Frequent Flyers: Robert Smithson’s “Aerial Art,” 1969

The proposal for the formal ratification of a new epoch of geological time to be known as the Anthropocene, submitted to authorities in 2023, required that a specific location and event be officially used to define a break with the Holocene, the current unit of Earth time since the last major ice age. The Anthropocene concept recognizes a period in which human activity has impacted the planet’s climate and ecosystems to the extent that it is reflected in its rock strata. The chosen marker, known as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point, was a core sample from a small lake in Canada that shows an abrupt appearance of plutonium circa 1950—radioactive fallout from atomic bomb testing. Nevertheless, in February 2024, the proposal was voted down.1  In his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, cultural theorist Charles Jencks declared that “July 15, 1972, at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts)”—the time that a section of the vast Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis, U.S., was demolished—was the moment that “Modern architecture died.” He asserted that this event should serve as a global boundary of sorts that marked the end of Modernism and the dawn of Postmodernism. Jencks’ meme stuck fast. Yet the notion that the buildings’ design was somehow fatally flawed has since been debunked as racist and classist.2

Despite the unpromising nature of these precedents, yet precisely because of their uncanny layering of failure, historiographic nomenclature, mythmaking, and how they delineate cultural and planetary transitions, this text proffers a kindred polemic. I will argue that the 1969 publication of Robert Smithson’s article “Aerial Art” should be recognized as a boundary event for the emergence of a new era of contemporary art and exhibition-making, a fulcrum whose defining characteristic was the explosion of affordable mass air travel. Smithson’s article was printed on a single spread of Studio International ’s February–April 1969 issue: a short essay on one page and four images on the other.3  As with other Smithson published writings, notably “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space” (1966), we could think of “Aerial Art” as a work on paper, a creation that goes beyond the words themselves to convey information and trigger meaning.4  The text is effectively a coda to Smithson’s work from 1966 to 1967 as an artist-consultant with Tippetts–Abbett–McCarthy–Stratton (TAMS) while the architecture firm was developing integrated site studies, data analysis, and a masterplan for an entirely new airport site in Texas, U.S., that would become Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (DFW), today the second-busiest airport in the world. Published almost two years after Smithson’s contract with TAMS had concluded, the article is a consolidation of the previously published “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” published in Artforum, which sublimates the impulse of its “towards” into a vaporous form of manifesto for a new genre of art: aerial art.5  Its conceptual preamble leads to the concise description of four proposed art projects—by Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Smithson himself—for earthworks to be sited at the ends of the runways and potentially seen from the air.6  Morris’ envisions a giant grassy hill. Andre’s offers two ideas: a bomb crater and a vast swathe of flowers. LeWitt’s describes a cube with unknown contents buried underground, and Smithson’s proposes a huge, spiraling concrete pavement. However, the pharaonic airport scheme was restructured in 1968 and TAMS were ultimately limited to engineering and systems design. Their plans for the terminals and airstrips, along with the artists’ proposals, never left the page.7  Yet the publication of “Aerial Art” offers a runway for a new story about how contemporary art took flight.

The collaboration with TAMS and the genesis of DFW had a pivotal significance for the development of Smithson’s thinking around site specificity and consideration of high-altitude views. The experience would prove to be instrumental and acted as the catalyst for both his large-scale environmental sculptures, not least Spiral Jetty (1970), and his theoretical concept of the Nonsite. Yet while the history of the “network of interconnected drawings, writings, sculptures, models, and interviews” that the collaboration encompasses is well documented, the wider ramifications of the aerial art coinage—its anthropocenic and postmodernist possibilities, rather than its biographical interpretability—have been overlooked.8  While aviation has shaped human subjectivity and the relationship “between the center and the edge of things,” its agency and capacity has largely escaped detection and explanation in accounts of contemporary art.9  Smithson’s concept set forth proposals for works of art on the fringes of the airport complex, but it also foresaw a novel convergence and mutual relationship between art production and global mobility that was contemporaneous with a surge in airliner flying that has produced a sustained multi-decade growth in CO2 emissions, and warming effects that have been responsible for 4% of global temperature rise since pre-industrial times.10  The aerial art era has been one defined by a jet-lag temperament of artificial acceleration (“the hidden dimensions of ‘time’ apart from natural duration,” as Smithson puts it), the dispositional outcomes of aviation’s infrastructure space (“an esthetic based on the airport as an idea, and not simply as a mode of transportation”), and not just global but planetary consequences (where an “airport is but a dot in the vast infinity of universes”).11

