Robert Smithson, Land Art, and Speculative Realities

Rory O'Dea looks at how Robert Smithson's art revealed and unsettled the assumptions that hold up rational reality. Rather than accept those assumptions, the book reads his work as a kind of true fiction, one that clears away a false sense of the world so other possibilities can appear.

O'Dea follows the web of connections between Smithson and science fiction, speculative thought and mystical traditions. Through these links the book examines the aesthetic encounters his art creates, and how they can warp the contours of reality and loosen what it means to be human. The discussion is set against the Anthropocene, the planetary shadow cast by humanism, which gives the question of being other-than-human a pressing weight.

The book will interest scholars of art history, contemporary art, American studies and environmental humanities. It is published by Routledge as a 1st edition, ISBN-13 9781032304786.