Robert Smithson’s practice is marked by wit and irony, drawing on science fiction, B-movies, and popular culture. This untitled work from 1962 is portable and can be plugged in. When opened, the box reveals a working record player that spins a collection of plastic toys set on a tinsel nest, against a backdrop of movie star headshots and a golden Christ figure on a salmon-pink cross.

Featured among similarly religious works in one of Smithson’s first solo shows, ​Feet of Christ foreshadows the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with spirals. In this drawing, the stigmata are depicted as whirlpools of flesh and blood, their centers aligned like the empty eye holes of a mask. For Smithson, the spiral is an endless quest for completion, the geometry of which defies tangible fulfillment. The wounds in ​Feet of Christ ​are the symbolic end of man’s search for God—yet their meandering shapes render certainty elusive.