fb pixcode

PUBLISHER
Hopefulmonster

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 6.25 x 9.5 in. / 168 pgs / 53 color / 105 bw

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
No longer our product

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2002

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788877571465 TRADE
List Price: $30.00 CDN $35.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

THE SPRING 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG

Artbook | D.A.P. Catalog Cover Link
Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
  

HOPEFULMONSTER

Robert Smithson Bernd & Hilla Becher: Field Trips

Essay by James Lingwood. Introduction by Vicente TodolĂ.

In December 1968, the American artist Robert Smithson embarked on a field trip to the huge industrial complex in the Ruhr district of Germany. His local guides were the Dusseldorf-based artist duo of Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Konrad Fischer, in whose Dusseldorf gallery Smithson was scheduled to exhibit. The Bechers had begun their own project of photographing the vernacular industrial architecture of Northern Europe in the early 1960s, and had already spent several months photographing at Oberhausen as well as at adjacent industrial sites. The different series of photographs made by Smithson and the Bechers of the same site foreground their respective preoccupations with the industrial landscape and the process of production and entropy, with systems and their inevitable dissolution. Their contrasting bodies of work embody alternate perspectives on time: the Bechers' sense of historical time and Smithson's of the geological. Though formally divergent, each artist's work comprises a radical rethinking of classical notions of beauty and landscape. Neither the Bechers' typologies nor Smithson's projects were possible without prospecting in neglected parts of the landscape, whose distressed state refuted any automatic relationship between history and progress.
Robert Smithson Bernd & Hilla Becher: Field Trips

ROBERT SMITHSON MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS