Untitled (Mica and Glas)

Is this a landscape? We see a stack of greenish glass, not a green forest; some flat stones, not a painting of stony ground. An explanation is required. The material is mica, a mineral found only at a few sites in nature. Its atomic structure makes it possible to split the stone into very thin, flat, glittering pieces or flakes. The sculpture is built out of transparent, ubiquitous, fragile man-made glass and of opaque, rare, equally fragile natural mica. Robert Smithson turns landscape into a sculpture. He has stated that after the Western tradition for the treatment of nature in art had culminated in the works of Cézanne and the Cubists it had become necessary for artists to "... reintroduce a kind of physicality; the actual place rather than the tendency to decoration which is a studio thing."