriate maintenance protocols, and grounds crews regularly removed fallen pieces of wood and debris, despite Smithson’s expressed instructions that all debris remain untouched. By 1984, it was noted that the collapsed woodshed had been removed.
The social context in which the Partially Buried Woodshed was created and the controversy surrounding it are relevant to the second issue of whether the social environment can truly be separated from the natural environment. In his instruction for maintenance of the Woodshed, Smithson stated that “nothing should be altered in [the] area.”[5] The Western construct of art requires a distancing between artwork and viewer. However, Smithson did not create his work in an uninhabited location; the entropic process of the Woodshed consequently involved the social environment as well as the natural environment. The act of spray-painting “May 4, 1970” on the lintel of the woodshed and even the arson were part of the process of the Woodshed’s dissolution into the larger surrounding body. However these human actions on the Woodshed stray from a predictable process of decay that might make the artwork’s physical decline tolerable. This chaos is even less acceptable to the viewer who values permanence and stability, and those that subscribe to the belief that artwork and audience must remain separate.
Perhaps the more final acts against the Woodshed are the words of provocation and actions by a vocal community personally offended by the Partially Buried Woodshed and Smithson himself. This is an issue that impacts all public art whether during the stages of planning or as criticism post-installation and relates to the tendency to marginalize less popular voices and opinions in the public sphere. While the work always had critics and supporters, statements in local papers belittling Smithson and denigrating his work on Kent’s campus as a “piece of garbage,” found support among area community members, including, at least one of the University’s own professors.[6] A reporter from the Akron Beacon Journal reveals a blatantly populist attitude, painting Smithson as elitist.[7] The social atmosphere in which Smithson created the Partially Buried Woodshed proved more corrosive than even a neutral environment, and demonstrates how public spaces are not as inclusive to all as we might believe.[8]
Viewing the photographs of the work from the 1970’s-80’s can create expectations that something should remain of the Woodshed, other than what does. However, photographs can be deceptive in the way that they can collapse time and ignore consequential events. Photographs, as Smithson states, present “an illusive or temporal escape from physical dissolution.”[9] Smithson could obviously not predict the appearance of the woodshed’s dissolution. In considering Smithson’s intent to make “visible” the entropic process by burying a building under truckloads of dirt, it is difficult not to maintain some conception for what should exist after fifty years of decay. Perhaps these expectations are in error, for nature, as philosopher Stephen David Ross states, is not so tidy, but rather “wild and disorderly.”[10] Smithson’s interest in entropy lay in part in its irreversibility, when things can no longer be restored to a previous state.
In a 1973 interview, months before he passed away, Smithson recounted instances of communities which had undergone natural disasters and the decision of whether to restore the area to its previous state. Part of Smithson’s interest in entropy was finding the point of “irreversibility.” Our penchant for preservation and the evasion of death, change, and an unknown future contrasts with Smithson’s obsession for exploring the turning point at which “things can’t be put back together again.”[11] Not only is preservation and restoration not always possible, at times attempts at restoration are actually exercises in futility. In considering the inevitable occurrences of decay and transformation, Smithson concludes, “Here we have to accept the entropic situation and more or less learn how to incorporate these things that seem ugly.”[12]
[1] Brinsley Tyrrell, interview by author, June 6, 2020.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Deed of Gift from Robert Smithson to Kent State University, January 22, 1970, Kent State University School of Art Collection.
[6] Kent State University English Professor, James Neil Harris stated in an op-ed. “I object to this waste. I object to calling this piece of garbage a work of art,” and questioned Smithson’s legitimacy as an artist. “Professor Objects to Funding $80,000 Woodshed Park,” Daily Kent Stater, May 14, 1975.
[7] Journalist William Bierman quoted an earlier reporter’s disdain for Smithson’s work, accusing him of, “trying to teach the “Ohio corn-pickers” a lesson about culture and what real art is.” William Bierman, “Burn the Woodshed! Spare the Woodshed!,” The Beacon, The Akron Beacon Journal, May 20, 1975.
[8] Rosalyn Deutsche, "Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy," Social Text, no. 33 (1992): 34-53.
[9] Robert Smithson, “The Monuments Passaic,” Robert Smithson: Sculpture, ed. Robert Hobbs, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
[10] Amanda Boetzkes, introduction to The Ethics of Earth Art, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 13.
[11] Robert Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” interview by Alison Sky, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 301.
[12] Ibid., 306-307.