Another artist who used writing very effectively as part of their practice was the "land" artist Robert Smithson. Smithson's work already played on the complexity of the "presence" of the gallery artwork, which he defined as a "non-site" in relation to which an actual "site" which was usually situated in the landscape quite some distance from the gallery. The "artwork exists somewhere between the gallery and the outside space of the work.
Smithson's most famous work is Spiral Jetty (1970).
An example of his writing is the essay (?) "Tour of the Monuments of Passaic", which was published in Artforum in 1967. In it Smithson takes the reader on a tour of the mundane physical structures of a small-town, (post-)industrial New Jersey landscape, where the disintegrating and ramshackle industrial landmarks are re-imagined as monuments from the present-day in order to meditate on the themes of time and entropy (the "winding down of the universe") which his work is concerned with.
The essay is available here:
http://gd1studio2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/smithson-monuments-of-passaic.pdf
The photo-essay in Artforum was also paralleled by the exhibition of the photos themselves as "artworks", and these are currently in the collection of the Museet for Samtidkunst, Norway.
http://www.robertsmithson.com/photoworks/monument-passaic_300.htm
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