Robert Smithson grew up collecting rocks, shells, and insects. He adored The American Museum of Natural History, about which he famously said: “There is nothing ‘natural’ about the Museum of Natural History. ‘Nature’ is simply another eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction.” An iconic figure in what we now know as “Land Art” or “Earthworks,” he is best known for the conceptually radical distinction between site and non-site and the brilliant aesthetic repurposing of natural history, industrial decay, geology, cartography, photography (“art that is made out of casting a glance”[2]), entropy, erosion, gravity, the monumental, and the crystalline into tools and methods of conceptual and minimal art. Such works as Asphalt Rundown (1969), Spiral Jetty (1970), Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), and Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan (conceived in 1970 but realized some 30 years after his death by Minetta Brook in collaboration with the Whitney in 2005), have given him an ambiance of neutral colors and earthy hues, tones drawn from the layers of geological sedimentation and industrial waste from which he made his art. For this reason, you wouldn’t be the only one who passed through the glass doors of James Cohan’s handsome new gallery on the Lower East Side and …