Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (Yale UP, 2004)

\\ Mirror-Travelsff Robert Smithson and History Jennifer L Roberts Yale University Press New Haven and London Yale Publications historical in the History of Art are works of critical and scholarship Department by authors formerly or now associated with the of the History of Art of Yale University. Begun in 1939, the series embraces the field of art-historical studies in its widest and most inclusive definition. Series logo designed by Josef Albers and reproduced with permission of the Josef Albers Foundation. Copyright © 2004 by Jennifer L. Roberts. All art and text by Robert Smithson Smithson/Licensed © Estate of Robert by VAGA, New York, N.Y. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, illustrations, in whole or in part, including in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the u.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission Designed from the publishers. by Daphne Geismar Set in Scala and Scala Sans type by Amy Storm Printed in China by World Print Library of Congress Catalog: ng-in-Publicatlcn Data Roberts, Jennifer L., 1969Mirror-travels: p. Robert Smithson Includes bibliographical ISBN 0-300-09497"3 1. Smithson, and history / Jennifer L. Roberts. cm. references and index. HARVARD (hard cover: alk. paper) Robert-Criticism FINE ARTS and interpretation. I. Smithson, LIBRARY Robert. II. Title. N6S37·S6184R63 2004 .1129 '04 700'·92-dC22 2003018791 Frontispiece· Robert Smithson, Spira/Jetty, 1971. Ink on paper, 12 x 9 in. (30-48 x 22.9 cm). The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The paper in this book meets the guidelines and durability of the Committee Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 for permanence on Production Guidelines for Book TO THE DENIZENS OF FROG HILL AND g07 CLARA: SITES OF MY OWN HISTORIES CONTENTS Acknowledgments viii I ntrod uction History in Smithson's Religious Paintings 12 The Deposition of Time 36 Forgetting Passaic 60 Smithson and Stephens in Yucatan 86 Spiral Jetty/Golden "4 Notes 14° Index 158 Spike ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book began, many revisions ago, as a dissertation Fine Arts at Syracuse University, where my manageable in the Department teaching schedule, of the History of Art at Yale University. I first thank my mentors there for giving along with the moral and intellec- tual support of my colleagues, allowed me to complete the project the generous support, and the critical the majority of the revisions to the manuscript. scrutiny, that allowed it to develop particularly like to thank Jonathan as it did. I am I'd Massey for helping especially grateful to jules D. Prown: not only for his me get up to speed on the fourth dimension encouragement small task), and Stephen C. Meyer and Eileen Strempel of this project in particular but also for his role in building a rigorous and stimulating for many stimulating discussions, environment from deconstruction to synaesthesia, for the study of American art at Yale. The (no on topics ranging over wine and homegrown tomatoes. Crow, Bryan jay Wolf, and Johanna Drucker, were each Department of the History of Art and Architecture objects of my greatest esteem before I had the good Harvard University energized fortune to work with them personally, with fresh dialogues members of my dissertation committee, Thomas and each has My new colleagues in the and perspectives; thanks espe- offered invaluable insight, advice, and debate as this cially to Eugene Wang, jeffrey Hamburger, project has progressed. Bois, and most of all to Robin Kelsey, a fellow con- Christopher S. Wood, although not officially a member of my committee, ful commentary His profound offered help- on the early drafts of several chapters. influence as a teacher and mentor on my way of thinking and doing art history is, I hope, evident throughout noisseur when he had better things to do. His critical insight and intellectual Many others have contributed through their careful and generous graduate students of various chapters, seminars with their high standards erudition, and engagement. me in of critical acuity, This project has passed with me through several other institutions, each of which, in its particular con- stellation of colleagues and resources, has enriched to this project reading of drafts especially Alex Nemerov, David Walter Cahn, Glenn Adamson, Carlton Evans, and Joshua Shannon. their example. have Lubin, Sally Promey, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Katherine Manthorne, lowe a great deal to generosity impacted this book at every level. appreciation to Michael Lobel and Sarah K. Rich, fellow intimidated Yve-Alain of rockpiles, who read the entire manuscript during a summer this text. I'd also like to convey my who repeatedly at the final year of revision An earlier ver- sion of the material in Chapter 4 was published in The Art Bulletin. Thanks to Caroline A. jones for her especially attentive reading of the article manuscript, it. My advisers and fellow Fellows from the Smithsonian and to Mary Miller and R. Tripp Evans, without whose American Art Museum, patient and generous where I spent a productive guidance year of pre doctoral research and writing, contributed basic aspects of Pre-Columbian in innumerable have undertaken ways to the final shape of this book. For their conversation and critique I thank Wendy Bellion, Kristin Schwain, Anne Collins Goodyear, Rodo Aranda-Alvarado, jobyl Boone, Alan Braddock, Jason Weems, and William H. Truettner. I also had the good Fellow in the Department of studies I could not such an extensive foray into an unfa- miliar subject. Thanks also to Perry Chapman Lory Frankel, whose editorial assistance and on the Art Bulletin version of the chapter greatly improved the current version. Several individuals went above and beyond the fortune to spend two years as the Carole and Alvin I. Schragis Postdoctoral in some of the most call of duty to assist me with research and reproduc- IX tions. I would particularly like to thank Jessica Cox and in the first place. I have been fortunate to study Alison Gallup at VAGA, Hannah Smithson's Israel and Elyse work during precisely the years that, for the Goldberg at the james Cohan Gallery, Mark Henderson first time, something at the Getty Research Institute, and Vicki Buchsbaum has been compiled, Pearse, who went to the trouble of granting important mission to reproduce father's invertebrate an illustration me per- from her approaching its full spectrum archived, and published. son's papers and library to the Smithsonian biology textbook soon after he able to me have been Robert Hobbs's Golden Spike National Historic Site, assisted of Smithson's sculpture, of Smithson's early drawings and paintings, working through the archives there. Like all of the Sobieszek's Spira /jetty and its pilgrims, despite the fact that tographs, this kind of curatorship writings, and Gary Shapiro's is not likely part of his official Judy Throm and the entire staff at the Archives of American Art in Washington, accommodated Smithson of Smithson's and jennifer reproduced Smithson's on Smithson that this book attempts And although Ann M. Reynolds's Lester graciously provided the images Genevieve Hyacinthe and jacob Proctor, my research help with photographs and copyediting. Without the of Nancy Holt, who made many photo- graphs available and who graciously submitted to an from the seventies her 1993 doctoral dissertation My work on this book would have been imposof many instistage the project received substantial support from the American Luce Founda- tion, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Fellowship Smithsonian American Art Museum, Mellon Foundation, at the the Andrew W. the John F. Enders Fellowships at Yale University, and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. expenses was provided by the Clark/Cooke Assistance with photographic Fund for Faculty Research at Harvard University and the Schragjs Faculty Fellowship research fund at Syracuse. For whatever insights I have been able to bring to Smithson's was especially imporwork. made the joys of this project outweigh the dangers. to fruition. Council of Learned Societies/Henry here, at the Spira/Jetty site and, in every other possible way, patience of my manuscript At the dissertation on goes to Dan Hisel. He fended off the rattlesnake editor, jeffrey Schier), it could never have come tutions and foundations. to answer. monograph My deepest and most heartfelt gratitude, finally, Michelle Komie at Yale University Press (along with sible without the financial generosity first raised many of of the most difficult aspects of Smithson's And without the expert guidance of Patricia Fidler and boundless analysis of short essays tant for me in its rigorous and detailed reading of some interview, this project could hardly have begun. the apparently pho- Smithson was published too late to be considered at Harvard, offered heroic last-minute assistance philosophical work. Joseph Masheck's the questions here from the Estate of George Lester. assistants path breaking work on Smithson's my every request for access to the books for my perusal. Anne, Robert, Robert Jack Flam's '996 edition of Smithson's D.C., Papers and routinely hauled out heavy boxes early survey Eugenie Tsai's "unearthing" rangers I met at the Site, he has cheerfully adopted the job description. Institu- tion's Archives of American Art. Also particularly valu- had passed away. Rick Wilson, chief ranger at the me in Most of all was Nancy Holt's 1995 gift of Smith- work, I am deeply indebted to all of those who have helped make it available to scholars X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Robert Smithson's passport, 1968. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Spiral Jetty was built in the spring Robert Smithson's of 1970 along a remote portion of the northern shore- an entire complex of historical reference and reflection that structures Smithsoris work. Over his brief career line of the Great Salt Lake (fig. 2). The Jetty's physical (cut short by his accidental monumentality Smithson worked in a remarkable (6,650 tons ofrock and mud forming a spiral over a quarter-mile long) is matched by its art-historical renown. Widely appreciated most important and influential as one of the illustrated in nearly every art history survey text published in Given its fame and the enormous to build it, it is tempting effort required ture, and poetry among them. His work ranges in to the cool disaffection of his gravel-mirror abstrac- tions to the ironic wit of his travel narratives. But despite to happen to this remote, sparsely populated area of and constantly renegotiated, of history. Consider, for example, the sheer volume of historical research that Smithson are brought to bear upon son papers and library (now housed, appropriately, brine flies and scattered herds of livestock. But some- at the Smithsonian) thing big-bigger, the implications perhaps, and illustrated even in textbooks-had engage- his projects. Even a cursory glance through the Smith- Utah, where even today most of the few existing roads are unpaved, and the primary inhabitants as a continuing, ment with the practice and philosophy to assume that the jetty's would have been the biggest thing ever more frequently array of media: collage, film, sculp- these variations, his entire career can be understood the past twenty years. construction painting, drawing, photography, tone from the dead earnestness of his religious paintings art projects of the twentieth century, it has been prominently death, at age 35, in 1973) already happened reveals that the artist considered of his work at every possible histor- ical scale. His project file for the Spiral Jetty includes, here. Almost exactly a century earlier, on May 10, among other things, maps of the prehistoric 1869, only seventeen line of what is now the Great Salt Lake, several books miles away at Promontory Sum- mit, the last spike was driven into the last tie of the and brochures transcontinental continental railroad, and an article on kutsavi, a food traditionally prepared by the Ute Indians by drying the railroad (fig. 3). This so-called wedding of the rails, vividly choreographed hastened for posterity, the close of the frontier era and furnished about the construction shore- of the trans- tiny brine shrimp found in the lake (it was akin, one of the defining images of nineteenth-century apparently, to bacon bits). When he visited Mono Lake, American history. a similarly brackish Western attraction, Although the existing scholarship on the Spiral Jetty devotes little or no attention to the Golden Spike able to discuss topics ranging from his knowledge connection, stratigraphic anyone who has attempted to visit the earthwork knows that the two monuments in something are locked of a lonely binary orbit. As Smithson's own route map of the area demonstrates, the only prac- ticable way to access the Spiral Jetty is to pass through history, to Mark Twain's nineteenth- century account of his visit to the area in Roughing It. Smithson staged frequent confrontations distant precedents and predecessors, casual (as in his passing suggestion that Edgar Allan Poe was the first true earthworks Even today it is from the Golden Spike site that visitors It with his ranging from the atic (as in his Ariforum project "Incidents to the earthwork. was of the deposition of calcareous tufa that marks the lake's the Golden Spike National Historic Site (fig. 4). must launch their expeditions Smithson artist) to the systemof Mirror- Travel in the Yucatan," which derives its title, and a good deal else, from a nineteenth-century expedition postcard displays; checking the water supply, odome- to the same area). Such explicit references help to ter, and snake bite kit; and picking up a map to the differentiate is here, after inspecting the replica locomotives and Smithson's work from that of many of his Jetty from an obliging Park Ranger, that Jetty pilgrims more properly minimalist leave the last stretch of pavement who tended to shrink from making overt historical and set out on the or conceptualist colleagues, bumpy journey to the lakeshore. The Golden Spike site gestures. They also provide a useful corrective to the frames the experience of the Spiral Jetty, and vice versa. tendency in some scholarship The connection between the Spiral Jetty and art (particularly to interpret Smithson's his land art) as if it occupied an the Golden Spike is not simply an isolated accident of empty or neutral historical space, as if his earthworks geographical were simply oversized relocations contiguity. It is, rather, just one facet of of sculpture from s Robert Smithson, Spira/Jetty, Andrew J. Russell, East a[ West Shaking Great Salt Lake, Utah, April 1970. at Laying [of] Last Rail, 1869. Black rock, salt crystals, earth, and red water (algae), Yale Collection of Western Americana, 3 'I. x 15 x 1,500 ft. (1.07 x 4.57 x 457.2 m). Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Photo: contemporary Robert Smithson print from Smithson's 1970 negative. and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Hands Library. 4 Robert Smithson, ...:''f,,;r . ~- Spira/Jetty, 1971 . Ink on paper, 12 x 9 in. (30A8 x 22.9 cm) . ~- --.;.' The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. ¥J ""$1< .,., ~.t> 1'l"""'1 p",,,, • "t -; Je ,.,0-JnSril:-~ .................,. the gallery to the vast, similarly rarefied spaces of the our understanding American West. To attend to Smithson's the first chapter T examine the religious paintings interest in of one of its defining aspects) the Golden Spike, in other words, is to make it impos- Smithson sible to see the Spiral jetty's site as "open space" or tual crisis" of 1961. Wavering unsettlingly its materials as "general conceptual matter." Smithson's iconography produced ernist techniques ment, these images demonstrate Smithson's encounter between that evokes eternal revelation and mod- spaces, however deserted they may appear visually, are This book examines that during what he called his "spiri- thick with the histories that occupy and organize them. I In that embrace historical entangle- history preoccupied that the problem of Smithson from the outset of his with these histories and with the idea of history itself. career. Chapter 2 examines the working model of his- The task is not a simple one, for Smithson's tory that Smithson developed between the years 1964 opera- tions upon history (cast as they often are in slate, mir- and 1967, after he had abandoned ror, or steel) are not as readily decipherable motifs. Through his study of the growth of crystals, the as those of a card-carrying history painter. Moreover, any histori- structure cal study of Smithson's hyperspace, work is complicated at the overtly religious of mirror reflections, and the discourse of Smithson posited history as an entropic outset by the fact that Smithson worked during a period process of material deposition of profound final crystalline stillness. Each of the following chap- uncertainty about the shape and mean- ing of historical time. Like many of his colleagues in the postwar era, Smithson progressive historicism nineteenth-century abandoned the idealist, that had been inherited German philosophy. we shall see, Smithson tical denunciations Indeed, as of all of our received ideas about "History is a facsimile of events held together by flimsy biographical mation." But Smithson's infor- distrust of traditional cism was not synonymous ters features a critical case study that examines Smithson's historical method as it worked upon, and devel- from was given to implacably skep- history's course and enterprise: that settles itself into a histori- with a wholesale dismissal oped out of, a specific site. First I address Smithson's 1967 photographic travelogue "The Monuments of Passaic," then his 1969 Artforum project "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," and finally the canonical Spiral Jetty. In each of these projects, Smithson worked in a place that was already doubly complex historically. Each of the sites was already marked as "historical," and each was also the subject of renewed of the past. Rather it was quite the opposite: his rejec- public debate about how exactly it was to be historicized. tion of traditional By exploring Smithson's interventions methods of historical abstraction served to open, rather than close, the pressing question each chapter connects of historical inheritance. politics of history. And, throughout failure of established Smithson's response to the historical models was not simply demonstrate Smithson's that Smithson's in these debates, work to a broader the book, I hope to historical operations to discard or selectively ignore the past, but rather provide an interpretive lens through which we might to become constantly, even painfully, aware ofits obdu- gain new perspectives on other, seemingly unrelated, rate presence. aspects of his career. Ultimately, this book will have For him, history was as ponderous as so much rock and mud." Multivalent, referential, as much to say about Smithson's sophisticated, Smithson's and richly cross- work offers art historians a landscape, visual perception, engagement cross-cultural with encounter, and social conflict as it will about history per se. kaleidoscopic array of critical possibilities that have only begun to be explored. This book focuses closely on Smithson's historical operations; it will not attempt to provide a full survey of Smithson's work and will rr-Historical Method and the Problem of "Continuance" One of my key goals here-certainly forward on the face ofit-is the most straight- to historicize Smithson's make only fleeting reference to many of the themes work. This means that I will take special care to demon- (semiotics, strate the ways in which Smithson's dominated picturesque aesthetics, etc.} that have published research on Smithson to date. Its to specific social, ideological, and material contradictions essential gambit, of course, is that what is lost by nar- of the sixties and early seventies. rowing the interpretive aperture on Smithson's work immediate will be regained by increasing projects as significant contributors the depth and clarity of work responds 4. I will treat the historical conditions of Smithson's INTRODUCTION famous to their form and meaning, and ask questions accordingly: what does it mean, for example, that Smithson famous tour of the "Monuments" conducted that Smithson's sculptural installations Smithson's on the Yucatan upon (whether they be echoes, rearrange- ments, or sublimations) Act? Does it matter history's demands might the complexity and sophistication of his responses of Passaic, New Jersey, in the immediate wake of the passage of the National Historic Preservation the pas~ Only by recognizing Smithson his begin to become apparent.! "continuance," a series of special challenges in my view, presents to historians of his work. For one thing, it asks us to confront the material, Peninsula coincided with a series of revolutionary discoveries about the nature and scope of Maya history? social, and political embodiment What might we learn from the fact that a series of wise appear to be Smithson's highly publicized-and in "temporality." highly controversial-Golden of what might other- abstract experiments Smithson's innovative play with time Spike centennial celebrations had occurred at Promon- and duration has been a frequent topic of discussion tory just a few months before Smithson among art critics and historians. begin building the Spiral arrived ~ J,tty' In Smithson's case, however, one must not only take note of the synchronic structure I will add my own analysis to this ongoing debate, and will formally analyze Smithson's cross-patterning, and mirroring of the artist's immediate historical context, but also account for the to dissociate diachronic relationships their material embodiment through which Smithson infolding, pulverizing, of time. But it will be important Smithson's as histories. At its most basic, this analysis amounts For Smithson, were mate- politicizing temporality ~y"'specifying it-and projections it-as rially continuous, not merely anamorphic of an absent past. Smithson understood history as a material residue, an ever-accumulating remainder time. In developing this thoroughgoing "historical materialism," historf from ----- understood his own moment to be connected to history. historical depth formations not temporal experiments simply to an insistence on studying What interests me most about Smith- son's work is the way in which it forces us to acknowlof which he derived directly from the phys- edge that time is inseparable embodies from the history that it, and that temporal models cannot be con- ceived without drawing upon, and in turn affecting, ical sciences rather than from Marxism as such, histories. Smithson sorts work might be, then, it is never merely theoreti- practiced a historical method that required However theoretically sophisticated Smith- him to wrestle physically with the histories in which cal. For it is one thing to wave away, with a flick of the he was attempting to intervene.e poststructuralist version of historical materialism is quite another to do so to an earth's worth of rocks and Smithson's contributed to his explicit concern with what he called "continuance," a term he used in opposition atomism and presentism to the of psychobiographical mod- wrist, a historical ruins. It is one thing to pull out the conceptual structures that support traditional cal matter left behind-what is personal. The personal talent might be there, but the the "sheer fact of the historicist .tradition, range, extends into the past. In mounting Fredric Jameson calls presence" of the past. his temporal experiments, Smithson don't know where their heads are now, they don't know where their continuance configurations, work strug- infra- ideas of time, but had to work through and upon preexisting is." Smithson's it quite another to confront the heap of deboned histori- els of art criticism: "1 don't go for that idea that art . People metanarrative; historical forever altering, in the process, the gles at every turn to come to terms with this "continu- histories that he encountered. ance," a form of historical connection the Spiral Jetty, this means that 1 will read the earth- that he per- In the case of a work like ceived as an inalienable material heritage. For Smithson, work as more than a monumental this heritage was not a catalyst for nostalgia or anti- of time arbitrarily installed in the Great Salt Lake. I quarianism will explore it as a historiographical but rather a perpetual/challenge duction of form. Smithson's historical to the pro- method was, gathers and redistributes like his physical production method, "worklike," a term progress embodied 1 borrow from Dominick La Capra's notion of the pro- and rewrites American ductive dialogue in which the past interrogates historian as insistently as the historian the interrogates Inherent diagram of the shape intervention the legacy oflabor in the transcontinental that and railroad, history in the process." in this approach is my belief that in order to pursue a rigorous examination of Smithson's operations upon history, one must pay more than glancing or gratuitous tories) in question. attention critiques. Although to the history (or his- Much of this book is devoted to a close reengagement with the historical elements Smithson of high-modernist certainly did oppose thought and practice, an exclusive focus on this aspect of his work offers past that no way to account for the energies that he put into his Smithson refigured, whether by tracking the history of encounter, race relations in the depressed with a much larger body of previous historical and textile towns along the Passaic River or tracing the path of a nineteenthcentury travel writer through the Honduran as a critical practitioner art-historical jungle. and interlocutor, inheritance. I recognize that the recent critical climate has This kind of analysis will require a considerable expan- not been particularly sion of the diachronic study. In pursuing range and sensitivity that is conducive to cross-historical long historical connections, art his- normally brought to bear on Smithson's work. The most torians today are rightly aware of the danger of repris- rigorous and influential ing the triumphal ism, Eurocentrism, far has concerned research on Smithson thus itself primarily with Smithson's tus within the history of modernism sta- . .!he predomi- so conspicuously to Smithson's Jetty and Golden Spike, for example, often the key, figure in the transition but risk venturing to "postmoderrr models of art production in the United States. The resulting large body of analysis has done an excellent and necessary job of accounting indeed, helping to determine one of the most influential century. It has demonstrated -Smithson's status as artists of the twentieth (he challenges that Smith- son's work posed to the totalizing impulses with high modernism contamination contingency, for- associated by detailing his unabashed of idealistic aesthetics the traditional sites of artistic production; of his compli- r cannot into methodologically of Spiral help objectionable territory. To an audience of Americanists, the compar- ison may seem suspiciously of the nationalist-essentialist reminiscent criticism that marked the early years of the field, when, in a hermeneutic cal domestication, American nineteenth- of recipro- and twentieth-century art was often apposed in order to demon- strate the transhistorical of the "American with materiality, and physical labor; his dislocation By attending juxtaposition nant approach has been to position Smithson as a key, from "modern" or idealism of previous models of historical continuity. persistence Mind."? of core impulses More generally, the Jetty I Spike motif may raise the specter of a threadbare brand of linear, progressive historicism, a teleological method that would seek to plot the two monuments cation of the authorial function; and his violation along a timeline and show how one develops necessarily of disciplinary out of the other. Not only has this approach been boundaries." In principle, the various poststructuralist repeatedly overruled, both in practice and in theory, by theories informing this criticism would allow and even contemporary encourage the reconnection would also seem to be particularly ill-fitted to the matter its extensions of Smithson's work with in history. In practice, however, because it has tended to focus on examining as a disruption or displacement of mid-century modernism, Smithson's work of a specific form this approach has been limited by what literary critic Alan Liu calls the "historically foreshortened" discourse.f lyzes Smithson's work as a reaction against its imme- diate high-modernist precedents but fails to address its pervasive dialogue with earlier precursors. toriographical effect of this approach, specific intention, The his- if not its is to narrow the purview of "history" to a sliver of Smithson's immediate past and to assign to it the role of hapless foil for Smithson's triumphant and art history, but it at hand. For even at the most basic formal level, the Spiral Jetty renounces linearity. If anything, as it swerves counterclockwise into the lake, it suggests a derail/ ment of the linear progress that the nearby transconti- Inental quality of much postmodernist Thus it routinely and productively ana- historiography railroad track bed once so perfectly embodied. For these reasons, pursue Smithson's previous historical connections ally been met with either indifference The common attempts to have gener- or suspicion. charge has been that to examine Smith- son's work in terms of its historical precedents is, as Pamela M. Lee puts it, "to subscribe to the kind of enfeebled historicism ... [that] Smithson violently rejected." To be sure, in any such analysis it is important to avoid the construction 6 INTRODUCTION of normalizing his- torical pedigrees. "Nothing is more damaging to theo- articulated his thoughts on history in anything resem- retical knowledge of modern art," said Adorno, "than bling a common its reduction his writings that address temporality to what it has in common with older historiographical shorthand. In or history, he is periods." Even so, this book begins with the proposition much more likely to refer to a science fiction novel by that a reconsideration J. G. Ballard or a poem by T. S. Eliot than to explicitly of the role of history in the physical and theoretical landscape of late twentieth- historical meditations of Benjamin or Foucault (or, century art need not be either feeble or reductive. for that matter, Hegel, Marx, or Nietzsche). Indeed, in the case of an artist like Smithson, distilled his philosophy of history out of disciplines not work demonstrates whose a persistent concern with continuity, such rigorous reconsideration seems unavoidable.'? To my mind, the greatest challenge facing this or any project that hopes to trace Smithson's torical negotiations is the imperative edge and describe Smithson's his- that it acknowl- relationship to the past without itself resorting to the progressive spectival historicism or per- that his work attempts to cir- immediately associated with either philosophy history. The practice of history, for Smithson, amalgamation of thermodynamics, tography, literary criticism, and other seemingly lated pursuits. His historicism W.J.T. Mitchell calls "the turbulence and incoherence at the inner and outer boundaries of disciplines," and therefore both rewards and requires an interdisciplinary analysis that reaches beyond historiography attends render the "continuance" between the Spiral Jetty and closely to Smithson's the Golden Spike? One might reasonably look to some of the alternative critical models currently pop- is that the unstinting ulating academic historiography "continuance" perhaps the Spiral Jetty, coiling and recoiling around its vortical center, performs a kind of traumatic tion of the Golden Spike's originary puncture. haps, as Smithson's repetiPer- dump trucks backed out over the proper and own diverse sources.'? Another reason for hesitating Smithson's and art criticism: unre- was built out of what cepts of progress, retrospection, to or was an crystallography, pho- cumvent. How, without reflexively invoking the conor influence, Smithson work into contemporary materialism to translate historical theory of Smithson's exceeds the capacities of current histo- riographical vocabularies. The problem of diachrony (change over time) occupies a blind, one might more accurately say a sore, spot in contemporary Although abandoned criticism. in the middle of the last century spiraling rubble, they stood to the Spike as Walter by the synchronic bias of structuralism, and then Benjamin's retrospective further discredited by poststructuralist critiques of angel stands to history. Or perhaps the Jetty can be understood, pace Georges Bataille, as a flume of historical expenditure escaping Hegelian progress, the question of diachrony continues to loom over critical discourse. It has now tended to the alchemical economy of the Golden Spike. I have be displaced, however, into psychoanalytical entertained am thinking of the explosion of memory discourse each of these possibilities in my analysis models. I of the Spiral Jetty. But although these alternative criti- in recent years and of the widespread cal-historical vocabularies spectral, the uncanny, and the traumatic as paradigms will have much to con- tribute to this text (and although informed my own view of history), I have tried to resist the temptation Smithson's they have thoroughly to apply them too neatly to of historical connection. adoption of the Whatever considerable virtues these models may possess, however, they rely too heavily on discontinuous explanations of diachrony to be cleanly applied to Smithson's "continuance.v'J work." There are several reasons for this hesitation. Here we might pause to consider a single A very simple one is that no single group of historical example of a historical model that is potentially applic- theories determined able to Smithson's cal formation. Smithson's Smithson's status as autodidact ian. Smithson own historiographi- This is due more than anything to and interdisciplinar- was a voracious and sophisticated work: that of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's theoretical temporary criticism "Benjamin's esteem is so pervasive in con(as Peter Osborne prose breeds commentary reader who referred habitually to his intellectual a lab") that it is worth examining influences in his writings and interviews, yet he rarely phenomenon 7 puts it, like vaccine in as a symptomatic in itself. It seems to me that Benjamin's notion of revolutionary historical constellations form- entropic tendency ing in a sudden "flash," or "blast," is attractive to us material inevitability, because understood it provides one of the few available tools for theorizing the continuing profoundly agency of the past in an era hostile to traditional historicism. epileptic quality of Benjamin's The of all systems, which he saw as a disallows any potential sense) for historical action. My point here is not to discount the importance "shock" allows us to (as in the electrical, as well as the political to endorse Smithson's of Benjamin's work, nor historical model over that of imagine a powerful, trans formative, and even dan- any other artist or theorist. I simply hope to delay gerous connection the process of assigning to the past at the same time that it relieves us of the awesome responsibility now-impossible mechanism task) of having to specify the precise of that connection. Smithson's gle critical discourse Smithson's work to any sin- long enough to help recover the complexity, variety, and contingency of the solutions that Smithson 14 work has often been connected with Benjamin's, obsession (and the and artists of his generation offered to the postwar crisis of history. 15 and for good reason: both shared an with rubble and ruin, both developed a Smithson's Transcendentalism materialist method of citational history, both were con- There is a final critical twist to be mentioned cerned with correspondences something especially strange about Smithson's entropic and the modern, between the archaic and both, as Craig Owens famously historicism that reverses our usual expectations. argued, shared an essentially allegorical procedure. I will argue, Smithson's Yet while J hope that this book might ultimately a teleology that incorporates tribute to further discussions about Benjaminian history, it will not itself translate Benjarninian con- Smithson's work into terms. I want to avoid folding Smithson too quickly into Benjamin: to do so would be to risk writing a(nother) book about Benjamin rather than a book about Smithson, and it would also serve to obscure the ways in which Smithson's Benjamin's. Smithson's work differs from materialist ity, for example, complicates critique of optical- any direct equivalences here, As work often attempts to define history yet leads through and out of it into a timeless, posthistorical stasis. Thus, if Smithson's stubbornly historiography materialist contemporary is in some ways too to be strapped comfortably into theoretical vehicles, it is in other ways too stubbornly transcendentalist. This may seem an oxymoronic assertion at best (transcendental ism?), and a downright contemporary blasphemous material- one (from a critical perspective) at worst. How could Smithson, supposedly the anti-idealist par excellence, that might be drawn to the spectacular or phantasmagor- have possibly subscribed ical dimensions of Benjamin's tal system? 1 was certainly not expecting to find any And Smithson's engagement cally incommensurable of Benjamin's imagistics of history. with entropy is categori- with the latent energeticism notion of the revolutionary historical "flash." Benjamin's version of historicism instantaneous energies. releases across time of stored mnemonic But such discharges sible in Smithson's are essentially impos- historiographical features an ever-increasing universe, which historical somnolence marked by the slow, steady, and continuous tion of time. Smithson's against the messianic drives Benjamin's leads Smithson relies upon crystalliza- entropy tugs and drags reanimation of matter that to any form of transcenden- such thing when I began working on Smithson several years ago; I was planning to emphasize tory agency of Smithson's contingency insistence the desublimaon historical and specificity. I had in mind an analysis that would bring Smithson's into alignment entropic materialism with something like "base material- ism," the term employed by Rosalind Krauss and YveAlain Bois in their groundbreaking study of Bataille's Informe and its echoes in twentieth-century Smithson's art. version of history, I thought, would refuse all forms of unity, totality, or dialectical resolution, utopian historical schemata. This and offer us a form of history bound and threaded to to take a much darker view than does specific places and bodies, conflicts and controversies.t'' Benjamin of the prospects for revolutionary Smithson dismissed as metaphysical ous "forces" populating humanistic action. But when 1 began working in earnest on this fictions the vari- project, 1 found the task proving far more difficult- thought; and interesting-than the 8 INTRODUCTION I had originally imagined. I Rrr even as h, seemed to embrace the radical particu- larism and historical embeddedness Smithson seemed, puzzlingly, that I had expected, to make frequent gestures toward a timeless or ahistorical mode of practice and reception aesthetics, became more and more convinced that Smithson's convictions about the material persistence were counterbalanced a "when you're not con- transcendent, of history by his need to pre-figure a eternal condition beyond the limitations of that history. This condition was not to be metaphys- scious of the time or space you are in." Smithson's ical but rather, in his terms, "infraphysical," own statements on time and history, sprinkled through- to be located within rather than without the material. a condition out the interviews and prose pieces that he left behind, It was to involve, as he put it, a "transcendental seemed hopelessly self-contradictory. of matter." [9 some passages modernist, Smithson To be sure: in The essential claim of this book is that Smith- sounds like a good post- as when he argues for the value of each state son's confrontation with history was marked by acute specific moment that the artist spends in the process ambivalence. of working: "[a]ny critic who devalues the time of we might call a proto-postmodern the artist is the enemy of art and the artist." But, far of history as a force-Zfinevitable more frequently, 1 found Smithson seeming to wish loss. Yet even as he acknowledged this about history against all odds for precisely the atemporal, he seemed determined cal condition that 1 had presumed ahistori- he would oppose, as when he describes one of his sculptures as "a clock that doesn't keep time, but loses it," when he praises filmmaker Roger Corman's "esthetic of atemporality," when he champions Ad Reinhardt's they assure that "[tjime vanishes sameness," paintings because into a perpetual or when he describes his site selection process by saying that "when I get to a site that strikes lthe kind of timeless - I was in for other surprises this intransigent as well. 1 was had what understanding fragmentation and to overcome it, to manipulate material into a form that might redeem its discursive essence into a greater unity. Although Smithson's unsettling work proposes the profound and historicity of all phenomena, it also attempts to produce a kind of secondhand eternity from the materials of historicity itself. His photographic projects obey a p':'inci~le of infinite accumulation, which the mnemonic multiplied chord, I use it." 17 On the one hand, Smithson power of the single image is beyond recognition into a jumbled geology of silver and paper. His crystallographic work subjects stunned to discover his earnest religious writings of the time to a lapidary process in which the alienating early sixties, in which he openly called for a reestab- effects of history are ultimately cross-cancelled. lishment Smithson's of devotional art, and even more surprised gious imagery continued a series of self-inoculating to operate, thinly disguised each point that Smithson under the rubric of crystallographic abstraction, throughout his later work. Ultimately, aspect of Smithson's assumptions work to square with my initial can be made for the oppositional Indeed, can be interpreted as historical structures. At invites history into his work, he seems to do so in order to neutralize the most difficult was his systematic embrace of entropy. Although arguments entire production from his early reli- to find that motifs and structures in its effects. Perhaps inevitably, my attempts to negotiate Smithson's en tropic worldview will mean that I can- not always maintain rent Smithson the celebratory tone of the cur- literature. Smithson's work is exem- politics of entropy as an artistic strategy, Smithson's plary in its direct material registration version seemed to me to be profoundly histories and historical conflicts, yet in its attempts For Smithson, deterministic. as time passes we will eventually reach transcend strategies that many art historians no disorder left," all difference being obliterated in the problematic. not to resist but rather to naturalize the concept of a predetermined, eschatological history and to provide Smithson with a cosmic endorsement for his own aversion to activism, political or otherwise) In short: I primitivism __lessness~n to those conflicts it occasionally resorts to an entropic point in the future where "there can be wan stillness of posthistory. 18 This seemed to me of specific now consider to be In some cases i~p:e.eals to a brand of informed by an ideal of primordial timeothers it proposes a meticulous ethics of passivity in the [ace of historical injustice)nroughout his work Smithson think, t~n 9 entropic looks forward, rather overeagerly I endtime;'an eternal state of cosmic sameness, of the clashing in which all of history, as well as all perspectives that embody it, will exist without conflict. And yet one needs not necessarily every detail of Smithson's agree with eschatology in order to learn from his brilliant and remarkable work. Because Smithson engaged more seriously with the problem of history than most any other artist of his generation, his work serves as an unparalleled critical resource. His site-specific projects offer thorough tiques of the dominant and studied cri- historical narratives shaped the modern American landscape. that have Because his experiments with new models of time and space were conducted through the medium his work provides art historians of history, with a critical oppor- tunity to extend the practices of durational and site- specific analysis into their necessary intersection historical politics. And finally, although work often struggles to approximate with Smithson's the posthistorical, its inclusive materiality cannot help but leave traces of the historical conflicts and configurations that inform it. My task here is to retrace those traces, hoping in the process to unearth historical moment understanding moments the complexity of Smithson's as well as to consider new ways of Smithson's "continuance" with not his own. 10 INTRODUCTION HISTORY IN SMITHSON'S REliGIOUS PAINTINGS In 1961 Smithson was twenty-three years old, living in New York on Sixth Avenue in what he described as "the hinterlands between the Garment there was just nothing," atmosphere and where he had left his native New Jersey soon after graduating from high school and Greenberg's Art and Culture but also John Cage's Silence. district and the Village." Having felt alienated, misunderstood, bored by the "stifling suburban Clement In this heady and unstable atmosphere Smithson was as well positioned as any young painter to migrate from the fringes to the center of the downtown art world. He was certainly moving in the right circles; a regular at the Cedar Tavern and an active denizen of came to New York expressly to become an artist. He the Greenwich Village Beat scene, he made his way into had made no attempt more than one of Fred W. McDarrah's now-legendary to go to college, although had taken several courses at the Art Students he League and the Brooklyn Museum School, and he was arguably photographs of Saturday night loft parties. He mingled with both first-generation abstract expressionists and more widely read than the average college student. Black Mountain By this time he was beginning relationship with Richard Bellamy, whose influential to establish himself as artists, and he was developing a close a painter; he had a solo show in 1959 at the Artists Green Gallery had just opened. Many of his friends and Gallery and had shown in the "New Work by New acquaintances Artists" exhibition at the Alan Gallery in 1960. Smith- late fifties he had worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop son's work at this point combined elements and illustrated gestural and geometric abstraction and featured tightly compacted elements, grid compositions, and occasional of both scattered figurative bits of overpainted were poets and publishers; during the the covers of literary magazines. He had met both Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and he dabbled in poetry himself. collage. 2 1n the spring of that year, Smithson was busy Smithson would later describe his work of this period working on a new series of paintings in preparation in terms of the intersecting his upcoming influences of Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, one-man Lester in Rome. Lester had offered Smithson the show and Jean Dubuffet. Irving Sandler, in a 1959 review, after having seen his paintings described Smithson's The Rome show was to be an enormous paintings as "whelped by Surre- for show at the Caleria George at the Alan Gallery. opportunity alism and primitive art" and "reared by frenzied for Smithson: his second major solo show, his interna- Action Painting." tional debut, and (not least) an opportunity Smithson I was still groping for a style that suited him, but, it might be argued, so was the a few weeks visiting the Eternal City itself. But Smithson was having trouble. In a series of agonized letters entire New York art world. In 1961 postpainterly that he wrote to Lester as he prepared abstraction he complained was a critical favorite, but it shared space with second-generation abstract still vital in many quarters, expressionism, as well as early pop art and an entire range of new practices, including to spend of an "almost unbearable work: "The paintings for the show, tension" in his I am sending to you reveal my spiritual crisis. A crisis born out of an inner pain; a pain that has overwhelmed my entire nervous system."