Bingham Copper Mining Pit—Utah / Reclamation Project

Robert Smithson

1973 · Photostat and plastic overlay with wax pencil · Photographs

In the last two years before his death in a plane crash at age thirty-five, Smithson proposed various land-reclamation projects that would transform devastated industrial sites into a new form of public art. Here he envisions an earthwork that would have dwarfed even his famous "Spiral Jetty": the oldest open-pit copper mine and the largest man-made excavation (more than two miles wide) in the world. The unexecuted project involved the construction of a massive revolving disk—reminiscent of the viewing platform of a nineteenth-century panorama—at the pit's base from which to survey nature's gradual and inevitable reclamation of man's invasive enterprise.

Artist

Robert Smithson

Date

1973

Medium

Photostat and plastic overlay with wax pencil

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Pat and John Rosenwald Gift, 2001