Field trips

In December 1968, the American artist Robert Smithson embarked on one of his field trips to the huge industrial complex of Oberhausen in the Ruhr district of Germany.

His local guides for the trip were the Dusseldorf-based artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who had an intimate knowledge of these industrial sites, and Konrad Fischer, in whose gallery in Dusseldorf Smithson was scheduled to make an exhibition.

The Bechers had begun their project of photographing the structures of the vernacular industrial architecture of Northern Europe at the beginning of the 1960s, and they had already spent several months through 1968 photographing at Oberhausen as well as at adjacent industrial sites. The different series of photographs by Smithson and the Bechers made on the Oberhausen site foreground their respective preoccupations with the industrial landscape and the process of production and entropy, with system and inevitable dissolution.

Though formally very different, both artists' work comprises a radical rethinking of classical notions of beauty and landscape.

Neither the Bechers' typologies nor Smithson's projects were possible without "prospecting" in neglected parts of landscape, whose distressed state refuted the relationship between history and progress.

The book was published for the exhibition "Robert Smithson, Bernd & Hilla Becher - Field Trips" held at the Museu Serralves in Porto from November 30th 2001 to March 3rd 2002.