U.S. artist and land art pioneer Robert Smithson was 35 years old when he died in a plane crash in 1973. The airplane dipped while the artist observed his work Amarillo Ramp in the state of Texas, rising on top of a broken circle more than a hundred meters in diameter, in the middle of one of the vastest settings of North America. I imagine him tumbling in his infinite, vertical, slightly winding downfall, to a plateau of dry land and dust clouds merging with the clouds in the sky. I picture the burning sunlight bouncing off millions of crystals. Then the muffled roar of the plane breaking to pieces upon touching the land and the explosion throwing a ball of flames towards the limpid blue sky. I imagine what it would be like to die in the middle of those confines, with no human life for miles around: when a plane hits the ground, everything becomes faceless matter, a combustion of flesh and metal thundering into the plateau. The encounter of a human with a land such as that of Texas happens with the harshness of an accident. [...]
Landscape
in ENCYCLOPEDIA