! It was He told Lester that he was in the process of changing the year of Morris Louis's UnJurleds but also Claes his entire approach to painting: "For the most part I Oldenburg's have abandoned performance, paintings happenings, and assemblage. The Store, Frank Stella's metallic stripe but also Roy Lichtenstein's Look Mickey, image .... '3 the shattered image. . the distorted Now, I have all the Choatic deamons [sic] in their place. The spirit of my art is being drawn from a Pre-Renaissance Here I will tackle the complex issue of Smithson's mood. Nature has all, but evaporated. religious sincerity by tracing the rhetoric of mystical Divine Suffering has taken the place of Nature.":' It is difficult to imagine who would later become famous glass, manneristic distortions, natural ironic detachment, spiritual timelessness Robert Smithson, for his shattered and almost preter- of his upbringing. religious embraced ough foundational paintings, painted study of this material (one that I hope will someday be written) will require an extensive and wholeheart- biographical the Catholic faith He began to produce here will that Smithson's religious work raises. Much remains to be done: a thor- beset by this or any other his teenage atheism edly, if temporarily, to deploy it picto- My comments only begin to address the questions crisis. But it was at about this time that he jettisoned as Smithson attempted rially in his early paintings. background, a comprehensive icono- graphic analysis of the intricate imagery, and a detailed expressly investigation in stark color and a of Smithson's place in the history of American Catholicism in the tumultuous era of Vatican heavy, obsessive line, many of which featured varia- II. My aim here will simply be to establish, through tions on the crucifixion, stigmatization, a series of close documentary and entomb- ment of Christ (see figs. 5, 6, 8-10).5 Smithson's unknown centrality of Christian religious paintings were essentially understanding until 1985, when the Diane Brown Gallery in New York mounted a small exhibition of Smithson's early work (drawn primarily from George Lester's concerns itself with transcending • worldly historical est, manifested paintings) perspectives early the limitations of by devising methods of conscious- "ikons" (as he called his religious struggle to produce this consciousness and against a postwar environment ings, drawings, and collages that Smithson produced ical fragmentation. between 1958 and 1964. Yet critical attention victims of Smithson's to the In Smithson's evoking a timeless, eternal, all-embracing ness. Smithson's most notably in the work of Eugenie mysticism of history. Broadly defined, mysticism collection). Since then, there has been increasing interTsai and Caroline A. Jones, in the wide range of paint- and formal analyses, the in marked by histor- That they fail in this attemptown ambivalence about history religious paintings in particular remains scant. This is as well as the internal contradictions partly because many, perhaps the majority, of the reli- within the formal apparatus gious paintings does not obviate the sincerity of their aim. Indeed, were lost or intentionally before Smithson's destroyed death. What's more, Smithson duced his overtly religious paintings pro- for only about a year; by 1962 he had tempered his "Divine Suffering" with irony, and by the time he began producing tures based on the structure religious iconography disappeared sculp- of crystals in 1964, all (along with all figuration) had of religious figuration- fully and painfully aware of his failures to evoke the timeless through figurative representation, Smithson would go on to pursue his mystical aims by other means. Although the specific Catholic motifs would disappear from Smithson's work, many of the structures of their articulation from his work. Because the religious paintings derive from what appears to have been a tran- he discovers would not. To interpret Smithson's early paintings, drawings, and writings in terms of their attitudes toward tem- sitory religious episode in his youth, and because they porality, then, is to reveal important continuities between seem to depart so substantially his religious mature production, from the tenor of his they have not generally been per- ceived as essential to the critical analysis of his later work. But most fundamentally, paintings r suspect, have failed to attract sustained the religious scholarly work and his later work. Smithson's religious work inaugurated a dialectical conflict between the eternal and historical that would continue to define his practice for the rest of his career; it must not be seen as simply postponing the development of attention because they raise the exceedingly thorny ques- his mature work but rather enabling it. Many of the tion of the sincerity of Smithson's most radical aspects of Smithson's later temporal strate- religious beliefs. For to recognize religious impulses in Smithson's work, early or late, is to be confronted Smithson with an image of that is difficult to orchestrate utation for skeptical irreverence.6 with his rep- gies were already under halting investigation in his religious work. Indeed, much of what we have come to understand as Smithson's "postmodernism," his concern with the interchangeability 14 HISTORY IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS PAINTINGS such as of center and periphery, his engagement perception, with the corporeality concern for the spirit in N.Y.C.," which will soon over- of take "the latest obscure mess of abstraction." and his sense of the reified and particu- late nature of time, derives ultimately from his with the lugubrious engagement Christian mystics bemoaning premonitions of he says; "the most sophis- ticated people in Manhatten [sic] are very much con- cerned with it." The magnitude a fallen world. "Don't be afraid of the word 'religion," confidence of Smithson's youthful on this point is worth noting. As he says "The Decaying Force of Duration": Mysticism and later in the same letter, "After my visit to Rome, and Smithson's Critique of Modern Art when I return every body [sic] in New York art circles To anyone familiar with Smithson's will know about the George Lester Gallery and Robert later writings- biting and skeptical as they are-his Smithson. nineteen letters sity of Smithson's the inten- and virtually unnoticed remains almost embarrassingly to Smithson's artistic and philosophical the early sixties. Without consulting struggles in that the reli- evident in Smithson's experience. If anything it was a reversion to a first relisince it amounted early iconogra- rejection of his recent Beat experiences his inspiration early church fathers) and medieval mystical tracts (particularly the work of Meister Eckhardt). Although Smithson owned a few books on Eastern spirituality, his of a greater or lesser degree of "interest" in religion." mysticism, Rome exhibition struggling Lester to design the upcoming to place more emphasis on what Smithson calls his "religious" and "spiritual" in favor of primarily from patristic texts (by the phy are simply one of his ironic quirks or the result to convince a reluctant deliberate an earlier form of Christian art and worship. Smithson's library concentrated Most of the letters feature Smithson to Smithson's letters and writings of this period reveal that he drew guide the letters, one may easily be left with the impression gious concerns tone foreign to Smithson's later writings, they remain an indispensable Smithson's "concern for the spirit" from the "second religiousness" giousness, since Lester donated them to the Archives of American Art in 1987. Although the letters' anguished to distinguish that Jack Kerouac identified as typical of the Beat religious convictions during this period, have gone unpublished 1J It is important prepared paintings for his show in Rome, prove startling. The letters, which clearly demonstrate I don't have to appeal to the art world here; they will follow." to George Lester, written primarily in 1961 as he work.8 much more heavily on Christian the life of St. Francis, third-century desert ascetics, and the martyrs of the early church. Many of his books on these topics were written by British Catholic apologists of the twenties and thirties and have the musty air of English belletristic conservatism. Smithson repeatedly defines himself as a religious artist. T. S. Eliot was perhaps his primary influence here, but In a short biographical statement that he submits to Smithson also owned at least three of G. K. Chesterton's Lester for inclusion in the catalogue, he prominently religious books (written after Chesterton had converted lists his 1950 confirmation from Anglicanism another letter he mentions as a Roman Catholic. In that he is pursuing the to Roman Catholicism in 1922) and at least five by the mystic poet and theologian Evelyn publication of some of his poems with Sheed & Ward, Underhill, which he describes as "a very powerful avant-garde first half of the twentieth century. This was all of a piece Catholic publishing with Smithson's general interest in Anglo-American house," and begs Lester to include one of them, an Eliot-inspired "Incantation," in the the preeminent conservative modernism writer on mysticism of the interwar in the period: his catalogue: "Please do not ignore the incantation, because favorite writers at this time included Wyndham you think it is too religious."? H. G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and T E. Hulme. Although Smithson insists that Lewis, "the over all effect of the show + catalog should convey by 1973 Smithson would renounce a 'Dark Night of the Soul.' The paintings as "antidemocratic intelligentsia," during his spiritual people mortified These paintings should make and fill their eyes with suffering. are not for arty-chatter but for the crisis of the early sixties they helped him to articulate his discomfort with contemporary art and culture. Indeed, he would later admit that he had been attempt- lacerated soul.'tIO Smithson all of these writers argues that if Lester wants to "be in [on a] new epoch in art," he should attend to the "new ing "to reestablish traditional Eliot-Pound-Wyndham '5 art work in terms of the Lewis situation.v" »: CreepingJesus (fig. 5) is one product of Smithson's attempts to reestablish traditional art. Rendered in a species of creeping weed). Smithson updates this Blakean insight for the postwar era by imagining highly linear figurative style with sporadically attached discomfiture collage elements taken from advertising imagery and sition with the ever-accelerating broad washes of bright, sometimes consumerist caustic, color, the painting draws freely upon the standard repertory of the of the eternal when forced into juxtapotime cycles of a utopia of accumulation. 13 On the right side of the picture Smithson has Christian iconography. Smithson's model here is clearly collaged an image of a hand ringing a bell. The ringing the crucifixion, although he reconfigures bell bears ritual significance; here it probably indicates scene somewhat by permeating consumer products. the expected it with contemporary the precise instant of transubstantiation The collaged figures of three mass. Yet the bell's traditional in the Catholic role as an instanta- women, which appear to have been excised from a sin- neous harbinger of divine incarnation is complicated by gle magazine its fractured and replicated image, which borrows advertisement, stand below the body of Christ. They might easily be mistaken for the figures from Cube-Futurist traditionally dynamism, depicted at the foot of the cross, except convention in order to suggest change, and duration. The hacking motion that one of them plays a home organ, and two hold forth implied by the echoed wrists, too, calls the bell's shiny new household benevolence contemplation. attributes appliances Although for our spiritual these appliances recall the of succor held by the saints in attendance the crucifixion (particularly tomary jar of ointment), Mary Magdalene's at cus- they also seem closely related to the Roman attributes of torture (will they scald Christ modernist By including an allusion to threats to the body of Christ, Smithson hints that his concerns about modernity go beyond his discomfort for the products of mass culture to an unease about modernist with the coffee? Brand him with the iron-). Christ's attenuated body cringes as if anticipating into question. painting here, among the ranks of temporal standards of representation.I't Indeed, Smithson's letters to Lester brim with this; attached invective against both Futurism and Cubism, as does firmly to the cross, he can only hang helplessly as an unpublished he is besieged by the symbols ("36%") and products olation," that he was writing when he painted Creep- (cars, skis, irons, coffeepots, of contemporary maraschino cherries) consumer culture. Smithson's painting forces divinity and modernity into an antagonistic, essay, called "The Iconography of Des- ingJesus. In the essay, Smithson takes particular issue Nude Descending a Staircase, precisely with Duchamp's because it entangles itselfin duration: "Revelation has even painful, juxtaposition. The painting does not com- no dimensions. fortably reestablish and time. The early Christian the devotional painting tradition If it did, it would be dead in space Fathers never Fixated so much as it pictures the difficulty of doing so in the on dimensions modern world. have developed icons something like Marcel Duchamp's The clash of sacred and profane in Creeping Nude Descending a Staircase, which Duchamp calls'. Jesus occurs not only in space but also in time. Consider an expression the temporal presentation status of the consumer objects. The objects, caught up in the accelerating production and advertising, temporality of their future obsolescence prefigured in the anachronistic "historical" costumes of the divine. Smithson of time and space through the abstract of motion.' Marcel Duchamp stopped painting early in his life, because he wasted his art in )( time and space. Duration cut him off from revelation, thus confining of their bearers, harbor a kind of predatory temporality at odds with the timelessness in their theology. If they did, they would grace to the chessboard." 15 Here Smithson offers Nude Descending a Staircase as a kind of anti-icon. Whereas the true icon aims borrows the title Creeping Jesus from a phrase in a to reveal the divine body in a way that eludes and tran- poem by William Blake, who had used it to suggest the scends vulgar dimensionality, absurdity of imagining that Christ could ever reduce expression of dimensional extension one of his primary himself to the level of petty human goals. Duchamp's Christ, as G. K. Chesterton concerns. commented Such a in his book on Duchamp makes an anti-icon subjects the perfect divine form to inertia, decay, and distortion; it subjects it, Blake, would have to be "a lower and meaner Jesus" in short, to the condition (hence the term's later adaptation governs all other objects in the temporal world (else- as the name for a T6 HISTORY IN SMITHSON'S of durattonal RELIGIOUS PAINTINGS extrusion that 5 Robert Smithson, Creepingjesus. 1961. Photo collage and gouache, 18 x 14 in. (45.7 x 35.6 em). Estate of Robert Smithson. . , '" where in the article Smithson force of duration"). refers to "the decaying Thus the quasi-Futurist bell in that in these letters to Lester he essentially secedes from the avant-garde.f Creeping Jesus, its brassy pivotings directly recalling Although these epistolary manifestos on devo- Duchamp's painting, joins the anti-iconic forces threat- tional painting may seem to reflect an insufferable ening the body of Christ. It shatters overconfidence be an immediate, instantaneous what should presence into a his- produced on Smithson's part, the images that he that year tell a different story. Like Creeping torical extension. like the obsolescent matter embodied Jesus, which enacts the struggle to evoke a timeless in the consumer products, the bell signals the "wrath" or "waste" of time. l6 devotional experience A recurrent theme in Smithson's letters to Lester is his conviction that art had been steadily degen- rather than successfully religious paintings halting and ambivalent He paint- approach to the project of pro- much of Smithson's ambivalence awareness followed upon the humanist practice of representation modeling, etc.) of the Renaissance (perspective, tradition. Devel- inhabiting itself. Although the Smithson claimed to want to create true devotional imagesimages of timeless Smithson chaos and ruin of human of Byzantine that hinged upon his of the fatal contradictions oping his own idiosyncratic brand ofPre-Raphaelitism, argued that the traditions A close look at two other paintings from this period demonstrates ing, but rather as its natural declension: Cubism simply spatializing doing of 1961 reveal a ducing an art of "no dimensions." erating since the advent of Renaissance humanism. saw Cubism not as a rejection of Renaissance so, Smithson's revelation, above and beyond the history-he found that devotional painting should be revived. Writing to Lester the pictorial means he had at his disposal were inade- after he had sent a group of his paintings off to Rome, quate to the task. He was unable to keep history out Smithson of his religious paintings, stated that "the show that 1 sent you was born out of an inner crisis, that has it's [sic] roots in [sic]. The broken icons of Byzan- the Pre-Renassaiance and there were two central causes of this failure: one was the historicity of line, the other the historicity of vision itself. tium inspired me more than all the insipid equine figures of the Florentines." Smithson, in fact, frequently Lineage; Lineament; Limbo: Smithson's Use of Line referred to his own paintings as "ikons." Although paint- During the early sixties, Smithson ings like Creeping Jesus seem too agonistic to function exclusively linear form ofrepresentation; as devotional images per se, they do dramatize of the works he produced son's efforts to exorcise "insipid" Renaissance and revive the hieratic airlessness For Smithson, Renaissance Smithspace of the Byzantines.'? this involved rejecting not only art but also all of its extensions in mod- ernism. Indeed, Smithson's )( for virtually all "modern letters to Lester have it in 'Isms.'" In one particularly were not paintings indeed most between 1961 and 1964 but crisp drawings in pencil or ink on paper. Even his fully realized oil-on-canvas paintings were, as Peter Halley has pointed out, "really highly linear, colored drawings in paint." The linear bias of this work is clear, and yet its very ubiquity in Smithson's paintings vitriolic letter, undated but most likely written in June its significance. ofI961, of line in Smithson's he makes a list of "anti-art" of the twentieth practiced an almost puts us in danger of overlooking A close formal and historical analysis religious paintings can help century and includes "Futurism, Dada, 'The Wild Beasts' us to retrieve the decisive significance that the draw- [Fauvism], The Ash-Can School, Cubism, Brute Art, ing process held for the artist. I will suggest here that among others." This jeremiad against modernism cul- Smithson returned repeatedly to linear representation minates in Smithson's proposition that "Jackson Pollock during these years because line was itself intimately ... died of modern connected demonic claim that "Happenings possession," and his are simply 'the Black Mass' for the retarted [sic] and should be stopped." This comment on the happenings, which by 1961 were becoming to the "spiritual crisis" that he described in his letters to Lester"? In reading Smithson's letters to Lester, it quickly becomes evident that what seems to have bothered mainstream, hints at the extent to which Smithson's Smithson most about contemporary relationship to the New York art world was changing sity for action. ''All modern schools of art, that are during this period. It is not overstating the case to say infused with action, ultimately 18 HISTORY IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS art was its propen- 'despair and die.'''20 PAINTINGS "Witness, the new vogue of'Happenings' "refuse to seek for the invisible proportions, and so they sweeping NYC's Beatnik realm, where art is swallowed up by fall into the pit of despair." Smithson's action.'?' ing of proportion Smithson's counterpoint to "action' is religious "Passion," and he develops the distinction at length understand- (a term that he nearly always under- lines for emphasis in his letters to Lester) appears in his letters. Most important here, he associates "action' to have derived from his reading with history and reification, and "Passion" with time- as he explains: "The 'fearful symmetry' lessness and transcendence: speaks about in his poem Tyger is what I mean by proportion rather than breakdown or distortion." As this citation and the Blakean title of Creeping Jesus suggest, "Action changes with the 'spirit of the times,' whereas Passion is etemal.t'" "Action Painting is the art of Despair .... Action is ofWiUiam Blake; that Blake against Passion. Action leads to dead matter, while Pas- Smithson had studied Blake's work carefully. He had sion leads to the life spirit. In his last years, Pollock, seen a selection of Blake's original drawings on exhi- tryed [sic] to find proportions bition on at least one occasion, and he owned several for his tortured soul, but his [sic] wasn't artist enough to exorcise his demons. books on and by Blake, including Northrop Frye's So he, rode to his death in an infernal machine.v-? famous study, Feaiful Symmetry. Pollock, with whom Smithson was clearly pre- Smithson's strategies for avoiding the trap of "action" and finding refuge occupied during these years, was of course best known in the eternal stillness of proportion were closely tied for his poured "skein" paintings, to his understanding of Blake, not just to Blake's poems but also his drawings and paintings, puddling, over- and interlapping fields of swirling, lines that recorded the which embodied trajectory of the artist's arm and body as it moved specific ideas about line that were at odds with the above the canvas. Michael Fried famously described dynamic Smithson these paintings as having effected a decisive break with the history of representation mining assumptions in the West by under- philosophy neoclassical about the mimetic role of line. In Pollock's paintings, line functions independently qualities of Pollock's arabesques." of was deeply influenced by Blake's of line, which was derived partially from strategies of producing formal precision, clarity, and stability. For Blake, line was a mystical delineation, since it has been released from its usual instrument, charge of securing delineation of eternal proportion because it avoided the figuration through contour. As and a linear style was necessary in the Michael Leja has convincingly argued, this free, abstract worldly caprices of perspective and modeling. line placed Pollock's paintings line was, first and foremost, with period discourses into direct dialogue of electrodynamics, the "drive- instrument a bounding Blake's line: an of delineation, taxonomical clarity, rectitude, discharge" model of the psyche, and other manifes- immediacy, decision. As Blake himself put it, "How tations of an emergent pan-energism do we distinguish Smithson, with his pronounced in postwar culture. aversion to "action," the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? ... What is reacted against precisely these energetic connotations it that builds a house and plants a garden, but the of Pollock's line. Indeed, in the quote above he goes definite and determinate? so far as to read Pollock's death by car crash (which honesty from knavery, but the hard and wirey line had occurred just five years earlier, in 1956) as a con- of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions? sequence of the artist's failure to pull himself out of Leave out this line, and you leave out life itself; all the whorling is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be vortices of line that embodied tured soul." Smithson late paintings, his "tor- also refers to the corpus of in which Pollock experimented What is it that distinguishes drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist."26 In this formulation, with a line is not only determinate kind of re-figuration by translating his energetic line but also eternal: it functions back into contour, as well-meaning matical essence of Creation that exists independently but inadequate of the temporary attempts at "proportion.v-t What did Smithson mean by this "proportion" to reveal the diagram- and superficial appearances of the profane world. An incisive line functions as an index of that, if properly executed, might have saved Pollock? the artist's capacity, which Blake labeled "Imagina- According to Smithson's tion," to see through temporal contingency to the essen- letters to Lester, Pollock was not alone in his failure to locate it: all modern artists tials beneath: "This world of Imagination '9 is the world 6 . Christ Senes: , C h (IS. t in Limbo, 1961. Robert Smithson, x 18 in. (61 x 45.7 em). I k and gouache, 24 n 0 f Ra bert Smitthson . Estate 7 of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall Ralph Buchsbaum, illustration from all go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World Animals Without Backbones, 1948. is Infinite & Eternal, whereas the ofImagination world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Tempo- ral. There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.:"? I will return to this "Vegetable Glass of Nature," which Smithson would reconceive in his outdoor mirror installations of the late sixties, in later chapters. What is important probooci, to note here is that for Blake, unlike many later naturalist-romantics who saw nature as a direct revelation of divinity, the outward forms of nature are fallen and fragmentary reflections of hidden proportions accessible only to mystics and communicable only through linear depiction. He often expressed iii. this by noting that pure linear contour, through which the artist perceives and communicates "Permanent Realities," does not exist in visible nature but only in the mystic artist's imagination. t but Imagination i"~lin. General body .lrucl~r. of. n.~ ,hoo·n in CI'OD-oe:tion. (na..d on W. R. Co.) "Nature has no Outline, has. ,,28 Smithson's drawings and paintings of 1961 can tures of limbo, generally unclassifiable structures that be seen to work through the collision of the two models appear to be purely fantastical members of line under discussion orders of animalia, also threaten to puncture Christ's The representational here: Pollock's and Blake's. content of the images, which usu- of the lower protective boundary. The overdetermined stress to ally features a conflict between the divine body on which this contour is subjected hints that this painting one hand and nature or popular culture on the other, hinges upon an acute ambivalence corroborates and power of the hieratic line itself. The painting a deeper philosophical question raised even as it asserts, the eternal by the method of depiction. Namely: can the mysti- threatens cal-fixative properties inviolability of Blakean lineament. of the Blakean outline hold back the dynamic, contingent, to dismantle, blance to the microscopic Christ in Limbo (fig. 6), for example, traces out an the cellular structures unresolved lower invertebrates In this image, which alludes to medieval manuscript illuminations 29 The creatures of limbo bear a strong resem- temporal-historical whips and drips of Pollock? The richly unsettling crisis of contour. about the function show- cross-sectional and segmented that Smithson diagrams of body plans of had been studying for years in his books on natural history (fig. 7). Thus ing Christ breaking souls out of their captivity in it is not only nature but specifically microscopic nature limbo, the body of Christ occupies the rough center of that appears the composition, surrounded brane that separates by a framing memby Smithson's limbo. This brings Smithson's work into a particular form of conflict with the eternal outline, him from the teeming mar- ginalia of the drawing. Were this an illustration to populate for it puts Blake's claim about the pure ideality of outline under microscopic Blake, who used clean linear sections to segregate scrutiny. G. K. Chesterton different orders of creation in his work, the bubble idealism as follows: "The most important would guarantee can be found in one sentence which he let fall as if surrounding the separation of Christ from the yeasty space. Yet Blake's bounding here is a semipermeable membrane line at best. A band of described Blake's linear conception by accident, 'Nature has no outline, but imagination has.' If a clear black line when looked at through a small creatures has managed to pass through it into microscope was seen to be a ragged and confused edge Christ's territory, and the lanky extremities of the crea- like a mop or a doormat, then Blake would say, 'So 8 Robert Smithson, Man of Ashes, 1961. Tempera and pencil, 18 x Estate of George 11 '? much the worse for the microscope.v 3/4 in. (45.7 x 29.8 em). It is precisely this microscopic B. Lester. populates and constitutes line that both Smithson's in Limbo essentially interprets Christ painting. Christ's descent into Limbo as a descent in scale, Alice-in-Wonderland style, into the microscopic world. The profound ambivalence of the painting derives from the fact that Smithson is not so ready as is Chesterton's microscopic line as microscope." "50 Blake to brush off the much the worse for the The entire situation threatens to be so much the worse for Christ as well. Squashed as if onto a microscope slide with a drop of pond water, peered at by some gigantic eye above, his fragile, mis-scaled body under threat from the liney forms, Christ is placed in immediate and uneasy juxtaposition with the "ragged and confused" origins of his own linear construction. The lines of limbo also embody history at the level of process. The image displays quite emphatically the history of the drawing itself, its development through repetition and gradual modification. has been produced The drawing in what we might call geological fashion, each mark building upon the last in a complex array of stratification use of sequential and subdivision. cell-like compartments, which is often occupied, protoplasm-style, Smithson's each of by a nucleic dot, allows him to build up the bodies of the creatures through a process of serial or modular accumulation. In limbo, each line implies and produces another; each line provides not a firm and final boundary for the form that it circumscribes but simply a kind of platform for the reflexive addition of another line. In fact, the creatures' illegibility from an iconographical standpoint only underlines their status as pure accretional draw- ing. This process of linear stratigraphy, moreover, contains its own echoes of mutational son seems fascinated repetition evolution. Smith- by the way in which the simple of a line or cellular unit across space tends to amplify minute distortions in the original form. Here, as in similar accretional drawings of the early sixties like Man of Ashes (fig. 81. Smithson develops the evolutionary potential of the doodle. There could be nothing more threatening to the etemallineaments of the icon than this chaos of lineage. The morphogenetic potential of Smithson's painting is closely tied to its appeal to microscopy and, by extension, to natural history. Smithson had grown 22 HISTORY IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS PAINTINGS up wanting to be a field naturalist or a zoologist. He Thus the flagellate line poses an enormous threat to had devoured books on the evolution of animals, the eternal body of Christ. We might even see this paint- painted a dinosaur ing as another version of the Flagellation-a mural in the hallway of his school at age seven, and made sure that the Smithson family vacations included visits to Ross Allen's reptile farm in Florida. He spent innumerable can Museum hours at the Ameri- of Natural History, and he even devel- oped a small natural-history family basement. museum of his own in the Thus he was early exposed to the idea of history as natural history, and to an image of the passage of time embodied of interpretation leap that may seem improbable at first but which appears more viable if we look also at other of the period. In Jesus Mocked (fig. 9, a kind paintings of iconographical hybrid of the Mockery and the Flagellation), a linear Christ is beset by whiplike lines, while Fallen Christ (fig. IO), a stations-of-the-cross episode, features a conspicuously Perhaps, in the evolving mor- ciliated crucifix.P then, the bounding line provides phological diagrams of the bodies ofliving creatures. A no mystical vision of Blake's Eternal; perhaps favorite source of these and other natural-historical simply a trap, an endless, classic textbook Animals Without Backbones (from which fig. 7 is taken). history. Perhaps line, in other words, is only a kind ~ Smithson's aunt Julia gave him this book for his twelfth Catholic theology a place where souls must wait, birthday; its spine eventually became so weakened excluded from the eternal beatific vision, until their diagrams was Ralph Buchsbaum's from repeated opening, decollated for Smithson's approached invertebrate and its pages so thoroughly collage projects, that it course of microbiology in order to question the pos- Christ in Limbo ultimately casts rescue. Smithson's doubt on the efficacy and the possibility most manuscript inhabitants of Limbo, Smithson's Christ has fallen extruding from the cell-like compartments tions of his own linear in the of setting free the into the border, trapped by the temporal the function of line of that illuminations this scene show Christ triumphantly sibility of the eternal outline. Note the ciliated extensions painting. These "cilia" complicate it is whorl of X of limbo. Limbo: from Latin "edge" or "border," in rescue; whereas status itself." Christ in Limbo draws further upon the dis- self-involuting implica- -- re£!esent;tion. - ------ as pure contour, not only because they visually "fuzz," Despair and the Historicity of Vision through the addition of tiny perpendicular For Blake, true art was the product of a kind of clean boundary line (as in Chesterton's units, a microscopic imaginative vision that transcended all merely cor- "doormat"), but also and especially because each poreal opticality. "He who does not imagine in individual "hair" is simply a line as line, freed from strong and better lineaments, and in stronger the function of bounding better light than his perishing mortal eye can see and contour, simply wav- ing free on the page. In this regard they directly con- does not imagine at all." The "Corporeal nect the drawing to Smithson's anxieties about Pollock. Eye" is a fallen instrument, Pollock's roiling line, supposedly Blake's mystical/proportional exiled through draughtsmanship, morbidly and Vegetative dependent upon everyday time and space. As such it can pro~ vide only fragmentary, contingent information: "The sneaks in through the back door of microbiological Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed illustration. tions / Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, And just as cilia function in flagellate ani- mals as primordial sensation instruments in an aqueous medium, of propulsion and so do these ciliated percep- fix'd into furrows of death." Like Blake, Smithson understood everyday vision to be a somatic opera- lines of the drawing introduce a suggestion of current, tion hopelessly atmosphere, tions. There is Eternal Vision and there is temporal and motion into the airless stillness of the Eternal Imagination. suggest contingency; In doing so they necessarily bending this way or that, having no "eternal" posture, the ciliated line encodes the immersion of Christ in specific (natural-] historical con- ditions, whether we want to call these the primordial vision; Smithson distinction entangled in spatiotemporal was deeply concerned distor- with the during this period and would remain so for the rest of his life. As he put it, "The Great Universal ishment soup or, following Blake, "The Sea of Time and Space." Vision is caving in, and the Age of Astonis beginning."33 For Smithson, 2) all of this had immediate ramifi- 9 Robert Smithson,Jesus Mocked, 1961, Watercolor on paper, 373/4 x 35 in. (96 x 89 em), Estate of George B. Lester. Robert Smithson, Fallen Christ, 1961, Ink and gouache on paper, 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61 cm). Estate of Robert Smithson. cations for his own painting. Which brand of vision ing that his "ikons" would be better off in a church would viewers bring to his work? How could he be sure than an art gallery, if only because it would be harder to that his own "ikons" would not become "weak Visions see them there: "The dark Roman churches of Time & Space" in the vulgar eyes of their viewers? to me because much of the ~rt can not be defiled by.vul, His anxiety about this becomes clear in a letter he gar liberal eves." In his essay "The Iconography appeal of wrote from Rome to Nancy Holt (whom he would later Desolation," marry). In it, Smithson be "looked at" in the same way that one looks at other described his discomfort at Smithson specified that icons were not to the fact that people were looking (or, more precisely, objects. ''Art was never objectified during the Ages "staring") at his paintings of Faith; art was an 'act' of worship. Icons would never while his show was on view at Lester's gallery. He complained, "People want be 'looked' at like a tourist looks at an objet d'art, even if he is a 'passionate sightseer." must stare in order to grant approval. There is some- of "looking at" contradicts devotion for Smithson, thing indecent about such staring." Staring seemed to because the spatiotemporal to stare with aggressive eagerness him blasphemous or they feel they or obscene; he felt that his paint- ings were violated, not consummated, by the vision of tourists, "like the private parts of butterflies [pinned] poreal eye prevents The practice entanglement devotional immediacy. vision defiles the icon by historicizing of the corCorporeal it, pulling it out of the realm of the timeless?" against the walls of ice cubes." He found himself mus- Smithson's work of this period, whether explicitly 25 religious or not, repeatedly imagines this historicizing spective was absolutely taboo. Smithson's visual defilement as a process of burial of the revela- and paintings are resolutely flat and hieratic, except of the artwork. In Alive in the Grave of tional presence drawings when he imports collage, which functions as a carrier Machines (fig. II), for example, Smithson surrounds of depth, distance, and point of view. I will have much an iconic human figure with images of automobiles and more to say about perspective and point of view- automotive as will Smithson-but parts cut from what appear to be maga- zine advertisements. Although this painting recalls that Smithson for now I will point out merely does not see perspective as an elastic Creeping Jesus in its concern with the detritus of modern operation of universal understanding consumption, kind of machine for the production of reified "views," it goes further by neatly equating this but instead as a trope of waste with the theme of vision. The "machines" fixed on scraps of paperwaste. in the grave of machines becomes an artifact of a single angle of vision at a function simultaneously as images of waste and as proxies for vision itself. single moment Smithson painted blobby, eyelike forms in the margins of many of his 1961 paintings Creeping (including Each perspectival view in history. These view-scraps, which participate structurally in the junkyard car-parts aesthetic of the collage as a Jesus [see fig. 5J, in which they lurk among the house- whole, serve to link profane vision with the passage of hold appliances). time and the ruined accumulations Here, in the grave of machines, the of history. History cast-off tires and hubcaps clearly evoke eyes (in case we is a junkyard, and each act of lowercase-v vision tosses should miss the connection, another artifact onto the pile. Smithson's decision to what is unmistakably Smithson has added an eye at the upper left corner of the painting). The hubcap patterns suggest the stria- tions of the cornea or the splay of eyelashes. The eye-tires link vision with a specifically automotive here is deliberate prominently and important. iconography The car features in many of Smith sons collages of this (tired eyes?) also suggest Blake's organic "Vegetative" period (Creeping Jesus included) as a representative eyes by evoking anemones, history and indeed of everything that prevents access symmetrical jellyfish, and other radially invertebrates. of to presence and eternity. First, for Smithson, auto parts Yet these eyes are not merely protoplasmic; there is another, equally crucial, set of meanings condensed had deeply personal connections his father had worked for Auto-Lite (an auto parts com- into their radial forms. The forms are organic, but pany). In an interview they are also machines, interesting suggesting photographic aper- films-where lower right). Smithson thus equates the organic and the automated, mechanical, marching of Smithson recalled "some things that he used to bring home-like tures or film reels (note the small movie camera at applying the pejorative associations to his own history: they had all these car parts sort of you know, like marching carburetors spark plugs and and that sort of thing." And fallen vision to both. The organic eyeball is no better Smithson's maternal grandfather had been (of all things) than the photographic; a wheel maker. Cars also function in Smithson's both are estranged from the "Great Universal Vision," and both produce distortions. as representatives Given these themes of visual distortion consumer and displace- ment, it is no accident that the grave of machines is filled with collage. Note that Smithson does not use col- work of the accelerated pace of postwar production and obsolescence, suggesting speed and "action" and thus, in Smithson's mythol- ogy of the period, reified waste (''Action leads to dead lage for the man's body (which, in fact, resembles some matter"). Most importantly, the car is both a historical sort of exercise in the proportional ideal)-he and existential of tragedy; the flipped it only to construct the population of vision-machines in the surrounding space. Collage occupies, indeed constitutes, ~ the space of mundane But thereTSsomethillg uses chassis and scattered tires in the grave of machines clearly evoke the death of Jackson Pollock." accumulation. elseabout Smithson's use instrument The tragedy of the automobile combines here with the tragedy of collage and perspective. Thus of collage that links it even more strongly to vision: the tire falling away into perspective space at the lower only through collage does Smithson right corner of the work amounts allow perspective to a kind of his- into this or any other painting of this period. For all torical ruin. Distorted by perspective, the photographic his interest in the linear during these years, linear per- image of the tire is embedded 26 HISTORY IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS in time and space PAINTINGS Robert Smithson, Alive in the Grave of Machines, '961. Collage and ink on paper, 24 x '4 in. (61 x 35.6 cm). Courtesy of the Collection of Andrea Rosen, New York. and thus suggests the fossilized remnant-like Paleozoic cephalopod -of some a single moment of vision from a single point of view. The upside-down car result of skepticism, which is itself defined as a ten- dency to see things in their outward, fragmentary temporary, lights, giving the impression and of a dis- above it is the detritus of a different moment, a different mantled and pulverized world, rather than in their view. These wasted "views" are the fallen remnants inner essences, which maintain an eternal form and of Blake's Eternal Imaginative Vision and, like Humpty- truth. As Chesterton Dumpty, they cannot be put back together again. As "It means believing one's immediate impressions Smithson the expense of one's more permanent and positive wrote in one of his letters to Lester, "The noted in his book on Blake, at vision can't pull it self [sic] together because the break- generalizations." downs and distortions mere Ringing of facts at a great conception" and "a mere "Breakdown"-a -was are separated by despair." term that also refers to automobiles also calls skepticism "a attack by masses of detail," both of which might serve just the right term to use here. Human vision, as fairly accurate descriptions like collage and like urban junk, is scrappy, disconsolate, and disconnected, Chesterton of the relationship the tires to the man in Smithson's scattered across space and through of painting,38 Smithson was clear in his letters to Lester about time. The best that fallen humanity can hope for, with- the connection of despair with everyday vision: "The out access to "the Great Universal Vision," is a junkyard deadly effect of despair breaks down or distorts ... all of visual data,36 vision, confounding Eugenie Tsai has pointed out that 1961 was an auspicious year for collage, with the Museum ern Art's Art of Assemblage exhibition of Mod- mounting a historical survey from Picasso to John Chamberlain. 1961, collage was already an important burgeoning street-junk aesthetic Rauschenberg, ble mire." Another connection he made between despair, skepticism, and vision was his frequent use of the symbol of the tear. Indeed, in paintings like Tear By part of the of the Beats and of artists like Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, divine and worldly into a horri- Robert and Jasper Johns. Indeed, Alive in the (fig. 13) Smithson emphasizes the eye as an organ of excretion rather than reception; beneath the crying eyes grows a heap of archaeological waste, indistinguishable from many of Smithson's opaque geohistorical other depictions of detritus. The visual field consti- Grave afMachines can be seen as Smithson's critical tuted by this lachrymose commentary of eternal truths. The "Great Universal Vision," we on the emergence of these artists, espe- looking prevents a clear view cially when we consider that the painting was pro- might say, is refracted beyond recognition duced at almost precisely the same time that Kaprow filled skeptical-historical held his Yard happening out, rather than focuses and constitutes, at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Kaprow's installation forced viewers to wade through In the epigraph hundreds Smithson of old tires piled in the courtyard of the gal- by the tear- view. Everyday vision drowns of "The Iconography its object. of Desolation," quotes the following passage from Alice lery (fig. 12); Smithson's painting buries a man under in Wonderland: a heap of hubcaps. Alice as she swam about, trying to find her way out." Like Kaprow, Smithson fascinated by junk, by the ever-accelerating postwar consumerism and its attendant is clearly pace of accumulation of waste. But he resists giving in to its appeal. For Smithson in 1961, Kaprow's Yard would have seemed the perfect embodiment of "the pit of despair" into '''I wish I hadn't cried so much!' said The idea of being drowned by the waste products of the corporeal eye could hardly be expressed more succinctly. Smithson would explore this idea again and again in his later work, although, seeking less affective equivalents, he would come to replace "teardrops" which he felt all modern artists were falling: "Accord- with glass, mirrors, and similar materials as his agents ing to St. Thomas Aquinas despair is the worst sin." of refraction.J? "The Spirit reveals itself differently in every age, provided dispair [sic] doesn't crush revelation.r'? Smithson frequently refers to despair in his writ- Iconoclasm As the summer ofl961 approached, Smithson looked ings of this period; this usage is not offhanded. Despair forward to visiting Italy for his show. He mentioned is a religious term. Throughout to Lester that he was especially interested in seeing early the religious litera- ture in Smithson's library it is identified as the inevitable Renaissance 28 HISTORY art in Florence, the frescoes by Pietro IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS PAINTINGS Allan Kaprow, Yard, May 1961. Courtesy Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (980063). Cavallini in the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, the catacombs, and the paintings of Botticelli ("I like Botticelli, because he burnt so many of his vain works after hearing the terrifying prophecies of Savonarola."). But if Smithson had hoped to find in Rome the timeless tranquility of pre-Renaissance tradition, the Eternal in the Eternal City, his trip turned out to be a disappcintment. His letters home to Nancy describe his expe- riences in the city in detail, but his observations feature the scatological, the ornamental, and the dispropor- tional rather than the spiritual ideal. He finds that even the Eternal City of Rome roils in "tutti-frutti" and "beads and fake jewels and piles of hair doos [sic]." What's more, he describes all this quotidiana with irony, humor, and even relish.t? Smithson would later admit that visiting Rome had only exacerbated the tension he felt, already evident in his paintings, between his desire for timelessness and his fascination with history and decay. Speaking in T972 about his trip, he discussed the impact that the city's millennia-worth of ruins (which he associates with the Baroque and the grotesque) had upon him. He said: "So my trip to Rome was sort of an encounter nightmare with European history as a ... my disposition was toward the Byzan- tine. But I was affected by the baroque in a certain way. These two things kind of clashed." He also commented, "There was a kind of grotesqueness that appealed to me. As T said, while I was in Rome 1 was reading William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and the imagery in that book corresponded grotesque massive accumulation tive rituals. There was something in a way to a kind of of all kinds of rejecabout the passage of time."?' With this, Smithson joined a long tradition of American writers and artists deeply affected by what we might call the abject materialism by the experience of Roman history, of having seen (in Henry James's words) "the past, the ancient world, as you stand there, bodily turned up with the spade and transformed from an immaterial, inaccessible fact of time into a matter of soils and surfaces." What might earlier have seemed to Smithson, an opportunity from across the Atlantic, to be to access the spiritual eternity of Chris- tian tradition, turned into an opportunity to observe eternity operating in and through the material, in and through the Baroque, in and through objects and images and soils and surfaces. The acute tension that " Robert Smithson, Tear, 1963. Gouache, photo, and crayon on paper, 24 x 26 . In. (51 x 66 em). Estate of Robert Smithson. i \ \ I Smithson had previously felt between eternity and He first mapped some of the procedures this dissolution of in the second half of his 1961 "Icono- graphy of Desolation' distortions of worldly vision, becomes inextricable from the general jumble of "views" taken from different history began to dissolve while in Rome.t" essay. The first part of the essay, from which I have been quoting throughout this angles and rendered in different media. In the following passage, for example, Smithson alludes to several different modes of representation; jected to photography, the divine is sub- film, painting, and engraving: chapter, shares in the tortured and contrary tone of his "A specter of Creeping Jesus is strontiumized springtime Cedar Street Tavern through the eye of a safety pin. A letters to Lester. About halfway through the essay, however, Smithson's tone shifts, as he begins peal of woes. A nameless augur pronounces to provide an ironic celebration of that which he had diction: 'Convert to Hoboken, previously feared: the breakdown The unpainted vision departs .... between the timeless of the separation and the temporal, between the sacred and the profane. The main transition with this paragraph: occurs "We now discover an iconoscope in the the bene- and cry unto her!' A wolf-mart (geniuses know where he lives) howls on a fire escape in Chelsea. Fac me plagis vulnerart. Who call paint it steadily? In St. Patrick's Cathedral a wax pope watches Luis that shall forgive the divorce of heaven and hell while Bunuel's Viridian.a in tones of crimson. The graphic it flashes before us for our selective graces-the needle pierces the Hairy-Heart-atrobilious and pieces of Divine Catastrophe. bits Such a scope has lost acid squirts onto canvas thin as a spider's web."45 It is important all division and order. One must pick over the scat- to keep in mind, of course, that tered icons the way a bum picks over the dumps. The Smithson's iconoscope will now be plugged in."43 into a heap of imagery, but also (in the same motion) The first thing to note about this "iconoscope," which represents the literal "breaking point" of the essay, is that Smithson clastic instrument. conjures it for use as an icono- The device reduces divinity to iconoscope not only throws the icon down consigns it to the rubble of time. The divine has fallen into history, into the twentieth absurdly century, where it mixes with safety pins, Hoboken, and Bunuel films. The Bufiuel reference is especially important here, "bits and pieces." After the iconoscope is "plugged in," not only because Bunuel was well known for his the essay's controlled contrasts between sacred and blasphemies, profane break into a stuttering for Smithson, progression of overlap- but also because the medium of film itself, performs the ultimate blasphemy: it ping imagery and shifting modes of address: "Here draws the icon out into space and time simultaneously. begins the canticle of Philomela, It is no accident that filmic discourse frames much of the screech owl. Itys. ltys. 