Saturday 9 February, 2013 - 4.30pm

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Ticket includes complimentary drink.



Smithson's "Judd": Androids in the Expanded Field
New York University Professor and contributing editor to Cabinet magazine Lytle Shaw discusses his latest project Fieldworks – considering the physical location of art and poetry within site and place.

Before Robert Smithson’s work had entered the expanded fields of Utah, the Yucatan, and Cayuga Lake, his prose had carefully fashioned an alter-ego android that was, properly, Smithson’s first site-specific artwork.  Radiating unearthly critical authority, “Judd” could be deployed in a number of formats: as a narrative agent on field trips, seeming to confirm the validity of Smithson’s counterintuitive readings; as a fabricator of alien sculpture that crushed and distended normative time; or as an authoritative critic of outmoded art historical positions.  But as each, Judd was not merely an empirical human. This talk, part of Shaw’s forthcoming book Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics, considers Smithson’s odd appropriation of Judd as the ur-scene of site-specific art and writing, staging the key problems attending their reception over the next 40 years.

Supported by Stanley Picker Trust.

Poet/critic Lytle Shaw works primarily on American literature with emphasis on poetics, art and theory. His books include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie and two forthcoming studies: Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics and Specimen Box (on new modes of institution critique in art and poetry). A contributing editor for Cabinet, he has recently published catalogue essays on Robert Smithson and Zoe Leonard for DIA Center; on Gerard Byrne for Koenig Books, and on The Royal Art Lodge for the Drawing Center. His collaborative work with the artist Jimbo Blachly has been exhibited widely and is collected in The Chadwick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse. Shaw is currently working on two books: one about the politics of time in depicted landscapes and another about the status of poetry in recent theoretical debates.

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