The entire work of Robert Smithson operates around the perception of intensive reordering of the landscape. He developed an artistic project for the Fort Worth/Dallas aerial terminal, then under construction. For him, the development of an airport site places new problems of scale. The question is placed in the relation between the terminal and the airplane: while the later goes up to the biggest altitudes and speeds, the meaning of the terminal as object changes. A new meaning based in the instantaneous time, resulting in an immobilization of the space, more evident in the extreme altitudes of the satellites. The relief of the space is substituted by a crystalline structure of the time.

The maps of air reconnaissance, made from the land coordinates, resemble to grids of lines. Points, lines and areas that establish a syntax of the sites. For Smithson, the embankments, excavations, roads and patios have aesthetic potential. Topographical surveys and preliminary constructions can be understood as a set of artwork that disappears during the process. A new way of ordering the land, a radical type of construction that covers large extensions of land and water. An approach that implies an immense scale.

The installed art around an airport must turn us conscientious of this new abstract landscape, whose lines (slots) exceed our conceptions of nature. Aerophotogametrics and air transportation, with its drastic changes of scale, disclose the surface of this mutant universe of perspectives and optic illusions. Here, simply to observe at the eye’s level is not a solution. The aerial map discloses how little there are to see. The aerial art, with focus in the non-visual space, delineates an aesthetic based on the airport as idea, an imperceptible point in the immensity.

The enrollment with the totality of the area of these structures leads to the substitution of the realistic landscape for a new abstract landscape. A not-objective notion of place: as a diagram. The landscape appears as a three-dimensional map: the drastic changes of scale turn the world abstract. A remote art to the spectator’s eyes, as seen by telescope. Based in a non-visual space and time. The vision in movement is substituted by the schematical matrix of the of geodesic observation programs. The scale here is one of the Earth.

Images:

R.Smithson. Proposal for Dallas - Fort Worth Regional Airport, 1967