This is a study on the ecological view of Robert Smithson’s reclamation projects. Smithson was a pioneer of Earth art in the late 1960’s. Robert Smithson believed that he could transform industrial wastelands, such as an abandoned oil rig and a no longer used quarry, into “Earth Art." In the early seventies, he conceived of land reclamation as a new art form and called this art “Reclamation Projects.” His attention regarding industrial ruin started from the American political and social situations in the 1960’s. In the late 1960’s, American society was in chaos from the right of movement of African Americans, the women’s rights movement and from the strike for renunciation of the Vietnam War. The intellectual class seemed to believe that it was the destiny of a closed system’s society to run in the direction of entropy. Smithson, who was skeptical about the system of American society, also thought that entropy was the proper diagnosis to describe America’s situation in the 1960’s. The 1960’s civic movements like the civil rights movement and antiwar movements expanded into the environmental movements based on ecological views of the 1970’s. The government had also started to worry about environmental pollution. Thus, the reclamation act was also established in 1972. Smithson believed that the relation between art and social background are closely related and affect each other. He was concerned with how art can join society, and the result was reclamation projects. Such reclamation projects lie on man-made wastelands, like abandoned oil rigs and no longer used quarries, which was an allegory of entropy. He also thought that Frederick Law Olmsted was a pioneer of earth art. The aesthetic category of Olmsted’s view of landscape is to be based on the picturesque of Uvedale Price and William Gilpin. So Smithson, who considered Olmsted as his touchstone, also accepted the picturesque. Such reclamation projects aim to change with nature by adapting the creative power of artists to the ruin which has the highest level of entropy in industrial society. Smithson wanted this to become the bridge between man and nature. His reclamation project’s aim, which shows the system interacting between man and nature as a network, is not different from the ecological view of the 1970’s environmental movement.

• 이재은(성신여자대학교) | Lee, Jaeeun