Seongsan Art Hall

Robert Smithson, Strata: A Geophotographic Fiction, 1971, print on paper, 27.2 × 86 cm, artist’s contribution for ASPEN Magazine No. 8, section 12

To Robert Smithson, contemporary sculpture is neither a monument to a past place nor a meaningful signifier, but rather something that exists as “not a place.” This geopolitical fiction is presented in Issue 8 of ASPEN, a publication masquerading as a magazine that made the rounds in 1960-70s New York, in the issue devoted to Fluxus. Smithson arranges enlarged photographs and texts about fossils from different geologic periods along a long vertical axis. His experimental texts, weaving between the ongoing accumulation of time and layering of earth, parallels the structure of this Biennale, oscillating between language and image.