An Evaluation of Robert Smithson's Works Titled Spiral Hill/Broken Circle in the Context of Rosalind Krauss's Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Abstract

Robert Smithson's work titled Spiral Hill, created in 1971, is a complex and exemplary piece of Land Art situated in an open outdoor space. Spiral Hill is often considered together with another nearby work called Broken Circle, located just in front of it in Emmen, Netherlands. Thus, it is a work that appears as a complex set of examples of Land Art. The work named Spiral Hill can be considered as a part of open space sculpture works with its ability to spread over space. Art historian Rosalind Krauss's article titled Sculpture in the Expanded Field generally explores how to evaluate examples of open space sculpture in terms of their contextual integrity within the landscape/non-landscape and sculpture/ non-sculpture dichotomies. The semiotic method that Krauss put forward specifically in her own methodology actually reveals the causality of the transformation of the artistic output that coincides with the image of nature in the evaluation of open space scuplture into a kind of 'sculpture' through the aforementioned methodology. This article reveals the points where Krauss's theoretical modeling overlaps with the general elements of Land Art, and evaluates her wide-area sculpture evaluation method, as discussed in Sculpture in the Expanded Field, in the context Smithsons' works Hill and Broken Circle.