"Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development"
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Straight lines are a human fantasy: efficient, legible, obedient. Smithson’s jab at linearity isn’t just botanical wisdom; it’s a critique of the modern urge to neaten the world into progress charts, master plans, and museum-ready narratives. “Sprawling development” is doing double duty here. It evokes actual geologic and ecological growth - messy, entropic, full of detours - while also naming the cultural sprawl of late-industrial America: suburbs, highways, extraction sites, the “new” landscape built on churn and spoil.
Smithson, a key Land Art figure, worked in and against that churn. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Minimalism prized clean geometry and high-modernist architecture sold utopia in right angles, he gravitated to quarries, salt flats, and dumps: places where nature and industry were already collaborating. His most famous gesture, Spiral Jetty, literally rejects the straight line in favor of a coil that feels both ancient and provisional, made to be eroded, submerged, revealed again. The point isn’t that nature is “organic” and therefore good; it’s that time doesn’t behave like our diagrams.
The subtext is anti-teleological: no final form, no guaranteed improvement, no moral arc that tidies history. “Proceed” suggests intention, and Smithson undercuts it, implying that what we call development is often drift - accumulation, collapse, remake. For an artist obsessed with entropy, that sprawl is not a problem to solve. It’s the real medium.
Smithson, a key Land Art figure, worked in and against that churn. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Minimalism prized clean geometry and high-modernist architecture sold utopia in right angles, he gravitated to quarries, salt flats, and dumps: places where nature and industry were already collaborating. His most famous gesture, Spiral Jetty, literally rejects the straight line in favor of a coil that feels both ancient and provisional, made to be eroded, submerged, revealed again. The point isn’t that nature is “organic” and therefore good; it’s that time doesn’t behave like our diagrams.
The subtext is anti-teleological: no final form, no guaranteed improvement, no moral arc that tidies history. “Proceed” suggests intention, and Smithson undercuts it, implying that what we call development is often drift - accumulation, collapse, remake. For an artist obsessed with entropy, that sprawl is not a problem to solve. It’s the real medium.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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