Robert Smithson, The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria (1969)
Brown ink, crayon, graphite, and collage on paper
22 ¼ x 17 ¼ in. (56.5 x 43.8 cm)
Collection: Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Robert Smithson, The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria (1969)
Brown ink, crayon, graphite, and collage on paper
22 ¼ x 17 ¼ in. (56.5 x 43.8 cm)
Collection: Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Robert Smithson, The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria [detail] (1969)
Brown ink, crayon, graphite, and collage on paper
22 ¼ x 17 ¼ in. (56.5 x 43.8 cm)
Collection: Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Robert Smithson, The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria [detail] (1969)
Brown ink, crayon, graphite, and collage on paper
22 ¼ x 17 ¼ in. (56.5 x 43.8 cm)
Collection: Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Robert Smithson, The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria [detail] (1969)
Brown ink, crayon, graphite, and collage on paper
22 ¼ x 17 ¼ in. (56.5 x 43.8 cm)
Collection: Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Robert Smithson, The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria [detail] (1969)
Brown ink, crayon, graphite, and collage on paper
22 ¼ x 17 ¼ in. (56.5 x 43.8 cm)
Collection: Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro
© Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York
Closely related to Smithson’s slidework Hypothetical Continent in Shells: Lemuria (1969), this two-dimensional work provides conceptual details around the object of representation. Lemuria, a theoretical continent whose existence was quickly disproved by the scientific community, comes to life through the artist’s attention. “You don’t have to have existence to exist,” Smithson asserted in Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan (1969).
The collage includes maps of both the fictional island and the placement of Smithson’s sculptural rendition, thus connecting the concepts while simultaneously emphasizing their removal from one another. Similarly to Smithson’s Nonsites, which bring attention to places often overlooked or elsewhere, The Hypothetical Continent of Lemuria resuscitates an idea from pedagogical obscurity.
Robert Smithson’s Upside Down Trees (1969) form a circuit with the artist’s parallel series of earth maps, one that materializes and satirizes period visions of the growing informationalization of art and perception.
In the Nonsites, the prehistoric reference comes through, but the sites are all here today, within the maps of materials (stone, mud, grass and shells). All of these things point to continents and land masses that don't exist today. That establishes a context.
Robert Smithson
“Interview with Robert Smithson (1970),” eds. Paul Toner and Robert Smithson in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p236.
Situated along the coast of Sanibel Island in Florida, Smithson’s Hypothetical Continent in Shells: Lemuria is sculpted from a pile of shells, its tenuous form vulnerable to the impacts of nature and time. The hypothetical continent in question is similarly fragile; theories surrounding Lemuria were disproved soon after their original conception. Smithson believed that the presence of any given object hinges on its absence; with this work, a concept’s non-existence is represented by material reality.
