Skip to main content

Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed sculpture

While not a digital projects related thread, I did want to write about something that I have always loved about this campus.

I have long been fascinated by Robert Smithson's earthwork on the Kent State campus. Smithson had been a visiting artist on campus just months before the Kent State shootings in May, 1970. My mother remembers attending one of his lectures on campus during that time, and also reflected on the years since the art work was created, saying that it was often a sore subject for the university. Shortly after the shootings, someone spray painted "May 4 Kent" along one of the beams, perhaps then creating a more political piece. There is also some speculation that the site was cleared by university grounds employees who were tired of its presence on campus. There is even a reflection of the immediate disapproval of the work in some articles in the Daily Kent Stater: Like this one, dated February 4, 1970 complaining about the piece, or another insight claiming the whole thing to be a hoax. I've always loved the art works that shake things up a bit, and get people talking about art.

I have always been intrigued with Earthworks in general- in that they take on a different life after creation. The impact of the elements and environs morph a work into something else completely. Likewise, I have always enjoyed artists like Anselm Kiefer, who believe his works have their own life cycle and history after they are created. There is no idea of permanence or giving a pretense of timelessness or eternal youth that many museums and galleries elude in the act of display and collecting.

The Communications and Marketing department recently created a short video on the piece, and in mind perhaps finally acknowledging the life cycle of such an unusual work.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Privacy and digital collections

This past October, I put in a book proposal on the topic of ethical decision-making around privacy issues in digital collections. It has been accepted by Morgan and Claypool, and I am cranking to meet a May 1st deadline to get this into print by November. It's exciting, but also nerve-wracking and perhaps a little terrifying for a few reasons. Ethics is head space that I very much enjoy- This work will include a nod to an essay from Martin Heidegger, which oddly enough I used a different Heidegger essay in my museum studies MA thesis on the ethics of art conservation. The philosophy aspect in ethics is probably the most enjoyable part for me, but it's also unbelievably murky waters. I spent many years rejecting absolutes in my early twenties, though at some point I have to put the pen to the paper and just write. (Funny sidenote- This digital girl still prefers the analog. I write primarily on my laptop and then print out draft and edit by hand. I also hate, hate, hate e-bo...

Navigating the "if you build it, they will come" mentality in digital libraries

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how users come to find our digital content, and how we can improve the ways users find, navigate and interact with our content. We are in the midst of a re-design of Digital Collections for Special Collections and Archives at Kent, moving to an open source Omeka option. I'm most excited about the enhanced search and browse features, and also in using OAI-PMH to further open our collections online. I will be tracking use over the next year and looking to see how users find our collections (open Google search? From our homepage?), and then what they do once they have found what they are looking for. But this all assumes that people have found a way to search the digital collections- how can we highlight certain features that are currently hidden and buried away? Our staff and faculty have used some social media tools in the past, but are these a lasting mechanism? Omeka has a digital exhibit function, which I hope will be quite useful as ...

New image viewer in place for Omeka content

In anticipation for the addition of a large number of textual documents to be added to our online digital archive in the next year, we've added a new image viewer that allows for much more interaction with the digital items. Now a user can zoom in and navigate through an image or document. Here is an example: http://omeka.library.kent.edu/special-collections/items/show/1458 One feature that we are excited to have in place with this new viewer is to provide a slideshow/scroll view of items with multiple pages or images. Thanks to Project Mirador ! Check back for more additions in the coming months.