Talk

BFA Fine Arts presents a visiting artist lecture with art historian and critic Suzaan Boettger.

Suzaan Boettger, art historian and critic, will discuss paintings she discovered and deciphered in research for her new book Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson. Smithson’s images’ correspondences to a disguised self unmasked his art as autobiography, prompting a biographical approach—the first for this artist. As a coolly innovative sculptor and essayist famous for Spiral Jetty, Smithson sought to suppress his earlier images of Christ’s crucifixion; angels hunky, lithe or buried; astrological symbols; and exploding penises in delirious undergrounds. This paired with the reappearance of symbols in his putatively abstract earthworks show that Smithson is more fascinating than anyone realized for reasons that no one knew until Inside the Spiral.