Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown (1969)
Rome, Italy
Sculptural event
Asphalt and earth
Photograph: Robert Smithson

A dump truck unloads a large amount of asphalt which runs down the side of a hill outside of Rome, Italy.

Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown (1969)
Rome, Italy
Sculptural event
Asphalt and earth
Photograph: Robert Smithson

Invitation card for Robert Smithson's Asphalt Rundown
Galleria l'Attico, Rome, Italy, October 1969

Invitation card for Robert Smithson's Asphalt Rundown
Galleria l'Attico, Rome, Italy, October 1969

Installation view of Robert Smithson in Europe at MUSEUMSZENTRUM QUADRAT, Josef Albers Museum; Bottrop, Germany showing Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown (1969)

Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer

Installation view of Robert Smithson in Europe at MUSEUMSZENTRUM QUADRAT, Josef Albers Museum; Bottrop, Germany showing Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown (1969)

Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer

1969—1970

Asphalt Rundown

Robert Smithson

1969

Cava di Selce, Rome, Italy

Asphalt, earth

Sculptural Event

The first of Robert Smithson’s major earthworks conceived to exist exclusively outdoors, Asphalt Rundown (1969) demonstrates what Smithson called the “crystalline structure of time.” He argued that time does not pass so much as it builds upon itself. In October 1969, Smithson poured a truckload of hot asphalt down a steep embankment in a quarry outside Rome. As the asphalt flowed downhill, it cooled and hardened. The resulting sculpture can be seen as time frozen mid-flow, or as yet another sedimentary layer in the infinite accumulation of time.

Asphalt was a material Smithson frequently referred to; he was interested in its geological origins and industrial applications. It occurs naturally at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and near the abandoned oil jetty close to Spiral Jetty (1970), while asphalt used in road construction consists of bitumen mixed with mineral aggregates.

Writing

Scholarly Text

Asphalt Rundown

Serena Solin

In 1969 and 1970, Robert Smithson created three “pour” sculptures that demonstrated his mastery of a difficult and deadly medium: entropy. In all three, an industrial material was prepared and poured downhill at a remote or neglected site and left to solidify. The first of these sculptures, Asphalt Rundown, was a dramatic release of hot, viscous black material down the shorn crags of the defunct quarry, intended—and perceived—as a “powerful, annihilating gesture,” in the words of Frank Stella.1

Scholarly Text

graphite drawing of an earthwork made using asphalt and limestone

Robert Smithson’s "Texas Overflow" (1970)

Leigh A. Arnold

In early December 1970 Robert Smithson traveled to the Dallas-Fort Worth area at the invitation of the Northwood Institute—a private business college located just outside of Cedar Hill, Texas. The purpose of Smithson’s visit to this small suburb southwest of Dallas was to present his work to the students of the Institute’s short-lived Experimental Contemporary Art Program, while visiting area galleries and museums and meeting local arts patrons. Within a matter of days Smithson conceived an earthwork for the site that was to comprise hot asphalt pumped into the limestone quarry creating, what historian Robert Hobbs has described as, a “modern day tar pit, a monument to the tar pits of the prehistoric age."

Within an island you have all kinds of particles, but at the same time the awareness is a scale thing—it contracts and makes you more aware of the possibilities within that confinement. The Earth is an island. Everything is confined, whether it is indoors or outdoors. It is the degree of awareness of the ratio between the two.

[Asphalt Rundown] is an on-the-site piece that relates to itself; it is in a quarry in the suburbs of Rome. It just follows the contours, but it has the same fanning out from a central point, so it is involved in the same thinking. All of the things internally have that aspect, they all are involved with the unification of the duplicity, the dual aspect is reconciled within the pieces, and reflects a greater scale of dialectic. In this case, just following the slope, running down, and dissipating itself.

Paul Toner: “Interview with Robert Smithson” (1970)

Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 239.

Asphalt Rundown

Writing

Asphalt Rundown

Robert Smithson’s "Texas Overflow" (1970)

Related Info

See Also