Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson
Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson is currently on show at Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles until January 24, 2026. In 1968 Robert Smithson declared: “A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance.” This exhibition takes him at his word. Casting a Glance: Dancing with Smithson invites eighteen artists to join him on the floor as partners who resist, improvise, and extend the rhythm of his thinking.
From his early 1960s drawings confronting the crumbling ideals of European Modernism with a queer sensibility, to his searing critiques of industrial capitalism and attention to geological timescales, Casting a Glance positions Smithson as both provocateur and visionary. He called for artists to infiltrate corporations, championed the agency of all earth-beings, and gravitated toward the exhausted edges of suburbia over the charismatic metropolitan centers. Smithson’s innovative conception of the site/Nonsite dialectic, his redefinition of what sculpture could be, and his conviction that art is a philosophical encounter with the Earth’s surface converge in this vibrant dance among artists.
In this exhibition, selection of rarely seen works by Smithson—chosen in collaboration with the artists—offers a journey into his radical imagination.
Robert Smithson gathering material for Nonsite “Line of Wreckage,” Bayonne, New Jersey (1968). Photograph: Nancy Holt
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