'Let the insects do the suffering for us!' says the Word Dissected. Roll on! A pale man wanders off the stage and falls into a backfiring redemption the germs of vice and virtue. Smashing fuming down over the essay: "Lights! Camera! Action! Prepare for the Practical Martyrdom! A clever soul places the body into a deep-freeze on a bed of thoms, whereupon proclaims, the soul 'You'll forget ice-cream once you taste ice- the rocks goes the Virgin's coffin into the foaming con- blood.' Cut. Print it! Listen to the sounding brass or tentment the tinkling cymbal: take your pick. 1-2-3-+ Forward! surrounded by progressive Christendom. THE LIGHT SHINES IN DARKNESS!"44 Smithson had already stated in the essay that Footage, more footage! Dies irae, dies ilia. Bring leon400 into the ultraviolet rays."46 Such spatiotemporal despair distorts vision, "confounding divine and worldly extension, such a drawing into a horrible mire." This "horrible mire," of course, out into "footage," does considerable is exactly what we get after Smithson instantaneous iconoscope. The iconoscope represents plugs in the Smithson defilement of the icon, its filmic fall from grace into giving in to despair, fully allowing himself (and us) to space, scatters it throughout look at the icon. Whereas previously Smithson uum, where it interpenetrates had violence to the integrity of the icon. This temporal-visual the dimensional contin- the field of mundane preserved the image of the divine body lying intact, alive, modernity. It might be compared, in fact, to a drawing- and alone under a pile of visual-historical and-quartering he shatters its contours and proportions. waste, now The icon, sub- jected like all other objects to the fragmentations and of the divine body. (Indeed, Smithson would later write about film's connection to evisceration; in his 1972 essay "The Spiral Jetty" he described the J' way his film editor "pulled lengths of film out of the "Entropy" provides a good comparison. movieola with the grace of a Neanderthal pulling that the heat death of the universe is imminent, intestines from a slaughtered At any rate, man and woman seal themselves in 1961 Smithson mammoth.") was already imagining the icono- Recognizing a into a hothouse in order to preserve themselves from the rapid dissipa- clastic potential of film. In fact, a close examination tion of energy occurring outside. Yet the woman realizes of the typescript that to remain sealed inside the house is only to delay of "The Iconography of Desolation" essay at the Archives of American Art reveals that, rather the inevitable, and, with a "clasm" of her own, decides than "iconoscope," Smithson had originally used the to get it over with: "She moved swiftly to the window term "kinetoscope" before Callisto could speak; tore away the drapes and (Edison's precursor projector) to identify his iconoclastic of the movie instrument. It smashed out the glass with two exquisite hands which was only at the last minute, apparently, that he added came away bleeding and glistening the neologism "iconoscope" and turned to face the man on the bed and wait with "kinetoscopes" on the typescript.e? It might be tempting iconoclastic over the rubbed-out him until the moment to interpret breakage as a refutation Smithson's But there is a sense in which the scene seen through iconoscope has managed to recuperate lessness that had once inhabited was reached, and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant Smithson's of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion."48 all of the time- the intact icons. The iconoscope offers a certain cold comfort-it of equilibrium when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside of all of his pre- vious ambitions toward transcendence. with splinters; Just as the final equilibrium in Pynchon's story has a "tonic" effect, so too does Smithson's man- icono- scope bring about a palpable sense of relief Smithson's ages, by bringing the opposite spheres of sacred and invention mundane transition from a youthful horror at the inevitable ruina- into a dedifferentiated a form of transcendence The pressure mundane equilibrium, to wrest out of the iconoclasm itself. differential here inaugurates words "forgiven," the very definition of beauty. With the iconoclasm, from a discrete, differentiated Smithson's to an infinitely scattered, dedifferentiated, produces But this is an evenly distributed previously embodied chaos and disorder. disorder; the Unity point of timelessness which, in its static equilibrium, in the bounded icon is perversely the icon undergoes an immediate and total transformation by the inertia of iconoscopic equilibrium. To be sure, iconoscope his tion of the world to his later embrace of entropy as between the sacred and the is released, in Smithson's of the iconoscope glinting beauty, recuperates lapidary field homogeneity, and the very sense of eternity regained, after the iconoclasm, by the refined, homoge- originally sought in the intact icon. The iconoscope neous consistency provides its own view of eternity, although that eternity of its dispersion. This homogeneity, this dissipation, ensures an end to the struggle between the sacred and the profane. In a classic thermodynamic transformation, the now weaves itself throughout instead of remaining an entire fractured field sequestered within an iconic boundary. And indeed, within a few months of "plug- energies expended to keep the two realms apart have ging in" the iconoscope, been exhausted, Lester that he had discovered that "the way up is the way and all further tension is impossible. was writing to Smithson's iconoscope instrument, and his iconoclastic maneuver is a key early Smithson would from then on reach "downward toward of his career-long interest in entropy infinity." He had glimpsed a way to suggest the eternal manifestation and the methodologies course of Smithson's then despairingly is, in this sense, an entropic Smithson of equilibrium. In fact, the essay-obsessively breaking, the boundaries preserving, which down." Instead of reaching upward toward infinity, through the temporal. struggled If Smithson with the tension aims of mysticism had previously between the eternalizing and the temporal despair of skep- preserve an ontological differential between the sacred ticism, he has now developed something and the profane, mimics the plotline of many of the an equilibrium stories about entropy that he was reading at the time. mysticism or mystical skepticism. This "mystical skep- The final paragraph of Thomas Pynchon's 1959 story ticism," in fact, would go on to inform Smithson's 32 HISTORY approaching between the two, a kind of skeptical IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS PAINTINGS crystallographically inspired work of the mid-to-late six- is static; it tries to overcome movement in space or ties. As he wrote in a 1967 article about the crystalline time .... labyrinths of thirties architecture, a glance; its unity should be immediately "Belief is not the motive behind the timeless, but rather a skepticism the generating is [T]he whole of a picture should be taken in at evident, and the supreme quality of a picture, the highest measure of its power to move and control the visual imag- force."49 ination, should reside in its unity. And this is something to be grasped only in an indivisible instant of time. Smithson; Greenberg; Fried J have suggested that Smithson's work of 1961 harbors No expectancy is involved in the true and pertinent a consistent impulse toward timelessness, experience first in its ambivalent attempt to defend an instantaneous of "revelatory" q. aggressions reception model against the historicizing of biological, consumerist, porality, and then in its construction and visual tem- of a broader sense of eternity from the infinite accwnulations of a painting; a picture, I repeat, does not 'come out' the way a story, or a poem, or a piece of music does, It's all there at once, like a sudden revelation .... You are summoned point in the continuum and gathered into one of duration."si We might well wonder at this point why Smith- of histor- ical ruination itself. Before moving on to the next phase son was bothering to argue with Greenberg. of Smithson's shared Greenberg's career, 1 would like briefly to address some of the implications standing of Smithson's of this reading for our underposition in art-historical ratives about modernism in the early sixties, particularly as that position is mapped in his relationship two most conspicuous nar- art-critical to his contemporaries, Clement Greenberg andMichaeLFried. Since Smithsons and understood He clearly interest in "sudden revelation" along with Greenberg that in order to procure it one needed to define a mode of reception that would factor out the temporal and material extension of the work. The sticking point for Smithson was not Greenberg's Greenberg aim but rather his method. claimed that great art revealed itself to the relation to these figures has usually been defined as viewer in a purely optical fashion, defining the optical an outright opposition as that which could transcend that marks and defines Smith- son's key role in an emergent postmodernity. it is Greenberg, the experience matter and time. For of the work should involve instructive to reassess this view with an eye to the the impression assumptions and exists only optically like a mirage." 52 that Smithson shares with both critics. It is true that Smithson Greenberg's Smithson, explicitly contested aesthetics during these and later years. In "that matter is incorporeal, weightless, of course, could not subscribe to It went against everything this optical transcendence. a jab no doubt intended at Greenberg, in 1961 Smith- he knew about the limitations son referred to postpainterly etative Eye" and its temporal and material complica- painting as "the latest of the "Corporeal Veg- obscure mess of abstraction" and specifically disparaged tions. He recognized Kenneth Noland's concentric paintings (Greenberg's attempting favorites) by claiming that "those without souls can aration of Spirit from Matter. What is crucial to under- continue seeing truth in targets.v'" But the critical ani- stand here is that Smithson mus Smithson because he aims at transcendence, squabbles spondences demonstrates with Greenberg in these and other obscures the deeper corre- between the two writers. Both Smithson and Greenberg, for example, were concerned about that Greenberg was essentially to use opticality to perform a dualistic sepfaults Greenberg not but because (with his invalid "optical" method based on the very corporeal space that it aims to transcend) he is destined to fail to attain it.53 Several years later, Greenberg's the problems that historical time poses to the instanta- brilliant protege neous, revelatory artwork. According to Greenberg Michael Fried would also come to struggle with the in 1959, avant-garde threat that temporal, spatial, and phenomenal artwork can succeed only to the extension degree that it separates itself from duration. In lan- pose to the "at-onceness" of the artwork. Fried's semi- guage similar to Smithson's nal I967 article 'Art and Objecthcod" framed this strug- assertion that revelation must eclipse the decaying force of duration, Green- gle as the menace of "literalism" (by which he meant, berg argues that "pictorial art in its highest definition essentially, minimalism's 33 activation of everyday space and time) to the very survival of art itself. Smithson intimacies of modernist conviction in the face of the quarreled infinities publicly, and famously, with Fried over the article. In the narrative of postwar art criticism, the of phenomenological space and durational time. He is careful to expose and to ridicule the spiri- Smithson/Fried bout is usually interpreted as a collision tualist overtones of Fried's position, painting Fried of personalities that had been theretofore as a religious fanatic who attempts, "in a manner wor- wholly incommensurate philosophical following trajectories. thy of the most fanatical purita n," to ward off the Fried's article is seen as the swan song of a retroguard terrors of worldly space and time by ritualistically transcendent employing "Seven Deadly Isms, verbose diatribes, scan- Smithson modernism-a song that galvanized (who seemingly swooped in from his own dalous refutations, a vindication bizarre world of science fiction and geology) to propose shrill but brilliant disputes a new paradigm 'objecthood,' for an art of the concrete, the dura- of Stanley Cavell, on 'shapehood' dark curses, infamous vs. claims, etc." But tional, and the entropic.X But Fried's passionate we can now say that the acuity of Smithson's defenses of art from objecthood cism (Fried himself employed many of the same strategies that Smithson had earlier used to defend icons from objecthocd. uncanny resemblance Note, for example, the "brilliant" has recently described and Smithson ful and interesting" critic of his work in general) was due largely to his intimate familiarity on duration in 1961 and Fried's in 1967. Smithson, nature of Fried's own struggle. Perhaps 1961: "Revelation is eclipsed by the decaying force of sarcasm deflect attention "Soon there will be nothing to stand on except the webs of manufactured throbbing time warped among and condescension with the Smithson's were attempts to from his own previous affinities with Fried's quasi-religious galaxies of space, space, and more it as as "by far the most power- between Smithson's thoughts duration." criti- aims at revelation.S? The ferocious wit of Smithson's letter has also space.")5 Fried, 1967: "The literalist preoccupation tended to obscure the fact that, even as late as 1967, with time-more precisely, with the duration of the experience ... confronts the beholder ... with the end- His approach to Fried was similar to his earlier approach lessness not just of objecthood to Greenberg but of time; or as Smithson had not rescinded his own claims to eternity. inasmuch as he attacked Fried not for though the sense which, at bottom, theatre addresses aiming at the eternal but for going about it the wrong is a sense of temporality, way. Near the end of the letter, in a passage often of time both passing and to come, simultaneously approaching and receding, as if overlooked, apprehended the result of skepticism, in an infinite perspective.vw Such resemblances of Smithson's show how an understanding religious paintings sider his relationship forces us to recon- to high modernist criticism. Smithson nicely encapsulates comments that "eternal time is not belief."58 This phrase Smithson's own transition from a model of eternity based on belief to one based on skepticism. His tone toward Fried is condescending Fried's discomfort in the face of everyday duration had because he knows that he has already tried Fried's once been Smithson's like Fried, eternalizing and horrible developed a better one. In a postlapsarian had attempted "endlessness" paintings own. Smithson, to focus the confusion of time. Smithson's writings and iconic of 1961 had already worked through what Fried saw as the mortal challenge of literalism modernist Objecthood" to the artwork. In many ways, Fried's "Art and can be interpreted eration of Smithson's Smithson's as a secularized "Iconography reit- of Desolation." celebrated arguments with Fried in the late sixties, therefore, must be reexamined. sider the letter to the editor that Smithson Con- published in Artforum magazine in October of 1967, attacking ''Art and Objecthood." In the letter, Smithson Fried for quixotically world it is useless to attempt to stuff the reified accumulations of history back into a single point or "instant." Instead it is better to adopt a strategy of infinite skepticism, infinite fragmentation, infinite duration, in order to arrive at eternal time. Smithson's historical transcendence was inclusionary while Fried's was exclusionary, but it was a brand of transcendence Chapter 2 will explore Smithson's nonetheless. inclusionary tran- scendence of the late sixties, and the crystalline strategies of its achievement, lampoons "cling[ing] for dear life" to the strategy, has found it wanting, and has Smithson's not be understood 34 HISTORY in more detail. religious period, therefore, as a detour of misguided IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS PAINTINGS should mysticism that postponed the launch of a properly postmodern career. Smithson's aversion to "action," his hopes for historical transcendence, and his dalliance with the comforts of absolute stillness would not be "corrected" in his later work; rather they would be instrumental in establishing the dialectical tensions that have made his work so influential in the first place. After all, Smithson would still be quoting Chesterton as late as 1972 in the epigraph to his "Spiral Jetty" essay; phrases pulled intact from his "Iconography of Desolation" essay would pop up again in a series of 1970 preliminary sketches for a film called Tropical Cargo; his understanding of vision as a machine tion of oblique perspectival for the produc- artifacts would underlie all of his later work with sculpture, photography, and film; and his investigation of the volatility of contour when examined microscopically would have a profound effect on his later experiments with the instability of boundary and scale.w In short, Smithson's paintings introduced a permanent tranquility religious inflection toward into a body of work that might otherwise have participated unhesitatingly in the aesthetics of "action" of the early sixties. The vehicle of that tranquility would change from Christian tallographyand of exhaustion four-dimensional revelation to crysgeometry, to a rhetoric or acedia, and to a fractal aesthetics locked in recursive symmetries. But the stillness itself would remain. The essential aims of Smithson's dalliance with religion - his struggle to imagine a totalizing perspective outside of human time and historywould remain operative in his work for the rest of his career. His challenge would now be to transcend history not by eluding it but by working through and upon it. 35 THE DEPOSITION OF TIME One of the canonical specimens of Italian Mannerist painting, known for the audacity with which it challenges the conventions of its high Renaissance prede- Deposition altarpiece (I525-z8) cessors, is Pontormds in the Capponi Chapel at Santa Pelicita in Florence (fig. 14). Scholars of Renaissance art have long noted the painting's cryptic, even disturbing, Shearman has described the unusual of the composition, gonal separation qualities. John rotational effect which derives from the ortho- of Mary and Christ along with the spiraling contours traced by the limbs and drapery of the figures: ''As the body of Christ is lowered forward it also pivots, it seems, on the crouching figure in the center beneath the knees, while the movements around the Virgin flow reciprocally back to the center-line at the top." And yet any suggestion of dynamism that might be implied composition is immediately Irrational by the screwlike retracted by other aspects of the painting. shifts in scale and color seem to fracture the very space in which the image is constructed, venting the buildup of pictorial absence of atmospheric and the evacuation momentum. pre- The effects, the icy, jarring colors, of the central axis of the compo- sition plot the figures in a frozen vacuum. As Arnold Hauser has observed, a feeling of aftermath, a "sense of resolved tension," exists in Pontormds choreographic work, as if the energy of high Renaissance painting had been petrified, decentered, and redistributed a series of attenuated across forms. The result, to borrow a phrase from Daniel B. Rowland, is "a world where action is impossible." I The Capponi altarpiece has traditionally been labeled a Depozitione, although some have argued that it should instead be considered a Lamentation, Entombment, or Pieta. The confusion as to its intended subject matter is due to the absence of either a crucifix or a tomb in the painting, and to the enigmatic disposition of the figures, whose poses are not firmly associable '. [acopo Pontormo. The Descent jrom the Cross, 1525-28. 10.3 x 6-4 ft. (3.1 x 2 m). Capponi Chapel, S. Felicita, Florence, Italy. '5 Cvrostosis. 1968. Robert Smithson, Painted steel, 73 5/8 X 54 '/S x 39' 14 in. (187 x 137.5 x 99.7 em). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Joseph H, Hirshhorn, '972. ,6 Robert Smithson, Untitled, 1964. Blue metal frame and orange plastic mirrors, 81 x 35 x 10 in. (205.7 x 89 x 25-4 em). Estate of Robert Smithson. with any specific iconographic program. This confusion serves as a further insinuation of stasis: severed from particular in the scripture, narrative references the painting is able to explore a more abstract and radically atemporal postdepositional calls Pontormo's condition. Leo Steinberg image "visionary and ahistortcal" for this reason. Indeed, by eliminating and abjuring the certainties dynamism of narrative, seems to suggest that the meaning Pontormo of Christ's post- Crucifixion departure from the human historical world can be expressed only by performing the exhaustion of time itself." Some commentators exhaustion have interpreted this as an abdication of religious faith; Giuliano Brigante, perhaps trading on the traditional asso- ciation of sloth with sin, notes that there is "surely no expression ofreligious feeling ... in the tired beauty of the forms here. The twining bodies, gliding into the spiral of the perspective against a cold, glittering sky convey only a sense of painful languor ... their sadness is really so desperate and languishing that it can scarcely be called Christian grief." Others, however, see the painting's renunciation of humanist dynamism as a new way of evoking a "higher" spiritual realm free from the futile gyrations of worldly space and time. The languor of the figures, in this sense, is itself transcendent. The painting suggests the winding-down of time and motion and amounts, in Steinberg's words, to an "eternal presentiment Smithson scrutinized of redemption.v' Pontormds altarpiece carefully. Although his letters from Italy in 1961 do not mention any visits to the Capponi Chapel, it is clear that by the mid-sixties he had, at the very least, closely examined the painting in reproduction. several other books on Mannerism, Along with he had a copy of Daniel B. Rowland's 1964 Mannerism: Style and Mood, which prominently features Pontormo's a chapter called "Two Depositions: 38 THE DEPOSITION OF TIME painting in An Introduction to Mannerism in Art History." Smithson annotated phrases throughout been especially interested in Rowland's references what we might call the depositional temporality Pontonnds Because the transfer short of Smithson's from pre- to post-Renaissance the chapter and seems to have panied by his transition from representation to tion, it is sometimes of continuities painting, its suggestion of a "timeless frozen paintings sculptural pleasant landscapes Gyrostasis as a conversion ofPontor~o's of Perugino and Raphael."? The aftereffects of Smithson's can be surmised encounter throughout passion with and the work that followed it. Yet just as we can see Mannerist into the syntax of crystallography, understand his work to abstrac- difficult to trace the thematic between his religious world completely foreign to the full daylight and the Pontormo allegiance sensibility was accom- so can we other aspects of Smithson's sculpture in of the mid- and late sixties. In a piece like his 1968 terms of its translation Gyrostasis (fig. 15), a fabrication of painted steel com- raphy. In some cases, such as the shared concern posed of triangular solids proceeding with asymmetry lurking behind the spiral structure both Pontormo's Deposition and Smithson's in a diminishing series to form a rigid spiral, Smithson own winding-down produced of time. His description other of his "gyrostatic" sculptures unlocking of this and painting: was reading. ''All Smithson inactive, and stopped. Move- literature that Smithson In others, however, little translation mentions in his statement systems" that above, for exam- ment is impossible. Temporal duration is excluded. ple, are systems of growth that occur through All turning is hung in suspension. ular accretion. !he name of this growth process, in in a state of rigid equilibrium, Everything exists molec- parlance, is deposition. crystallographic as in crystallographic of Gyrostasis, requires extensive digres- will be necessary. The "crystallographic are brought to a static state. The rotation is non-dynamical, these connections sion into the crystallographic might just as well be used as a wall label for Pontormo's rotational progressions his from iconography to crystallog- systems at the point of least action."! "Non-Dynamic Time" From approximately 1962 to 1964, Smithson refrained Gyrostasis is one of many sculptural installations From Icon to Crystal: of the mid- and late sixties through which Smithson explored what he called "the crystalline structure from exhibiting of his work, undergoing instead an time.,,6 Resolutely abstract, with hard, cool surfaces and intense program of reading and reflection. When he quasi-mathematical emerged logics of construction and arrange- from this self-imposed exile, he began ment, this work could not seem to depart more sub- exhibiting a new series of sculptures that he would later stantially from the religious painting that preceded it. describe But as the connection to Pontormo's as his first mature work. The new work signaled an acute stylistic shift; whereas in 1961 he had Deposition sug- gests, Smithson's new work did not represent nearly so been filling page after page with writhing, metamorphic radical a departure figure drawings, by T96S he was having disaffected from his earlier mystical priorities as one might conclude. Pontormo's painting is reprised sculptures in Smithson's sculpture: both works use a crystalline him by local professionals. rhetoric of aftermath to evoke a "timeless frozen world." sculptures originated Even so, Smithson's lography and included adaptation of Pontormo (as of plastic, mirrors, and steel fabricated for (derived from the structure great deal about the way Smithson's idea of mystical series of untitled timelessness that suggested by the time he produced crystalline Gyrostasis. Rather than attempting to revitalize a Byzan- these sculptures and several, though to of ice crystals) and a polygonal wall structures tine formula of devotional immediacy by returning incorporated tals, used mirrors in which they were installed in which Renaissance dynamism, fragmented, retfied. them. Describing I Smithson mirrored not themselves "action" of Renaissance has now adopted a Mannerist model of transcendence, to "crystallize" surfaces, shaped like crys- either the rooms or objects brought near his Four-Sided Vortex, for example, called it "a well of triangular and calcified at the brittle entropic end of its existence, any object may be placed in here-it adopts its own form of crystalline eternity. kinds of delicate polyhedra."? 39 (fig. 16) forms and facets. Many of the state of affairs prior to the malignant spatio-temporal and modern art, Smithson of these study of crystal- pieces such as Cryosphere opposed to some other religious painter) can tell us a had changed The structure in Smithson's mirrorsreveals all At this point Smithson essays in exhibition also began to publish catalogues and major art peri- at hieratic, revelatory drawing in the early sixties, Smithson had already concluded that a wholesale rejec- odicals. In his writing, too, he borrowed liberally from tion of history was impossible. crystallographic sculptures, concepts and terminology. In his critical essays on Donald Judd (1965) and on minimal to action, allowed Smithson sculpture movement (1966), he made frequent between minimalist comparisons form and crystal morphology, and His crystallographic while carrying forward his earlier aversion to incorporate time and in a static form. It suggested a way of fracturing and freezing the movement of time, convert- equated the new methods of seriality with the processes ing it from a dynamic to a depositional state. In addition, of crystal growth. In other essays of this period, such by avoiding the taint of the organic, crystallography as "The Crystal Land" (1966) and "Towards the Devel- permitted opment of an Air Terminal Site" (1967), he discussed with the creeping historicity of nature: as he wrote in the landscape a letter to Martin Friedman, itself as if it were undergoing of crystallization. a process Although his writings after 1968 Smithson to bypass his earlier discomfort ruled by the temporal "The Natural world is (dynamic history), whereas the were rarely as explicit in their crystallographic reference crystalline (largely because by then he had toned down much dynamic time).'?" Crystallography also served, in a way of the science-fictional that would have major implications tain motifs borrowed tenor of his first writings), cerfrom crystallography remain operative in his work throughout would his career. Crystallography became an important discourse through which Smithson purposes for the of this book) history.8 In a 1972 interview with Paul Cummings Archives of American the importance described to translate his transcendent more palatable Art, Smithson of crystallography it as the breakthrough for the acknowledged (non- for his career, leanings into a vocabulary to the emerging "cool" sensibility of the sixties. I should caution that Smithson's would develop his philosophies of vision, language, and (most importantly world is ruled by the atemporal work of these years should be understood as loosely, rather than precisely, "crystallographic." Smithson based aspects of his work on a few essential principles structure: he was not interested of crystal in producing replicas in his work and he of actual crystals or a body of installations that allowed him forms would derive, with the predictability required of whose to resolve the struggles of his early paintings and launch scientific accuracy, from laws of crystal formation. his mature career. After telling Cummings about his Nor did his ideas about the relationship 1961 trip to Rome and the simultaneous fascination porality and crystallography and repulsion that he had felt toward the jumble between tem- develop into a single, internally coherent model of history. There is no empir- of history, he went on to describe his next step: "Well, ical crystal to which we can point that might serve as a gradually perfect illustrational microcosm of Smithson's historical I recognized an area of abstraction was really rooted in crystal structure. that In fact, I guess universe. Smithson seems instead to have borrowed the first piece of this sort that I did was in 1964. It isolated motifs from various areas of crystallography in was called the Enantiomorphic order to model different features of his ideas about Chambers. And I think that was the piece that really freed me from all these the structure preoccupations of growth defect in crystals, the screw dislocation, to with history."? What was it about crystal structure that delivered Smithson from his "preoccupations Crystallography with history"? provided Smithson with a new under- standing of time itself, one that resembled his earlier of historical time. He drew upon a form articulate the nature of temporal progression; rowed a concept from crystal symmetry, phism, to model the relationship he bor- enantiomor- between past and future; and he appealed to the thermodynamic stability ideal of a timeless state but that suggested a way of of crystal structure terminal incorporating history rather than equilibrium spiritual torical conflict. And yet if Smithson's engagement attempting and neutralizing to evade it through crystallography, Smithson tory, with something ition, "in suspension." appeals. In found a way of placing his- ofPontormo's Through cryogenic intu- his abortive attempts that, he felt, subtended crystallography haphazard, to evoke the all-embracing was improvised all worldly hiswith and even occasionally this is precisely why it is so useful to any analysis of his work during this period. 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J;;lU;;lq0l sn Mone pJe'B;;ll sll.{l u~ WSlUfq.lOddo S!l{ 'slaAEI -U03 S;;llEldw;;ll ;n!soddo OM.L (q) laABI pdle30Is~p UM01.:3' aAEl{ l{3~4.M SUOqlE301PAl{ u!±Julud uo 'uO!lE30IS!P 3!JlUa3 aI.:3u!s B WOlJ UO!l!sodap Snonu!lu03 Aq JO SIU1SA1:J U!4.L • q '~,' '_' _'_' '_'_,_-----"\ c-\ \ _...... _-""1 ~---'" . ~ 'vg6l '3:JU31:J5 puo :S/01SNJ 'uuns 31moN wellllM W 310lj 113111 s<llJe4] WOJ:l L, ,8 I. M. Dawson, electron micrographs, reproduced in Charles William Bunn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science, 1964. suggesting (in a sentence Smithson underlined] that "when growth takes place the step can advance only by rotating round the dislocation point somewhat like the hands of a clock." A particularly micrograph vivid electron of the process occurring in paraffin hydro- carbon hectane crystals (fig. 18) must have seemed to Smithson a picture of the microscopic accumulation of time itself. Smithson carefully excised this entire page from his copy of Bunn's Crystals. Its ghostly images of temporal buildup stand behind the sculptural stacks and spirals that Smithson produced throughout his career, even as late as 1972, the year before his death. 1 n the essay he wrote about the SpiraL Jetty that year, he described the earthwork as "advanc[ing] around a dislocation point, in the manner of a screwv'" Perhaps the most direct echoes of Smithson's (al engagement with screw deposition a series of stacked-mirror are to be found in installations that he produced in 1966-67. M'rrored Ziggurat Of1966 (fig. '9), which bears an unmistakable micrograph resemblance of the double-dislocated to the electron structure in figure 18, is a case in point. While the sculpture does not (and of course could not) precisely replicate the molecular structure of a screw-dislocated esting to note that Smithson crystal, it is inter- has preserved in the piece the essential principle of dislocated accumulation that most interested him. The mirrors are the key ele- ment here, because they serve as the material to be (b) deposited on the stack while also serving as the instruments of dislocation. Each mirror reflects the base of the mirror above it and the top of the mirror below it; this has the effect of doubling and distancing the junctions the between the mirrors impression and introducing that there is space between them, as if they were floating or hovering one above the other. This PLATE 5. Crystals of the paraffin hydrocarbon hectune, showing (<I) spiral layer formation originating from a single screw dislocation, (b) concentric layer growth originating from a pair of opposite (left- and right-hand) dislocations. Electron microscope photographs by I.M. Dawson. Magnifications 15,000 and 7,500, respectively. illusionistic repulsion between the material parts of the sculpture helps to refute any impression connection or development next. The sculpture of organic from one mirror to the reads, like a crystal, as a stack of separate, deposited parts, fissured by dislocations. Smithson, Cummings, in his 1972 interview with Paul explicitly discussed his stacked sculptures in terms of both history and crystallography. mentioning After the interest in ancient history that he devel- oped during the mid-sixties, he claimed that "I became more and more interested in the stratifications the layerings. 1 think it had something 42 THE DEPOSITION OF TIME and to do with the '9 Robert Smithson, Mirrors, 11 Mirrored Ziggurat, 1966, x 25'/2 X 25 '/2 in. (30 x 65 x 65 em). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, 1986 (lg86.272a-e). way crystals build up too." Indeed, Mirrored Ziggurat, coated glass, has a strikingly pellicular quality about it. with the Mesopotamian Itrecalls a stack of film frames, and suggests that overtones of its fiat-topped pyramidal structure, evokes an entire complex of histor- Smithson's interest in cinema (see discussion of Smith- ical and monumental son's "iconoscope" in Chapter t] informs his interest themes. If we are to take Smith- son's claim about the "crystalline structure of time" in crystallographic seriously, we might begin by asking what it might mean to interpret the dislocation-deposition model of crys- time as well. As film theorists have long agreed, a central paradox of cinema is its treatment of motion as an illusion created by a succession tal growth as a model of time. This is a useful exercise of still frames separated by interstitial gaps. The dis- because it immediately runs up against intractable location-deposition model of crystal formation vocabulary failures that help to convey the extent of gestively analogous with cinema, which, according Smithson's departures to film theorist Mary Ann Doane, evokes "the impos- from prevailing conceptions. Reading Mirrored Ziggurat as a model or maquette of time and history disturbs many of the essential metaphors that have been commonsensically understand sibility of movement of all movement used to and change given the reducibility to an accumulation Nor does the depositional temporality.'! is sug- of static states. "14 model of time allow us to consider time as a "space." Although the matrix First, the Ziggurat does not imagine time as an of temporal particles in Smithson's time-crystal is internally driven organic development. The dislocations gridded and essentially regular, it is not tabular. What between the units ensure this. Although the Ziggurat T mean by this is that the grid units are not to be under- derives its structure stood as empty spaces that crystal molecules from what is commonly referred may to as crystal "growth," growth, with its organic con- or may not occupy. The units can only exist in a state of notations, fullness. This has important is not an entirely accurate way to describe the cumulative logic of either the crystal or the sculpture. Instead, in the process of crystal deposition, Smithson implications because it dissolves the commonsensical distinctions between time and history. Time is not an empty container in which had found in nature what we might call a Manner- historic events occur. Rather, time is itself a histor- istic model of progression. ical plenum. Time and its historical content are coter- development emanating but an inert encrustation Time here is not an organic from a living "seed" or origin, minous, and no temporal model exists independently p~cessing of the material history that constitutes a "fault," or a "dislocation!' J accretion obeying a crystalline [ connection something around a "slip," the depositional matrix. It loses any it. Finally and most importantly, the Ziggurat and Time is a static, indifferent model informing it imagine time as to an animate origin or center and becomes entropic. It may seem odd that a sculpture as geometri- superficial, uninspired, cally precise, regular, and rectilinear as MilTored Ziggu- belated, supple- mental. There is a sense of decadent ornamentalism rat could be described as entropic. But the lay associa- about the entire affair. tion of entropy with irregularity, abjection, or formless- Although Smithson's suggest depositional some sort of progression, equate this progression it is impossible with movement ness is not altogether accurate. For Smithson, in fact, time does to in the usual the governing characteristic equilibrium, Of, of entropic systems is their in other words, their absolute regular- sense. Time does not "fly" or "pass"; these terms imply ity. In an unpublished that time is capable of arriving and departing, whereas Smithson makes this clear: "When final equilibrium Smithson's takes place we get relatively stable or rigid divisions of sculpture imagines it as a material sedi- essay called "Spiral Wreckage" ment that remains on hand indefinitely. Time merely matter, as in crystals which are divided into lattice or accretes in prepackaged grid parts." History, understood sitional progression quanta. This form of depo- relates directly to Smithson's long- standing ambivalence about dynamics and his predilection for works of art (like Pontormo's] umphant in this way, is not a tri- progress but rather an inevitable deposition of time into a condition of "final equilibrium.t" that convert motion to stasis. In this case, for example, we might Enantiomorphism and the Play of Mirrors consider MilTored Ziggurat in terms of its relation to The mirrors cinema. The sculpture, with its thin sheets of mirror- crucial role in Smithson's 44 THE of Mirrored Ziggurat playa complex but DEPOSITION OF TIME time-crystal. As mentioned above, the mirrors ducing illusionistic serve as dislocative agents, intro- space between the parts of the cate the severance of the parts. The mirrors sculpture. At the same time, however, they also unify ously fragment the sculpture. Because it is impossible to determine is not sure whether the precise point at which one mirror meets another, of wholeness. the illusionistic fissuring of the mirrors also knits the pieces together in an indeterminate divide on one level and unify on the other. They simultanethe piece and introduce a specter (one it is a ghost or a premonition) The ambiguous effects of the mirrors in Mirrored embrace. Each Ziggurat and Chalk-Mirror Displacement relate directly mirror both repels and transfixes the mirrors adjoining to crystallography, which treats mirror relationships it, P!oducing the illusion of a structure in a similarly paradoxical throughout that is riven yet is, on the whole, whole. In this sense, the mirrors allow the sculpture to evoke the paradoxes of entropic finality, which Smithson a condition characterized fragmentation: understood simultaneously "the configuration as by unity and of maximum ness [is] at the same time that of maximum whole- division or entropy." 16 Smithson's other mirror installations often have Chalk-Mirror Displacement the relationship between two solid forms that are crystallographers tiomorphic substance). and "left-handed" mentation, interrupting the gestalt of the heap and pre- venting the viewer from experiencing apprehension (and not otherwise identical slabs of steel or aluminum) reading. immediately For even as the mirrored complicates that surfaces clearly divide the pile of chalk, the optical effects of that partitioning oddly reinforce the overall impression wholeness. An experiment: piece (attempting forms in the everyday world, often offered in crystallography texts as a way to help readers visualize the relationships going on at the molecular level, include the human left and right wise and counterclockwise) tiomorphic because guard) so threads. (clock- Indeed the enan- relation is often called "screw asymmetry," all helical forms are enantiomorphic. Smithson's interest in spirals is directly connected their enantiomorphic of lie on the floor next to this not to alarm the museum molecules like tartaric acid. Common hands, and screws with left- and right-handed any unified of its conical geometry. But the fact that these are mirrors crystals of the same and certain crystals formed from examples of enantiomorphic From a purely physical to Such crystals include quartz, the most mineral, chalk is sliced into eight segments the mirrors function as agents of frag- common forms (meaning that one can find both stereoisometric standpoint, 1S because many crystals adopt enan- (19691 is a good example (fig. 20). A heap of particulate placed in an asterisk pattern. work and term that denotes mirror images of each other. The term common by eight mirrors Perhaps the most writings is that 09!nantiomorphism,j "right-handed" the same double-effect. fashion. pervasive motif to be found in Smithson's to character, as we shall see.'? Although the mirror relation of enantiomorphic forms may seem to imply a straightforward or bilateralism, enantiomorphism symmetry actually involves that your eyes are below the upper edge of the mir- a special class of symmetry so mind-bogglingly complex rors and you are able to see into only one of the chalk that it is often described in crystallography wedges. What you will see is not a single wedge- a species of dissymmetry. shaped slice of the cone. The mirrors instead produce morphs, illusions that recuperate differential the image of the whole-you although identical "handedness," in all respects each other. One cannot be superimposed whole is immanent other-just in the part. The sculpture is actu- in its unity; save their are totally irreducible are presented with the image of the entire cone. The ally quite aggressive and even alarming texts as This is because enantioto upon the as the glove for the left hand cannot fit on the right and a lightbulb with a clockwise thread it looks the same from every angle (and in this sense cannot be inserted into a socket made for a light bulb performs its own neutralization of motion by elimi- with a counterclockwise thread. We get little sense narrative of the moving of this superimposition problem_by looking at the dia- nating the phenomenological viewer). The mirrors refuse any kind of partial view. gram ~ enantiomorphic quartz crystals in Bunn's After all, it would seem to be easy The only thing that saves the sculpture from becoming Crystals (fig. a horrifying uber gestalt is the faint visual wobble or enough simply to flip one image over onto the other to perturbation along the edges of the mirrors, which indi- make the two images coincide. True enough. 45 2I). But this Robert Smithson, Chalk-Mirror Displacement, 1987 version of a 1969 work. Double-sided mirrors and chalk, 10 x 120 X 120 in. (25-4 x 304.8 x 304.8 em). Art Institute of Chicago. Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Morris, 1987.277. flipping operation that we have just mentally performed they cannot be reduced back to it. The maddening is imaginable strangeness dimensional only because we are looking at tworepresentations, crystals themselves. diagram not the three-dimensional To make the two forms in the coincide we actually need to transport one of the enantiomorphic ering philosophers relation was both- long before the crystallography books in Smithson's library were written. Kant labored over the problem in his Prolegomena to Any Future of them up and off the page through another dimension Metaphysics: "What can be more similar in every respect -the and in every part more alike to my hand and to my third. The same would be hue of any mirrored two-dimensional forms. For example, there is no way ear than their images in the mirror? And yet I cannot to turn a sheet of paper cut into the shape of a lower- put such a hand as is seen in the glass in the place case e into its mirror image by simply scooting it around of its original; for this is a right hand, that in the glass on the surface of a table. One must resort to a maneuver is a left one, and the image or reflection of the right that occurs outside of the two-dimensional ear is a left one, which can never take the place of the plane of the form itself, that is, flipping the e up and over in three- other .... dimensional and similarity, the left hand cannot be enclosed in the space. One always needs an extra dimen- sion to bring such mirrored same bounds as the right one (they are not congruent); of Wee-dimensional the glove of one hand cannot be used for the other,"?" Smithson's now become apparent. Where is the extra space that might allow us to rotate a lefthanded chunk of crystal into alignment handed counterpart? with its right- rule of coincidence, conclude that if enantiomorphic Using we must crystals can be aligned, ~ can occur only in some four-dimensional space, a space outside of all Euclidean comprehension. explained in one of Smithson's As- books on physics: "The left side of a straight line can be interchanged the enantiornorphic most conspicuous deployment of concept was his 1964 piece Enantiomorphic Chambers (fig. 22), which comprised two wall-hung steel supports holding mirrors set at Nowhere in the three-dimen- sional world that we are equipped to comprehend. the extra-dimensional their complete equality forms into alignment. The utter strangeness enantiomorph~might [N]otwithstanding with oblique angles. The two chambers, themselves enantio- morphs, held the mirrors at an angle precisely calculated to provide the viewer with a visceral demonstration of the incommensurability According to Smithson, the two chambers, themselves of enantiomorphic forms. when viewers stood between their mirrored images canceled out, "abolishjing] the central fused image," its right side by rotating the line in a plane, the clock- and causing the viewer, essentially, to disappear. The wise direction on a surface can be interchanged installation an anticlockwise three- dimensional space (turning screw with a right-hand the right hand-by dimensional over), a left-hand screw-or 'moving' the left hand with the object in four- we can perhaps begin to understand has implicitly associated enantiomorph invited the viewer to occupy the space of convergence of the two enantiomorphic self-images, but then evacuated the very space in which that convergence might occur. The Chambers, which also constitute a withering critique of perspective representa- tion, will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter space.,,18 Setting aside the fourth dimension research with direction by moving the surface in why previous Smithson's be resolved or synthesized use of agenda.'