Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This presentation examines use of voice by the American land artist Robert Smithson. Voice is a component in three of Smithson’s 1969 artworks: an audio lecture and slideshow (Hotel Palenque (1969/72)), a video recording with voice-over (Swamp) and an improvised conversation between the artist and his wife, Nancy Holt (East Coast, West Coast). Also during 1969, Smithson undertook a planned journey to Mexico, travelling the Yucatán peninsula with Holt. The trip culminated in Hotel Palenque – an artwork which occupies an ambiguous place in Smithson’s canon and can be seen, through voice, to challenge extant conventions of ethnographic representation. Voices tend to mellow over time, becoming more atonal. Yet only three years were to transpire between Smithson’s artmaking in Mexico and the delivery of his Hotel Palenque lecture (in 1972), as relayed to a group of architecture students at the University of Utah. Smithson’s voice, which becomes increasingly flatter the further he moves away from the New York city art world, traverses a great deal of liminal space: from inner Manhattan to the suburbs of New Jersey, before finally coming to rest on the small Mexican town of Palenque. In my research I draw on technical analysis commissioned from voice expert Dr Brian Stasak (University of New South Wales). Graphs of Smithson’s voice pose questions around artistic intention, and set the stage to propose the occurrence of a ‘voice aesthetic’ – as an overlooked, yet theoretically significant component of Smithson’s historical practice.