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Exhibition title: On Location: Art, Space and Place in the 1960s

Edited volume title: On Location: Siting Robert Smithson and his Contemporaries.

On Location: Art, Space and Place in the 1960s

This research project addressed the art practice of the late 1960s which created the shift from the autonomous art object to site-specific work. At this date a number of artists explored (and resisted) the impulse to ‘dematerialise’ the art work; my point of departure for examining this impulse was the work of Robert Smithson in which he introduced raw or salvaged materials into the gallery in order to direct the viewer’s attention to absent sites. Smithson termed these works ‘non-sites’ and considered them to be a move beyond sculpture to explore a ‘dialectic of place’.

My research project was thus addressed to significant shifts in art practice which still resonate for contemporary artists. Yet the research also addressed debates in art history developed by David Summers concerning the relationship between art works and ‘real space’. Exploring this material from this perspective entailed more than the writing of a conventional monograph. The practice of Smithson and his contemporaries could only be properly assessed through the curating of an exhibition which brought together those works which precisely sought to test the limits of the gallery space. The research project thus developed as a collaboration with art historians and also with artists of the period who contributed both to the exhibition and to the arguments developed in the accompanying volume. The exhibition was held at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and was thus an early example of the cooperation between organisations which was to result in the founding of the Sainsbury Institute for Art.