Smithson opines that the “outer limits of the terminal could be brought into consciousness by a type of art, which I will call aerial art, that could be seen from aircraft on takeoff and landing, or not seen at all.”12  He portrays an airliner’s takeoff as a transition of “drastic changes of scale [...] from the dazzling to the monotonous in a short space of time.” And his words could equally characterize the sweeping transformations of the air travel experience since 1969 as the luster and exclusivity of the jet set travel of the first commercial scheduled services of the late 1950s was superseded by the transformations in scale and capacity represented by DFW-sized airports, built as hubs for a new breed of large long-range wide-body airliners, dominated by the Boeing 747, which entered service in 1970. TAMS work was underpinned by management and circulation criteria, and it foresaw a relentless growth in the numbers of gates needed, the area required for terminal, cargo, and hangar facilities, as well as peak hour passenger and baggage movements.13

The conditions for a new kind of accelerated airborne transnational art world were expedited and intimately intertwined with the growth of the global airline industry. Both have consolidated into a particularly stubborn challenge in terms of decarbonization.14 As earth systems become ever more disrupted, future art historians might plausibly look back and discern art history up until 1969 (or thereabouts) as the planetary cultural production of the human species that was afforded by the relatively stable climate and benign conditions of the surprisingly narrow environmental niche that has served the whole of human civilization during the last 10,000 years.15

The career of Harald Szeemann, arguably the most celebrated curator of the early aerial art era, left ample evidence of its reliance on the relentless growth of air travel during his lifetime. As part of the Getty Research Institute’s 2018–19 touring exhibition “Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions,” Travel Sculpture (late 1960s–2004) was featured as an artwork attributed to Szeemann. This creation comprises a multitude of luggage tags accumulated over more than fifty years of flights in and out of ZRH, GVA, and BRN airports—bar-code strips, gate-check dockets, and business-class labels, adorned with “Priority,” “Rush,” and “Short Connection.” This bag-tag collection, which hung for years in the Fabbrica Rosa, Szeemann’s archive and library in Maggia, Switzerland, forms a striking totem of the normalizing of a paradigm of curatorial hypermobility.

Yet crucially, Smithson’s aerial art implies as much about the subjectivity of its potential viewers as it does about its material culture: its public is also one that is constantly in transit. Large-scale characteristics of cultural production and exchange can be discerned via particular modes of travel, whether of people or capital. Most people throughout history have largely been pedestrian. Art, and the dissemination of culture, was once intimately yoked to the relatively slow modalities of the world’s sail, road, and rail networks. Likewise, the increasing possibility (and affordability) of flying has also shaped the way we see ourselves and experience the world. Just as Fernand Braudel, the historian of the longue durée, realized that his study of the diplomacy of Philip II of Spain was actually a story of land and sea transport, and the Mediterranean was a “space-movement,” clearer art historical insight could be afforded by study of the circumstances under which contemporary art became established post-1969 as a complex and thickening network of travel and trade routes enabled by increasingly frequent flying. This space-movement tracked the increasingly generic and functional experience of aviation in the 1960s and 70s, through to the emergence of low-cost carriers following deregulation in 1978 in the U.S. and in the EU in the 1990s.16

Such a story of contemporary art taking flight might encompass not only the increasing speed and reach of ideas opened up by air travel, and how geographical communities become aspatial communities of interest, but also how this acceleration happened inequitably and reinforced already established transatlantic connections of influence and authority. It could also consider and contrast how flying has unevenly impacted both the conveyance of artworks in relation to artists, and likewise the kind of artwork and artists that better thrived, or were less suited, to its mobility modality. To what degree has the trope of the globe-spanning hypermobile artistic agent, the multinationalization of museum brands, and the proliferation of the model of the biennial since the 1990s, been literally fueled by a dependence on comparatively cheap passenger and air freight flights? Moreover, a broader art history (and future) of low carbon footprint art production, mobility, and exhibition, could be drawn out, whether from “the work need not be built” principles that Lawrence Weiner established in the 1960s, or Gustav Metzger’s Reduce Art Flights campaign, founded in 2007—which aimed to highlight the environmental impact of air travel in the art world.17

The world nears the year 2030: the United Nations Paris Agreement’s legally binding deadline for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 50% in order to have a chance of keeping global warming below 1.5°C. Recognizing aerial art inevitably entails considering what the space-movement of the visual art sector would look like—its exhibitions, institutions, markets, social relations, the material and conceptual nature of art practice itself—without the restless movement of huge volumes of artworks and art people around the world by airplane. In the coming world, as Smithson’s far-sighted practice anticipated, our contemporary art will be another civilization’s antiquity. Yet in aerial art’s coming back down to earth, it will have reknit itself back into the web of life.