? ism with a deconstructive The two sides of an enantiomorph for now, cannot, by definition, in a moment of rational + For now it is enough to point out that enantiomorphism offered Smithson that emphasized a way of thinking about mirroring the irreconcilable difference, as well as the similarity, between a form and its reflection, a way of viewing the mirror as a tool of cutting or splitting rather than strict unification. Enantiomorphism gestalt. Enantiomorphs imply, indeed require, a radically served as the primary metaphor empty center-there is no worldly space between imagined through the function of the mirrors which he that he consis- them where both forms can coexist. A pair of enantio- tently used in his work between 1964 and 1969, in morphs is essentially an empty set of spatiocognitive series such as the mirror strata (see fig. 19) and mirror parentheses, displacements made all the more frustrating talizing resemblance by the tan- between the two forms. They seem to be derived from some common root form, but (see figs. 56, 57, 59-6I). When Smith- son says that mirrors function to "generate incapacity," when he speaks of "a mirror looking for its reflection 47 lU~P"4!illJlj 'uMou~un "tg6l ";nqwo!1:J uoueocq "SjOJ.A!W pue l~d~S p~lu!ed J!!1dJOWOI1UOU3 'UOS4~!WS 1J~qo~ lj11.\\ ·sIEls.\J:IzPEnb popueq-rqsu "tg6 L';nu<J!JS -z- pue pun -IP'l ',f 'x SlJ;)UJ pUO <JJnJON U! "IO~ 1!<J!11 :S/01SrtI:J 'uung welili/>,\ sape4:J WOJ~ but never quite finding it," or of something guished by reflections," tiomorphic he is referring quality of mirroring. being "extin- to the enan- The essential dissym- metry of the mirror, its inability to recuperate of differance (Derrida's keyword for the approximation difference which evades, precedes, and constitutes all presence-a difference which operates both spatially and temporally, which both differs and defers). Enan- that which it reflects, became his general model of reflection tiomorphism and a hallmark of his entire body of work as he defined tion, and reflection but offers no ground upon which it: ''A lot of people are disturbed a metaphysics by my work because provides a model of resemblance, repeti- of presence or adequation can take hold; it is not within their grasp; it isn't a simple symmetry." it constitutes an identity riven by alterity, Indeed, the The fragmentary action of the mirror has wide currency fault line, central axis, or hinge of the enantiomorphic today, of course, in our post-Lacanian, relation seems to encapsulate perfectly the empty center theoreticallandscape, primarily post-Derridean of postmodern but in the mid- sixties it was through a crystallographically inflected subjectivity''! This enantiomorphic evacuation of the present sculptural practice that Smithson was able to develop the is quite similar to the dismantling broader implications became one of the major tasks of the deconstructive of dissymmetry for himself. 21 of the "Now" that project. By the "Now" I mean the key philosophical The Mirror in the Moment: Deconstruction Smithson Enantiomorphism and the of the Now was not, of course, content to consider enantiomorphism-with its powerful tropes of in com- pletion and interstitial vacancy-as phenomenon. a purely spatial The temporal implications of the concept, while not immediately obvious in the installations concept that goes by many other names- Presence, Being, eidos, Unity-all of which convey traditional Western philosophy's aim to define subjectivity as an unmediated (immediate) Self-consciousness the Now-"I presence of the self to itself. must occur instantaneously, knowing myself at the moment that I know"- themselves, find dear renditions in Smithson's writings. otherwise a delay or deferral is introduced In many of his essays of the mid-sixties, sciousness makes reference Smithson to an empty or nonexistent flanked by the equilateral projections present of past and in must know myself and know myself to be that immediately self-knowledge because into con- proscribes the fullness of and splinters the self into a string of re-collection and re-presentation. Durational time, the future. In one essay he writes that "the future criss- enemy of the Now, is also the enemy of the self; as crosses the past as an unobtainable present." In another Mark C. Taylor puts it, time "threatens to fault the he speaks of "a double perspective of past and future identity of the subject and to interrupt the presence that follows a projection that vanishes into a nonexistent the present.r-s present." Smithson's understanding of this temporal of In the previous chapter I discussed the centrality "double perspective" was derived from enantiomorphism of this Now for the modernist and was bolstered by supporting in Smithson's formative years in New York. Tn the post- usual interdisciplinary material from his brew of sources, including a gen- erous helping of science-fictional time-play and cer- aesthetics war world, with its fragmentation prevailing and disillusionment of subjectivity, the avant-garde work of art was given tain temporal motifs in Nabokov. In each case Smithson the urgent task of collecting or compelling the embattled imagines modern subject into unified coherence. In Greenberg's time as a mirrored double-projection of future and past. The failure of the two halves of time "at-once ness" and Fried's "Presentness" to coincide leaves the space between them-the son's early aims at "Revelation"), the distinctive value -as "unobtainable." wishes to be ingenious requires mirrors. Smithson's present As he noted in 1969, "If one enough to erase time one of the work of art was to be its capacity to stabilize liberal-humanist model of the unobtainable present the Now, much of continental is, I think, the aspect of his work that most fully deconstructing approximates and Kierkegaard I will complicate worldview Although this reading in a moment, pointing out that enantiomorphism subjectivity by producing immediacy. But even as Fried and Greenberg were institutionalizing "22 the poststructuralist (as in Smith- it is worth offers a passable thinkers was busy it. Drawing upon the work of Husserl earlier in the twentieth century, such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Emmanuel 49 philosophy Levinas, and Derrida were ques- '3 Robert Smithson, Oil on canvas, Man oj Sorrow 1 (The Forsaken), 1961. "Total Crystalline Consciousness": 45.3 x 25.6 in. (115 x 65 em). Smithson's Estate of George B. Lester. '. Fourth Dimension By evacuating the present, radical deconstruction Robert Smithson, Man oj Sorrow 2 (The Forsaken), 1961. Smithson also performs a of the notions of immanence and subjectivity that rely upon it. Smithson's Oil on canvas, 45.3 x 25.6 in. (115 x 65 em). enantio- morphic model reduces the centered and cohesive Estate of George B. Lester. humanist worldview to a crystalline rubble of irrecon- cilable halves. Considering this splitting of the imma- nent self, we might return briefly here to Smithson's earlier career and note that his engagement enantiomorphism (if disaffected) continuation with handedness of the obsessive concern that he had displayed in his religious A survey of Smithson's paintings. with in the mid-sixties functions as a direct "ikons" reveals that the problem of corporeal symmetry was very much on Smithson's mind in 1961. At that point, it seems to have been related to his exploration of the mysteryand the tragedy-ofIncarnation. How is divinity- which transcends time and space-to dimension? of Sorrow 2 (both disembodied occupy quotidian In the diptych Man of Sorrow T96r), Smithson and Man 1 presents a pair of hands whose prominent them as the hands of the incarnate stigmata identify and crucified Christ (figs. 23, 24). He revisits this compositional device in painting after painting of the early sixties: Feet of Christ, Blind Angel, Green Chimera with Stigmata (fig. 25), and others. In each case, the theatrical display tioning the logical tenability of this Now. The models of the stigmata accompanies of time developed in their work suggest the impossi- composition bility of self-present consciousness and challenge the (the "blindness" foundations gaping void of the mouth of the Chimera, of Western metaphysics. Smithson's access to this debate on the level of properly "philosophical" significant. discourse was oblique but His crystallographic an exaggeratedly bilateral and a conspicuous failure of the center of the angel, the eyeless face and etc.]. The "stigma" here seems to be related to symmetry itself, as if the crucifixion were merely an allegory for a more image of the present essential geometrical tragedy in which divine tran- being perpetually evacuated by its flanking extensions scendence of past and future was supplemented symmetry. The self-identical body of the divine, sub- by his reading is forced into the humiliation in Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Husserl explained the "present" as a point ject to the indignities of the enantiomorphic that was always diverging forward into pretention the transcendent backward into retention. The Phenomenology- Smithson its influence and of bilateral paradox on earth, unfolds into a mirror world that cannot locate identity of the split beings that popu- owned a copy of late it. It seems that in these and other works of the is clear when he early sixties (including several that refer to the iconog- claims, for example, that in one of his traveling raphy of St. Francis receiving the stigmata), Smithson projects "the present fell forward and backward into a struggles with what he sees as the inherently tumult of 'de-differentiatlon.v" eral operation of revelation in the physical world. The J n each attempt to grasp at the present, one will encounter gap suspended and retention. only a void, a by the reflective ligatures of protention central anxiety of these paintings tact with transcendence manifest 50 THE periph- is that direct con- is simply not possible; it can itself only as a series of dis symmetrical DEPOSITION OF TIME '5 Robert Smithson, Green Chimera with Stigmata, 1961. Oil on canvas, 47.2 x 56.7 in. (120 x 144 em). Estate of George B. Lester. in his later pieces, like the Enantiomorphic Chambers, ,6 From Charles William Bunn, as well. This is why I will now attempt to overturn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science, 1964. even while acknowledging, tation of Smithson's the deconstructive interpre- use of mirroring. A transcendental connotation the concept of enantiomorphism has accompanied from the outset, not only in Christian discourse but also in certain pseudomystical strains of science and mathematics. tioned earlier, the puzzle of enantiomorph remained As menism has vivid for centuries; this is largely because its "solution" does not exist in the everyday three-dimensional universe that we are equipped to observe with our senses. Yet it is precisely this worldly incompatibility that has historically inspired contemplation TOO PERFECT 7 possibility of a "higher" dimension about the in which such a solution might be feasible. It seems impossible that a mirror and its reflection or a right hand and a left hand could be completely unrelated; thus they encourage the spectator to infer or imagine another dimension in which these reflected forms might be reconciled. In fact, mirrored forms have long begged-and often been used to answer-the have question ofa four- dimensional, radically unified condition. In 1827 Mobius made precisely this argument, claiming that the exis- tence of solid mirrored forms implies, compels, and virtually maps out the existence of a fourth dimension, unavailable to our own sensory apparatus, which enantiomorphs through can be brought into alignment. Throughout the literature on four-dimensional since that time, enantiomorph geometry ism has often been offered as an argument or even as proof of the empirical existence of a higher dimension, the deconstructive or hyperspace. Thus potential of enantiomorphism perhaps appropriately, is, only half of the story. Enantio- morphs, in proper deconstructive fashion, evacuate the traces on the isolated extremities of worldly forms. One possibility of adequation hopes for the ecstasy of St. Teresa, but ends up with sional world, but they also imply, even require, a higher unity in another kind of space, another dimension.z6 the delayed, diluted, rerouted-one suburban-scars might even say Smithson of St. Francis. Despite the tormented posture of these paintings, however, it is important presumption: to remember their essential namely, that the unified condition from implications in the everyday three-dimen- was well aware of the transcendental of enantiomorph that he first encountered ism; in fact it is likely the concept of asymmetrical mirroring within the context of hyperspace philosophy. which these figures have fallen does (or did) in fact He snipped out a diagram of a pair of tartaric acid exist. In this sense, the enantiomorphic crystals from his copy of Martin Gardner's famous book the embodied splitting of figures indicates the possibility of tran- The Ambidextrous Universe, which has an entire chapter scendence even as it admits its terrestrial intermission. on the fourth dimension This possibility, I believe, remained latent for Smithson where asymmetries might be resolved. The transcenden- 52 THE DEPOSITION OF TIME as a "transcendent world" appeared in ArtfOl-um's special issue on American sculp- tal implications of enantiomorphs were also evident in Bunn's Crystals. In one slightly tongue-in-cheek dia- ture in June of 1967. This issue was a seminal com- gram, "Crystal Characters," pendium Bunn plays on the associa- of texts and has since become legendary for tions inspired by each form of crystal; the enantio- the impact and diversity of the essays between its cov- morphs at lower right are labeled "The Mystics" (fig. 26). ers (other articles in the issue include part three of (Smithson Robert Morris's "Notes on Sculpture," was very familiar with this particular illus- Michael Fried's tration, as he cut out the image of the "Romantic" "Art and Objecthood," crystal to use in another collage.) Linda Dalrymple on Conceptual Henderson, is among the most cryptic of his writings, but a close in her magisterial reconstruction fortunes of hyperspace in twentieth-century of the art, has and Sol LeWitt's "Paragraphs Art"). Smithson's "Air Terminal" article analysis reveals it to be a meditation on four-dimen- identified the artists, writers, and scientists who did the sional space and its temporal most to perpetuate wrote the essay after serving as an artist-consultant the philosophy of higher space implications. Smithson centuries. Many, for the architecture such as H. G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Buckminster Fuller, Stratton, which was in the process of entering a design during the nineteenth and twentieth Arthur C. Clarke, and the popular science writers competition firm Tibbets-Abbett-McCarthy- for the terminal at the new Dallas-Fort Martin Gardner, J. W. Dunne, and Max Jammer, were Worth airport. "While working on schemes for art instal- key figures in Smithson's own intellectual lations designed to be seen from the air by passengers ment. And as Henderson argues in her forthcoming develop- on arriving and departing airplanes, Smithson had edition of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean become intrigued by the relationship between motion Geometl)' in Modern Art, Smithson was himself exposed (change over time) and form.t" to active debate about the consciousness-expanding In the article, Smithson pos- performs an extended sibilities of hyperspace through his association in the meditation mid-sixties with the artists of the Park Place Croup." contrast between two ways of thinking about motion. Indeed, if we reconsider Smithson's work of this period in terms of the discourse of hyperspace, we on the nature of time by developing He illustrates his distinction ous discussion a through a rather humor- of the two modes of aircraft design find that it is full of formal, temporal, and optical motifs that prove most appropriate long associated with hyperspatial puzzles. These include adigm. He begins by describing an appeal to simultaneity of naming aircraft: "As it is now, many [aircraft] are perspectival and stillness, a rejection of representation, shadows as indicators, a-logical structures. the use of mirrors and the construction or of i11-or All of these strategies have direct for each time-motion still named after animals, such as DHC pire T.; Chipmunk T. Mk. 20; par- the traditional system 2 Beavers; Vam- Dove 8s; Hawker Furies; Turkey; etc." These names, Smithson argues, reveal analogs in Smithson's work of this period (considering certain assumptions the appeal to the a-logical, for example, it is interest- flight has for the most part been conditioned ing to note that Smithson did an entire series of instal- rationalism lations called Alogons in 1967). Smithson progress, and speed." Airplanes named after wild ani- was also and biases: "The meaning that supposes truths-such of airby a as nature, interested in alternating perspective figures or "Necker mals were designed to express "the old rational idea Reversals," which are commonly illustrated in books of visible speed." What he means by this "old" idea is on the fourth dimension the commonsense approximate as tools to help the reader a kind of hyperspatial might also note Smithson's negative/positive perception. interest in this period with relations in photography. monly reproduced negative photostats, We his photographs thus producing He com- notion that when we observe a speeding object we are seeing what is, in fact, a speeding object-a discrete unit of matter moving or being moved through space as time passes. Airplanes in this and collages as universe are named after animals because they are a kind of tonal understood to move as if alive, as if they had volition (L called "a-space" is also evident in his essay "Towards the volare, to fly; L volo, present indicative of velie, to will). These animal aircraft, in other words, occupy an animistic universe: elastic, kinetic, changing over time as Development objects shift about from place to place.3° enantiomorphism Smithson's (see figs. 29, 35)·2.8 embrace of what Martin Gardner of an Air Terminal Site." The article 53 Smithson then asks the reader to imagine a different kind of aircraft: one that is not designed named) to express speed but rather, as Smithson (or puts Disclosure it, one that "discloses itself" on a "network."!' is the key notion here: when Smithson When Smithson claims that writes in his ''Air Terminal" article that "the rationalist sees only the details and never the whole," when he says that the rationalist "cannot see the aircraft through the 'speed,'" he is echoing Ouspensky and Hinton by saying that motion is an aircraft "discloses itself" rather than moves, he merely a "detail," a microscopic implies that what we perceive as the airplane's motion larger spatiotemporal is really only the gradual coming-to-appearance As he wrote in an early draft of his essay "Quasi- some greater form. Here Smithson needs a key concept of hyperspace of adapts to his own philosophy: its prohibition of classical dynamism and its interpretation cross-section of a form that is, in actuality, static.H Infi~ities and the Waning of Space," "Time's direction becomes a progression, is immobile." within a terminal shape that Although there is no evidence that of motion as an illusory side effect of four-dimensional Smithson read Ouspensky's spatial forms. This rather thorny concept was first been indirectly familiar with his ideas through his popularized other readings on the subject. He was certainly reading by the British mathematician, and patent-office Smithson worker C. H. Hinton, was likely introduced physicist, to whom through his reading original text, he would have Kazimir Malevich (who had been heavily influenced by Ouspensky], going so far as to quote him in a draft of J. W. Dunne's Experiment with Time. Dunne described of his 1967 "Monuments the essential changing element of our consciousness stasis of Hinton's four-dimensional universe at length: ''A being who could see Time's extenworld as merely sectional and feeling, in the last analysis, is illusion."35 sion as well as that of Space would regard the particles of our three-dimensional of Passaic" essay: "The Thus Smithson appeals to the fourth dimension to offer a broader perspective on motion that will views of fixed material threads extending in a fourth reveal it to be, in actuality, inert. Time does not "pass" dimension, (or, to return to the aviation metaphor, time does not and would consider that the only thing in the entire cosmos that really moved was that three- "fly"); what we experience as temporality dimensional the process of a three-dimensional field of observation which we call the 'present moment.:"> is, rather, consciousness ing through an eternal four-dimensional Another eloquent proponent early twentieth-century of this idea was the Russian mathematician P. D. pass- form. As Hinton described this four-dimensional universe: "We should have to imagine some stupendous whole, where- Ouspensky. His highly influential geometrical-mystical in all that has ever come into being or will come co- tract on the fourth dimension exists, which, passing slowly on, leaves in this flickering explained time as fol- lows: "The contact with a certain space of which we are consciousness not clearly conscious calls forth in us the sensation of a single moment, motion upon that space; and all this taken together, i.e., and vicissitudes the unclear consciousness here what would later be widely referred to, in 4-D of a certain space and the sensation of motion upon that space, we call time. This of ours, limited to a narrow space and a tumultuous record of changes that are but to us." Hinton describes rhetoric, as the "block universe" of eternal form,36 last confirms the conception that the idea of time has In the ''Air Terminal" article, Smithson not arisen from the observation of motion existing in that this motionless perspective on motion is beginning nature, but that the very sensation and idea of motion to become more evident through the latest develop- has arisen from a "time-sense" existing in ourselves, ments in air and space technology. He claims that "as which is an imperfect sense oJspace: the fringe, or limit the aircraft ascends into higher and higher altitudes of our space-sense." and flies at faster speeds, its meaning Thus, for Ouspensky, time and asserts as an object change are illusions: "We are receiving as sensations, changes-one and projecting into the outside world as phenomena, words, the higher and faster an airplane is flying, the the immobile angles and curves oftheJourth dimension." slower it appears to be moving from a ground observer's could even say reverses." "In other words, every being feels as space that which standpoint. is grasped by his space-sense: the rest he refers to tendency is the satellite in geosynchronous time; i.e., the imperfectly Jelt is referred to time. "33 though 54 THE Smithson's ultimate In other example of this orbit that, moving very quickly in the classical sense, DEPOSITION OF TIME appears to us to be still. Smithson throughout suggests that we the image and asphyxiate all the busy should learn to perceive all objects in the same way we ship workers in the foreground. perceive satellites: "This immobilization this geometric form (which actually looks very much of space Smithson borrowed becomes more apparent if we consider the high altitude like the Secor satellite) from his copy of Bunn's Crystals, satellite. The farther out an object goes in space, the from which he neatly cut out the form with a razor less it represents the old rational idea of visible speed." blade along each of its jagged faces (fig. Not only do the new satellites provide concrete demon- image seems disquieting strations of four-dimensional because Smithson's collage practice introduces also embody hyperspace design. As if to emphasize inertia as they fly, they philosophy in their formal this point, Smithson careful to include in his article an illustration If this or dystopian, it is largely jarring shifts into the viewer's visual experience of the space. The crystalline form perching is of the )0).40 conspicuous on the hill appears and "alien" (this image was long referred boxy, seemingly inert Secor surveying satellite (manu- to as "Science Fiction Landscape") because it refuses factured, he notes gleefully, by the Cubic Corporation) to fit into the representational structure of the image (fig. 27). We are a long way from the misguided itself. Whereas the landscape photograph of the harbor mism of the DHC 2 ani- Beaver here; the Secor satellite, with its gridlike articulation, metonym and microcosm is nothing space (objects diminishing so much as a of the eternally static "block resemblance throughout Secor illustration also bears a strong to the diagrams his crystallography Indeed, throughout dimensional of crystal lattices found hooks (see fig. JO). the essay Smithson associates four- space with crystal structure: "The stream- signs of recessional in size as they approach the horizon, for example), the crystal form does not obey this sense of perspective. universe" of hyperspace.'? Smithsons shows the familiar and reassuring The gridded rhombohedral units obey an axonometric, rather than a linear, projection. By repelling the viewer's customary experi- ence of viewpoint, the collage is a remarkably eco- nomical visual embodiment Smithsons of the implications lines of space are replaced by a crystalline structure dimensional of time."38 Future aircraft, Smithson claims, must reflect articulates this. Smithson proposes that as the four-dimensional dimensional universe becomes more apparent, all aircraft design will and demonstrates, cast off its outmoded career, that the "crystalline structure Corporation's vitalism and adopt the Cubic more enlightened design principles: "It of crystalline "spacetime," where limited threeperspectives the essential do not operate. The image incommensurability form and perspectival prophetically of four- representation, for Smithson's later of time" is utterly alien to the prevailing traditions of naturalistic repre- is most probable that we will someday see upon these sentation runways, aircraft that will be more crystalline in shape. of the form contradicts the idea of space (or landscape) . . . Perhaps aircraft will someday be named after as a stage for action, movement, crystals .... Smithson's At any rate, here are some names for pos- sible crystalline aircraft: Rhombohedral 'Ez: Ortho- rhombic 60, Tetragonal Terror; Hexagonal Star Dust of landscape. The eerie stillness and opacity and historical drama . four-dimensional crystallographic airspace of the mid-sixties was very much linked to his earlier mystical leanings. As Henderson has docu- 49: etc."39 Art, of course, must do the same; it must mented, the idea of the fourth dimension attain the radical stillness of the transcendent been closely associated with mysticism. This connection crystal can be easily reconstructed and leave behind its frantic naturalisms. During these years Smithson produced collages that address this gradual replacement several to crystallography of the rather than a refutation, has long for Smithson, whose tum constituted a secularized extension, of the concerns of his reli- animistic worldview with the crystalline. In Proposalfor gious period. His earlier interest in William Blake's a Monument on the Red Sea (fig. 28), a scientific dia- "eternal proportions," gram of a cube appears massive and alien in its juxta- lary in the four-dimensional In Proposalfor a Monument at Antarctica (fig. 29), a negative photostat of a collage produced in 1966, a gridded crystalline "immobile angles and curves." Indeed Blake can be understood as a progenitor form sits ominously on a hill, as if threatening to spread Underhill's position with the coastal landscape. A corner-folded 55 for example, finds a ready corolblock universe with its of hyperspace page in Smithson's philosophy. copy of Evelyn Mysticism makes this suggestion: "Often '7 Secor surveying satellite, as published in "Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site," '967. Courtesy Cubic Corporation, San Diego, California. when we blame our artists for painting ugly things, they are but striving to show us a beauty to which we are blind. They have gone on ahead of us, and attained that state of'fourfold vision' to which Blake laid claim; in which the visionary sees the whole visible universe transfigured." And the quietude of Smithson's crys- talline block universe, its ability to contain all times at once in an eternal equilibrium, offered the same refuge of eternity, silence, and unified essence that St. Augustine had held out as the very image of God: "Try as they may to savour the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, would glimpse the splendour they of eternity which is for ever still.":" What the mystical-spatial also able to do for Smithson fourth dimension was was to suggest a cool, hard space beyond limited anthropomorphic a space wherein the seemingly perception, fatal contradictions and paradoxes that he explored in his religious paintings might be resolved. The tragic enantiomorphic fragmentation of the divine body in the two-dimensional world of his icons (see figs. 23-25) is permitted an uJtimate, if etiolated, resolution in the four-dimensional world of his time crystal. In terms of its temporal modeling, then, Smithson's crystallography must finally be understood not as a deconstructive but rather as a synthesizing paradigm. Smithson deployed crystallography to intimate a new form of trans- or extratemporal perception, a four-dimensional crystalline "space- time" that could offer what he called a "total crystalline consciousness dimensional of structure." This leap out of three- systems recalls Tony Smith's spiritualiz- ing use of the infinite crystal grid and Malevich's Suprematist use of the fourth dimension for a transcendental cal specificities. as a scaffold realm free of all social and politi- Indeed, Smithson's "time-crystal" can be seen as an attempt to pursue a dialectical sublation of temporal flow itself. It provides a unified, or aggregate, perspective that includes all other perspectives, with their associated illusions of temporal passage, and resolves their apparent contradictions into a single, static system." The specific cultural implications of Smithson's crystalline view of history would begin to become 56 THE DEPOSITION OF TIME ,8 Robert Smithson, Proposal for a Monument 1966. Cut-and-pasted on the Red Sea, paper, pen and ink, and pencil on photograph, 8 '/4 X 6 'Iz in. (21 x 16.7 em). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Elmer A. Johnson, Jr., Bequest. " Robert Smithson, Proposal for a Monument at Antarctica, 1966. Negative photostat, 8 x 12 in. (20.3 x 30.5 em). Estate of Robert Smithson. -_. 'I '0 From Charles William Bunn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science, 1964. abundantly apparent as he moved into landscape the late sixties (his crystalline treatment in of Passaic, New Jersey, will be addressed in the following chapter). First, however, he began to see the crystallization of time as the governing logic of the minimal art that to fill the galleries of New York. J n was beginning his famous article "Entropy and the New Monuments," Smithson explicitly discussed the new sculpby Donald Judd, Robert Morris, hue being produced Dan Flavin, LeWitt, and others in terms of crystal accretion. Smithson tal deposition, knew that in the process of crys- each new molecule added represents a decrease in the energy potential of the system and thus an increase in entropy. The entire system is in equilibrium -"cooled" and stabilized. Smithson sug- gested that the new sculpture was "monumental" in the same way that a crystal can be seen as monumen tal- for Smithson, petrifaction the sculpture registered the of time and the calcification of space and pointed to the finality and obduracy of the universe's Left: 1I "dog-tooth" crystal of calcite. ern/a-: a piece with cleavage surfaces at the bottom. Right: HaUy's idea of the relation of the natural faces to the stack of tiny rhombohedral units. entropic future. He spoke of the artists' "fascination with inert properties," argued that their work "conveys a mood of vast immobility," and referred to their pieces as "obstructions." For Smithson the new sculpture, in which "lethargy is elevated to the most glorious magnitude," could be seen as a crystallization and time. A series of minimal nullification of space forms represented a or occupation of time and space, so that it was no longer available for further use: "The action is frozen into an array of plastic and neon. "43 A remarkable passage in Smithson's essay on Judd reveals that Smithson explicit connection graphical critical was making an between the biblical and crystallo- meanings of "Deposition": "Instead of bringing Christ down from the cross, the way the painters of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Mannerist periods did in their many versions of The Deposition, Judd has brought space down into an abstract world of mineral forms. Smithson "44 then cited the minimalist format of "the slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number of housing developments of the postwar boom" as evidence that this new Deposition was, like Pontormds, beginning to reveal the exhaustion of history and the eternal infinity beyond it. It is to these "slurbs" that 1 now turn. 59 FORG ETTI NG PASSAIC On Saturday, September 30, 1967, Smithson took a bus ride from the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan to the city of Passaic, New Jersey. With Instamatic camera and notepad in hand, he spent the better part of the day exploring the downtown district of the city and rambling along the banks of the Passaic River, which were in the process of being excavated for the construction of a new highway. Smithson converted his field notes and six of his photographs into a travelogue that he published in the December 1967 issue of Artforum as "The Monuments of Passaic." A mock advertise- ment that he later drafted indicates his sardonic attitude toward the entire enterprise: "What can you find in Passaic that you cannot find in Paris, London, or Rome? Find out for yourself. breathtaking Discover (if you dare) the Passaic River and the eternal monwnents on its enchanted banks. Ride in Rent-a-Car comfort to the land that time forgot. Only minutes from N.YC. Robert Smithson will guide you through this fabled series of sites ... and don't forget your camera." Smithson's tour of Passaic was part of a series of New Jersey excursions that he took between 1966 and 1968. These short day trips across the Hudson had such seemingly unmemorable destinations as Bay- onne, North Bergen, Secaucus, Loveladies Island, and the Pine Barrens. Smithson visited quarries in Montclair, Sandy Hook, and Franklin, and explored abandoned airstrips, industrial wastelands, swamps of the Meadowlands. and the debris-filled (He also, occasionally, visited his parents in Clifton.) Often taken with friends and fellow artists, these trips established tion as one of Smithson's fundamental the expedi- artistic methods. Many of them, like the Passaic tour, eventually resulted in published magazine as specimen-gathering travelogues. Others served excursions for the new series of "Nonsite" gallery installations that Smithson devel- oped during this period (fig. 31). Smithson's implicit appeals to the grand expeditionary help tradition 3' Robert Smithson, A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey), 1968. Painted wooden bins, limestone, photographs, and typescript on paper with graphite and transfer letters, mounted Bins: 161/2 x 82 '/4 on mat board. X103 in. (41.9 x 208.9 x 261.6 em). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Susan and Lewis Manilow. account for the deflationary humor of these and other travel works; within rhetorical structures to convey epiphantic discoveries, Smithson disaffected narratives, anticlimactic samples, and lackluster designed labeled, feature such monuments presented bins of mineral black-and-white to the centralization the New York art establishment, drab Passaic photographs and his aggressively have been widely praised for their implicit critique of documentary "The Monuments of transparency. of Passaic" has also become some- thing of a cult classic in architecture, and landscape architecture, mark for its exploration urban planning, where it serves as a bench- of what would later come equipment (Monument Great Pipes Monument; The Fountain Monument), a playground Although sandbox Smithson published in day in Passaic. The other snapshots from these rolls, unpublished in Smithson's as yet in the scholarship more comprehensive lifetime and unexamined on Smithson, constitute the visual artifact of the Passaic tour. I will focus on them here." These unpublished snapshots go on to depict other, variously unexceptional is its fundamental toward the idealistic vacant storefronts, The photographs only six photographs his Artforum article, he exposed seven rolls of film that feature of the project monuments. and (The Sand-Box Monument). scape.' Another distinguishing bombast of traditional with Pontoons: The Pumping Demck), a group of wastewater pipes (The to be called telTain vague: the liminal or interstitial landirreverence as a rotating bridge (see fig. 39), an assembly of (The Bridge Monument) drainage snapshots." Smithson's Passaic tour has long been esteemed for its peripatetic opposition that Smithson published in his article, each carefully "monuments"- concrete escarpments, puddJes, parking lots. Many of them feature toppled, blemished, or down- 61 3' Robert Smithson, Monuments untitled snapshot from oj Passoic project (cube monument), 1967. Black-and-white commercially developed print, market equivalents of traditional monumental forms. The concrete cube in figure 32, for example, suggests the discarded base of some dismantled 3'/~ x 3 '{2 in. (8.g x 8.g em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, statue (or, perhaps, the imminent 19°5-87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. minimal sculpture). equestrian drowning of a unit of The leaky drinking fountain in figure 33 (another Fountain Monument) likewise disappoints. By categorizing these decidedly uninteresting objects as monuments anticlimactically fountain and by composing them so in the frame (looking down upon the and setting the cube indifferently middle distance), Smithson emphasizes produce the kind of metaphorical, wise invigorating connection in the their failure to didactic, or other- to the past that monu- ments are supposed to elicit. These monuments the mass, all the inertia of traditional have all monuments, but they have been drained of their capacity for inspiration or transportation. Resting blandly in the fiat midday sun, they are lethargic monuments, they have also been drained and thus of their capacity for word lethargy, after all, derives commemoration-the from the Greek Lethe, the mythical river in Hades whose waters cause drinkers to forget their past. These are the waters that Smithson's leaking fountain monument offers up. And the Passaic River, bathing its ponderous cube in a dull mercuric at least for the duration gleam, becomes, of Smithson's tour, the river of oblivion. Smithson L9 claimed in 1969 that "oblivion to me 1)0 is a state when you're not conscious of the time or space you are in." It could be found, he said, in "places without meaning." This is precisely the state that Smithson to us in his tour of Passaic, which presents is why it is so successful as an inversion of a traditional historical tour. Indeed, after combing "The Monuments through of Passaic," one is hard-pressed to shake the feeling of suffocating oblivion that it imparts. The Artforum article is masterfully elliptical, indeed it is difficult to call it a "site specific" work in the ordinary sense because it conveys so little specific information about the place it engages. In one of the better-known passages from the article, Smithson explicitly addresses this evacuation of meaning in Passaic, describing the city as a place without a predicate: "Passaic center loomed like a dull adjective. Each 'store' in it was an adjective unto the next, a chain of adjectives disguised as stores. I began to run out of film, and T was getting hungry. Actually, Passaic center 62 FORGETTING PASSAIC lJ Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot from Monuments Passaic project (small fountain monument), Black-and-white 3'/2 x 3'/2 commercially developed of 1967. print, in. (8.g x 8.9 em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 19°5-87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. was no center-it was instead a typical abyss or an ordinary void. "5 Smithson's Passaic travelogue leaves some of the most basic questions about this area unanswered. Where is Passaic, exactly? How far away from Manhattan? Who lives and works there? Is it an industrial city or a bedroom community? Smithson mentions What is its history? that a railroad track once passed through the center of town (I shall return to this later) but doesn't tell us where it headed or when it was operationaL There's a brief hint of a nineteenth-century past: "A rusty sign glared in the sharp atmosphere, making it hard to read. A date flashed in the sunshine ... 1899 ... No ... 1896 ... maybe," but its indecisive syntax suggests the refraction of historical narrative into a scattered series of illegible clues.6 In some ways Passaic in 1967 did indeed present itself as an "ordinary void" without history, but we do little justice to the sophistication of "The Monuments of Passaic" if we see it simply as a documentary reflection of the state of affairs in the city. It is ultimately more productive to examine Smithson's project in terms of its active conversion of Passaic's historical past (as well as its impending out meaning." future) into a "place with- The crystalline tropes running out the article provide an immediate of Smithson's .L9 interventions: through- clue to the nature many of the temporal strategies discussed in the previous chapter, including 1:10 Smithson's use of enantiomorphic to neutralize reversal or mirroring temporal direction and movement, his appeal to history as a material deposit, and his evocation of an all-embracing, terminal utopian stillness, are also at work in "The Monuments of Passaic." By tracing these motifs in the urban arena of their development, as Smithson worked them through a real place and its histories, T will begin to examine Smithson's crystal model in terms of its intersection time- with the politics of public memory in the late sixties. Along the way, I will carefully reconstruct some of the other histories that had a claim on Passaic in 1967 (especially its history of race relations). The reader may well argue at this point that any such attempt at historical reconstruction goes against both the spirit and the letter of Smithson's innovative project. This is precisely my point, although T hasten to add that this should not be construed as an attack on Smithson. It is instead an attempt, by looking awry 3. at "The Monuments Area of Smithson's of Passaic," to bring Smithson's project into dialectical relief. My aim is not to propose a more objective or meaningful in the "Monuments history of the city, but to restore some of the historiographical complexity tour through selected monuments numbered Passaic, with locations of in order of their appearance of Passaic" narrative, 1967. Map com- piled by the author from two United States Geological Survey maps (at left, Orange Quadrangle 1955, photorevised 1970; out of which Smithson's own version emerged. This at right: Weehawken Quadrangle, has the advantage, to my mind, of complicating the aura ment (Union Avenue Bridge; see figs. 37, 39). (2) General of objectivity that can tend to accrue around Smith- vicinity of all highway and river monuments It is indeed son's gritty and uninspiring photographs. tempting a uniquely clear-eyed to grant Smithson Smithson's lunch stop (11 Central Avenue) and the "parking lot monument" (see fig. 46). (4) Taras Shevchenko location of the playground I will argue instead that the soporific blandness Box Monument attempted to resolve a number reconstruction of conflicts. A strategic fragmentary outlines remain buried throughout the historical irresolution Smith- help us better to restore that Smithson confronted Passaic, as well as the historical implications in of his to it. Other Histories of Passaic By examining Smithson's field notes and the full sequence of his snapshots along with his published narrative, it is possible to provide a partial reconstruction of his route through Passaic on that September day. His travels covered a narrow strip ofland, Saturskirt- ing along the west bank of the Passaic River. Beginning at the Union Avenue bridge connecting and Passaic (see fig. 39), Smithson Rutherford ambled northward along the riverfront highway construction, then turned west away from the river and along Main Avenue toward the city center, where he photographed buildings, parking lots, and other "monuments," at the Golden Coach Diner at then returned southward, II and had lunch Central Avenue. He completing with the Sand-Box Monument his narrative (see fig. 48) at a play- ground adjacent to Passaic Stadium, near his starting point. Figure 34 shows the locations of several of the stops on Smithson's tour. If Smithson had been interested in leading a traditional historic tour of this area, he might have mentioned that the Passaic River had once powered a thriving manufacturing Alexander Hamilton economy. As early as 1792, and his investment Society of Useful Manufactures, group, the had used the Great Falls area of what is now Paterson (just upriver from Passaic) as the centerpiece of a blueprint for the first 64 FORGETTING monuments (see figs. 33, 48). (Below) area of detail. of some of those conflicts-whose son's texts and images-will responses of Passaic was itself a historical act, one that (see figs. 32, 38, 43). (3) Former railroad station in central Passaic, site of view of the bathetic "realities" of the American suburb. Smithson's 1967). (1) The Bridge Monu- PASSAIC Park, including The Sand- planned manufacturing century, becoming of worsteds boomed and encouraged an exponen- the fact that the question of history and its relation- workers. ship to urbanism contentious century the city was of foreign- was the highest in the country. The was the subject of conspicuous cided exactly with the rise of the historic preservaSmithson's in the New York metropolitan sequence of Passaic snapshots the decay of Passaic's urban infrastructure and the disruption twenties, including jects, all within a larger project of redefining the Passaic Textile Strike of 1926, it led directly to momentous Progressive-Era changes in labor law'? Unfortunately, ruinous the strikes also accompanied decline of the industrial caused by new large-scale construction torical monument. history because the base of the Paterson/ area. investigates labor unrest that gripped the entire region in the midhas become legendary in American and debate at the time. The Passaic tour coin- tion movement white but was by no means a typical suburb: by 1910 its percentage born population these historical narratives in his article was all the more significant for immigrant In the early years of the twentieth decision to suppress Its indus- fueled primarily by skilled Slavic and Austro-Hungarian predominantly Smithson's one of the world's largest centers trial success supported and the Landmarks Preservation Debate in the nineteenth and woolens manufacture. tial growth in population, white-bread Passaic, "Ultramodeme," center in the United States. Passaic, like Paterson, the his- Simply by attending to these themes and their confiation, Smithson project squarely-if polemically-within of preservationist landmarks pro- discourse. preservation placed his Passaic the context In New York City, the movement developed in Passaic area, which by mid-century was experiencing response widespread blight and dilapidation. By r967, the danger- begun to bring about the widespread to the postwar construction boom that had and largely ously polluted Passaic River flowed past abandoned unchecked demolition of older buildings and neighbor- factories. Passaic's downtown hoods. The debate reached a critical point in the mid- retail district (through which Smithson traveled on his tour) was being rapidly sixties, after Penn Station was demolished abandoned, spread community suffering from competition exurban shopping from new centers like the Garden State Plaza Square Garden. The Landmarks Preservation Act was signed into law on April 19, 1965, creating a legisla- and the Bergen Mall. Between r948 and r966 the city had lost 36 percent of its retail establishments; over wide- objections to make way for Madison this rate of decline was the highest in New Jersey. More- tive body with the power to designate landmark status on structures and enforce and districts within the over, as I examine more closely at the end of this chap- city. (Federal efforts on this score were also underway; ter, the entire city was beginning ,the National Historic Preservation to suffer from the effects of intensifying racial conflict stemming resistance of established influx of African-American from the ethnic groups to a major Smithson and Puerto Rican residents in the years following World War II.8 in "The Monuments was his own. Born in Passaic, Smithson could not have remained the debates surrounding unaware of historic preservation during these years. By 1966 and 1967, the Landmarks Significantly, another history that Smithson chose not to mention Act was passed in 1966.)10 vation Commission of Passaic" had spent Preser- was conferring landmark status at a furious pace; the New York Times regularly covered these landmark designations as well as the debates his entire childhood in two adjacent towns. Soon after over property rights that inevitably followed. One of the his birth his parents moved the family across the most contentious Passaic River (across, that is, the Bridge Monument, 39) to Rutherford, fig. where they lived during the war years. In 1948 (when Smithson was ten years old), the the Landmarks questions involved the designation of the entire area of Greenwich own neighborhood -as Village-Smithson's a historic district. This blan- first proposed in 1965, was intended to family moved back across Passaic to the town of ket designation, Clifton, which surrounds protect some two thousand Passaic to the north and west in the early history of Commission structures occupying a (traveling north on Main Avenue in Passaic, where sixty-five-block area (a space larger than all the other Smithson encountered New York historic districts combined). A bitter battle the adjectival storefronts, brings one quickly to Cliftonj.? between Village preservationists 66 FORGETTING PASSAIC and real estate interests ss ensued. After multiple public hearings and widespread Supplemental controversy, the official designation Ultramoderne project, 1967. was declared (pending final legal approval) in March 1967. Thus, on the morning of Smithson's September trip to Passaic, photograph taken in connection with print, 8 '/2 X8'/l in. (21.6 x 21.6 cm). Negative photostat Estate of Robert Smithson. he got out of bed in a sector of urban space that was all but certain to be frozen in time as New York's largest historic district." The historic preservation movement intersected at multiple points with Smithson's preoccupations. Smithson's broadly with preservation own historical time-crystal inasmuch model dealt as it posited history as the material persistence of all time. Yet it differed markedly from the kind of preservation cated by the landmarks advo- panel, whose protectionist approach was inspired by the form of historical value famously described by the early twentieth-century historian Alois Riegl: "The cult of historical art value must aim above all at the most complete conservation of the monument [or building] in its present state, and this requires that the natural course of decay be stayed as much as is humanly possible." with this approach, from Smithson's was, of course, that it attempted 12 The problem perspective, to circumvent entropy and therefore could not possibly succeed in its aims. Much of Smithson's work of 1965-68 responds, with varying degrees of obliquity, to the rise of pres- nous immobility" ervationism larger "trans-historical and its anti-entropic gambits. Indeed, it and trap temporal movement consciousness." seems likely that the historic preservation movement Ultramoderne provided one of the key conceptual out of familiar linear or progressive vanized Smithson pressures that gal- to develop and deploy his own architectural space is to be transported temporalities and to glimpse, if only through disorientation, critique of traditional history. Consider his "Ultramod- ical simultaneity erne" project from 1967, for which he photographed the boundaries Art Deco buildings ment of time, we discover premonitions, around New York City, particularly in a To enter an the rad- of the eternal time-crystal: "Within of the 'thirties, that multi-faceted seg- labyrinths, in the Central Park West area. His photographs empha- cycles, and repetitions size repetitive brickwork, the infinite." To occupy the crystalline time field of massing, cross-mirrored motifs (fig. 35). Smithson photographs setback-inspired pyramidal surfaces, and multifaceted published several of these in the September-October 1967 issue of Arts Magazine, along with his own idiosyncratic text celebrating the style. The text made clear that Smithson's understanding entangled of the crystalline nature of time was in his observations about these buildings: "There are two types of time-organic (Modernist) that lead us to a concrete area of architecture is to be at one with time and Ultramoderne with all times, to be in synchrony with the universe at large. Distance and difference are captured in a jewellike network. "The Ultramoderne exists ab aetemo!" 