Robert Smithson / Bernd & Hilla Becher: Field Trips

Rating:
Summary: how not to spend $85
Review: I'm sure the Becher's and Smithson enjoyed each other's company, but question whether there's more to this publishing project than art-celebrity profit-taking. Their brief 'field trip' to the Ruhrgebeit barely registers as an encounter; their divergent vocabularies, which the publisher thematizes (legitimately) as being of some significance, miss each other entirely. The poor quality of the book and its reproductions only exacerbates its tendentiousness. The Becher's photographs are terribly reproduced, being too bright and lacking detail. Some sections of the book have no obvious bearing on the artistic pairing that was the supposed reason for the volume, i.e. a suite of color snapshots from Smithson's stay in a dumpy Mexican hotel, and a group of photographs of blast furnaces the Bechers took in Alabama. The only pieces of value present here are a set of black-and-white Instamatic photos Smithson took while on the 'field trip' to Oberhausen: crumbling piles of slag, raised tracks of treads, smoky vistas of cooling towers and power lines; primitive technology suits this project well. Photographs showing their incorporation into Smithson's resulting show at the Konrad Fischer Gallerie in Dusseldorf are also of interest; but again, the quality of reproduction is off and thus unreliable from either an aesthetic or historical perspective.