Suzaan Boettger

Suzaan Boettger opens Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson with an act of gratitude, beginning where most books end. She recalls a formative moment in 1979, when The Writings of Robert Smithson arrived by post on her birthday, just as she was leaving to give her first lecture on earthworks. That coincidence marked the beginning of a decades-long engagement—part scholarly pursuit, part personal vocation—with an artist whose work would continue to unfold in complexity over time.

From doctoral research in New York to her first major book, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (2002), Boettger followed Smithson’s thinking across art, landscape, and environmental discourse. Yet even after years devoted to environmentalist art, Smithson remained unresolved. In 2015, she returned to his work through what she describes as “investigative art history,” gradually recognising that beneath its theoretical density lay a covert autobiography—coded, layered, and deliberately elusive.

What began as interpretation became biography. By tracing Smithson’s symbols back to his early life and family history, Boettger assembled a portrait drawn from visual evidence, personal correspondence, and previously unpublished material. Rather than plunging readers directly into chronology, she frames the book with a prologue that prepares the ground for discovery. The result is a carefully structured unveiling of an artist more intricate than previously understood—an invitation, as she notes, for readers to encounter in concise form what took years to uncover.