13 Although it does not explicitly announce as such, Smithsons "Ultramodeme" itself article amounts to a full-fledged rhetorical intervention in the landmarks preservation debate; indeed much of its persuasive and crystalline (Ultraist}." The text is also linked to his energy derives from the ironic friction that it generates "Air Terminal Site" article and its appeal to a higher, when examined four-dimensional an absurdist or parodic version of a preservationist archi- buildings, version of eternity: Ultramoderne according to Smithson, produce a "vertigi- in this context. The article reads as tectural paean; this is due, first, to Smithson's choice ,6 Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot of thirties Art Deco modernism from Monuments afPassaic project (square spirals), 1967. Black-and-white commercially developed print, Buildings constructed over thirty years old, were a low priority for preser- 3'/2 x 3'/2 in. (8.g x 8.g em). vation at the time. The Landmarks Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 19°5-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian as his subject matter. in this style, most of them just Institution. Preservation Com- mission was certainly not paying much attention to them.t't Second, because Smithson interprets Ultra- moderne buildings as crystalline and historically static, they not only evade but also inherently repudiate the construction of historical narratives. Ultramoderne buildings, for Smithson, operate as machines for scrambling the directional arrow of history upon which his- toricism and preservationism claimed, Ultramoderne depend. As Smithson architecture many types of monumental compressed "the art from every major period" into a tangle of "primitive inertia," thus confusing specific historical references and expressing the "basic disease of the historical function." Note that "Ultramodeme" attacks Landmarks Preservation not by disavowing preservation entirely but rather by attempting to redefine it. Ultramoderne buildings produce their own, superior form of "historic preservation" because the past, by intermingling kaleidoscopically with the present and future in an eternal stasis, is always at hand. "Ultramoderne," then, proposes an upgrade to the preservation idea, a form of hypertrophic preservaticnism everything-is efforts of all the monumental L9 1)0 architecture in which evetything- saved. By containing "all the arduous ages," Ultramoderne results in the "absolute inertia or the per- fect instant, when time oscillates in a circumscribed place." For Smithson, a single Ultramoderne building was better qualified to preserve history than are all the crumbling classicism fragments of nineteenth-century that the Landmarks Commission neo- was so keen on preserving. However, even as they preserve history in an infinite archive, these buildings archive useless by making it impossible render that to retrieve specific historical narratives from it. Tn their ability to crystallize all histories, these buildings oscillate between memory and oblivion, preservation and loss. It is important to take "Ultramoderne" sideration into con- when analyzing the Passaic tour because the two projects are closely related, both chronologically and thematically. They were published nearly sim- ultaneously, and both explored zones and spaces where Smithson felt that the ultimate crystallization of his- torical time was beginning to reveal itself In fact, Smith- 68 FORGETTING PASSAIC son's Passaic negatives reveal that when he set out for The refutation of progress encoded in these his tour, his camera was still loaded with an unfinished photographs reminds us that in order to imagine Passaic roll of film from the Ultramoderne as a historical terminus, project. More- over, as he walked through Passaic he continued to seek out architectural details of the Ultramoderne example, somewhere in downtown TV store and a small municipal stopped to photograph ilk. For Passaic, between a "Pocket Park," he an ever-receding square spiral a place where time itself would cease its motion, Smithson needed to be able to imagine the arrest not only of the past but also, equivalently, of the future. His understanding tralizing power of enantiomorphic of the neu- reversal was espe- cially useful in this regard. As discussed in Chapter Smithson was drawn to the crystallographic that would have been right at home on Central Park 2, West (fig. )6). of enantiomorphic concept symmetry because it allowed him to articulate an infinite stillness formed from the crossGridlock Although cancellation of the vectors of the past and the future. the spiraling pattern figure 36 provided Smithson of the tile work in with a prefabricated The Passaic tour makes liberal use of such enantiomorphic strategies; indeed, perhaps the most compelling crystalline motif that he could collect as if it were a idea that it has bequeathed kind of natural specimen, derives from this concept. It is tempting show Smithson to construct other Passaic snapshots using his camera more actively, intricate crystalline available visual materials. tional precision that Smithson's artifacts out of the Consider the composi- of the photographs to contemporary monumentalization urbanism to assume of everyday struc- tures was his most innovative strategy in the Passaic article, but I would argue that this is not what is most in figures 37 and radical or even "postmoderrr about the project. In 38, one showing the open steel roadbed of the Bridge fact, this kind of confiation has a long modernist Monument and the other featuring itage-Le neath an unfinished shadows under- overpass for the new highway. her- Corbusier, for example, identified Ameri- can grain elevators as monuments in the 1930S. The In figure 38, the broad diagonal bands of the traffic idea of a tour of industrial ruins was also well estab- barrier meet a near-perfect lished; "industrial tourism" had been common reversal in the striped shadows beneath the bridge, which are then reversed least the nineteenth again, at a lesser angle, by the vertical supports quality of the sights on Smithson's the steel bridge at the top of the photograph. of These since at century. Not even the deflationary tour was unprec- edented. According to tourism theorist Dean MacCan- dynamic reversals are fixed in turn by the horizontal nell, there was a new interest in "negative sightseeing" stratification -tours of the image, in which a visual pattern of sites of social and environmental wreck- of stacked slabs (steel bridge, concrete abutment, age-during wooden planks) packs the image into a tight geomet- guided tour of Harlem with the Penny Sightseeing rical interlock. Company, and in 1970, during Earth Week, one could Figure 37, too, features a visual inter- lock. Here, the recessional pull of the image (defined by the V shape made by the seam running through the late sixties. In 1967 one could take a take bus tours of the "ten top polluters in action."15 What was unusual about Smithson's the roadbed from lower right to upper left as it meets his assertion that the new construction the curb in the background) him were also monuments, miniature in the cross-hatching is echoed in infinite of the roadbed, and tour was projects around monuments which he called "ruins in reverse": "This is the opposite of the don't fall into then snapped back to the picture plane by its reit- 'romantic eration in the bold zigzags of the truss in the fore- ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before ruin' because the buildings ground. Note that this "gridlock" strategy operates at they are built." This paradoxical equation of progres- the level of subject matter as well: each photograph sion and regression features a roadway whose connotations page of historical motion. In Passaic, where progress have been invalidated Smithson's composition by the vectoral indecision of (the "Road Closed" sign in figure 38 thus becomes a particularly internal caption). of progression appropriate produces an enantiomorphic stop- is perpetually mirrored by decay, the very movement of time has been cancelled. Indeed, by suggesting we see Passaic's backward-looking looking construction that ruins and forward- projects as equivalent, Smithson 37 untitled snapshot from Monuments of Passaic project (crystalline grate on The Bridge Monument), 1967. Robert Smithson, Black-and-white commercially developed print, 3 '/2 X 3 '/2 in. (8.g x 8.9 em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. invites us to adopt the position of a fourth-dimensional observer in an eternal block universe the contingencies irrelevant. Smithson suspension in which of direction, change, and motion are sprinkles clues to this crystalline of direction throughout the article. On the way to Passaic, for example, he is careful to note that the bus turns onto "Orient Way," but once it crosses the river into Passaic there is only disorientation. Upon arriving in Passaic, he watches the Bridge Monument rotate to allow a barge to pass: "The Passaic (West) end of the bridge rotated south, while the Rutherford (East) end of the bridge rotated north; such rotations suggested the limited movements of an outmoded world. 'North' and 'South' hung over the static river in a bipolar manner. One could refer to this bridge as the 'Monument of Dislocated Directions.'" 16 I do not mean to imply that Smithson's project amounted Passaic to a purely fantastical exercise in applied crystallography. The landscape of the Passaic valley in the sixties did lend itself, in many ways, to Smithson's "ruins-in-reverse" idea. Indeed, few land- scapes were better suited to inspire a connection By I967 the wide- between decay and construction. spread urban decay was being brought apposition into stark with massive civil engineering projects that were often designed specifically to remedy (or at least to bypass) the stagnation of the area. The adjacency of the half-ruined and the half-finished was everywhere L9 00 apparent. Smithson witnessed this landscape often in his frequent travels back and forth between New York City and the northern New Jersey suburbs during this time, and it would have perhaps been more surprising had he not made a visual and conceptual tion between the two processes. connec- In his field notes for the Passaic trip, Smithson noted "the eternally ramshackled construction" that he passed on the way to his destination: he was probably referring to the gargantuan project of draining and developing the Meadowlands, which was getting under way at the time. He would also have witnessed the construction Jersey Turnpike.'? of the New Indeed, this was a particularly busy historical moment for the New Jersey Department of Transportation; massive highway projects were tear- ing up landscapes throughout Route 2I, the new north-south the state, including highway being built along the Passaic River, that Smithson in his tour. But although 70 FORGETTING PASSAIC Smithson documented was clearly attend- a Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot from Monuments of Passaic project (road closed), 1967. Black-and-white commercially developed print, their construction 3'/2 x 3 '/2 in. (8.9 x 8.g em). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian as an enantiornorphic of decay, Smithson Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-87, by identifying them ing to these "improvements," as a form of reversed ruin and therefore claiming Institution. precludes of urban renewal. In Smithson's jects do not bypass stagnation contribute equivalent the very possibility Passaic, highway probut rather, inevitably, to it. Smithson was not alone in this fatalistic inter- pretation of the prospects for change in Passaic. One Passaic housewife, interviewed for a 1968 New York Times article about the decline of the city, unwittingly echoed Smithson's "ruins in reverse" motif: "Passaic is decaying and all we get from the politicians promises .... Promises Promises are to make the streets safer. to build new housing. J don't have any faith left. If they started a new building here Saturday it would fall down Wednesday." Thus it is not entirely accurate to say that Smithson simply imposed a prefabricated notion of enantiomorphic cross-cancellation onto an unwitting landscape; more likely the landscape -in all its historical and political dimensions- inspired and reinforced the modeL Smithson's crystal, with all its pretensions dence, is inextricable time- to historical transcen- from the specific conditions of the exurban New Jersey landscape of the late sixties.18 like "Ultramodeme" and Smithson's other urban projects of the late sixties, "The Monuments saic" served as a kind of modern-day L9 of Pas- geological survey 1JO (or, better, crystallographical survey) report. The tour was an expedition to a place where Smithson eternal equilibrium felt that could be found in its natural state. It was thus also an inverted or backwards historical tour, in this sense a distinct example of "MirrorTravel." To travel from Greenwich Village to Passaic was to reverse the traditional direction of historical tourism by leaving an official historic district in order to visit a fringe zone of "infinite disintegration and forgetful- ness." To do so, however, was nevertheless at a higher plane of historic preservation. Preservation activists surely felt that they had managed time in Greenwich Village (Smithson's this emerges throughout to arrive to stop low opinion of the Passaic article in his frequent references to the futility of attempting to evade entropy). But for Smithson, managed the city of Passaic had to evoke an even more stable and inclusive brand of eternal stasis without even trying. In yielding passively to progress 71 (unlike the Village, Passaic had no wealthy, influential, or cohesive neighborhood the subject matter into crystalline patterns. But most groups that could stop the highway from cutting of Smithson's Passaic photographs through the historic fabric of the city), Passaic was "crystalline" in their pictorial logic as these. His pub- allowing itself to crystallize. It was "stopping lished image of the Bridge Monument (fig. 39), for time" far are not as obviously more finally and effectively than was Greenwich Village. example, frees the triangular As Smithson asked, only half-jokingly, "Has Passaic the tight organization facets of the bridge from replaced Rome as the Eternal City?19 they exhibit in figure 37, permitting around the picture plane that the perspectival recession of the image to rush backward unimpeded. In fact, a close analysis of Smithson's A Crystallography of Perspective Smithson conceived of his own work in Passaic as shots demonstrates contributing recessional to, rather than simply recording, the crys- Passaic snap- that many feature exaggeratedly compositions marked by the convergence tallization of Passaic. Consider Smithson's snapshot of orthogonal of the concrete cube sitting in the Passaic River (see fig. they stretch into the distance (see fig. 43). The railings, 32), which bears a close resemblance curbs, roadways, concrete barriers, and other reces- to the photo- collage, titled Proposalfor a Monument on the Red Sea, that he produced saw some connection chosen not for their topical interest but rather because between the notice that as he photo- the basic topographical outlines of the earlier collage. I discussed Proposalfor a Monument on the Red Sea as one of a group of experimental produced images that in an attempt to imagine the crystalline "block universe" of four-dimensional here) seem to have been they serve so well to indicate the perspectival graphed the cube in the river, he took care to preserve Smithson sional subject matter in these snapshots (most of which have not been illustrated collage and the snapshot; 2 of forms as a year earlier in 1966 (see fig. 28). Clearly Smithson In Chapter lines and the diminution space as it began to intrude upon the everyday three-dimen- Smithson's emerging interest in this exaggerated recessional technique is suggested by the fact that he further explored and refined it in subsequent pro- jects. In an expedition to Bergen a few months after the Passaic trip, for example, he took a series of snapshots labeled "Points on the Edge of a New Jersey sional world. The cube looms disconcertingly in the sea- Swamp." In this photographic scape because its shading is inconsistent five rolls of exposed film) Smithson with that distor- tions forced upon them by the act of photography itself. tour (which generated concentrated of the nearby rocks and, more importantly, because the his efforts even more directly on the production of pho- axonometric tographic perspectives perspective of its delineation is mis- (figs. 40, 41). In Passaic and aligned with the recessional space of the rest of the Bergen, Smithson attempted to explore the spatial struc- landscape. ture inherent The photographic seascape, with its nec- essary ties to linear perspective, limited, contingent, embodies the kind of singular viewpoint that the tran- scendent cube-crystal (in Smithson's universe) was set to overtake. Yet the cube snapshot Whereas of the rela- and crystallization. previously the crystalline associations the cube is integrated of the vision of the seascape, now seamlessly into the photo- graphic space itself. Smithson's throughout what has often been tation: its mechanization of linear perspective.e" What makes these perspectives embody a crys- talline vision (rather than foil or frustrate it, as in strategy underlying their production. each of these photographs If we think of as the material deposition of a single shard of vision (a "solid diminution," suggest that his tour he was experimenting with new itself as a crystallizing as he later put it), we can see them in series as a crystalline aggregate. In fact we can better understand Passaic snapshots methods of using photography images. In these Smithson's previous collages) is the broader depositional cube were established differentially, through opposition to the photographic in all photographic views, he emphasized described as the very essence of photographic represen- from the Passaic project suggests a different understanding tionship between photography recessional son's photographic Smith- process in Passaic if we consider it as part of his sculptural production. Smithson him- self tended to deploy a sculptural vocabulary to convey tool. One strategy that he tested, as we have already the process of vision (photographic seen in figures 37 and 38, was to use the camera to lock He spoke often, for example, of "casting glances." As art 72 FORGETTING PASSAIC and otherwise). 19 Robert Smithson, The Bridge Monument Sidewalks, from "The Monuments Showing Wooden of Passaic," 1967. Collection Museet for Samtidkunst, Norway. -- 4° Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot Edge of a New Jersey Swamp Black-and-white commercially from Points on the project (fence), 1968. developed print, 3 '{2 X 3 '/, in. (8.g x 8.g em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 19°5-87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 89 ~d'll 89 tid'll 4' Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot Edge of a New Jersey Swamp from Points on the project (railroad), 1968. Black-and-white commercially developed print, 3 '/2 X 3 '/2 in. (8.g x 8.g em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905- 87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 4' Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot from Monuments of Passaic project (traditional monument), 1967. Black-and-white commercially developed print, ... 3'/2 x 3'/2 in. (8.g x 8.g em). Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Smithson had repeatedly glance': 'I'm not interested Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-87, critic John Perreault recalled from a trip that he took with the artist in I968, "Out on the ice-cold Palisades Institution. spoken of 'casting a in casting material, but in art that's made out of casting a glance.''' And in his essay ''A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," Smithson made it clear that the artist's vision should as a solid: ''A great artist can make art by be considered simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place."2! Thus the solid artifacts among the monuments of Passaic include not only bridges, buildings, water fountains but also Smithson's and snapshots them- selves. Indeed, as the contact sheets from the Bergen and Passaic photo tours demonstrate, quently alternated Smithson fre- between recessional photographic views of empty space and views of traditional monumental forms. Throughout, his camera-crafted he equivocated pyramids obelisks that he photographed 42). It is as if Smithson perspectival apparatus along with them (fig. was attempting mechanization unerringly photographs Thus Smith- not only explore photography's of perspective, medusan gorgonization to use the of the camera to mold (or cast) empty space into pointed monuments. son's photographs between and the pyramidal but also theorize quality of the medium. the His of perspective space connects the Passaic with much of his other sculptural of the mid-sixties, work which often conflates perspective and matter (notably in the perspectival arrangements of specimens in his Nonsites: see fig. 3I). It also relates to the work of other artists interested cation of space; indeed, photographs Smithson's in the solidifiunassuming of roadsides and railroad tracks are just as closely related to Bruce Nauman's castings of nega- tive space as they are to the tradition of tourist and documentary photography>" By thinking of photography as a kind of injection molding process, Smithson understanding reverses the Cartesian of linear perspective as a tool for the sub- limation of the material world. Material objects, when represented in perspective, cede their particularity, their heft, and their conceptual infrastructure. opacity to a rational Smithson takes that infrastructural matrix and gives it a heft of its own. This intervention history of perspective was fully intentional; in the Smithson went out of his way to study the historical development 75 43 Robert Smithson, Monuments untitled snapshot from afPassaic project (concrete form), 1967. Black-and-white commercially developed print, 3 '/, x 3'/2 in. (8.g x 8.g em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905- 87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. of perspective and deserves to be counted among its most brilliant and compelling theorists. As his fossilization of perspective space in the Passaic photographs suggests, he shared none of the Cartesian ambitions of "Golden Age" Renaissance linear perspective. Rather, as his notes and papers demonstrate, eccentric and Manneristic he preferred the "perspective exercises" of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German and Flem- ish artists. A good example of these is the perspective diagram Of1604 by Jan Vredeman de Vries; the skewed objects strewn about the page, which, coincidentally, bear a striking resemblance to Smithsods own concrete artifacts in one of his Monuments perspectival Passaic snapshots, of suggest the "perspective pyramids" of a dozen glances cast in place (figs. 43, 44). The oblique forms appear as fallen, wasted views and offer more of an obstruction to the viewer than an abstraction of the viewer's visual penetration These Mannerist of the space." explorations of perspective were attractive to Smithson because they proclaim and embrace the artificiality of perspective systems rather than treat such systems as neutral expressions of visu- ality. Smithson felt that, since the Mannerist era, the inherent artificiality of perspective had been obscured by painterly atmospherics. essay "Pointless 'naturalism' DO Points": "With the rise of and 'realism' in the arts the artificial fac- tors of perspective 19 As he wrote in his 1967 Vanishing chiaroscuro." were lost in thick brown stews of Smithson's use of photography in the Passaic project aims to objectify and therefore denaturalize perspectival representation.e' Smithson's produced solidification of visual perspective, as it was in the context of a monumental tour, also served to denaturalize the perspectival meta- phors underlying of memory and his- the traditions tory. Ifhis library is any indication, Smithson frequently would have encountered the analogy between histor- ical and visual perspective constructions In Husserl's in his reading. Phenomenology of Internal Time-Conscious- ness we find that "an articulated part of the process 'draws together' as it sinks into the past -a temporal perspective ... analogous kind of to spatial perspec- tive. As the temporal object moves into the past, it is drawn together on itself and thereby also becomes obscure." In another of Smithson's books, philoso- pher George Santayana claims that "memory ... sets up a temporal 76 FORCETTING perspective, PASSAIC believing firmly in its 44 Jan Vredeman de Vries, plate 3 from Perspective, 1604. By permission of the Houghton library, Harvard University. 4' Lorenz Stoer, plate 7 from Ceometna et Perspectiva, 1567TYP520.67.81OF, Department Houghton Library, Harvard of Printing and Graphic Arts, College Library. recessional character .... time what perception Memory and prophecy do in does in space.r" By calcifying memorial space simultaneously, monuments, and photographic Smithson's not only to the current dialogues snapshots about the relationship ultimately Clement Greenberg between vision and memory. and Michael Fried had recently prevent the spectator from enjoying a transparently developed an aesthetics perspectival relationship to the past. Art historian James modernist Elkins has noted that sixteenth-century cess of a work of art for Greenberg perspective about history and but also to prevailing art-world discussions of visual renewability gospel. As I discussed in Chapter into I, depended the suc- on its exercises often convey a sense of desertion or ruination. "at-onceness." This at-onceness, in turn, depended upon We might well ask why this is the case. Why would the complete and unfailing repeatability an artist such as Lorenz Stoer feel compelled to render ence of seeing it: "The 'at-onceness' his J567 woodcut, also known as a "perspective or a piece of sculpture enforces on you is not, however, gar- of the experi- which a picture den" (fig. 45), as a ruin, complete with broken arches, single or isolated. It can be repeated in a succession blasted trees, and weeds growing between the forms? of instants, in each one remaining Perhaps instant all by itself. For the cultivated eye, the picture Stoer was elaborating upon the desolate sense already suggested by the refractory quality of the repeats its instantaneous forms themselves-each a single word."27 form crystallizes a perspec- tival system which is coherent multiply misaligned, in itself but otherwise not only with the viewer but an 'at-onceness,' an unity like a mouth repeating For Greenberg, the view of a monument (in this sense the modem artwork) is a fully renewable resource; also with the other forms on the page. Woodcuts like its occurrence Stoer's elaborated that might block or inflect the return view of the work upon techniques often used in produces no mnemonic the backgrounds of Mannerist paintings, which featured of art. The metaphysical unsettling architectural lies Greenberg's placement of linear perspective scenes formed by the dis(so that the viewer felt "off-line" with the image, as if seated too far to the side at a play with perspective scenery). Smithson, byproducts sleight of hand that under- assertions is that if each view is to be equal to the first, the phenomenal field must be con- stantly "reset" so that the memory of previous views will not not get in the way of the perfect apprehension of the surprisingly, was especially interested in Steer's work succeeding. The "cultivated eye" must be able to return In one of his notebooks, he drafted a paragraph of com- to the object and have the same experience mentary on Steer's "geometrical over again; it must not encounter landscapes" and over and the residue of its own also mentioned the work of Wenzel [amnitzer, an artist previous view, for this would block the purity of the who produced similar repetition. Of course it is precisely this residue or visual perspective constructions. Smithson was fascinated by these hardened, inaccessi- waste product that Smithson embodies in his entropic ble perspective objects, objects that (like the past) can "cast glances." His Mannerist offer nothing to the viewer but a sense of misalignment standing of perspective insists upon the mundane mem- and belatedness.26 orability of vision, defies any notion of renewable What is truly ruinous about Smithson's fication of perspective is its suggestion view has been deposited, morti- that, once a experience, and maintains and materialist a Siberian indifference it cannot be reoccupied. The "Stigmatic Vistas" and the Problem monuments of Nostalgic Affect of Passaic, like Stoer's geometrical scapes, are more radically, irretrievably turesque landscape monumental land- "past" than orthodox ruins depicted in picpaintings. This is why Smithson's photography-every glance preserved intact and piled upon the previous in an infinite photosculptural to the repeated advances of the cultivated eye. die has been cast by the eye. In this sense Smithson's all the perspectivally under- rubble-lends his view of Passaic its Smithson's monumental snapshots, is preserved by Smithson's ously rendered Instamatic, opaque to mnemonic Smithson's monumental photographs it is simultanerevisitation. do not remember Passaic so much as they bury Passaic under an infinite bleak and brittle sense of history. It is worth noting that deposition of mnemonic Smithson's visual anachronism unchecked "historic preservation" in Passaic was linked then, preclude memory even as they preserve it. Just as each moment 79 artifacts. The exaggerated, that results renders history infinite and thus impossible. Smithson not alone in exploring this conceptual was inversion, at greeting card (a romantic figure holding baguettes or a fishing pole, walking away into the distance, would infinity, between history and oblivion. We find a vivid seem right at home on the walkway). As suggested parallel in one of his favorite Jorge Luis Borges stories, above, visual and historical perspective have long been "Funes the Memorious." connected Funes is a character who, because he can forget nothing, can remember He exists in "a multiform, instantaneous nothing. and almost in the West; an image like this activates an entire battery of cultural metaphors recession and memory. Recessional intolerably precise world," where memory becomes threaten isomorphic by setting into play what Jeff Wall calls the "adventure with time itself and thus cannot function to raise any number linking spatial photographs of sentimental specters selectively: "Two or three times he had reconstructed ofloss" of perspective. a whole day; he never hesitated, camera can tum even the most quotidian landscape into but each reconstruc- a playground tion had required a whole day." Borges's story, like Smithson's hypermonumentality, specter raised by Proust at the beginning of affect."? Smithson contends with the was abundantly affective tendencies of the The stigmatic action of the conscious of perspective. of the In fact, 1've century, in which "it is quite possible that [the philoso- borrowed the term stigmatic from Smithson phy] according to which everything is doomed to who explicitly referred to photographs oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which vistas." His choice of this term, of course, immedi- would predict the conservation ately connects his photographs back to his religious paintings, figured prominently Smithson's of everything." camera, in its infinite memorializing of paradoxically as oubliette. Smithson Passaic, functions is, we might say, looking to forget.28 Smithson on many other cities and landscapes monumental as a mark of suffering as "stigmatic and broken unity (see figs. 23-25). He once also described perspective would train his amnesiac here, in "The Monuments where stigmatization as a form of wounding: camera after 1967. But strategies take on an especially acute sig- "Through road stabbed the horizon, incandescence." of Passaic," his photo- himself, recession the windshield the causing it to bleed a sunny All this suggests that for Smithson the "viewpoint" of the photographic memory had some nificance. After all, we must not lose sight of the connection to the nails of the crucifixion most provocative aspect of the project: Smithson art historian Jill Bennett has argued, the image of the chosen the city of his own birth as the site for his nail entering Christ's bloody wounds was enlarged experiments of Passaic" and lovingly detailed in some medieval devotional takes what might easily have been a mawkish exercise images in order to fix through bodily sympathy the in nostalgia and memory and transforms viewer's memory of the scene). Perhaps we might in forgetting. "The Monuments high-concept oblivion rendered detachment. The strategy is brilliant: has it into a with flawless ironic hoping to attain a "total crystalline consciousness," of the limitations perspectives, of specific histories situated memories Smithson's sentiment free and situated what better way to test one's mettle than to subject one's own most personal, to the eternalizing neutralization specific, and treatment? of both memory and in the Passaic project is so successful that it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the difficulty of the task to which he set himself. His use of perspective is a case in point. After studying Smithsons even consider tographer. for an artist Smithson (indeed, as to be the first medieval pho- At any rate, Smithson's annotations in his library reveal his association of perspectival diminution with all sorts of feeling, not only pain but also desire. For example, he underlined a passage in a text by Saint John of the Cross claiming desire seizes upon anything, that "the instant it is narrowed." The dra- matic attenuation of the receding objects in Smith- son's photographs embody, at some level, the very structure of desire, which in the temporal synonymous with nostalgia Because Smithson photographs arena is and memory.3° so well understood the in their disaffected aggregate, we need to stop and emotional baggage of his "stigmatic vistas," his preser- remind ourselves that an image like figure 39, showing vation, mortification, the Bridge Monument rushing perspective in the Passaic project served, at least in part, back into the distance, would need little or no alteration to be printed on a as a renunciation 80 FORGETTING and infinite crystallization of of historical nostalgia. By "casting" PASSAIC his views he plastered the mnemonic wounds; by mul- monument (fig. 46) is quite interesting, both in its per- tiplying them to infinity he reduced their individual fect encapsulation power to pierce. His crystallizing talline time (in its condensation blunts, confounds, treatment and ultimately of Passaic transcends the of Smithson's conception of crys- of tropes of stoppage and stillness) and also in the way it can be made to affect of history. His infinite deposition of temporal trag- reveal the more comprehensive ments into a crystalline simultaneity attempts to allow implications the perception of time above and beyond its perspectival first, as a remarkable association anxieties animating Smithson's career. Most importantly, with desire and nostalgia. "The Monu- of Smithson's compendium ments of Passaic" is just as much an exercise in mystical the parking lot raises-and detachment the problem of the automobile as it is a documentary way construction. treatment of high- Its rhetoric of dullness and passivity political and historical Passaic project. It serves, had so conspicuously of long-standing attempts to resolvewith which Smithson struggled in his religious paint- is a hard-fought liberation from the wounds of memory ings (see figs. 5, tr]. There, the speeding "infernal" and the habits of desire for the past. As Smithson machines underlined passage and fallen history. Here, however, in the in his copy ofT. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets": had served as anxious symbols of temporal "sunny nebulosity" of the Passaic afternoon, This is the use of memory: mobile is redeemed by the regular repetition For liberation-not enforced stasis of the parking lot. The gleaming less of love but expanding of love beyond desire, and so liberation transcendental Race in the Parking Lot of Passaic" is of history. tour of Passaic began drawing to a of a railroad track. This paving action links the monument to Smithson's Diner (see fig. 34). Starting back southward down," performing the Union Avenue bus stop where he began, he the penultimate monument of his journey: "I walked down a parking lot that covered the old ongoing interest in asphalt (see Asphalt Rundown, fig. 47) as an agent of hardening and congealment; toward to the As Smithson notes, the parking lot has its origin in the paving over close after he finished his lunch at the Golden Coach encountered by its relationship railroad tracks it has literally superseded. also political, however, for other residents of Passaic Smithson's glass facetry. The parking lot as an index of stasis is further suggested were also swept up in its crystallization and and metal surfaces of the cars suggest a species of From the future as well as the past." The personal drama of "The Monuments the auto- a material that automatically "runs its own entropic immobilization. The power of the asphalt to defeat the kinetic potential of the tracks underneath Smithson's curious treatment is paralleled by of the history of the rail- railroad tracks which at one time ran through the mid- road in his written narrative. dle of Passaic. That monumental with its vague reference to the railroad tracks that ran parking lot divided Smithson's discussion, the city in half, turning it into a mirror and a reflection through - but the mirror history an indistinct, muffled, and faraway quality. It is kept changing places with the Passaic "at one time," gives the railroad's reflection. One never knew what side of the mirror one true that the railroad tracks were old-they was on. There was nothing interesting or even strange part of the Erie-Lackawanna about that flat monument, yet it echoed a kind of had been line that had run along Main Avenue since 1831. Surprisingly, however, they cliche idea of infinity; perhaps the 'secrets of the uni- had been removed only four years before Smithson's verse' are just as pedestrian-not tour, in 196} They had been torn up in order to open to say dreary. Every- thing about the site remained wrapped in blandness the moribund and littered with shiny cars -one after the other they needed parking and to help facilitate the construc- extended The indifferent tion of Highway into a sunny nebulosity. backs of the cars flashed and reflected the stale afternoon sun. I took a few listless, entropic snapshots of that lustrous monument.O'' Notwithstanding downtown shopping area to much- 21.33 It had also been hoped that the new parking lot would contribute to the urban renewal of Passaic by remedying the profound racial and economic segrega- Smithson's there was nothing interesting insistence that about it, his parking lot tion that had historically divided the city. The idea that these tracks so recently had a "wrong side" raises the 46 Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot from Monuments of Passaic project (parking lot), 1967, Black-and-white commercially developed print, 3'/2 x 3 '/2 in. (8.g x 8.g em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 19°5-1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. possibility that Smithson's parking lot might be about the crystallization not only of speed but also of race. Indeed, this parking lot opens a new perspective Smithson's project by demonstrating on that his opera- tions upon history are part of a much larger adumbration of difference and conflict in Passaic. In Smithson's text, the disused railroad tracks serve as an enantiomorphic entropic sameness fold across which the of Passaic reveals itself. Acknowl- edging the urban cliche of the city split by railroad tracks into a right and wrong side, Smithson claims that the tracks "divided the city in half." But by refiguring this division as a mirror relation, he envisions that scission as caught up in a process of equivocation, as a difference in the process of dedifferentiation, locked in a larger cross-referential wholeness ("One never knew what side of the mirror one was on"). Like the mirrors in Smithson's gallery installa- tions that both sever and heal the material they transect, the ruined railroad tracks project a kind of still, "listless" harmony upon the town. Others, however, took a different view of the situation. Dr. Wallace Haddon, an African American dentist interviewed in 1968 for a New York Times article about Passaic, claimed that "there's a color line right down the middle of town, where the railroad tracks used to run." It rums out that this unassuming parking lot still served as a highly charged index of a form of L9 1:)0 difference that was, in reality, unlikely to heal itself anytime soon. Already destabilized of its textile economic sixties, undergoing rapid demographic to increased racial tension. the percentage by the decimation base, Passaic was, during the changes that led Between 1960 and 1970 of whites decreased from 91.2 percent to 64.2 percent of the total population. The African American population increased 10 percent, to 17.9 percent of the total population, while the percentage of Hispanic, primarily Puerto Rican, residents leaped from 3 percent to 18 percent of the total population. Racial tensions were high and virtually defined the complex politics of Passaic at the time. As Dr. Haddon testified, segregation remained as absolute as ever: ''A Negro catches hell" ifhe tries to move into the predominately white section of town.J" When Smithson's Passaic article is considered in this light, other aspects of an oblique racial subtext emerge as well: not only in his reference to the railroad 82 FORGETTING PASSAIC 47 Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown (Rome), 1969. Estate of Robert Smithson. " Robert Smithson, untitled snapshot tracks, but also in an experiment from Monuments of Passaic project (alternate view of demonstration The Sand-Box Monument), of the article, while contemplating Black-and-white 3 '/2 X 3 '/2 1967. commercially developed in. (8.g x 8.9 em). Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, print, he includes for the of the action of entropy. Toward the end the Sand-Box Mon- ument (fig. 48), Smithson writes: "I should now like to prove the irreversibility of eternity by using a jejune 1905-87, Archives of American Art, experiment Smithsonian eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on Institution. for proving entropy. Picture in your mind's one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, the result will not be a restoration but of the original divi- sion but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy."35 To be sure, the language of color in this demonstration-black, white, and grey-is perfectlyexplic- able in terms of the broader discourse of black- andwhite photography running throughout the article, and can easily be read as being so abstract an image of dialectical entropy as to be emptied out of all social or political content. But it should be noted that Smithson made a conscious choice to design his sandbox experiment in black and white. He borrowed the experiment almost verbatim from a book called Turning Points in Physics. Here is the original text, which he carefully marked in his copy of the book: "The experiment simple and convincing. L9 1)0 is Fill a jam jar half with white sand and half with red sand, and then stir the contents a hundred times in a clockwise direction. The result is pink sand. Stirring now a hundred times in anticlockwise [sic] direction will not separate the sand again into white and red. In fact, the sand will be even pinker." The sand in the original text was red and white; Smithson purposes changed it to black and white for the of Passaic. Given the conspicuousness of the racial tensions at the time, as well as the frequency with which Smithson employs color rhetoric in the article (elsewhere, for example, he notes that "the houses mirrored themselves into colorlessness"), cult not to see Smithson's it is diffi- sandbox as a place where race is very much in play, even as Smithson's forward entropic projection wants to claim that the game is already over.36 Smithson's sandbox, then, functions as a listless utopia of sorts. It serves as an abstract demonstration of entropic sameness, but it also addresses (even as it attempts, prematurely, to resolve) the rising crisis in 84 FORGETTING PASSAIC race relations that was gripping the country at the time. Smithson rarely commented but he was knowledgeable overtly on race issues, and concerned about them. In fact, in April of 1967, just a few months before embarking on his Passaic tour, he had contributed a sculpture to the Annual Art Exhibition and Sale of the Scholarship, Education, and Defense FW1dfor Racial Equality. If we were to attempt to assign an ethical intentionality to the sandbox, we would do best to inter- pret it as an instrument for the production of racial equality through the dissolution of racial disharmony as well as all other distinctions. But the sandbox also displaces the exigency of difference by projectingand naturalizing-its entropic endpoint. And at heart, with its rhetoric of dullness, sterility, and acedia, it projects a hope that racial conflicts might inevitably resolve themselves slowly, gradually, sleepily. Given the explosive race rioting that, by September was already beginning ofI967, to alarm the nation, Smith- son's en tropic black-and-white sandbox seems both poignant and willful. Just two months before Smithson arrived for his tour, the city of Passaic itself had experienced its first race riots-two firebombing nights oflooting and in July. In the two years ahead the city would experience not Smithson's sleepy grey-scale unity but rather continued Smithson's and intensifying violence.F sandbox, then, serves not only to stifle the memory of the city's segregated past and present. It also serves to forget, before it has even happened, Passaic's violent future. In doing so it encapsulates in microcosm all of the essential hopes of the Passaic project as a whole. Throughout ments of Passaic," Smithson "The Monu- works to neutralize Passaic's history: his "ruins-in-reverse" progress trope equates and regress, thus obviating all historical trajectories; his photographic the affect of historical ent accumulation "cast glances" transform retrospection of perspectives; into an indifferand his entropic monuments attempt to override the violent struggles of difference that so often mark historical But, as I hope to have suggested change. here, history can still occupy the scene of its entropic exclusion; there is still some digging to do in Smithson's sandbox. SMITHSON AND STEPHENS IN YUCATAN I actually value indifference. I think it's something playas that Yucatan as indifferent has aesthetic possibilities. -Robert a pejorative; by constructing authorizes Smithson, 1967 to their own history, Stephens his extraction of archaeological from the region. Smithson Robert Smithson and John Uoyd Stephens were both New Jersey-born residents of Manhattan, wherefrom the people of artifacts subjects such imperialist operations to a blistering and sophisticated inversion. Nevertheless, critical in some of the most sophisti- each embarked on a well-publicized excursion to the cated aspects of Smithson's narrative, particularly in his Yucatan Peninsula. attempts to imagine a form of "dedifferentiated" vision One departed from New York on Monday, October 9, I84I, aboard the cargo ship and history, Stephens's Tennessee; the other left on Tuesday, April 15, 1969, ence is necessarily aboard Pan Am flight 67. Both published critical debate about the historical implications narratives of their travels: Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Yucatan Smithson's was a two-volume book published by Harper & Brothers despite Smithson's notion of indigenous retained. My goal is to help initiate expeditionary pomorphism" in the Yucatan" appeared as an article in the September Yucatan Peninsula I969 issue of Artforum. Both narratives and a politics of peripheral abundant illustrations. methodology of and to suggest, frequent renunciations in r843, while Smithson's "Incidents of Mirror-Travel included indiffer- of "anthro- and politics, that his expedition to the constituted both an anthropology encounter. I The immediate similarities end there. Stephens's Stephens and Catherwood antebellum adventure, steeped in nineteenth-century During the r830s and early I840s, John Lloyd Stephens imperialist and positivist rhetoric, bears so little direct embarked on several major expeditions to regions resemblance to Smithson's meandering, skeptical treatment that the two barely seem worth discussing the same breath. Indeed, Smithson played his connection Stephens's in himself down- to Stephens; although writings and suggested beyond the fringes of Anglo-American he knew in his title a desire exoticism of his destinations influence. The (such as Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Arabia, Jerusalem, and Central America), combined with what one twentieth-century critic approv- ingly described as his "delightful style overflowing with to reflect upon them, he avoided any direct reference anecdote and salacious adventure," made Stephens to Stephens in the body of his article. When he did speak one of the most successful and influential American explicitly of Stephens, travel writers of the nineteenth it was only to negate him-in one interview he referred to his Yucatan trip as the "anti-expedition" to Stephens's." Yet despite Smithson's about Stephens but also influenced a generation of American writers, apparent ambivalence and his nineteenth-century baggage, his Yucatan project can be fruitfully examined in terms of the dialogue it invites with the American expeditionary tradition. Both travelers, for example, applied the rhetoric of historical indifference landscape and to the inhabitants sula. Stephens's century. His best-selling books not only found favor with the general public, to the of the Yucatan Penin- narrative puts "indifference" into among them Poe and Melville. Stephens's Central American travel narratives have remained important references; still in print, they are considered classic texts in Mesoamerican archaeology) Between 1839 and I842, Stephens took two trips to the Yucatan Peninsula, in a two-volume illustrated each of which resulted expedition narrative pub- lished by Harper and Brothers in New York. Stephens was accompanied fectly unintelligible. on both occasions by the British The cutting was in very high relief, architect Frederick Catherwood, whose drawings illus- and required a strong body of light to bring up the trated the published figures; and the foliage was so thick, and the shade so narratives and gave U.S. audi- ences their first glimpses of ancient Mesoamerica. in deep, that drawing was impossible."! Only after indigenous the late 1830S, most of the ruins of what are now known to be ancient Maya cities had been abandoned centuries. Although European accounts liable) had been published the late eighteenth Stephens and Catherwood undertake (mostly unre- it open"-and had been only after several failed attempts at drawing-was for a few of the sites in and early nineteenth laborers employed to cut down the trees around each stela to "lay for monuments centuries, were the first explorers to finally able to separate the phrased it, to "bring up the figures" before him. The resultant a systematic survey of the ruins, proving Catherwood from the foliage and, as Stephens had engravings, the first to be encountered in that an extensive ancient civilization had once flourished Stephens's book, reproduce for the (presumably Anglo- on the American American) continent. Within the United States, viewer the difficulty of this first struggle their discoveries inflamed vigorous debate about the for representation. origin of themysterious 49), the stylized turbulence connection, ancient builders; about their the background if any, with the region's current inhabi- In this image of a stela at Copan (fig. of the vegetation filling makes the design on the stone and the tants; and about the position of the United States within design of the forest seem mutually derived; even the the suddenly scale of the clumps of leaves matches that of the mon- expanded scope of the New World's ument's course of empire." Stephens and Catherwood carved patterns. Only the deeper contrast of the figure differentiates first encountered Maya ruins at Copan (then, as now, in Honduras), where tenuously the ancient structures distance. The engraving centuries-old and stelae stood tangled in a jungle chokehold. near the beginning The discovery came of the expedition; having landed in Belize, the travelers began their explorations dense, mountainous rainforests in the of Central America, then gradually made their way to the drier, more thinly forested landscapes of the northern part of the Yucatan Peninsula. immersion conquest the stela's previously undifferentiated status, accords an ontological force to the act of perception itself. 6 In 1844 Catherwood republished progress of the expedition and the unfolding the dramatic chiaroscuro chapters of the trav- its own primordial resistance. This residue of camouflage, this reminder of The effect of this itinerary upon the pub- and for the inaugural ultimate of the scene; the residue of camouflage encodes within the representation illustrations landscape, recalls the stela's original even as it proclaims Catherwood's lished narrative is to suggest a correlation between the of the it from the vegetation and relegates the forest to a safe atmospheric many of these in a folio volume of colored lithographs; romance of perception, in figure 50 conveys the same with an eerie illumination elogue this means that the opening of vision, the emphasizing founding in the context of the overgrown forest. With illus- of historical perception, the landscape all participate and the clearing of narrative. Stephens's descriptions of the obstacles faced in Copan emphasize the most basic challenges visual and historical differentiation, landscape's resistance trations in the same dramatic the to narrative and representation. At first, according to Stephens, Catherwood of monumental such as this, Stephens found announce Western expeditionary vision to be something It is a concen- trated, focused, generative perspective; one that the modem travelers have had to import. Like contemporary "Magic Eye" stereographs. which reveal their three- it difficult to produce even a coherent drawing from the dimensional tangled scene around him. Inscribed with illegible wood's images proclaim that only with straining hieroglyphs which seemed to mimic the overgrown veg- and training can difference-the etation that covered them, the ruins proved challenging figure and ground, monument to discern, much less to comprehend: present-be were very complicated, Mr. Catherwood "The designs images only to the practiced eye, Cather- Stephens's between discernment 88 SMITHSON difference between and forest, past and forged from the indiscriminate Throughout and so different from anything had ever seen before as to be per- form and Catherwood more than simply passive perception. of dramatizing the precariousness AND STEJ>HENS jungle. narratives, this struggle and camouflage IN YUCATAN is also arti- 49 Frederick Catherwood, Stela at Copan, 1841. Engraving by A. L. Dick. From John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. By permission Library, of the Houghton Harvard University. ·i:"·~ ~ ",.. )~ 5° Frederick Colored Idol at Copan, 1844. Catherwood, lithograph by Andrew Picken, culated as a historiographical Plate I of Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. Typ 815A4.2624PF, Department Graphic Arts, Houghton of Printing and Library, Harvard College Library. theme. Stephens quently used light as a metaphor edge, discussing a "ray" or "beam" picking a picture from the surrounding of Catherwood's fre- for historical knowl- historical obscurity. As in many r844 lithographs, in which the light seems to have searched out the historical monuments from beyond or before the picture plane (see fig. 50), Stephens implies that historiographical perspicacity is not available locally. It is efficient, deictic, and discriminating, and must be manufactured by the historicizing eye of the modern traveler? Industry and Idleness Stephens and Catherwood develop the theme of visual/ historical manufacture as an explicit counterpoint not only to the indifference what they construct of the jungle, but also to as the indifference tecans themselves. of the Yuca- According to Stephens, the histori- cal obscurity of the ruins was compounded by the fact that the indigenous inhabitants of the area, although they seemed certain to be blood descendants of the ancient builders, had retained virtually no knowledge of their own history. Nor did they seem interested in attaining that knowledge; in his narrative Stephens often seems less amazed at the monuments themselves than at what he calls "the ignorance, carelessness, indifference" of the inhabitants ments. As Catherwood and toward the monu- wrote in T844> "Unfortunately for the antiquarian [the Indians] are totally without historic traditions, nor is their curiosity excited by the presence of the monuments Catherwood's amongst which they live."g visual representations of the "l ndians" only reinforced this impression of indigenous indifference. Even when the ruins he depicts stand outside the thick jungles of Copan or Palen que, the framing function of historical obscurity remains active in the image, borne by the indigenous figures themselves. In his illustration of the partially cleared exterior of the Casa de las Monjas at Uxmal (fig. 51), for example, the Indians demonstrate incapacity by ignoring their historical the newly cleared monument behind them. Pinned to the proscenium, their glances are indifferent seem uninterested ronment. they and to the background, as they in the historical axis of their envi- Thus, even as they serve the role of archaeo- logical staffage, they remain detached conceptually from the archaeology 90 SMITHSON AND STEPHENS they frame. Catherwood IN YUCATAN associ- " Portion of a Building, Las Monjas, Frederick Catherwood, Uxmal, 1844. Colored lithograph by Andrew Picken, plate XIV of Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Typ. 8°5-44.2624 PF, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. ates them with only the space (and, it is implied, the laborers' reluctance order) of the vegetation which provides a foil to the uments at Copan: "The Indians, as in the days when historical buildings. The woman at the left seems to the Spaniards to clear vegetation from the mon- discovered them, applied to work with- have sprung intact from the maguey plant at her feet, out ardour, carried it on with little activity, and, like while the akimbo limbs of the reclining man at right children, were easily diverted from it. One hacked into mimic the fleshy sprawl of the adjacent cactus. As a tree, and, when tired, which happened autochthonous sat down to rest, and another relieved him. While one figures, acting almost as after-images of erstwhile underbrush, they are identified less with the historic architecture than with the tenseless vege- tation that had, until recently, obscured In the course of his narratives ates indigenous historical indifference generalized lack of industriousness-a functions throughout and Catherwood's Stephens associlack which then vigorous habits of modern histor- Stephens bemoans worked there were always several looking on. I remembered the ring of the woodman's of managerial the indigenous axe in the forests at home, and wished for a few long-sided Mountain with a more the narrative as a foil to Stephens ical inquiry. In the following outburst exasperation, it.? very soon, Green boys."!" This lack of "ardour" signals for Stephens the historical failure of Mesoamerican civilization; it is a spent civilization, one so lethargic that it cannot muster the energy to overcome its terminal state of slothful equilibrium. In the United States the sin of sloth had lost most of its theological connotations 9' by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries For Stephens and Catherwood, then, both vision and had come instead to be classified as a sin against the national and historical awareness economy and against the linear, uniform, progress and industry. Stephens's narrative and Cather- unidirec- tional kind of time upon which that economy Stephens's various descriptions of indigenous relied. acedia do indeed suggest that the people of Central America wood's illustrations require a commitment dramatize to a difficult genesis, a rending open of the claustrophilic, primordial jungle into a Western space where figure and ground, fore and Yucatan inhabit a different sort of time: lazy, and aft, present and past, can be rationally plotted circular, and stagnant. Throughout within a spatial and temporal continuum. of the scenes and "incidents" the narrative, many Stephens The viewer's line of sight in these drawings follows a channel of chooses to relate are thinly disguised allegories for this unproduc- visual and historical power, recalling in many respects tive inertia; he clearly believes that the Yucatecans' Michel Foucault's siesta-bound from Foucault's model in ODe crucial aspect: whereas culture precludes any possibility of their further participation in the "onward impulse"l! of his- one characteristic "sovereign gaze." But it differs of the "Eye of Power," especially as tory: "Moving on to the high stone structure forming it has been discussed the platform of the well, I saw a little boy, dressed in a this period, is that it operates inconspicuously, in relation to American art of straw hat, dozing on an old horse, which was creep- ing over the power relations inherent ing round with the well-beam, drawing in broken buck- tion by naturalizing the representational smooth- in representaapparatus itself, ets a slow stream of water, for which no one carne. Stephens and Catherwood seem preoccupied with At sight of me he rose from the neck of his horse, and emphasizing the frictional energy of this intersection. tried to stop him, but the old animal seemed so used Art historian Kenneth John Myers has argued that, by to going round that he could not stop, and the little fel- r840, the picturesque mode of seeing in the United low looked as ifhe expected to be going till some States (which had begun as a set of exclusively upper- one came to take him off."? That "some one" is of class British conventions) course Stephens, the Yankee whose attempt to recon- ralized, and that American viewers in general were able struct a historical narrative from the ruins will pro- to "forget the labor of admiring" vide the only linear motion to counter the ramshackle Yucatan and Central America, inefficiency of the circular local currents. lag-the This temporal disjunction productive between Stephens's historical time and the Indians' labor of admiring But in it seems, there is a is not forgotten but rather picturesque had to be reinvented. Stephens and Cather- time- wood emphasize, cal narrative. Anthropologist installing Johannes Fabian, who cussed it at length in his indispensable a landscape. obsessively revisited, as if, in the contact zone, the lessness has been shown to be typical of anthropologicalls this strategy the "denial of coevalness," had been thoroughly natu- has dis- rather than mask, the labors of modern obscuring, vision and modern indifferent history in an environment.l" critique of the uses of time in anthropological discourse. Although I am Other Operations focusing here on Stephens's representation During a portion of their expeditions, of indige- Stephens and nous culture, it should be noted that Stephens also Catherwood were accompanied "denies coevalness" to the Americans of Spanish extrac- Dr. Samuel Cabot, a Boston surgeon and ornithologist. tion whom he finds in the Yucatan. He represents Cabot had come along primarily to collect zoological even by a third traveler- the highest social castes as stunted dead ends of mod- specimens, em European progress, as if they were preserved speci- for supplies he offered to bestow his surgical services mens of Old Europe, trapped in the amber of Central on the people of the town. He particularly wanted to try American out a new surgical procedure that he had recently ahistory: "The countries to the Spanish dominion in America subject have felt less sensibly, per- but while the group was waiting in Merida learned for the ocular affliction strabismus. In strabis- haps, than any others in the world, the onward impulse mus, also known as "lazy eye," defects in the muscles of the last two centuries, surrounding and customs and in them many usages derived from Europe, there long since fallen into oblivion, are still in full force."! one or both eyeballs cause the eye to roll off center, preventing the proper functioning binocular vision. People with this condition experi- 92 SMITHSON AND STEPHENS IN YUCATAN of S' ence an unresolved Nathaniel Currier, Untitled (illustration of surgery visual field, making it difficult to for strabismus). 1841.Tinted lithograph. focus and to perceive depth. The surgery required that Stephens and Cather- From Alfred C. Post, Observations on the Cure of Strabismus. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. wood assist by pinning the squirming patients' heads to the operating table and spreading their eyelids apart while Cabot made precise incisions in the offending muscles (Stephens never mentions thetic) (fig. 52). Recounting any form of anaes- the surgeries, Stephens can hardly contain himself over the intrinsic violence of this ostensibly charitable enterprise. the operations He describes in lurid detail over several pages and finally proclaims that his head was "swimming visions of bleeding and mutilated Although strabismus United States, Stephens's of associating with eyes."15 was also common in the narrative has the effect the disorder with the Yucatecans. This is partially because Stephens notes what seemed to be a higher than usual incidence among them: in Merida "there seemed to be more squinting eyes, or biscos. as they are called, than are usually seen in anyone town." More importantly, however, the etiology of strabismus as discussed in contemporaneous med- ical treatises featured traits and behaviors that Stephens had already pejoratively attached to the Yucatecans. For example, strabismus was strongly associated with mental incapacity because of the "dulness of look" it produced and the fact that it was often a symptom of neurological diseases and other "cerebral irrita- tions." It also suggested infantilism (its onset is nearly always in childhood) and lassitude that the wandering well-disciplined (it was believed eye could often be controlled by a patient willing to make the effort teenth century, and he argues that as vision (along with other physiological toward "proper practice and educaticrr'[.t'' metaphors It may seem curious that the inability to orches- processes) tory production, binocularity with a kind of industriousness. could have been interpreted cussion of the stereoscope: or laziness, paradigm of fac- itself became equated trate one's eyeballs into position for binocular vision as immaturity was absorbed within governed by the emergent As he notes in his dis- "The apparently passive but it was during precisely this period that binocular observer ... by virtue of specific physiological capacities, vision was first fully understood was in fact made into a producer of forms of verisimil- resolution as the brain's active of the images it receives from the two separate eyes. This had important implications itude .... for the prevailing model of vision, which would now be understood not as the passive reception of a preconstituted image, but instead as the ability to actively construct The content of the [stereoscopic] is far less important than the inexhaustible images routine of moving from one card to the next and producing the same effect, repeatedly, mechanically." Although Crary's a hints of drudgery here give binocularity the taint of coherent scene from a raw field of divergent visual factory labor, one should also consider the managerial data. Art historian connotations Jonathan Crary has shown that this of the process -after new model of vision was part of a broader "mapping vision involves the coordination of the eye as a productive potentially "lazy" eyes.'? territory" in the early nine- 93 all, binocular and control of two Consequently, nous population industrious when associated with an indige- of circumstances, and implicitly opposed to civilized, vision, strabismus dition of the contemporary could be made to signify Maya as "wholly the result for he did not believe in the exis- tence of inferior races." Stephens did frequently inter- not merely a visual disorder but also a cultural one- pret the indigenous a culture unable to break out of an indolent parallax and than essentialist, terms, largely because he could rightly perform the perspective attribute the Mesoamerican functions of modern indus- conditions in historical, rather denouement ities and "monkish vision with historical knowledge throughout put it, "With the arrival of the Spaniards narrative, strabismus der-a Stephens's culture unable to manufacture the necessary its foreground neatly reinforces, historical indifference that he found in Yucatan as a cent Arcadia. Rather, to choose a canvas from Thomas Cole's series Course of Empire (with which Stephens at the level of the body itself, the Yucatecans' indifference. the sceptre state of primordial savagery, nor did he see it as an inno- from its background, its present from its past. Within Stephens's narrative, strabismus of the Spanish. As he of the Indians departed." He did not, then, imagine the also signals a historical disor- perspective to differentiate fanaticism" to the atroc- trial civilization. And given the pervasive equation of Into his would certainly have been familiar; it was exhibited in lengthy, sanguinary account of the strabismus opera- New York three years before he left for Central America), tions Stephens seems to have displaced all of the latent the Indians inhabit a state of Desolation violence of the archaeological operation ahead, with its course of empire exhausted, aims to overcome the local historical myopia by slicing their very awareness of history, extinguished.'? By placing the nineteenth-century through all obstacles to visual and historical perspective. (fig. 53), their their history, indeed, Maya within the historical frame of the Desolate, Stephens was able to recognize the operations Historical Prospecting Most of the meager literature causality without going so far as to imagine that his- on Stephens takes a brighter view of his attitudes toward indigenous of a certain historical culture tory, which had once disenfranchised the Maya, might in Yucatan and Central America. This is because be equally capable of reempowering Stephens was the first to argue that the Mesoamerican regard he drew upon the historical philosophy of Amer- ruins had been erected by Native Americans, ances- ican exceptionalism-an attitude shared by many of tors of those he found when he arrived. The nearly his contemporaries universal assumption that, while all other prosperous at the time was that structures of in the United States. The view held empires had suffered declines and falls, subject to the law of the circular such caliber could only have been conceived extrahemispherically, them. In this "Course of Empire," the United States would enjoy a by a lost tribe from the Old World (favorite candidates included Egyptians and Israelites) forever progressive course. Art historian Angela Miller or from a lost continent such as Atlantis. But Stephens's has concisely described magnanimous double standard," attribution must be qualified by the this belief as a "historical since it allowed the United States to lengths to which, as I have shown, he and Catherwood benefit from the fall of other empires while reserving went to demonstrate for itself a historical immunity. that the nineteenth-century In this case, the double Maya did not inherit the historical mantle of their ances- standard leads Stephens to see the decline of the Maya tors. According to these travelers, the antiquarian as inevitable and inarguable, ineptitude only inasmuch of the Maya effectively disqualifies from any claim to their own history-an which then renders it conveniently United States, whose modern, them abdication become the worthy heirs of this American intellects illuminate assessment of the of archaeological science, by which historically suc- cessful nations aim to rescue golden age artifacts from heritage and the rightful directors of any project designed as it will bolster the progress of its per- manent new curator. Stephens's Maya renders them eligible for the "salvage paradigm" available to the disciplined their heritage useful to it.18 cultures that have degenerated beyond the capacity to care for them.?" Thus, even as Stephens constructs him- Stephens has also been praised for his enlight- self as the agent of history's return to the area, he ened views on race. According to critic and historian need not accept any responsibility Van Wyck Brooks, Stephens reinstallation. saw the deplorable con- 94 SMITHSON for its permanent At no point are the Maya to regain AND STEPHENS IN YUCATAN 53 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, c. 1836, Oil on canvas, 39'/4 x 63'/4 in. (99.7 x 160.7 em). Collection of the New-York Historical Society. command over their heritage; Stephens's aim is the visions of glory and indistinct fancies of receiving extraction of historical artifacts and their relocation to the thanks of the corporation flitting before my eyes, the United States, the new Pan-American drew my blanket around me, and fell asleep. historical epicenter. Consider his gleeful description subheading "An Operation (under the in Prospect") of his plans "to buy Copan! remove the monuments of a by-gone 1969: A Series of Standstills Stephens extracted hundreds people from the desolate region in which they were sites, returning buried, set them up in the 'great commercial architectural rium,' and found an institution great national museum empo- to be the nucleus of a of American Antiquities!'?' Although Stephens takes great pains to distinguish remnants and that were to form the core col- lection of his Museum his museum his of artifacts from the Maya to New York with sculptural of American Antiquities. But was never built; tragically, he installed the artifacts in Catherwood's new panorama downtown, of the Spanish, through his antiquarian's tents destroyed by fire a few weeks later. The only eye the Maya only to see the structure building archaeological explorations from the earlier pillagings are conquered r "22 and all of its con- comfort in this incalculable misfortune was the fact that again. One might wonder why, given what he believed to be the essential enervation of the Maya, Stephens a few large stone pieces had yet to arrive by steamer and thus escaped the conflagration. Stephens gave these felt it necessary to take the trouble to reconquer the Maya to his friend John Church Cruger, who proceeded to at all. Why the emphasis install them on his private island in the Hudson River on the heroic exertion of vision and historiography? managerial mandate to appropriate Why the hurry to establish a over the ruins? Why the rush artifacts? Stephens's here reveals a specific condition United States' assimilation emphatic determining of Mesoamerican attitude the history among faux-gothic ruins that he had constructed remained for some eighty years, until T9T9, when the American Museum of Natural History in New York learned of their existence and acquired them from one in the early 1840S. The United States' claim to that of Cruger's octogenarian history needed to be established prominently not so much over the in emulation of a Thomas Cole painting. Here the artifacts daughters. The museum displayed them in the collections of Mex- Maya (too indifferent to be of concern), nor even the ican and Central American Spanish Americans it was there in the 1940S that the young Smithson throughout (whom Stephens represents the narrative as emasculated, imperial has-beensj. bumbling, but rather over other European nations that might attempt to arrogate this newly antiquities (fig. 54), and would first have seen them on one of his many boyhood visits to what was (and would continue to be) his favorite museum." Smithson, accompanied by his wife, Nancy Holt, discovered history to their own pedigrees and collections. Given this threat, and given that their expedition and his friend (and dealer) Virginia Dwan, embarked on occurs in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine, Stephens his own Yucatan expedition in April of 1969. As the and Catherwood's title of his own expedition narrative suggests, Smithson Herculean labors of vision/history function almost like homesteading have viewed this landscape, indifferent claims. Simply to to have organized this field along Western lines of visual and sci- entific perspective, to have "laid it open" to "rays of knew of Stephens's work. He had a Dover paperback edition of the Incidents in his small collection of books on Mexico and the Maya, and he also had a copy of Catherwood's frontispiece to the 1843 edition. It is historical light," is to have cultivated it. In recording one unclear exactly how closely Smithson of his bedtime ruminations narrative, but just as the title of his essay announces Stephens narrates: "Other ruins might be discovered even more interesting that his expedition read Stephens's will involve "mirror-travel" to and more accessible. Very soon their existence would Stephens's "travel," Smithson's work on the peninsula become known and their value appreciated, constitutes an extended reflection on Stephens's brand and the friends of science and the arts in Europe would get pos- of nineteenth-century archaeological exploration.e" In nearly every respect, Smithson's session of them. They belonged of right to us, and, though we did not know how soon we might be kicked Yucatan can be interpreted out ourselves, I resolved that ours they should be; with of Stephens's 96 SMITHSON operations. AND STEPHENS work in as an inversion or undoing In language IN YUCATAN reminiscent S4 Installation of "Stephens Stones," American Museum of Natural History, c. 1965. of his crystalline neutralization Smithson paradigms of motion in Passaic, begins his travelogue by challenging the of narrative and progress that had defined Stephens's entire enterprise. While driving south from Merida in his rental car, Smithson is always crossing the horizon, muses that "one yet it always remains distant. ... The distance seem[s] to put restrictions on all forward movement, countless thus bringing the car to a series of standstills." the hard-fought Whereas for Stephens view into depth had anchored the coherent perspectival organization assuring its visual, physical, and historical travers- ability, here it ensnares of space and time, the traveler in an impassable network of infinite distances." During the expedition, the form of temporary Smithson arranged these "standstills" sculptural installations took that at various sites, photographed, and then dismantled. "mirror displacements," The best known of these are the which both illustrate and 97 ,6 55 Robert Smithson Robert Smithson, setting up Yucatan Mirror Displacement photo by Nancy Holt. #1, 1969. Yucatan Mirror Displacement Chromogenic-development #1, 1969. slide. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. structure his written article (each mirror displace- ment becomes a subheading displacements, Smithson of twelve-inch-square throughout within the text). For the installed the same group mirrors at nine different the region, arranging the mirrors sites in roughly parallel arrays, either balanced among tree limbs or cantilevered into the sou (figs. 55, 56). Although my focus is primarily on the displacements, Smith- an Upside-Down son's work in the area also included Tree at Yaxchilan, a series of Overturned Rocks at Palenque and Uxmal, a group of root and rock constructions near Palenque, the Hypothetical Continent of Gondwanaland at Uxmal, and a set of slides shot at the Hotel Palen que, which Smithson would present in 1972 as model of "anti-architecture" in a lecture at the University of Utah (see fig. 62) .,6 Perhaps Smithson's most conspicuous inver- sion of Stephens's precedent is that none of the famous Maya ruins appears in any of his photographs, though several of the installations even were assembled within eyeshot of the major archaeological persed and half-covered by sediment sites. Dis- or branches, the blocky mirrors do suggest the ruins, but their empty reference to the desired historical spectacle proposes a systematic erasure of Stephens's visionary enterprise (fig. 57). This refusal to see the Maya ruins amounts in many ways to their re-covering, to their removal from the conditions of archaeology which, over the past century and a half, had endorsed their use as imperialist trophies or their recontextualization as art objects." The Collapse of Vision But Smithson's anti-archaeological tactics in this project go beyond his simply not picturing the ruins. His use of mirrors as a medium, especially when considered in the context of the enantiomorphic rhetoric of his ear- lier work, signals a more systematic attempt to oppose Stephens's visual imperialism. 98 AND SMITHSON STEPHENS IN YUCATAN In his 1964 piece 57 Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacement #2, 1969. Chromogenic-development slide. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Enantiomorphic Chambers (see Chapter 2), Smithson cock-eyed, at times myopic, overexposed, or cracked." developed a model of binocular vision that would Smithson structure inhabiting the overlapping, kaleidoscopic visual field of his entire Yucatan project (see fig. 22). His describes himself as a blinded traveler; 1967 essay "Pointless Vanishing Points" had described "lazy" eye, he cancels out Stephens's efforts to impose the piece as a sculptural deconstruction any kind of perspective upon the Yucatan Peninsula. vision, as a stereoscope itates, three-dimensional chambers of binocular that thwarts, rather than facilperception. The two steel were meant to evoke eyes, and the "vanish- ing" of the viewer standing between them intended He offers "a type of 'anti-vision' or 'negative seeing''' against Stephens's penetrating vision. Thus the Yucatan project shares many of the same anti perspectival aims of the Passaic project; but whereas in Passaic Smithson to suggest the evacuation of a centralized consciousness had critiqued perspective by fossilizing and multiplying that might gather and coordinate the images in each it until both its clarity and its directionality were neu- of the chambers. The piece thus used mirroring, tralized, here he destroys it from within.3° its connotations of alignment question binocular with The Enantiomorphic Cham- stereo-optical coordination. Art historians generally agree that Smithson's failure, to call into vision, which relies upon precise deconstruction of binocularity is one of his most influential and praiseworthy artistic innovations. Ann bers essentially synthesize crystallography with phys- Reynolds has detailed Smithson's learned and wither- iological optics, locating the enantiomorphic ing critique of Clement Greenberg's slippage then-hegemonic or "vacancy" right between the eyes of the viewing aesthetics, based as they were on an ideal of disembod- subject. As Smithson ied, pure "opticaJity" which Smithson exposed as a explained, the sculpture produce an experience would of "infinite myopia" rather logical and corporeal impossibility. Gary Shapiro and than vision in depth. "The two separate pictures that Rosalind Krauss have demonstrated are usually placed in a stereoscope osophical implications have been replaced of this refutation of modernist opticality, equating Smithson's critique of the video (the in my Enantiomorphic by two separate mirrors Chambers-thus excluding any fused image." Smithson appealed here to the essential binarism the deeper phil- of human seeing subject) with the philosophical project of inter- rogating the Cartesian cogito (the thinking subject). vision to propose that there can be no such thing as an Krauss puts it concisely: with Smithson's deconstruc- eidetic perception: tion of binocular vision comes "the disappearance "The binocular focus of our eyes of converges on a single object and gives the illusion the first person." This is certainly borne out in the above of oneness, so that we tend to forget the actual stereo- excerpt, in which Smithson positions hirn-vself" not as scopic structure a unitary subject but rather as irretrievably bicameral; 'enantiomorphic of our two eyes or what I will call vision' -that is seeing double."z8 Is this "seeing double" not an uncanny to strabismus, an anti-surgery the subject of his sentences is not "I" but "the eyes."!' But Smithson's return a correction of Dr. Cabot's corrections, that might restore what Stephens had additional attention "negative seeing" requires that be paid to its inspirations and implications. Although the subversive intentions and the described as the "crisscross expression" of the indi- intellectual genous perspective? As Smithson blindness cannot be dismissed, it is nonetheless impor- tant to recognize the primitivist of essay, "Why not reconstruct asks in his Yucatan one's inability to see?,,29 Indeed, at many points in the essay Smithson recounts this "inability to see," evoking the physiology of strabismus and other binocular disorders: eyes, being infected by all kinds of nameless "The tropisms, couldn't see straight. Vision sagged, caved in, and broke apart .... Squinting helped somewhat, didn't keep views from tumbling sophistication of Smithson's models of underpinnings his reversion to "lazy eyes," to scrutinize the image (I use the word image advisedly) of the Maya and of Mexico that this reversion encourages, and to explore the ways in which this image, deployed as it was in the late sixties, constitutes a specific political position. yet that over each other. Double Vision as Low-Level Perception How could that section of visibility be put together The Yucatan mirror displacements again? Perhaps the eyes should have been screwed up fields simultaneously: into a sharper focus. But no, the focus was at times which the camera points, partially obscured 100 SMITHSON AND present two pictorial a view of the landscape STEPHENS IN YUCATAN at by the mirrors, and another view (usually skyward), partially any fusion with the Other, Smithson caught on the mirrors. Neither view is complete, nor travel through can the two be consolidated into a unified spatial whole. of indolence The mirrors' reference to ruination himself half-buried arrangement) (in their scattered, thus extends to their effect upon the space around them-they compose or to ruin the illusion of continuous Moreover, note that this decomposition and regression, space. is produced Smithson predicated strabismic perceptual insouciance. upon the Yucatecans. in their primordial, condition-that is, their We might say that as Smith- son travels his eyes fall out of alignment hazard corners of space-such other and into alignment ment would actually act to draw the surrounding into the installation, space and, through that, implosion would paradoxically serve to affirm the centrality of the binocular mirrors, their function as anchors. around Rather what is visual perception, exertion, with each with nature. The eyes are relaxed, the ardor of binocular Primordial for status that Stephens bilaterally. The mirrors do not aim randomly into hapa chaotic arrange- that thus reproducing joins the Yucatecans indifferent, describes and verbal vocabularies the same "indifferent" had originally act literally to de- the sculptural vision forsworn. unburdened by simply mirrors the environment it: "Small bits of sediment dropped away striking about the mirrors is the care with which Smith- from the sand fiats into the river. Small bits of per- son has installed them so that each face parallels the ception dropped away from the edges of eyesight. others. Thus the mirror displacements, rather than Particles of matter slowly crumbled scattering the view into an infinite tangle, produce their that held the mirrors. decomposition crumbled by means of a binary overlap. As in double vision, the unitary visual field of perspective into the eyes.';» This rhetoric of visual passivity was part of space splits apart, crosses over, and shallows out. It Smithson's is as if space has been infolded, as if the two visual lethargy. In his writings Smithson planes were collapsing around a single hinge. saurus's compass) of listlessness, Smithson's double vision suggests the eternal misalignment of the travelers' perceptions. on this misalignment broader fascination at length in the Yucatan essay, speaks (with a thelaziness, acedia, is perhaps most easily explained by his fascination with entropy and its accompanying Smithson question: "Some Fron- fatigue, boredom, and stagnation. Although this interest in disinterest traveling, seeing, representing-into travel through Villahermosa, with the theme of tedium, torpor, ennui, dissipation, He muses using it to call the entire travel narrative tradition'enantiomorphic' down the slope Tinges, stains, tints, and tones cosmic exhaustion, also drew upon a broad spectrum of literary sources. These included the writings ofT. E. Hulme, tera, Ciudad del Carmen, past the Laguna de Terminos. T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Two asymmetrical disdain for modern busy-ness was an early influence trails that mirror each other could be called enantiomorphic enantiomorphs-the enantiomorphs. after those two common on Smithson; right and left hands. Eyes are Writing the reflection is supposed Lewis, whose conservative Plaubert's novels, those "Epics ofImmo- bility" which, through various means, produce the to impression of narrative petrifaction; match the physical reality, yet somehow the enan- ric narratives, tiomorphs structural don't quite fit together. The right hand is Borges's geomet- which trap narrative progression labyrinths; in and the lyrical novels of Andre always at variance with the left." In the context of the Gide and others whose passive protagonists, expeditionary ing to literary critic Ralph Freedman, resemble mirrors tradition, this amounts to a humble accord- (and humbling) statement, one that approaches contem- in that they substitute porary postcclonialism especially important to Smithson were art theorist Anton in its recognition of the recal- perception for action. Also citrance of the colonized Other. Yet in another, deeply Ehrenzweig's theories of low-level perception, paradoxical sense, Smithson uses this misalignment Levi-Strauss's concept of the "cold society" (both of as a tool of access, a way of allowing, rather than pre- which will be discussed below), and, of course, the pre- cluding, an understanding vailing "aesthetic of (and immersion in) the primitive." To begin with, although travel" seems to recognize of indifference" pop, and conceptual his "enantiomorphic the impossibility of Claude of minimalism, art.J" Smithson often used the phrase "low-level scanning" to describe the perceptual insouciance here; in one interview, for example, of apprehending he described his method called "incidences nonpresence."37 The are relaxations of vision and, thus, of displacements a site as "a kind of low-level scan- of primordial ning, almost unconscious." He borrowed the term "low- landscape-they level scanning" open, perhaps, by the work of modern vision, to fold from Ehrenzweig's 1967 book The Hidden Order of Art. Ehrenzweig, whose influence Smithson's working method on would be difficult to permit the landscape, still propped back in upon itself, back to the indifferent overlap that Stephens had originally troped in his dramatization overstate, developed a psychology of artistic creativity of indigenous strabismus. The enlightenment that advocated the value of unconscious Stephens had cleared and held open with his stereo- modes of vision and attention. Ehrenzweig describes low-level scopic exertions (fig. 58) is systematically vision as syncretic, a form of vision that can ignore the the strabismic interfolding distinctions displacements (fig. 59). between figure and ground by "hold[ingJ them in a single unfocused Smithson's glance" and that can space that collapsed by of Smithson's mirror cultivation of low-level perception, apprehend a mass of concrete detail without consciously along with his rhetorical breakdown identifying aries between subject and nature, verges on nostalgia it. He valorizes "the artist's vacant unfo- cused stare" (recalling as he does the strabismic ness of look"]. Low-level vision operates the conscious systems that differentiate aspects of vision: "Unconscious "dul- beneath incoherent scanning-in contrast for a mythic state of noble savagery. But Smithson goes further than that, taking his regression proto-human, not just a proto-civilized, artist thinks "somewhat terns-can site. You are sort of immersed tiers" (Smithson, peripheries with blurred fron- for his part, referred to the various he visited as the "unfocused Ehrenzweig fringes")}5 included this low-level syncretism like a dog scanning over a in the site you are scan- "One must see the world through the eyes of small foraminifera, corals, brachiopods, within his broader concept of "dedifferentiation," which was another keyword that Smithson compound molluscs, and crinoids." version of the essay he evokes the eyes of insects, of which the fractured visual deployed and which was perhaps the closest synonym to arrays of the mirror displacements "indifference" larly appropriate in the sense that Smithson it. For Ehrenzweig, energy; it is a simple "gathering," faculty, indifferently refuse. Smithson's absorbing a purely receptive undifferentiated enantiomorphic produces the same effect-without ing stereographic intended low-level vision uses low levels of visual fly population. model of vision from all over. ashy hues, his work Discussing his "upside-down tree" he notes that "flies would come and go This attempt to reinhabit the visual apparatus of primordial creatures is an attempt to get as close as possible to a nature which, slouching as it is toward chromatics."36 blotches and sunburned recommends . and peer at them with their com8 pound eyes." "Why should flies be without art?" he asks.3 nected receptacles: "The eyes became two wastebaskets filled with diverse colors, variegations, seem a particu- Indeed, there is a section in the region as being especially suitable for the local the viewer expenddiscon- illustration. in the essay where Smithson installations, effort, the eyes remain condition. ning." And, in an earlier draft of the Yucatan essay, In the published often back to a Two months before his Yucatan trip, he had said that an to conscious thought which needs closed gestalt pathandJe 'open' structures of the bound- entropic heat death, is itself collapsing. Enantiomorphic Leaving Difference Alone vision, according Smithson's of nature itself, and he was interested mirror displacements recognize the essen- tial difference at the heart of all cognition, all vision, to Smithson, mimics the essence not in any "ide- alistic notion of perception" but rather in "zeroing all memory, but they leave that difference alone, in what in on those aspects of mental experience that somehow we might call its primordial coincide with the physical world." For example, Smith- state, without attempting (as Stephens did) to refine, resolve, or process it into son repeatedly describes an illusion of perspectival were itself indifferent, space and linear historical the light in Yucatan as if it unwilling time. Smithson's "Incidents of Mirror-Travel" attempt purposeful simply to perceive, to the extent that it is even possible, "The rays are shattered, the collapse occasioned stronger than moonbeams." by what Jacques Derrida 102 SMITHSON to gather itself into rays, overtaken by the forces of gravity: AND STEPHENS broken bits of energy, no He speaks of the "load .. IN YUCATAN of perception" and notes that "in the jungle all light is and rendered incapable of operation. Here again we paralyzed." In regard to this heavy or groggy light, the find Smithson word "Incidents" work. He invokes the landscape's in his title is significant. The Eng- both doing and undoing Stephens's malarial reputation lish word incident derives from the Latin incidere, mean- as if to restore the bouts of fever that had slowed, ing to fall upon. The tenns incident light and incident and eventually stopped, ray refer to light as it falls upon a surface, as opposed Central America, but in so doing perpetuates to light that emanates from or passes through it. Smith- of the area as essentially dissolute." son was well aware of this etymology-he pointed Stephens's progress through the image The collapse of the visual field in Yucatan is out in an interview soon after his Yucatan trip that "inci- attended in Smithson's dent itself means falling." Smithson's historical field. In a 1966 essay he had explained his incident light isfallenlight: "Reflections fall onto the mirrors without logic." And it is fallen in all its postlapsarian tations-"If conno- colors can be pure and innocent, can they not also be impure and guilty?"39 preferred sense of time: "Its balance is fragile and precarious, and drained of all notions of energy, yet it has a primordial It takes one's mind to the grandeur. very origins of time-to This concern with "impure" colors is part of an narrative by the collapse of the the fundamental memory." This passage, with its fascination with "origins" and extended discourse on color in the essay and further its evocation of a phenomenon emphasizes energy," shares the same vocabulary that Smithson used Smithson the exhaustion of the natural environment. describes the region as suffering under to invoke an indifferent, an excess of color, which, as he says, "is the diminution of Iight." Color for Smithson is light at a lower energy "drained of all notions of primordial mode of vision.P In accordance with this temporal energy drain, Smithson's mirror displacements function as models level, spent light, light wrecked into its prismatic of passive memory. J n a draft of the Yucatan essay, elements he wrote that "the color of past time is forever passing and destined, Smithson's like Humpty Dumpty (one of favorite illustrations of entropy), to remain dismembered. Once fallen, once broken into color, it contributes to the general gravity of the area: "an excess of green sunk any upward movement" "Refracting sparks of sunshine (fig. 60). seemed smothered under the weight of clouded mixtures-yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.rt'' Finally, a persistent trope throughout his discus- through the sky," and that "the sky reflected down its 'involuntary memory' in squares of blue" (fig. to Samuel Beckett's book Proust, which he owned and annotated heavily. Beckett, in this early piece of criticism, discussed at length Proust's interest in "involuntary" memories (e.g., the madeleine episode of Swann's Way) as a gateway not to a past composed sion of color and light is infection: "light is suffering actively constructed from a color-sickness"; of inattention, "particles of color infected the 12" 61). Smithson referred here to Marcel Proust, or rather of rationally, historical narratives but to the field of everyday routines and situations, molten reflections"; and "certain shades of green are precisely those normally considered boring or unmem- carriers of chromatic fever." Indeed, the notion of con- orable: the field, as Beckett wrote, of "dullness" and tagion articulates "habit." In acting as receptors for a Proustian Smithson's sense of perception species quite nicely, suggesting the discomfiture which modern of involuntary vision suffers upon exposure to the entropic environ- ments equate memory not with history but with habit, ment. To see in Yucatan is to have one's modem perspec- not with energy but with ennui. They suggest a being- tive infected-"the reminded-of instead of a compositional of nameless eyes, being infected by all kinds tropisms, ror displacements and minimalist couldn't see straight." The mir- themselves combine mirroring seriality in such a way as to suggest memory, Smithson's (this is a distinction remembering dating back to Aristotle). Smith- son's mirrors catch light in an incidental fashion- because they are untrained and unfocused, light merely infection or some other insidious form of reproduction befalls them-and -their ofhistory clusters suggest patterns of viral or bacterial mirror displace- thus bring Stephens's (still ricocheting, light beam perhaps, through the air) replication, and their splitting of the landscape view per- down again to earthy tangles, dispersing it, displacing forms an ongoing perceptual it, and draining it of both its directional mitosis. The traveler's perceptual apparatus, thus infected, is sapped of energy illuminating IOJ power." force and its ,8 Frederick Catherwood, Idol and Altar at Copan, 1844. Colored lithograph by W. Parrot, Plate V of Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiopos and Yucatan. Typ. 80544.z624PF, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Houghton Library, Harvard College library. " Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacement #7, 1969. Chromogenic-development slide. