A critic once called Smithson “boyish,” trying to describe his weird cocktail of seriousness and humor.

If you stole all of your mom’s hand mirrors and stuck them just above the high tide line where the sand is soft, you’d end up with Mirrors and Shelly Sand. Boyish AF. A similar piece might involve filling your pockets with sand and making your bedroom into a mini beach of your own. But then, in the process, you show the audience an infinity of sand reflected against the mirror chambers, endlessness, entropy grinding mountains into sand. But sh*t, also the endlessness of a child’s summers. But also death. F*ck.

But when the Met Breuer exhibited this piece in 2016 they put in the same room as Félix Gonzales-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) which is similarly a pile but instead of sand it’s candy. Gonzales-Torres out-childed boyish Smithson, people kept stepping all over the sand to grab a piece of candy. Me, I was one of those people.

Who the heck is Shelly Sand anyway? A weather lady? Maybe she announces amateur sports games. Or maybe it’s the name dumpy motel near the beach Smithson vacationed at as a kid? Probably it’s just sand, but with shells in it. Like very specific sand from the part of the beach that’s least good for sandcastles. He’s definitely trying to place you, and it’s kind of a silly name, though not funny per se.  

Smithson’s real joke was imagining the art handlers pouring $1 million of sand, that’s 125 buckets, onto the floor of some museum that he wasn’t even into anyway and being like MINIMALIST ART! If Spiral Jetty was his thesis this was his senior class prank, which would be funny but then he died pretty soon after, so all that stuff about infinite sand and the cosmos just rings ~tru.~