Paul Cummings: What about current activities?

Robert Smithson: I haven't really worked on a major piece since the Broken Circle. That's about a little more than a year ago now. I’ve been trying to since find a way out of the current art world context, into another context.

PC: In what way?

RS: Well, my involvement with the reclamation project, and the strip mining areas is an example. I went up to Maine recently, to look for property up there to possibly do something up there. I'll probably be going out to California, there's a possibility of doing something on the Salton Sea in southern California. I really would like to see myself involved directly in involved in the industry, where the industry actually needs my art as a necessary part of their reclamation projects, where industry takes on a more acute sense of the visual. I do find perhaps the whole ecological crisis has brought about, in terms of art in the landscape, [the fact that] one has to start thinking about exactly where the art comes from. You can buy your steel plate to make a piece of steel sculpture, but I would be more interested in tracing that back to its origins, back to the smelting and all those elements, and getting them all in the whole apparatus of the company, rather than a gallery. I think the big issue is whether or not art is going to remain an isolated entity within the confines of the art world. Whether it will inflate itself the point of aesthetic fatigue with all this proliferation of objects in SoHo. Or whether it will find a new context. That's really what interests me most. I’ve been going around talking to people. I talked to the head of the Bureau of Mines in Maine who was very sympathetic, and felt that the mining industry could use somebody like me.