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 60 Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacement Chromogenic-development slide. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. #5, 1969- 6, Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacement #4, 1969. Chromogenic-development slide. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The Crystallization of Difference: Smithson and Levi-Strauss Unsupported by historical effort, the edifice of time in Yucatan collapses, like the edifice of vision, into an indifferent field of binocular overlap. The repeated "foldings" allowed by each displacement gressive invagination produce a pro- of the entire landscape or region. Taken as a whole, the project creates a progression refractions of (literally: incidents), a series of cleavages, that structure the contraction of the landscape. With the obliquity of primordial difference left to itself, the landscape is not so much "viewed" or "pictured" but rather is allowed to crystallize in its natural form. What kind of history might exist in this landscape? Although resulting from what might be called a natural process of primordial historicity and relying upon distance, belation, and separation, less recuperates, it neverthe- as a whole, a sense of eternity, immer- sion, and even presence. A similar concept of mirrored, crystalline time crops up in one of Smithson's favorite novels: J. G. Ballard's The Crystal World (1966). In a story that is particularly interesting for its par- allels with Smithson's Yucatan project, Ballard imagines a tropical forest in Africa that freezes into an interlocking, impassable tangle of delicate crystal forms. The forms result from an apocalyptic process in which time abandons its linear flow and locks itself into space, "deliquescing" into mirrored spatial reverberations. As one character marvels: "It's as if a sequence of dis- placed but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light." Ballard's crystalline forest recalls Smithson's vitrifications, not only in its intimations own Yucatan of doubling, inertia, and collapse, but also in the suggestion that the end state of time amounts to a return to a primordial beginning: "This illuminated forest in some way reflects an earlier period of our lives, perhaps an archaic memory we are born with of some ancestral paradise where the unity of time and space is the signature of every leaf and flower."44 Smithson's conception most important of crystalline source for his "archaic memory," however, was anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss had explained the ahistorical character of "savage" thought by evoking an infolded structure. In one passage, the last part of which Smithson carefully underlined in his copy of the 1967 Yale French Studies special issue on former structuralism, were supplied Levi-Strauss compares primordial myth are those which use the energy with which they at the outset to music and shows how both are able to convert their on operating inherent were very well constructed diachrony into an essentially synchronic structure. He may as well be describing mirror displacements: "This relationship Smithson's to time is of a very special nature: everything takes place as though indefinitely tion and heating. and which, in theory, could go with this energy, provided and were not subject Thermodynamic hand, such as the steam-engine, of a difference in temperature machines, operate between parts, between the boiler and the condenser; deny its place. Both, in effect, are mechanisms a tremendous The act oflistening to the musical work has immobilized the passage of time because ofthe work's internal organization; like a cloth billowing in the wind, it has caught up and infOlded it."45 to do away with time .... Elsewhere Levi-Strauss compares primitive logic to a kaleidoscope and writes that within the mind of the primitive "a multitude of images forms simultane- amount on the other on the basis their component music and mythology needed time only in order to designed they to fric- they can do of work, far more than the others, they use up and destroy their energy.48 but in the process Smithson was greatly affected by this idea that different kinds of societies have fundamentally different relationships to energy, not least because of his career-long fascination with entropy. In a casual interview a few months after his trip to the peninsula, ously, none exactly like any other, so that no single he was specific not only in his praise of The Savage one furnishes more than a partial knowledge.v-" Mind as a thermodynamic Smith- in his preference for the "cold" approach.e? son's Yucatan project clearly betrays Levi-Strauss's influence; he makes the connection abundantly model of culture, but also Levi-Strauss argues, moreover, that the thermo- clear by using a long quote from The Savage Mind as one dynamic status of a given culture not only determines its of the two epigraphs economic and cultural life, but also predicts its atti- of "Incidents the Yucatan": "The characteristic mind is its timelessness; of Mirror-Travel in feature of the savage tudes toward history. History is a high-entropy endeavor: whereas cold societies attempt, "by the institutions its object is to grasp the world as both a synchronic and a diachronic totality and they give themselves, the knowledge which it draws therefrom historical is like that to annul the possible effects of factors on their equilibrium and continuity afforded of a room by mirrors fixed on opposite walls, in a quasi-automatic which reflect each other (as well as objects in the by "resolutely internalizing intervening making it the moving power of their development." space) although without being strictly par- allel." Primitive temporality structuralist synchrony, In these passages becomes a paragon of trapping fashion," hot societies operate the historical process and (which Smithson underlined his copy of The Savage Mind) is an echo of the distinc- the flow of time within a crystalline play of mirrors in order to neutralize tion I have been making between Stephens's it and make it static.f" graphic industry Levi-Strauss's model of primitive timelessness also related to Smithson's goals and their highly differentiated idleness. and Smithson's Historical "quasi-automatic," interest in lethargy and indifference is passive, natural, while historicism Thus, in thermodynamic their progressive is literally a form functions, expend terms, history is a form of work which draws its energy from a differential energy quickly, whereas "cold," or primitive, societies established attempt to maintain Smithson had theorized binocular vision as an anthropomorphic their social and economic tures in a state of equilibrium. struc- Levi-Strauss bases this binary model on a thermodynamic interpretation of between past and present. And just as disconnected are rather like machines, and it is a well and thermodynamic machines. that primitives temporal enjoy: "Primitives because they see in it the beginning known fact that there are two main types of machine: machines operation of production from nature. Levi-Strauss sees the differ- ture from the crystalline mechanical the differential entiating exertions of modern historicism as a depar- society and culture: In short, societies historio- historiographic of industriousness.t? indifference. According to Levi-Strauss, modem, or "hot," societies, in order to maintain in The unity with nature distrust history of the separation, the beginning of the exile of man adrift in the cosmos." ro8 SMITHSON AND STEPHENS IN YUCATAN Primitive societies, then, have never warmed up to attitudes toward Mexico, Central America, and pre- historical difference: Columbian they remain static, "crystalline"; they "function at a temperature not zero as understood it had been essentially by the physicist, but in the 'historical' sense." Smithson's attachment civilization. In the United States in the late sixties, the prevailing view of Maya society was that of absolute zeroto the "cold prehistoric. On the first page of Victor W. Von Hagen's World of the Maya (which society," exercised as it is in the Maya region, inspired Smithson as it is by Levi-Strauss, shows how comfortably area), we learn that the ancient Maya, despite their malism's "cool" sensibility and conceptual "aesthetic of indifference" structural anthropology's mini- "glyph-writ system," were a "preliterate art's people." Mexi- can poet and essayist Octavio Paz stated in 1970 that could be aligned with "from the Mexican high plateau to the tropical lands of version of primitivism.J' Of course, Levi-Strauss harbors no illusions of Central America, for more than two thousand years, various cultures and empires succeeded one another a truly present "Presence" of primitive timelessness. He recognizes carried with him as he traveled through the that the savage mind is caught up in and none of them had historical consciousness. Meso- temporality. But he imagines that mind folding tempo- America did not have history but myths and, above ral difference in against itself, crystallizing difference all, rites."54 into an armorial structure that remains inviolable to The ancient Maya were imagined as a prehistoric, historical narrative. History is "annulled" in a "quasi- mysterious, automatic" fashion. This is why, in his essay "Structure, from European historical and philosophical systems. On Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human one level, this estrangement Sci- ritualistic cult, ineluctably estranged of the Mesoamerican ences," Derrida argues that Levi-Strauss's method "com- Other can be applauded-after pels a neutralization the ancient Maya (as Stephens did) into the analytical oftime and history" that amounts to the projection of a sort of secondhand all, it resists absorbing order of the Western historical lineage. But on another eternity onto the culture under study. This is also the reason why level, this very resistance Derrida suggests that, despite Levi-Strauss's pological, and political functions, awareness of difference, profound "one no less perceives in had its own cultural, anthromany of which served to fulfill various Western fantasies. During the his work a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia sixties, the ignorance for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence."!" culture to be used as a vessel for the Western cosmic, One perceives something in Smithson's placements work. Smithson's of Maya history allowed Maya of the same ethic colonial, and eschatological Yucatan mirror dis- for the futuristic projections of what writer Adam Gop- imagination, nik has called "sci-fi primitivism." provide a certain low-level inoculation in structural especially Spurred primarily of difference, one which will crystallize and prevent the by developments anthropology, penetration of politics, historical narrative, and other sixties saw a preoccupation contentious forms of modern differential behavior. He pre- and the posthistoric. Communications the late with the alignment of the theorist Marshall McLuhan, who demonstrated a loose affilia- cible idleness" of primitive time: "The 'shape of time,' tion with Levi-Strauss in his definition of primitive when it comes to the Ultramoderne, cultural media as "cool," predicted an impending wrote in his "Ultramoderne" unending-a essay about the "invinis circular and circle of circles that is made of 'linear incalculables' and 'interior distances.' efforts of all the monumental All the arduous ages are contained in tronic retrlbalizatiorr to a condition "elec- as technology returned society of spontaneity and wholeness: "The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life. the uJtra-instants, the atemporal moments, or the cosmic ... The modes of life of non literate people were seconds. This is a return to a primitive implicit, simultaneous, inertia or invincible idleness.rO and discontinuous." The pre- historic was seen as a template for the posthistoricthe future was the obsolete in reverse. Smithson, Dehistoricizing It remains of course, subscribed the Maya: The Broader Context to be shown how Smithson's embrace of to a version of this pan-historic equation. The inevitable increase in entropy, after "primitive inertia" relied not just on a generalized all, would lead to a universal sameness, 1960s primitivism ation, that would provide a mirror image of the origi- but also on specific contemporary a dedifferenti- nal primordial unity. He equated primordial time with My feeling is that this hotel is built with the same spirit that end time: "I am convinced that the future is lost some- the Mayans built their temples. Many of the temples where in the dumps of the non-historical changed their facades continually: there are sort of facades past." 55 The prevailing conception of Maya temporality overlapping facades, facades on facades. You know as tangled with time but impervious to historical narra- this window is actually looking out over the things that we tive accorded well with Smithson's crystalline field of went there to see but you won't see any of those temples temporal indifference/dedifferentiation. In other ways in this lecture; that's something that you have to go as well, Smithson's Yucatan narrative was fully com- there to see for yourself, and I hope that you go to the Hotel mensurate Palenque so that you learn something about how the with the broader cultural project of dehis- toricizing the Maya, for it repressed both the historical Mayans are still building. The structure has all of the con- experience of the ancient Maya and the political exis- volution and terror, in a sense, that you would find tence of the contemporary Maya. Smithson evokes the Maya exclusively through mythology-perpetuating what philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade called "the corrosive action of mythicizatiorr in a typical Mayan temple-especially of the Uxmal variety which is ... called Mayan Baroque and made out of serpentine facades loaded with spirals and rocks carved in upon history. The the shape of woven twigs and things; it's quite nice. So that ancient Maya appear in Smithson's text not as historical to me this window, this seemingly useless window called cultures but as muses; they arise only as gods, eternally forth all sorts of truths about the Mexican temperament.V' haunting the peninsula, appearing unexpectedly in Smithson's rearview mirror or addressing him through Advocating the air conditioner of the rented Dodge Dart. This is renewal, of dysfunction not to say that Smithson uses the myths simplistically- Smithson's a processual architecture of ruin and and "de-architecturisation," Palenque talk deserves a place among the on the contrary, as art historian Rebecca Butterfield has seminal texts of early deconstruction. shown - but merely to point out that his project takes no interest in the Maya as historical actors.56 the "truths about the Mexican temperament" One might argue that at least Smithson respects the mythological integrity of the site. Unfortunately even that is compromised commentary that have inspired this radical revision of modern architectural theory? The truths are certainly not historical- Smith- son's image of "facades overlapping facades, facades by the fact that most of the gods with speaking parts in the text are Aztec, not Maya. They dispense But what are on facades" proposes, as do his mirror displacements, a jewellike ensnarement and advice which of history. What is troublesome about these "truths," in often have nothing to do with Maya mythology-for fact, is that Smithson has rendered them eternal- example, Texcatlipoca (Aztec god of the smoking mirror) exhibiting a textbook primitivism, implores Smithson to "travel at random, like the first Yucatecan history and politics into this homogeneous Mayans"-advice "convolution." which derives not from any Maya Smithson folds all of Smithson makes no distinction between codex but from the 1961 Michel Butor novel Degrees. "the Mexican temperament" Among the mirror displacements of Mexico in 1969, despite centuries of conquest tions in Smithson's a Mesoamerican and other illustra- article, there is one photograph artifact-but of it is Olmec. Smithson's and the Mayan; the people revo- lution, and creolization, remain changeless icons of the mythological Maya. According to Smithson, the Hotel notion of Maya culture tends toward a hodgepodge Palenque's (and the entire region's) "complete wreckage of Mesoamerican situation" derives from eternal natural laws, not from prirnitivism.S? specific social or historical conditions: "One can't figure The "Invincible Idleness" of Mexico out why they put that door there but it seems to belong, In 1972 Smithson gave a slide lecture at the University it seems to have some incredible sort of Mayan neces- of Utah about the Hotel Palenque (he had taken the slides during the 1969 expedition but did not include them in his "Incidents equated the ramshackle sity. It just grew up sort of like a tropical growth, a sort of Mexican geologic, man-made wonder.">? of Mirror-Travel" article). He contemporary ancient ruins nearby (fig. 62): hotel with the Since the cancellation of historical time is per- haps Smithson's primary concern in the Yucatan project, such eternalizing ITO SMITHSON AND strategies are hardly surprising. STEPHENS IN YUCATAN 6, Yet given the political crises consuming the area in 1969, Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque #7, 1969. it is important Chromogenic-development to recognize the obstinacy of Smith- son's evasion of history here. He could not have been unaware, for example, of the alarming rise in guer- rilla and terrorist violence in Guatemala (more than a thousand of 1967 murders slide. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. between the summer and the summer of T968), or of the growing concerns in the American media about the failure of the U.S.- sponsored Alliance for Progress. Even the primordial junglescapes seemed of the mirror displacements synonymous Vietnam-era with guerrilla must have warfare to a artist. 60 Violence does occasionally erupt into Smithson's essay, but only inasmuch as it is displaced, like the design logic of the Hotel Palenque, into a mythologized, primordial principle: "Through the windshield the road stabbed the horizon, causing it to bleed a sunny incandescence. One couldn't help feeling that this was a ride on a knife covered with solar blood .... Just sitting there brought one into the wound of a terrestrial victim. This peaceful war of the elements is ever present in Mexico-an echo, perhaps, of the Aztec and Mayan human sacrifices." Thus eternalized mythologized, the political violence adopts the cloak of inevitability. Smithson's enduring, and Yucatan becomes host to an primordial "war of the elements." Notions of political causality, historical change, or progressive Alternating activism become both futile and irrelevant in such for the populations territory. Smithson's views the violence, anarchy, and corruption treatment of the horizon theme is telling in this regard: the horizon functions symbol not of hope or anticipation as a but rather of apathy: between sympathy and condescension of the area, much of this literature America as endemic and insurmountable. in Central For exam- ple, just as Smithson had used the trope of infection to "Driving away from Merida down Highway 261 one express the area's incurable toxicity, so too does politi- becomes cal scientist Peter Nehemkis see its problems in epi- aware of the indifferent horizon. Quite apa- thetically it rests on the ground devouring everything demic terms: "For the truth of the matter is that Latin that looks like something." America is a sick society. It is sick politically. It is sick attempting indifferently progress. There is no point in The Yucatan landscape will disperse every effort at visual, historical, and political resolution.61 Although Smithson's Yucatan project tends to economically. It is sick spiritually. Each sickness feeds upon the others and the malaise is total." Where Smithson's mirror displacements perspective vision, journalist scramble attempts at Richard Gott writes express this political fatalism indirectly, particularly that "nobody ever realistically opens much of a per- in the way it de-emphasizes spective for Latin America." Smithson essentially did the agency of the artist! traveler, it is not difficult to locate a similar tone in more not have to look far in Latin American manifestly political analyses of Central and Latin ory to find echoes of his own sense of entropic America at the time. A survey of discussions on the sub- indifference: ject in Smithson's library, all of which stress the enor- ing to Gott, "have a certain blandness," mity of the social and political problems currently peaceful regions can attain only "a depress- region, reveals a palpable undercurrent facing the of hopelessness. political the- Latin American military regimes, accordand even the ing air of aimless stability." Nancy Holt has attested that Smithson considered the Latin American nations would only waste energy and aggravate the situation. to be models of "en tropic" government. And Smithson As he said in 1970, "One keeps dropping into a kind of claims that this futility is naturally embodied in the political centrifugal attitude of the "natives," who acquiesce calmly to "the atrocities onto those working for peace." It is interest- grand nullity of their own past attainments." ing that he uses the image of the centrifuge here; it Smith- force that throws the blood of son constructs their soporific resignation as a model for recalls his earlier illustration, his own attitudes-they Passaic" article, of the futility of attempting are, after all, already pre- pared for the world's entropic endpomt.f" of to over- come the forces of entropy (see Chapter 3): "Picture in Smithson's fatalism here not only echoes contemporaneous in his "Monuments political discussions about Latin America, your mind's eye [a] sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We it also accords with Smithson's own broader political take a child and have him run hundreds philosophy. wise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins Informed found apparent by entropic theory and having confirmation in the global political crises of the late sixties, Smithson period, interpreting was, during this political events as part of the to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase inevitably entropic tendency of all world systems. Thus, of entropy." Political action amounts to the perpetual than running frustration of his more politically active colleagues, he eschewed political activism as counterproductive: of times clock- to little more around in circles; regardless of the direction, disorder can only be increased.65 "I think that if you strive towards Faced with this situation, Smithson felt that the some kind of ideal you'll inevitably end up in a terrible task of the artist was to cultivate a thoroughgoing mess. And other messes will be developing acedia: "The artist should be an actor who refuses to act." right along. What I say is that all one can do, unfortunately, "Immobility is perceive these messes as they take place. ,,63 gifted artists prefer." When asked in 1970 about his posi- The pervasive passivism of Smithson's Yucatan and inertia are what many of the most tion regarding political action that should be taken project can, in fact, be read as a specific rebuttal to by artists, Smithson answered, the political activism of many of his colleagues. The Art sinking into an awareness of global squalor and futility." Workers' Coalition (AWe) held its first open hearing The quotes Smithson places around the word "posi- at the School of Visual Arts (three hundred tion" are typical of his broader suspicion oflinear artists attended) New York on April 10, 1969, just five days "My 'position' is one of per- spective, of single "points of view." When pressed before Smithson left for Yucatan. According to art critic on his political positions, Smithson's usual tactic, at least Lucy Lippard, Smithson in his published was no friend of the coali- interviews, was to attack the notion tion; she identified Smithson, Richard Serra, and Philip of positionality itself His position was, he said, "basically Leider as "notorious sightseers" of the AWe: "As long a pointless position .... as they play with themselves in the bar, telling everyone better, you know, just an endless amount of view.,,66 how absurd or mismanaged the AWC is ... they will be the bane and to some extent the downfall of the Coalition.,,64 r think the more points the of points Smithson's expedition to Yucatan can be understood as an exploration and performance of precisely Smithson's trip to Yucatan, then, occurred just as his carefully constructed philosophies of indifference this position. Seeking to sink into a form of perception that might coincide methodologically were coming to loggerheads with the activist awakening and dissolution of the New York art community. Smithson His dismissal of (disillusion) with the fatigue of entropic futility, found a model in the landscape of Yucatan. his colleagues' activism can be explained (if not excused) "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" functions by noting that his stance was not exactly apathetic- as a primer of indifferent passivity was a reasoned choice for him, the only passivity. The landscape and the population of Yucatan response to contemporary as Smithson with his intellectual politics which was consistent background. From Smithson's entropic perspective, struggles against political injustice perception and his contemporaries them-inscrutable, irresolute, and of political constructed impassive-exemplify the "invincible idleness" that Smithson II2 SMITHSON AND STEPHENS IN YUCATAN considered to be the only viable political strategy. Thus, for all his inversions of Stephens's narrative, Smithson perpetuates, even amplifies, amnesia, indifference, Stephens's belief in Yucatecan and myopia. Both Smithson and Stephens picture the Yucatan Peninsula as desolate in order to extract from it a heritage. For Stephens, the contemporary appropriation For Smithson, desolation of the Maya authorizes his of the region's archaeological artifacts. the desolation, now seen as eternal, is itself the artifact. It provides a primordial endorsement for passivity and a heritage, a "fundamental memory," of indifference. II) SPIRAL JETTY/GOLDEN SPIKE There were many photographs the Golden Spike in ,869, taken of the driving of but Andrew J. Russell's iconic East 6l West Shaking Hands at Laying of Last Rail (see fig. 3) is unquestionably the most famous. Among the reasons for this, 1 would suggest, is that the photograph's visual structure replicates precisely what is so satisfying about the form of historical thought that the spike-driving ceremony embodies. Compositionally, the image is strikingly simple: starting from the lower left corner of the photograph, one can trace a straight diagonal line along the shoes of the men standing in front of the engines, through the center of the chief construction engineers' handshake, and along toward the upper right corner of the image. The same line can be extended from lower right to upper left, resulting in a chiastic structure ing all the hardscrabble that has the effect of summonparticulars of the scene into a central point of juncture (an X, in other words, literally marks the spot]. The crisp, triangular wedge of space that is thus created along the ground in the scene, with its equilateral sides recessing obediently toward the center of the image, appeals to the conventions of linear perspective. Indeed, the composition tival redundancy perspective builds a perspec- into the image. The single-point matrix of the photograph, by the monocular already assured technology of the camera, is reiter- ated by the figures, whose arrangement the enabling conditions substantiates of the image itself. in 1869, the optical armature of Russell's photograph served to reinforce the message of the spikedriving ceremony at virtually every level. By gathering the visual space of the photograph into a single point, it helped to make the geopolitical operations at work in the Golden Spike ceremony-centering mating the American nation-seem and consumas "natural" as vision itself. The driving of the last spike was a ceremony uniquely positioned to symbolize this kind of gathering. Coming after decades of rapid expansion and sec- 6, William T. Garrett Foundry, San Francisco, after a description by David Hewes (1822-1915). The Last Spike, 1869. 176/10 59/16 carat gold, alloyed with copper, x 7/16 X '/. in. (14.1x 1.1 1.3 em]. X Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 1998.115.Gift of David Hewes. tional conflict that had recently culminated in the Civil War, the wedding of the rails helped to provide a muchneeded guarantee of the divinely sanctioned of an unsettlingly centrifugal union society. To quote the May 29, 1869, issue of Harper's Weekly, "This railway counteracts prevented [any] natural tendency to disunion, a separation [it] has and binds the States of the Atlantic and Pacific into one nation." The new railroad promised to bring these disparate could not easily be comprehended regions, which as a union, into an immediate relation. It served -literaDy, -to put Reconstruction-era in Russell's case America into perspective.' The Golden Spike ceremony effected this "binding" not only visually but also temporally. The com- sian to a point, from a process to a moment, both the pletion of the railroad soon led to the standardization photograph of clock time across the country, as the need for called "the specific making consistent railroad schedules forced the elimination of measurement discontinuous local time zones. More immediately, however, the ceremony a hammer-to promised-with the clang of gather the nation into a single point at a single moment. The rhetorical power of the cere- mony depended largely upon its punctuality-upon and the ceremony enacted what Heidegger possible." present that makes 2- The Golden Spike itself (fig. 6)) serves as a marvelously overdetermined artifact of this operation, because it neatly hypostatizes this punctual of presence and consummation model in both its design and its function. Even its goldness is significant, for at root the sense that the arduous, dangerous, and contentious the temporal punctuation process of building evokes a kind of historical alchemy. What is the Golden (and, by extension, a transcontinental railroad a national identity) could be com- pressed into a single moment. The ceremony ported to offer its spectators a moment pur- in which the Spike if not a miraculous J have been discussing transmutation? In it, the raw time and matter that went into the construction the transcontinental entire history of the nation could be effectively nailed rail-hauling, spike-driving, and tunnel-blasting, down. Moreover, in this way the ceremony encouraged tilled into a gleaming and prefigured its own historicization. sell's photograph helps to place its viewer, who "looks back" at the event, in a determinate relationship For just as Rusand intelligible to history (a perspectival relationship, with a predictable sense of scale, diminution, and hierarchy), of railroad, the grueling years of are dis- immediacy. No wonder that Smithson, entire career interrogating who had spent his "stigmatic vistas" like Russell's, built the Spiral Jetty next door to the Golden Spike National Historic Site. The introduction book established to this that the Spiral Jetty and the Golden so, too, did the driving of the Golden Spike stake out Spike are geographically a precise point in the field of time around which his- arable; as I've begun to suggest here, the two monu- torical perspectives ments are connected in many other ways as well. By might later be anchored. forming the transcontinental By trans- railroad from an exten- and experientially insep- the time he arrived in the Salt Lake area in 1970, Smith- "5 son had already spent years attempting the visual-historical embodied to dismantle models that seem to be so perfectly in the Golden Spike legend and its relics. the Last Spike at the precise time of day of the 1869 event (fig. 64). The Western Union telegraph message that had been sent in 1869 to President In project after project he had discredited the punctual- Grant-"The perspectival production -was izing perspective of history, whether by neutral- representation by subjecting infinite reification and accumulation, ments of Passaic," or by appealing and enantiomorphism it to as in "The Monuto binocularity in order to dislocate its apparent unity, as in his Yucatan tour. When Smithson came transcontinental Ulysses railroad is completed" repeated, also in telegraph form, now for the benefit of Richard Nixon, who was vacationing Florida at the time. The reenactment by months of symposia, banquets, was surrounded dedications, bitions, and other fanfare. Dignitaries including in exhi- and celebrities, Johnny Cash and John Wayne, attended to Utah he was well prepared to engage this landscape the events (Wayne was on hand for the Golden Spike and the historical meanings International that occupied it. Preview of his film True Grit in Salt Lake City}." Also attending The Golden Spike Centennial, 1969 the ceremony, but in a consider- In the century following the completion of the railroad, ably less celebratory mood, were small but vocal bands most of the physical reminders of protesters. of the Promontory area's frontier past had eroded or disappeared entirely. attention Many were there to try to draw more to the immense contributions that Chinese The entire I25-mile section of track that had stretched laborers had made toward the Central Pacific's side through of the railroad line. Others objected to the celebration Promontory around the north side of the Great Salt Lake was bypassed in 1904 by the Lucin Cutoff, a shorter, more level route stretching across the of a railroad that had served as a genocidal vehicle for nineteenth-century Native American populations. lake itself (see fig. 65). The site of the original rail junc- The protesters tion was abandoned; cern about the way that these other aspects of the not even a ghost town remained. seem to have had good reason for con- The tracks that the Central and Union Pacific rail- transcontinental roads had raced to build there in 1869 were ripped up torical narrative. The archives of the centennial and sold for scrap metal) bration (still housed at the Golden Spike National His- Antiquarian interest in the site slowly began to railroad had been erased from the his- toric Site) reveal the extent to which the centennial increase in the mid "twentieth century, and the area reenacted not only the original spike-driving was ultimately placed under the aegis of the National the entire ideology of nineteenth-century Park Service as a National Historic Site in 1965. A American visitors' center was constructed as Russell's 1869 photograph and the road to the site cele- nationalism but also Anglo- that originally produced it. Just had been carefully was paved. In May of 1969, soon after Smithson posed to exclude the hundreds returned standing just outside its frame, so too did the 1969 cel- from Yucatan and just ten months before he arrived in Utah to begin work on the Spiral jetty, ebrations nearly thirty thousand torical picture. At the reenactment people converged on the area to celebrate the centennial of the spike-driving The highlight of the celebration costumed reenactment authenticity Commission ceremony. was a scripted and of the original ceremony, the of which the Centennial Celebration took great pains to ensure. Exact replicas of the two original locomotives were displayed on a tend to set the Chinese outside of the his- of Transportation riously slighted the contribution its content and the protests it sparked-the in mountains Who else but Americans track in 12 hours>"! of the original par- could chisel through miles of solid granite? could have laid ten miles of Perhaps even more problematic back to the site. ticipants) dressed up in period costume and re-drove speech 30 feet deep in snow? Who else but (see fig. 63), which had long resided at the Stanford Actors (many of them descendants both asked, "Who else but Americans could drill ten tunnels of the original juncture. The original Golden Spike was shipped of the Chinese labor- ers. Widely reported in the national press-for Americans Museum, ceremony, Secretary John Volpe gave a speech that noto- few hundred feet of track that was re-laid at the location University of Chinese workers outright omission cussion u6 in the official centennial SPIRAL than Volpe's of the Chinese workers was the dis- JETTY {GOLDEN SPIKE publication of 6, Centennial reenactment of the driving of the Golden Spike, May 10,1969. Utah State Historical Society, Gift of the Utah Travel Council. the local newspaper, which spoke of "little yellow men" and the Golden Spike centennial-as who "trooped in from Sacramento in their blue blouses, constructed and basket hats, pantaloons introduction, flapping in the breeze, he planned and the Spiral Jetty,7 As mentioned in the chose for the Jetty was the site Smithson carrying small outfits, and chattering like so many mon- a short drive over dirt roads from what was then the keys." This publication new Golden Spike visitors' center (fig. 65). At the visi- (of which Smithson had a copy) also discussed the frequent clashes of the Chinese tors' center Smithson with their "red-faced, blustering Irish bosses." Native many times (along with the typical postcard racks and Americans fared no better in the centennial rhetoric; an interpretive advertisement of the "wedding of the rails." In this regularly and nois- Winchester for the Golden Spike commemorative rifle, under the banner "The Railroad, the would have seen, probably displays), an abbreviated reenactment ily staged event, still performed hourly today, the two Sioux, and the Repeating Rifle," proposed that "two replica engines leave their positions at the opposite ends things kept the railroad moving: the Indians did not of the short run of track, approach each other, and, know how to rip up track-and with great fanfare and exhalations of steam, nudge noses the Winchester arrived. before backing up to take their positions for the next 15 shots per man.,,6 The ethnic mainstreaming celebrations of the reenactment was perhaps not surprisin~ given that the Spike's ritual act of punctual unification was enlisted show (fig. 66). Smithson mentioned and the first transcontinental the Golden Spike railroad explicitly in the essay he wrote about the Jetty. He had a copy of The to serve much the same purpose in 1969 as it did Story afthe Wedding of the Rails, the special publica- in 1869. Occurring as it did in the midst of widespread tion that had been produced cuIrural upheaval and political instability, the centen- Box Elder News-Journal, a local newspaper. nial's patriotism and nostalgia for a unified, mainstream building the earthwork, culture was all the more intense. The reenactment the Golden Spike Motel (which, according to Virginia seemed to offer a chance to reexperience Dwan, held endless fascination a mythical deeply divided American summer of 1969lrhe the celebration, was a society about to enter the standard questions that we would including who and what were left out of it-were means that Smithson's bly complicated a distant historical precedent that its historiographical space: it revisited at precisely the moment recuperation was becoming the subject of intense public debate. By inserting into a historiographical for him) (fig. 67). still contemplating the relationship of the two monu- ments, drawing up preliminary plans for a museum about the Spiral Jetty to be built near the Golden first This Spiral Jetty took form in a dou- historiographical he stayed in Brigham City at Spike site (fig. 68)8 now ask of the original Golden Spike ceremonybeing publicly raised at the 1969 centennial. by the While Even a year after the Jetty had been completed, he was national unity, but what it truly reflected, in the collection of protests disrupting for the centennial itself climate that was already Modern Sculpture and the Alchemy of History Although Smithson responses to the Golden Spike spectacle, the Jetty left no written record of his direct itself is an articulate partner in the cross-monumental dialogue going on in northern Utah. This is due largely to the vocabulary of time and work that both monuments share. Smithson brought with him from New destabilized and politicized, the Jetty could not help but York a set of concerns about labor and process that join an active debate about history and its constitu- were entirely pertinent tion. As Smithson knew, the Jetty would come to occupy tions at hand in Utah. The Golden Spike model of not some mythic Western "wide open space" but punctual consummation, rather a space that had already been shaped by a con- to the world of Western railroading; spicuous historical event, the peculiar mechanics already wrestled with it back home, where something of its commemoration, very much like it formed the aesthetic foundation of and the politics of its continued Clement Greenberg's historical construction. The ambivalent imprint of those historiograph- to the historiographical ques- for example, was not peculiar Smithson art criticism. Smithson, had been closely monitoring Greenberg's had who writing dur- ical politics remains inscribed upon the Jetty itself. ing the sixties, would surely have noted that the entire Smithson spike-driving was very well aware of the Golden Spike- uS SPIRAL spectacle eerily reproduced, JETTY /GOLDEN SPIKE almost to 6, Northern Great Salt Lake area, showing location of Golden Spike National Historic Site and Spiral Jetty (indicated with arrow). (Below) area of detail. Salt; FJatsj J ;l .: ~ r'-c Spring Bay NA o L G R E ,Cub Island OunnisonL! Island \ SAL T 66 Replica engines used for hourly reenactments of "The Wedding of the Rails," 1996. Golden Spike National Historic Site, Promontory, Photo by the author. Utah. 6, Advertisement 68 for the Golden from Smithson's (special Golden Robert Smithson, Spike Centennial Archives of American 1969. Art, Smithsonian Stay at the '\ Pencil, 9 x 12 in. (22.9 x 30.5 em). Estate of Robert Smithson. issue of and Nancy Holt papers, '905-87, Institution. nJC\(J{)nAo J ~~pi.l, while in the Golden Spike Empire W. feotvr. frM TV, wall to walt carpeting, air COI .. lo.... cribs, connecting rooms, holf block from best restaurant, telePhonftS, post oHice and threat.r right in the heart of the busine$s district of Brigham City. We accept reservations and major credit cards. Ask us about information concerning the bird refuee and other Box Elder county points of interest. "Finest accommodations in Norlhern Utah" ~~E~~ 30 WEST FIRST SOUTH Plan for Museum Concerning Spiral Jetty near Golden Spike Monument, copy of The Story of the Wedding of the Rails the Box Elder News-Journal), Robert Smithson Spike Motel BRIGHAM CITY U. S. H;ghway 30p19T 1971. the letter, Greenberg's dictum that the viewer in front of a piece of modern art was to be "summoned devalues the time of the artist is the enemy of art and the artist. The stronger and clearer the artist's view of and gathered into one point" by the work. The Golden time the more he will resent any slander Spike, by encapsulating domain. instantaneous Manifest Destiny in an object, also paralleled Michael Fried's . Artists with a weak view of time are easily deceived by this victimizing kind of criticism, and are seduced into some trivial history:"? famous claim that modern art should be instantaneous and thus at every moment The kind of absolute positivity of the temporality "wholly manifest." Indeed, the Golden Spike, if translated into the art-criti- of production cal lexicon of Smithson's felt, thwart the commodification period, emerges as a pass- able prototype for a high-modern embodiment sculpture, a perfect that Smithson was then work- endorsed would, he cial privileges to any moment of art by denying spefalsely nominated or consummation. as 1t would preclude the possibility of building an art history around isolated works of art, because it would make it impossible for ing to defeat in his own work and writing." Similarly, although Smithson did not likely wish to express any specific opinions that Smithson a completion of the kind of pseudo-instantaneous "portable abstraction" on this critics to locate the significant points around which they would normally organize art-historical about nineteenth- narratives. century labor politics on the railroad, he did have opin- It would disallow the extraction of "finished" objects ions about twentieth-century from the continuous labor practices in the art world that were entirely applicable to the situation in raw history into which they are inalienably knitted. Smithson was essentially setting Utah. During the late sixties and early seventies, Smith- his theory of history as "spiral wreckage" against the son began to develop a critique of the operations standard art-historical the art market based on its relationship time. Smithson's of continuous understanding of to the artist's of time as a process material deposition meant that, for trope of the "breakthrough," which carved artistic careers into long stretches of stagnant or unproductive time, punctuated by abrupt, spasmodic moments of creative consummation. Smith- him, the work of art existed materially at every moment son encouraged leading up to and following the point at which it would continuous be traditionally seen as "completed." The art market. described sculptor Anthony Cards accomplishments, on the other hand, ignored all of the artist's time spent "a succession in the process of creation completed in order to fetishize 1968 essay "A Sedimentation Earth Projects," Smithson of the Mind: resist the process of temporal commodification subheading II the opera- tions of the art market because it does not permit the had argued that artists must results from this object-oriented of climaxes." as Fried had This positivity of process frustrates the work of art, the "product." In his artists to think of their work process as and nonhierarchical-not, that view of art. Under the "The Value of Time," Smithson argued essentially alchemical procedure of allowing the history of a work to disappear in order to return, concentrated and transvalued, in an isolable material object. As a new temporal economy. Smithson's those developed in the twentieth model resembles century by many for the equally positive value of each moment of the artis- theorists of supplementarity, tic process-a Lyotard's notion of the nonpropagative time of cinema, impossible value that, if granted, would make it to isolate the artistic process from the art including [ean-Prancois Georges Bataille's concept of expenditure, or Jacques object: "For too long the artist has been estranged from Derrida's theory of time as a gift that permits of "no his own 'time.' Critics, by focusing on the 'art object,' reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, deprive the artist of any existence in the world of both The artist's time is not "spent" in the classical eco- mind and matter. The mental process of the artist nomic sense, not given up now in exchange for its which takes place in time is disowned, transfigured modity value can be maintained so that a com- by a system indepen- dent of the artist. Art, in this sense, is considered less' or a product of'no convenient 'time- time at all'; this becomes a way to exploit the artist out of his rightful claim to his temporal processes. .. Any critic who restoration or debt.'