Smithson’s early work grew directly from Pop art and literary experiment

Evidence

Smithson’s early work flaunted a fetishized Christian religious iconography, informed by an appreciation of Byzantine art. Inspired by early Pop and Naked Lunch, he made sci-fi junk assemblages as well as delicately colored pencil drawings of sexually suggestive male and female nudes sometimes collaged within geometric patterns. Around 1964, Smithson abandoned figuration to become exclusively a maker of objects and soon after a writer. Brian O’Doherty included him in Lesser Known and Unknown Painters—an exhibition sponsored by American Express for the World’s Fair’s second season. His piece, titled Quick Millions, was neither painting nor sculpture—a geometric plexiglass construction that hung on the wall. He described it in the catalog as “emerging from a world of remote possibilities held together by incomprehensible motives.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1027