The objective of this article is to open the ‘black box’ of artistic production in order to describe, in minute detail, culture in the making, that is, the process through which cultural forms grow into being and are materially accomplished. I will do so through the study of the morphogenetic process through which the Spiral Jetty, an earthwork sculpture created by the American artist Robert Smithson, came into being. This study will show that artistic production constitutes an irreducible form of material practice which cannot be adequately understood as an individual activity or as an activity guided or constrained by ‘external’ social factors. As I shall argue, the attention to the material practice of artistic production reveals a much needed insight into the practices, materials and processes through which culture is actually produced and materially accomplished.
BaxandallM (1985) Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. London: Yale University Press.
4.
BeckerHS (1982) Art Worlds. London: University of California Press.
5.
BeckerHS (2006) The work itself. In: BeckerHFaulknerRKirshenblatt-GimblettB (eds) Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 21–30.
6.
BoettgerS (2002) Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. London: University of California Press.
7.
BornG (2005) On musical mediation: Ontology, technology and creativity. Twentieth Century Music2(1): 7–36.
8.
BourdieuP (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.
9.
BourdieuP (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press.
10.
ClarkA (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. London: MIT Press.
11.
ClarkA (2003) Natural-born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
12.
CookeLKellyK (eds) (2005) Robert Smithson. Spiral jetty: True Fictions, False Realities. London: University of California Press.
13.
CoserLAMackA (eds) (1978) The production of culture. Social Research45(2).
14.
CraneD (1976) Reward systems in art, science and religion. American Behavioral Scientist19(6): 719–734.
15.
CraneD (1987) The Transformation of the Avant-garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985. London: University of Chicago Press.
16.
CraneD (1997) Globalization, organizational size, and innovation in the French luxury fashion industry: Production of culture theory revisited. Poetics24(6): 393–414.
17.
DantoA (1964) The artworld. The Journal of Philosophy61(19): 571–584.
18.
de la FuenteE (2007) The ‘new sociology of art’: Putting art back into social science approaches to the arts. Cultural Sociology1(3): 409–425.
19.
DeNoraT (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20.
DeNoraT (2003) After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
21.
DickieG (1974) Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. London: Cornell University Press.
22.
DickieG (1997) Art Circle: A Theory of Art. Chicago: Chicago Spectrum Press.
23.
DiMaggioP (1977) Market structure, the creative process, and popular culture: Toward an organizational reinterpretation of mass-culture theory. Journal of Popular Culture11(2): 436–452.
24.
DiMaggioPStenbergK (1985) Why do some theatres innovate more than others? An empirical analysis. Poetics14(1–2): 107–122.
25.
DoguH (1996) An Intermittent Illusion: Local Reaction to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. M.A. Dissertation. Department of Art, CUNY.
26.
FocillonH (1943) Vie des formes. Paris: PUF.
27.
FocillonH (1992) The Life of Forms in Art. New York: Zone Books.
28.
FrancastelP (1965) La réalité figurative. Éléments structurels de sociologie de l’artParis: Éditions Denoël/Gonthier.
29.
GibsonJ (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London: Houghton Mifflin.
30.
HauserA (1951) The Social History of Art. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
31.
HauserA (1959) The Philosophy of Art History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
32.
HeinichN (1998) Le Triple jeu de l’art contemporain: sociologie des arts plastiques. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
33.
HennionA (1993) La Passion musicale. Une sociologie de la médiation. Paris: Métailié.
34.
HennionA (2008) Listen!Music and Arts in Action1(1): 36–45.
35.
HutchinsE (1995) Cognition in the Wild. London: MIT Press.
36.
InglisDHughsonJ (2005) The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
37.
IngoldT (1994) Making culture and weaving the world. In CraneD (ed.) The Sociology of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 50–71.
38.
Krzys AcordSDeNoraT (2008) Culture and the arts: From art worlds to arts-in-action. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science619(1): 223–237.
39.
LukácsG (1971) The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. London: Merlin Press.
40.
MoulinR (1967) Le Marché de la peinture en France. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
41.
MukerjiC (1997) Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
42.
MukerjiC (2007) Cultural genealogy: Method for a historical sociology of culture or cultural sociology of history. Cultural Sociology1(1): 49–71.
43.
MukerjiC (2009) Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
44.
O’ConnorE (2005) Embodied knowledge: The experience of meaning and the struggle towards proficiency in glassblowing. Ethnography6(2): 183–204
45.
O’ConnorE (2007) Hot glass: The calorific imagination of practice in glassblowing. In: CalhounCSennettR (eds) Practicing Culture. New York: Routledge, pp. 57–81.
46.
PanofskyE (1995) Architecture gothique et pensée scolastique. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
47.
PetersonK (1997a) The distribution and dynamics of uncertainty in art galleries: A case study of new dealerships in the Parisian art market, 1985–1990. Poetics25(4): 241–263.
48.
PetersonRA (1976) The Production of Culture. London: Sage Publications.
49.
PetersonRA (1994) Culture studies through the production perspective: Progress and prospects. In: CraneD (ed.) The Sociology of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 163–189.
50.
PetersonRA (1997b) Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
51.
PetersonRAAnandN (2004) The production of culture perspective. Annual Review of Sociology30: 311–334.
52.
PhillipsB (2005) Building the jetty. In: CookeLKellyK (eds) Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities. London: University of California Press, pp. 185–197.
53.
RothM (2004) Beyond Duchamp: An interview with Robert Smithson. In: TsaiE (ed.) Robert Smithson. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 81–94.
54.
RothenbergJFineG (2008) Art worlds and their ethnographers. Ethnologie Française38(1): 31–37.
55.
SantoroM (2008) Culture as (and after) production. Cultural Sociology2(1): 7–31.
56.
SmithsonR (1966) Entropy and the new monuments. In: SmithsonRFlamJD (1996) (eds) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 10–23.
57.
SmithsonR (1967a) Some void thoughts on museums. In: SmithsonRFlamJD (1996) (eds) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 41–42.
58.
SmithsonR (1967b) Towards the development of an air terminal site. In: SmithsonRFlamJD (1996) (eds) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 52–60.
59.
SmithsonR (1968) A sedimentation of the mind: Earth projects. In: SmithsonRFlamJD (1996) (eds) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 100–113.
60.
SmithsonR (1969) Aerial art. In: SmithsonRFlamJD (1996) (eds) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 116–118.
61.
SmithsonR (1970a). Letter written on 10 March, 1972 to Mr. Charles R. Hansen, Director Division of State Lands in Utah. [Microfilm]. Available: Archives of American Art, Roll 3833, Frame 90.
62.
SmithsonR (1970b) Special Use Lease Agreement No. 222 [Microfilm]. Available: Archives of American Art, Roll 3835, Frame 804–05.
63.
SmithsonR (1972a) Conversations in Salt Lake City. Interview with Gianni Pettena. In: SmithsonRFlamJD (1996) (eds) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Los Angeles CA: University of California Press, pp. 297–300.
64.
SmithsonR (1972b) The Spiral Jetty. In: CookeLKellyK (2005) (eds) Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities. Berkeley; London: University of California Press, pp. 7–13.
65.
SmithsonRFlamJD (eds) (1996) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
66.
WhiteHWhiteC (1965) Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
67.
WitkinRW (1995) Art and Social Structure. Cambridge: Polity Press.
68.
YanevaA (2003) Chalk steps on the museum floor: The ‘pulses’ of objects in an art installation. Journal of Material Culture8(2): 169–188.
69.
ZolbergV (1990) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