About the Author

Max Andrews is a writer, curator and co-founder, with Mariana Cánepa Luna, of Latitudes, Barcelona, Spain. Latitudes’ recent projects include exhibitions at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2021 & 2016); Fabra i Coats: Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2020 & 2018); and CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux (2017). Andrews has regularly written for frieze magazine since 2004, and he is currently a Contributing Writer. He is an Active Member of Gallery Climate Coalition.

Bibliography

Janna Eggebeen, “Between Two Worlds: Robert Smithson and Aerial Art,” Public Art Dialogue, 1:1, 2011, pp. 87-111.

Ramon Pico, “Aerial art, the new landscape of Robert Smithson,” Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 43(2), 2019, pp. 181-191.

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

• 1Raymond Zhong, “Geologists Make It Official: We’re Not in an ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch,” The New York Times, March 20, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/climate/anthropocene-vote-upheld.html, last accessed May 7, 2024.
• 2 See Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), “Modernism Was Framed: The Truth About Pruitt-Igoe,” Greyscape, undated. https://www.greyscape.com/modernism-was-framed-the-truth-about-pruitt-igoe/, last accessed May 7, 2024, and Julia Faisst, “Ghetto Aesthetics: Performing Spatial Inequality in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Approaching Transnational America in Performance, Eds. Birgit M. Bauridl and Pia Wiegmink. (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2017), pp. 265-288.
• 3Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” Studio International, February–April 1969, reprinted in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings ed. Jack Flam (University of California Press, 1996), pp. 116-118.
• 4Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,” Arts Magazine, November 1966.
• 5In 1967 Artforum had published Smithson’s “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” (Artforum, June 1967.)
• 6In fact, proposal B, by Carl Andre, is not present in the original Studio International article. The text “B. CARL ANDRE / A crater formed by a one-ton bomb dropped from 10,000 feet. / or / An acre of blue bonnets (state flowers of Texas)” appears first in the revised version of the text published in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979). The original typed manuscript of the article in the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers shows “Carl Andre (Plan in process)” in Smithson’s handwriting, although Andre’s 1967 note “Proposal for an Explosion” is included, along with proposals from the other artists, in the same folder. See Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers. Series 5: Project Files, circa 1950s-1982, 42: Box 4, Folder 2, “Aerial Art,” circa 1969.
• 7 See Eggebeen, op. cit. p. 108, footnote 27.
• 8See Trey Burns, “Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport Project, 1966-67” Holt/Smithson Foundation, January 2024, https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/dallas-fort-worth-regional-airport-project-1966-67, last accessed May 7, 2024; Ramon Pico, “Aerial art, the new landscape of Robert Smithson,” Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 43(2), 2019, 181-191; Janna Eggebeen, “Between Two Worlds: Robert Smithson and Aerial Art,” Public Art Dialogue, 1:1, 2011, pp. 87-111.
• 9Smithson commented that the DFW project “was very worthwhile for me because it got me to think about large land areas and the dialogue between the terminal and the fringes of the terminal — once again, between the center and the edge of things.” “Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution (1972),” Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, op. cit., p. 296.
• 10Klöwer, M., Allen, M. R., Lee, D. S., Proud, S. R., Gallagher, L., & Skowron, A. (2021). Quantifying aviation’s contribution to global warming. Environmental Research Letters, 16(10).
• 11Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” op. cit.
• 12 Ibid.
• 13See Robert Smithson and Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton, Terminal area concepts, 1966. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Today DFW serves more passengers in a single month than it did in its entire opening year, 1974. See Alexandra Skores, “‘Think big:’ CEO reflects on 50 years of DFW and sees 100 million passengers on horizon,” The Dallas Morning News, 26 September 2023.
• 14See Bergero, C., Gosnell, G., Gielen, D., Kang, S., Bazilian, M., & Davis, S. J. (2023). “Pathways to net-zero emissions from aviation,” Nature Sustainability, 6(4), 404-414; and Lee, D. S., Fahey, D. W., Skowron, A., Allen, M. R., Burkhardt, U., Chen, Q., ... & Wilcox, L. J. (2021), “The contribution of global aviation to anthropogenic climate forcing from 2000 to 2018,” Atmospheric Environment, Volume 244.
• 15A recent study has found that within the scenario of a 2.7°C rise in global temperatures above preindustrial levels, more than 2 billion people will be pushed outside humanity’s “climate niche.” See Damien Carrington, “We asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future...,” The Guardian, May 8, 2024; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in-despair, last accessed May 29, 2024
• 16Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Harper & Row, New York, 1972)
• 17Metzger’s campaign was prompted by his concern at the sheer number of art flights represented by the coincidence of three major art events in the year 2007: the 52nd Venice Biennial, Documenta 12, and Sculpture Projects Münster. See https://reduceartflights.lttds.org, last accessed May 1, 2024.