ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Smithson's fraught relationship with the environmental movement, and prompts readers to reconsider the ways that his ecological vision of art was prophetic of the most urgent issues facing the planet in the Anthropocene while also being marked by serious contradictions. Using the work Island of Broken Glass as a case study, the chapter investigates Smithson's dialectical conception of nature and culture alongside his new materialist sense of the all-encompassing mesh of terrestrial matter as a critique of, and alternative to, the idealist metaphysics paradoxically shared by modernism and ecology. Alternatively, this chapter considers what Smithson proposed as an ecology of the real, which aimed to draw attention to the inseparable knots of human and geological history. While Smithson's emphasis on the scales of geological time was a means to move beyond the limits of humanist history, this chapter also reflects on his failure to recognize the ways that geology is racially coded and connected to the exploitation of humans and nature. At the same time, it addresses the ways that his art participates in the history of land dispossession of indigenous peoples while also considering more inclusive ways of engaging with his practice from indigenous perspectives.