?" in the value-laden, climactic art object later. Rather it is simply "spent" in the sense of "exhausted," and it remains on the scene indefinitely. If what I have called the historical alchemy of the Golden Spike emerged from its fixation on the railroad's golden moment 122 SPIRAL JETTY/GOLDEN of completion SPIKE rather than on 6, the extended period oflabor and process that pre- Abandoned ceded it, Smithson's entrance into Utah, his strong Photo by the author. view of time in tow, was to offer an alternative. For Smithson, commodified the antidote "trivial history" set into play by the art racy and persistence 1996. 70 to the kind of object (or Golden Spike) is an insistence oil tank and jetty near Spiraljetty, Abandoned truck near Spira /jetty, 1996. Photo by the author. on the obdu- of each instant of the artist's (or railroad worker's) interaction with matter. Of course such an idea was not unique among New York artists of the seventies, who embraced becoming increasingly process art and were familiar with Marxist critiques of the art market. Smithson's arguments also recall conceptual art's emphasis on the value ofthe time spent thinking through the work prior to any physical production. But Smithson's "strong view of time" also had roots in his earlier engagement of hyperspace with the discourse (see Chapter 2). The work of art, when perceived according to the strong view, exists fully at each moment of its creation, stretching forward and backward in history as a four-dimensional object. A strong view of time reveals the full four-dimensional contour of the work of art, while a "weak view" sees only the three-dimensional object sold and exchanged among art collectors. These objects are merely fragments or cross-sections herein lies Smithson's Greenberg) of the true "work," yet (and main objection to Fried and they are treated by critics as if they were unified, transcendent wholes. 13 The Spiral Jetty aims to occupy this strong view of time in several ways. It has often been noted that Smithson's earthwork resists formal closure because its size and physical imbrication in the site make it difficult to isolate as a bounded object (it is impossible to determine exactly where the Utah landscape ends and the Jetty begins). But the same can-and be said for its relationship Smithson's treatment must- to its historical margins. of history in the Spiral Jetty pro- and more conventional high-altitude straight jetty (figs. 69, 70). A aerial survey photograph clearly demonstrates taken in 1993 the close relationship between the massive oil jetty (right) and the delicate Spiral Jetty ject ensures that the earthwork cannot be plucked out (left) (fig. 7I). Although these historical "distractions" of its historical "continuance." The experience of visiting are rarely discussed the Jetty makes this abundantly evident. As discussed are, for visitors, as conspicuous in the introduction, travelers to the Jetty must first pass in the literature on the jetty, they itself (if not more so-especially as the Spiral Jetty during the periods through the Golden Spike National Historic Site. Then, when the Jetty is underwater). further along the way to the earthwork, visitors find remains are inextricable the remains of a failed oil extraction operation arrogates the failed efforts of the oil field into its own from The oil operation's from Smithson's Jetty, which the 1930S (see fig. 4). These remains include the ruined four-dimensional foundation dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. of a shack, a battered tank, a truck, an amphibious trailer, a holding vehicle, and a much larger contour, as Smithson notes: "Two A series of seeps of heavy black oil more like asphalt t Rozel Point showing Spira/Jetty (left) and straight jetty from abandoned oil extraction operation (center), June 26, 1993- United States Geological Survey (USGS), National Aerial Photography Program. 7' occur just south of Rozel Point. For forty or more Robert Smithson, years people have tried to get oil out of this natural tar Contemporary pool. Pumps coated with black stickiness in the corrosive salt air .... Robert Smithson rusted A great pleasure arose from Untitled (Construction print from Smithson's of SpiralJetty), 1970. original negative. and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-87, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. seeing all those incoherent structures. This site gave evidence of a succession in abandoned of man-made systems mired hopes." All history, whether or not it ultimately contributed to something called "progress," becomes a part of the Spiral Jetty. 14 Smithson's abundant documentation of the con- struction of the earthwork also provides a "strong view" of its history. The Spiral Jetty film documents (at sometimes tedious length) the process of construction, incorporating time spent scraping, loading, dumping, and moving rocks into position. frames each correspond These cinematic to an instant of the time spent in construction, and function as cellular deposits of the production time of the Jetty. In this sense they are analogous to the earthwork project itself; history dumps itself onto the film much as the rocks are dumped into the Great Salt Lake. Smithson's knits the construction documentation also of the Spiral Jetty into a kind of "continuance" with that of both the oil jetty and the transcontinental railroad. Many of Smithson's struction photographs, con- for example, allude to the "aban- doned hopes" at the oil jetty by courting the possibility the Jetty. Because the Jetty takes continual contributions of failure. The truck in figure 72 leans precariously from the lake itself, its work is never done. I5 as it dumps its load of rocks, recalling Smithson's ref- By appending Spiral to Spike, Smithson proposes erence to the "tar pool" at the oil jetty and suggesting an inclusionary brand of history, one based on exten- that Smithson's sion rather than contraction, project, too, may end up "mired" (as continuance rather than Smithson knew, this was in fact a danger, for the salt instantaneity. The Spiral Jetty promises to recuperate flats forming the bottom of the lake at this point are forgotten or marginalized fragile, and the weight of the trucks might easily have porate all of the "mind and matter" that the Golden histories and to fully incor- caused the lakebed to buckle). At the same time, the Spike can only attempt to summarize, jetty's construction fragmentary fashion, through its perspectival/historical process-building a high embank- in a distorted and ment or bedding for a path to be traveled-refers representation. directly to the process of railroad building (figs. 7J, 74)' Promontory area, Smithson's insistence on the accumu- In fact, the Jetty was built with the same machinery lative positivity of the work that goes into construct- and techniques-and -as indeed, by some of the same men those used earlier in the twentieth century for the railroad causeways across the Great Salt Lake. Finally, Smithson projects the Jetty into its other temporal In the historiographical context of the ing a work of art cannot help but take on a polemical role. We might say that the Jetty performs nial counter-reenactment a centen- here, reenacting not the time- less and universal product oflabor, the Golden Spike, margin: the future. The Spiral jetty's history did not stop but rather that which the Golden Spike model of history when Smithson must repress-the sent the dump truck drivers home- duration, extension, and materiality rather, as Smithson mew it would, history continued of that labor. The Jetty provides a form of rescue to accumulate of the time that went into the railroad's deposition at the site in the form of the continuous of salt crystals over the entire surface of and thus poses a monumental construction, rejoinder to the goings- I J 73 Spiraljetty, 1970. Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Estate of Robert Smithson. 74 Andrew J, Russell, Granite Canon, Black Hills, 1869. From Russell, The Great West Illustrated. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 75 a visual and an aural scale, in other words it indicates Spiral Jetty, 1970, Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. a sense of scale that resonates in the eye and the ear at Estate of Robert Smithson. the same time. Here is a reinforcement tion of spirals that reverberates and prolonga- up and down space and time. So it is that one ceases to consider art in tenns of an 'object." In this passage, Smithson mentions the jetty's evasion of object status and connects this to the operation of scale relationships and a thematics of aurality (the Jetty does indeed have a cochlear appearance, fig. 75). Smithson alludes to a portrait of James Joyce by sculptor Constantin Brancusi to epitomize this cathexis of themes (the portrait is a simple spiral-shaped drawing), but I would like to begin this discussion of scale, aurality, and history by invoking another arthistorical ear that haunts Smithson's project.t'' Giovanni Morelli was a late nineteenth-century Italian writer who became famous for the forensic method of connoisseurship that he invented. Against prevailing models of authentication and attribution, he argued that only by closely examining dental details of paintings certain inci- can the true identity of their artists be determined. According to Morelli, it is on a few miles away at the Golden Spike National in painting unimportant Historic Site. It functions as the Spike's supplement, fingernails as if the spiral, spreading out into the lake, were a careful consciousness of tradition or of the grander themes of a painting, that artists reveal their personal plume made up of all the interstitial time that was being swept out of the way by the punctuated temporality The Jetty, with its relentless Promontory. positivity of time, functions as a kind of waste of timeSalt Lake becoming an enormous at the Great tailings pond for the historical effluent of official American frontier history. details like the earlobes and of figures, when they are not burdened idiosyncrasies and thus "give themselves away." Morelli's books were illustrated with drawings of ears supposedly corresponding to the unique styles of particular artists (fig. 76). For Morelli, these ears are the locus of the painter's true work, the seat of nonalienated UD- or pre-reflective, art labor. Just there, hiding in the folds An Ear to the Ground: The Resonance of History of paint building up the earlobe-the By locking the Jetty so thoroughly into the past, present, presence and future of its site, Smithson knits all three monu- like others, confers value through instantaneity, spontaneous of the artist. This form of connoisseurship, but ments (Golden Spike, oil field, and the Jetty itself) it does so by burrowing together in a larger historical field. This, he hopes, will details of the work, down at the very verge of its preclude the possibility of the excision and replace- microscopic ment of anyone measures go even further into the seemingly incidental presence as matter. [7 Smithson of them into some other "trivial his- tory." Yet his precautionary by had in his library a well-thumbed essay about Morelli and his ears: Edgar Wind's "Critique than this. For it is not only the outer margins of the Jetty of Connoisseurship." that must be protected from the objectifications book Art and Anarchy, the essay attacked Morelli for his the historian, of it is also its inner margins. We can begin to address this inner form of historical resistance by examining Smithson's comparison of the Spiral Jetty to equation of spontaneity devaluation Published in 1965 in Wind's with value and his consequent of the artist's durational "labours of exe- cution." Wind identified Morelli as a key progenitor of a "spiral ear": "[The Jetty] echoes and reflects Brancusi's the "romantic cult of the spasm" that had gone on to sketch of Joyce as a "spiral ear" because it suggests both define modern art history; this was because Morelli 128 SPIRAL JETTY /GOLDEN SPIKE " equated the artist's true presence with the instanta- Giovanni Morelli, illustration from Die Werke neous fullness of an unreflective moment. Wind's critique of Morelli is interesting in this context because it so closely parallels Smithson's Italienischer Meister, 1880. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College. own critique of the alchemy of art history, which confers all its value on an isolated moment of consummation. like Wind, deplored the tendency Smithson, of modern critics to define the work of art around an instantaneous moment; this moment or "spasm" could be too conve- niently cleaved from its durational context and reinserted into a historical narrative of the critic's choosing. No wonder, then, that Smithson decided to refer to Joyce rather than to Morelli when broaching the subject of ears. Even so, it is useful to keep Morelli in mind, for Smithson's "spiral ear" presents us with so perfect a frustration of Morelli's model that it seems to have been designed specifically to thwart the Morellian art-historical approach.f Morelli's model of criticism, although all ears, ultimately defeats the acoustic possibilities of art history. Lionardo. Spiral Jetty project, on the other hand, Smithson's attempts to define an aural historiography. a form of sensual apprehension Hearing is more complex and slippery than the Cartesian possession the same root as "red"). John Silver, Smithson points out, traditionally lives on Silver Sands Beach. Another local character ascribed to vision. To listen for something, we might say, is, incredibly, named "Mark Crystal." These incidental is never quite to find it. Its specific location cannot proper names, which in the Morellian universe would be pinpointed resonances because it is perpetually complicated by that pull it into other registers or scales. constitute stable attributions, slip uneasily into other scales, registers, and histories. Smithson rejects the This sensual slippage makes hearing ill-suited for any spontaneous forensic or evidentiary paradigm like Morelli's. Smith- that it remain connected through resonance to a larger son, however, defines the Spiral Jetty as an aural work, historical structure.I? and by doing so helps to immunize seurship. it against connois- The "Spiral Jetty" essay, for example, sets presence of any historical detail, insisting Smithson mentioned Jetty resonates in his essay that the Spiral in the eye and the ear at once. And names into resonance in order to retract the possibility indeed, in the process of visually representing of deriving from them a stable historical attribution. Smithson Smithson's essay is flagrantly "incidental," full of all sorts ization of the concrete detail. The most popular image of seemingly unimportant of the Spiral Jetty is the aerial photograph historical details. Smithson devotes several pages to documenting his rambles the work, creates the same slippage or dematerial- Gianfranco Gorgoni (under Smithson's taken by direction) in around the lake while looking for a site, listing the local 1970 (fig. 77). This image quickly became, and remains, people he met and often mentioning iconic. Smithson various inci- dents in their tales of life growing up around the lake. photographs But these nominalist first published details prove unstable; they have a fantastical or eerily coincidental that suggests a historical aspect about them echo. This is especially true reproduced this and eight other in his "Spiral Jetty" essay, which was in 1972 in a volume of writings edited by Gyorgy Kepes.P'' When the essay was originally published, Smithson guided the reader through a of proper names; he cites a writer named "William set of nine photographs Rudolph," who turns out to be the author of a quote a telescopic progression, each successive image dosing about red salt lakes (Rudolph, of course, coming from the distance to the Jetty, each a closer "detail," each rep- of the Jetty that proceeded in resenting a closer looking (or, perhaps, listening) Although the photographs in posthumous in. were published out of order reprintings of the essay, in the original that his photographic series might as well have con- tinued down below the current detail. Something the electron micrograph like that we have already seen publication Smithson carefully sequenced and captioned in figure 18, in fact, would occupy the next position in the photographs so that they proceeded as follows: the photographic First, the aerial view (see fig. 77), encompassing the landscape and the entire earthwork showing us the Jetty at the sequence, (fig. 81).21 next order of magnification This extension of the sequence accomplished, as it springs out from the shore, balloons toward the picture plane, we find that we have fallen through and then curls back inward toward the center of the reencounter piece. Next the viewpoint swings around in a counter- one hand an index of specificity and certainty, is actually clockwise direction and begins to close in on the Jetty being ghosted by its own abstract diagram. At the (fig. 78). Through level of the detail, perhaps the last frontier of instan- a series of further rotations, with the viewpoint of the photographs dropping ever closer the detail only to an aerial view. The salt crystal-on the taneous presence, the Jetty sli ps back into an aerial to the ground plane (fig. 79), the specific materiality detachment. of the Jetty begins to assert itself at the expense of its detail (as that which differs from, and thus grounds, more abstract identity as a spiral form. The final image or resists, the overview) becomes inoperable. Smithson is an extreme close-up view of salt crystals (fig. 80). actually says as much when he claims that the Jetty This is where Smithson's retains the same spiral form regardless of the position sequence of photographs Spiral Jetty is at the limits of the Morellian stops-the microscope. We can imagine that if the photographer The very notion of the resistant material from which it is viewed: "The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiraling crystal lattice, came any closer either the image would fall out of magnified focus or the camera lens would scrape up against the ment and prolongation salt. The double-counterclockwise and down space and time." This is why it is signifi- rotation (once trillions of times .... Here is a reinforce- of spirals that reverberates through the air and once along the surface of the Jetty) cant that Smithson's set up by the sequence salt crystals deposited on a tumbleweed seems to have reached its up final detail (see fig. 80) shows (and not, as one forensic endpoint; it has stopped, braked by the chaotic might expect, simply a closer view of the crystals on tangle of forms. Having taken an almost lcarian fall the rocks of the Spira/Jetty). from the general to the particular, we seem to have gone reinforce the suggestion as low as we can go. because, were it set in motion, the salt crystals clinging Smithson's sequence of photographs follow a Morellian progression. ear," ever closer, Smithson detail that stops or grounds seems to Peering into the "spiral presents us at last with a our search. But, just as Wind's critique of forensic connoisseurship destabilized to it would be propelled tumbleweed The tumbleweed of "a prolongation helps to of spirals," along a spiral path. The (which Smithson was carefuJ to identify in his caption) helps destabilize the center of the spiral by suggesting that the viewer can "tumble" further into the work.V This instability applies at the aerial, or "upper," Morelli's telltale detail, so must this journey down the material labyrinth of Smith sons aural scale ring hollow. end of the photographic For if we look more closely at the salt crystals in Smith- hills behind the Jetty in figure 77; they align in such a son's final "detail" (see fig. 80), we find that they, too, way that the far band (the Promontory carry echoes. Consider the following statement reaches around behind the near band (Rozel Point). Smithson that made about salt crystals in the "Spiral Jetty" series as welL Consider the Range) Within the context of the other photographs, in which essay: "Each cubic salt crystal echoes the Spiral Jetty the spiral arms of the Jetty often appear as recessing in terms of the crystal's molecular lattice. Growth in a horizons crystal advances around a dislocation point, in the man- mountains ner of a screw." Smithson's claim about the molecular arms of some even larger spiral, one that is itself pre- structure sumably embraced by another, and so on. of salt, which demonstrates that he is still fully engaged with the spiral-dislocation crystal deposition discussed in Chapter suggests even extends this spiraling to the process of representing 130 SPIRAL bands of separated by water strongly suggest the Smithson model of 2, (see fig. 79), these overlapping JETTY /GOLDEN the Jetty: "For my film (a film is SPIKE 77 SpiralJetty, 1970, Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Estate of Robert Smithson. a spiral made up of frames) I would have myself filmed from a helicopter (from the Greek helix, helikos meaning spiral)." If the spiral form lurks in the broader landscape, the Conn of the piece as a whole, and in the structure of the salt molecules that encrust it, then the spiral extends all the way down and all the way up the scale of scale. Translated into temporal terms: the salt-crystal detail cannot provide us with a single "instant" that might consummate the work, because it, too, partici- pates in the spiraling continuity of the Spiral Jetty and, indeed, of the entire span of history itself. To look at a "detail" of the Spiral Jetty is to peer Into an abyss or maelstrom of scale which, in its own helical trajectory, 1)1 78 Spiral Jetty, 1970. Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Estate of Robert Smithson. 79 SpiralJetty, 1970. Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Estate of Robert Smithson. 80 Spira/Jetty, 1970. Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Estate of Robert Smithson. 8, I. M. Dawson, electron micrographs (detail). Reproduced in Charles William Bunn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science, 1964. reiterates the form of the detail itself: "All is out of pro- site. Salt-that is to say, history-accumulates along the Spiral jetty's portion. Scale inflates or deflates into uneasy dimen- the rocks, materially sions. We wander between the towering and the bottom- durational less. We are lost between the abyss within us and ually revised appendix to Smithson's the boundless horizons it in a perpetual condition of delay. For this reason, salt demonstrated that there is a "persistent outside us." Gary Shapiro has direction in [Smithson's] work that leads from vertical structures to embodying extension. The crystals function as a continwork holding is the primary agent preventing the Spiral Jetty from attaining the state of completion that the Golden Spike (It also corrosively precludes the Jetty's horizontal ones, in which a spiral is squashed or pro- represents. jected onto a plane." I would merely add that Smithson's conservation constantly slipping sense of scale, one that incorpo- vator will attest, salts are the primary threat to the rates both "the towering and the bottomless," integrity of a stone artwork.] If gold embodies pure his- him to inject his squashed allows as an art object-as torical value, concentrated spiral with a profound any sculpture conser- and distilled, salt partici- pates in an entropic and supplemental sense of verticality." historical econ- omy: to "salt" the earth is to make barren or useless, just as to "salt" an account is to give artificial or exces- From Gold to Salt: Historical Flavor The salt crystal, then, serves as the ultimate key to sive value to the items therein. Salt, like Smithson's Smithson's crtitique of the Golden Spike. It frustrates all history, is an additive.et those, from Morelli to Greenberg, who would seek to And yet, as I have already suggested, apply the historical Midas Touch to an isolable moment. salt crystals that embody the principle of historical As a substance excess and remainder, the very salt crystals that function invested with aural resonance (and, of course, with taste), it serves as the chemical basis of as a kind of radical materialist a critical synaesthesia for their own transcendence. that dismantles the optical fixa- tions of the art market and of traditional microscoping historical the very additive, also arrange As Smithson's telescoping/ series of photographs of the Jetty demon- thought. Indeed, the salt along the Jetty was central for strate, salt serves as the agent of vertical scaling in Smithson from the beginning. the piece, investing it with a profound treats salt as the motivating project-its The "Spiral Jetty" essay magnifications. concern for the entire first paragraph is devoted to an uncharac- unity across all A bit of wordplay on the term "scale" itself helps to clarify Smithson's understanding of this teristically prosaic discussion of Smithson's search for paradoxical power of salt to serve as both a horizontal an appropriate and a vertical agent. On the one hand, the salt assures salt lake in which to produce the earth- work. He sketched out other salt works throughout that the Spiral Jetty is "covered with scale" - in the this period, with titles like Island of Salt Crystals in Red sense that "scale" is a noun referring to a crust, scab, or Water. In his Plan for Museum Concerning Spiral Jett:}! shell surrounding (see fig. 68) he specifies that the rocks surrounding functions the an object, but at the same time it as a principle of vertical motion or connec- tion, as in the verb "to scale" (a mountain, a staircase, spiral staircase be encrusted with salt. And the Spiral Jett:}!itself serves, if nothing else, as a saltworks. The etc.]. The idea of scale, as Smithson sheltering edges excess, remainder, and supplement arms of the spiral increase the concentra- tion of brine in the water, allowing for a higher rate of incorporating crystal deposition. of transcendence. The color of the water within the This play on scale accords with Smithson's surrounding own saltiness-indeed, rate of precipitation intervention own penchant for wordplay, which has its to "salt" a narrative is (in one now obsolete usage) to lend it a taste of piquant wit. of salt. With Smithson's while also them within a larger vertical movement coils of the Jetty is usually a darker red than the water the piece, which signals the increased uses it, acknowl- at the Great Salt Smithson's scaling has the power, ultimately, to Lake, salt replaces gold as the essential substance of dematerialize history. It perfectly embodies, in its crystalline structure, essential materiality. The salt is base matter, to be Smithson's model of time as a depositional sure, but in the Spiral Jetty it attains what Smithson ance." And it is not only an abstraction enaction of Smithson's "continu- but also an additive model of history at the the material without ever denying it its called in another context "a transcendental matter.t'" T36 SPIRAL JETTY (GOLDEN SPIKE state of The Spiral Jetty functions as a structure that chlorine, are violently reactive alone, but achieve an brings particulars under the aegis of a new kind of total- immutable izing pattern, one that manifests itself not across the impulse of matter to achieve an inert configuration, usual Euclidean space but rather across scale. There is energies in a state of equilibnum.e'' symmetry. a technical term for this operation-recursive The concept did not become widely circulated after 1975-when until permanence in salt. Salt embodies the its Derrida has spoken about the concept of "seasoning," arguing that it operates within the realm of fractals first became popular-but sublimation and dialectics. He points out that the Smithson had clearly developed his own version of it French term relever can be translated as "to redeem," "to in 1970. Throughout preserve," and "to season"-one ematicians this period, scientists and math- were beginning to model recursive sym- metries for the first time; perhaps food in order to change it but also to heighten the food's the most familiar results of their efforts are fractal graphics, which display self-similarity across infinite magnifications. I do not wish to make too much of this comparison, worth pointing out that Smithson but it is spent the late six- original flavor, to give it, as Derrida says, "still more of its own taste. "27 The salt acts to "season" the Spiral Jetty. It is an additive, supplementing the Jetty with concrete "historical flavor" but at the same time a preservative, maintaining its internal impulse ties and early seventies engaging in many of the same larger spiral resonance. pursuits preserves (hence sublimates, that proto-chaos-theorists were also follow- ing: exploring complex, turbulent, or entropic systems and finding ways to conceptualize them within fields of endeavor Smithson's that traditionally Mandelbrot and others were beginning for the first time: non-laminar ular basin boundaries Smithson's that Benoit to describe of all kinds. While ultimately to have been interested as seems in finding a new kind of order within disorder. As cultural theorist Katherine undermine N. Hayles has argued, "Chaos theory does not an omniscient a 1970 interview on his current work, he claimed that all involved with the unification of the duplicity, the dual aspect is reconciled within the pieces, and reflects a been understood opposing order through disorder, Smithson his work explicitly as a form of dialectical resolution during these years. In "all of the things internally have that aspect, they are (Broken Circle, 1970, Emmen, work has traditionally toward a both negates and in Hegel's formulation) Smithson was discussing flows (see fig. 47), irreg- Holland), and stochastic phenomena Seasoning the original object. This is the role of salt in the Spiral Jetty and historicity in Smithson's work as a whole. valued order. In fact, work of the early seventies could provide a virtual prospectus of the kind of phenomena adds seasoning to a greater scale of the dialectic."z8 Drawing upon not only Lenin but also Nabokov and other writers, Smithson understood the spiral's association synthesis. In one of his notebooks, with dialectical as part of a list he compiled under the heading ''A Metamorphosis the Spiral," he transcribed of the following quote from Nabokov's Speak, Memory: A Memoir. "If we consider view. Rather, it extends it beyond where even Newtonian mechanics could reach." the simplest spiral, three stages may [be] distinguished This recursive symmetry is significant because it signals in it, corresponding a form of completion 'thetie' the small curve or arc that initiates the convo- and wholeness that cannot be to those of the triad. We can call attained in the everyday historical world of the Golden lution centrally; 'antithetic' Spike. In his career-long engagement first in the process of continuing with mirroring the larger arc that faces the and bilateral symmetry (see Chapter 2), Smithson coded still ampler it as a sign of the inevitable fragmentation following the first along the outer side."29 the limited world of historical perception. of time in symmetry that might finally heal the asymmetries human history. A salt is, by definition, created out of this kind of stabilizing the realm of Hegelian dialectics, it can also be underof a substance resolution. the second while If the Spiral Jetty can be said to operate within Here, at the Spiral Jetty, the salt allows a glimpse of a new, eternal arc that continues it; and 'synthetic' the Pro- duced by the reaction of an acid and a base, salts form stood within the category of the aesthetic. Smithson's salt crystals, for example, approach the aesthetic category of the "concrete universal," inasmuch as they manage to solve the classical aesthetic problem of repre- a stable union of a positive and a negative ion. The senting a whole without distorting two chemical components which it is composed. To borrow a phrase from literary of common salt, sodium and TJ7 the particulars of critic Terry Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic, we might serves peripheral histories by pulling them out of range say that the Spiral jetty "represents of history itself It redeems lost histories by incorporat- on the one hand a liberatory concern with concrete particularity, and on ing them into the crystalline fractal of universal time, the other hand a specious form of universalism." where they may resonate but do not, precisely, reside. suggest that Smithson's To project operates in the realm of classical aesthetics is to counter, or at least revise, Conclusion: History from the Maelstrom the many claims that have been made for its participa- Scholars have often noted that the Spiral jetty alludes tion in a poshnodern obliquely to a Native American "anti-aesthetic." Hal Foster, in the introduction Art historian to the famous collection legend about cosmic whirlpools inhabiting the Great Salt take." I would sug- of essays by that same name, defines as anti-aesthetic gest, however, that a whirlpool legend of more imme- art that resists "the idea that ... art can now effect a diate relevance to Smithson's project is Edgar Allan Poe's world at once (inter)subjective, concrete and universal- short story ''A Descent into the Maelstrom." a symbolic totality." But by this definition Smithson's knew this text well and occasionally work, with its concern for commensurate writings.P The tale describes the "prodigious suction' of parts and Smithson cited it in his wholes, seems resolutely aesthetic. The Spiral Jetty, in an abyssal whirlpool off the coast of Norway; it cap- its reconciliation tures a man and his fishing boat, sending them spiral- of general and particular, fulfills what Eagleton calls "the mystery of the aesthetic object," ing down the vertical walls of an immeasurable meaning that "each of its sensuous parts, while appear- The man survives the experience, ing wholly autonomous, attests, terrifying enough "to change these hairs from incarnates the 'law' of the totality." We have, at the Spiral jetty, the world in a grain funnel. which was, he jetty black to white," and he relates his observations: of salt.'? Smithson's implications aesthetics of history have specific for its stance toward its monumental looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat neighbor, the Golden Spike. The Jetty, with its emphasis was not the only object in the embrace on extension, above and below us were visible fragments duration, labor, and materiality, offers up a history of the transcontinental railroad that is more sympathetic to Chinese workers than to robber barons. large masses of building-timber many smaller articles, Yet Smithson's historical intervention in Utah is more broken complicated than a transfer of historical ownership from watch, with a strange one group to another. Indeed, by setting its own matter that floated into such profound historical resonance, the Spiral boxes, of the whirl. Both of vessels, and trunks of trees, with such as pieces of house furniture, barrels and staves .... interest, I now began the numerous in our company .... "This fir-tree," myself at one time saying, "will certainly to things I found be the next Jetty prevents any group from seizing or claiming history. The Jetty lifts history into scales beyond the reach thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears,"-and of historical narrative, insisting upon its material preser- Dutch merchant vation of history but nevertheless to the claims ship overtook The presence it and went down before.V in the whirlpool of the Dutch merchant ship (in Poe's Knickerbocker specificity, materiality, and historicity that the protesters to find that the wreck of a refusing to allow it to be grasped. The Jetty is sympathetic of difference, then I was disappointed were making known at the centen- with unmistakable New York a structure connotations of pastness) suggests nial re-driving of the Golden Spike. But it does not that the fluid dynamics of the descent into the mael- propose to take this plenary field of work and time and strom have distinctly historical connotations-or, make it grounds for some simply oppositional history. ahistorical ones, for the maelstrom rather, functions to con- Although the jetty is made entirely of material, periph- found historical time. The old man's watch stops at pre- eral details, it does not offer up those details as mate- cisely the moment rial for the construction the currents of a new historical narrative. that his boat begins slipping into of the whirlpool. And the confusion of It offers no isolable points, parts, or products that can objects within the funnel suggests a breakdown of be selected for progressive stable pericdization. narrative construction of a traditional ("trivial") history. Rather the Spiral Jetty pre- The Dutch ship coincides improb- ably with the narrator's 138 SPIRAL JETTY !GOLDEN boat. Poe also seems careful to SPIKE provide what we might call a thermodynamic coding self to a water-cask, the narrator is thus able to delay of the whirlpool's other objects, which range from raw his descent long enough so that he rises again to the materials to spent wreckage (the above quote lumps surface of the sea when the maelstrom together various entropic stages of wood, from tree so he lives to describe the strange admixture trunks to lumber to furniture torical wreckage that he observed circling the mouth of to "broken boxes"). The subsides, and of his- shifting velocities and overlapping trajectories of this eternity. In Poe's story, then, the possibility of history flotsam suggest a massive historical blender, in which depends on the selection of the proper vehicle-one the material evidence of history is swept inexorably designed to accommodate into the immeasurable environment depths, becoming completely absorbed by the maelstrom. in the Great Salt Lake. In its pretensions ~rawing it performs even as it resists its ultimate pull. In this book I have likewise designed The Spiral Jetty opens a similar historical abyss historicism the vertical slippage of its to plenary its own "prodigious into itself all historical suction," matter within its rowed) critical-historical edge and resist the eternalizing abyssal productions. perpetual (or bor- vehicles that both acknowlpull of Smithson's The aim has been to navigate the slippage of history that Smithson's work expansive horizon. And the recursive symmetries under suggests without slipping out of history altogether. For which it organizes that matter send historical practice as much as Smithson's work may desire to attain the into a~ortical tailspir;i Stable points of reference entropic transcendence the Golden Spike) are unfixed. Historical (like matter, of the historical flotsam from which it is built, the specific shapes and traces of his- unfettered from its evidentiary connection to particular tory yet remain inscribed within it. Smithson's events and formations, glides along its helical trajectory line centrifuges-whether into a transcendent the Passaic essay (see Chapter 3), the "political whirl- unity. The ultimate question that we are forced to ask, then, is whether history can-or should-be upon the Spiral Jetty itself. Has Smithson, performed in pulling the bottom out from under history, produced that renders its own historicization (in Smithson's the bottomless," words) "between the historian a work impossible? Trapped the towering pool" of the Yucatan project (see Chapter 4), or the Jetty itself- ingest historical matter and send it spiraling toward its entropic end. But until that distant day when the final crystallization of history actually does occur (if, indeed, it is to occur), tales can still be spun and out of Smithson's maelstroms. in~.9 the verge of disappearing seems thwarted crystal- the churning sandbox in The historical matter on into the Spiral Jetty must attempts to locate secure events or objects from which ultimately be thrown back on the shores of the historical to construct her "trivial histories." world. There, reconfigured Indeed the position by its trip into Smithson's of the historian vis-a-vis the Spiral Jetty is as precarious vertical symmetries, as that of Poe's boatman vis-a-vis the maelstrom the histories that Smithson's itself. And yet Poe's tale does not entirely preclude Smithson, it offers up new ways of telling work engages. in the last analysis, recognized this. history; indeed, a certain form of history is the condition There is a famous scene in the Spiral Jetty film in which of possibility of the tale itself. As a narrative, the tale the artist, viewed from a helicopter above, stumbles requires that the narrator survive his descent into the along the length of the Jetty until he reaches its inner maelstrom endpoint. and report back upon his observations. "I alone am escaped to tell thee"-this biblical trope of He stands at the edge for a few moments, hesitating over the water as if waiting to be taken up into a narrative snatched from oblivion animates many of the recursive spiral himself and to enter some final Poe's stories. In "A Descent into the Maelstrom," transcendent hinges on certain machinations it of the narrator while crystallization of time and matter. But then (this salty apotheosis not having occurred) he turns, trapped inside the whirlpool. He notices that objects in a gesture both tragic and funny, to walk slowly back of a certain shape (cylindrical, in this case) seem to be out of the spiral toward the shore. It is at this moment moving more slowly down the walls of the whirlpool: of return that Smithson's ''A cylinder, swimming in [the] vortex, offered more resis- possibility and the necessity of history. tance to its suction, and was drawn in with greater difficulty than any equally bulky body." By lashing him- '39 work, like Poe's, renews the NOTES and "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmod- INTRODUCTION For the SpiralJetty ernism," in Beyond Recognition, 40-51, 52-69; Rosalind project files see Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 19°5-1987, Archives of American Art, Krauss, "The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture," Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Smith- in Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York:Viking, 1977); Ann son Papers). Smithson discussed Mono Lake in terms of M. Reynolds, "Robert Smithson: Learning from New jersey both Twain and tufa in an interview with Dennis Wheeler in and Elsewhere," ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1993 1969. See "Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and (published in 2003 by MIT Press); Caroline A. jones, "Post- Robert Smithson," in jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: StudiofPostmodern: The Robert Smithson and the Technological Sublime," in The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Post· Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 222 (hereafter Writings). Smithson mentions Poe in "A war American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Sedimentation ofthe Mind: Earth Projects," in Writings, 108. 1996),268-343; For the terms open space and general conceptual matter as Labyrinth of Signs," in Art Discourse/Discourse they have been applied to Smithson's work, see Henry Sayre, Brunswick, N.j.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 79-123; "Open Space: Landscape and the Postmodern Sublime," in Marjorie Perloff, "The Demise of'And': Reflections on Robert Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Smithson's Since 1970 Jessica Prinz, "Words En Abime: Smithson's in Art (New Mirrors," Critical Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1990): (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Mark Rosen- 81-101; and Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: thal, "Some Attitudes of Earth Art: From Competition to Adora- Art After Babel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). tion," in Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Alan Liu, "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmod- Art, ed. Alan Sonfist (New York: Dutton, 1983), 62. ernism, and the Romanticism of Detail," Representations Robert Smithson and Smithson, "Some Void Thoughts on Museums," in Writings, 41. 32 (Fall 1990): 104. FOt semiotic interpretations Typical of this approach was the 1976 bicentennial exhibition of Smithson's work see espe- cially Craig Owens, "Earthwords," in Beyond Recognition: Rep- at the Museum of Modern Art, which took the American resentation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley:University of California landscape as the guarantor of a transhistorical artistic com- Press, 1992), 40-51 (see also note 7 below). For Smithson munion, ultimately arguing that abstract expressionism and the picturesque see Yve-Alain Bois, "A Picturesque Stroll was a natural outgrowth ofluminism. Around Clara-Clara," trans. John Shepley, October 29 (Summer ed., The Natural Paradise: Painting in America, 1800-1950 See Kynaston McShine, 1984): 32-62; Ron Graziani, "Robert Smithson's Picturable (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976). There were press- Situation: Blasted Landscapes from the 1960s," Critical ing reasons for producing this kind of history at the time; indeed the emergence of American art as a field of study in Inquiry 20 (Spring 1994): 419-51. I'm indebted here to Fredric jameson's the sixties and seventies was arguably dependent upon pro- description of the contemporary view of diachrony: "So it is that depth forms (if gressive historicism. A fledgling field that needed a vocabu- any exist, like prehistoric monsters) tend to be projected lary with which to justify the relevance of its inquiry, it bor- up upon the surface in the anamorphic flatness of a scarcely rowed from the prestige of postwar American art by positing itself as its necessary historical origin. recognizable afterimage, lighting up on the board in the form of a logical paradox or a textual paralogism." jameson, "Antinomies of Post modernity," in TheJameson 10 See Gary Shapiro's critique of John Beardsley's work in "Entropy and Dialectic: The Signatures of Robert Smithson," Reader (London: Blackwell, 2000), 235. Arts Magazine 62, no. 10 (June 1988): 99; Pamela M. Lee, Smithson, 1970 interview with Paul Toner, in Writings, 240-41. "'Ultramoderne': Smithson is likely referring here to George Kubler's argu- Sixties Art," Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 54; Theodor ment that biographical art history makes it "easy to overlook Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota the continuous nature of artistic traditions." See Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in Press, 1997), 19· For these models, see jacques tacan. "The Unconscious and 11 YaleUniversity Press, 1962), 6-7. Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Repetition," in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 32; trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 17- 64; Walter the work of Michael Ann Holly,who speaks of the "past's role Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in illumina- in the act of construction" of its own histories, is also relevant tions, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Hary Zohn (New York: here. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical/magination Schocken, 1968), 257-58; Georges Bataille. "The Notion of and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Expenditure," in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, 1996),14· Fredric jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Min- University Press. 1994), xiv. nesota Press, 1985), 116-29. 12 W,J.T.Mitchell, "Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture," Art Some of the key texts that interpret Smithson's work as postor anti-modernist include Craig Owens, "Earthwords," Bulletin 77 (December 1995): 541. 13 '4' For an introduction to current memory discourse see Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, eds., Memory and Counter- {New York:Dutton, 1961}. For Smithson's other perambulations Memory, special issue, Representations 26 (Spring 1989). For through the Greenwich Village Beat scene see the Cummings an early and important application of the idea of traumatic interview in Writings, 274-76. repetition to art-historical analysis see Hal Foster, "Who's Robert Smithson to George B. Lester, May 1, 1961, Robert Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?" in The Return of the Real: The Smithson letters to George B. Lester, 1960-1963, Archives of Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Press, 1996), 1-33. (hereafter Lester Letters). 14 Peter Osborne, quoted in Alex Coles, "Introduction," The Optic 15 4 Smithson to Lester, April7, 1961, Lester Letters. of Walter Benjamin, de-, dis-, ex- 3 (1999): 8. For Benjamin's Smithson had been raised a Roman Catholic and seems to have vocabulary of revolutionary historicism see "Theses," 255, 262, been especially encouraged in this regard by his aunt, Julia 263, and passim. Duke, who lived with the Smithsons throughout Robert's child- Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse," identifies Smithson as a key hood and whom he described as a "second mother" in a artist within an allegorical postmodernism letter to Lester (May 1, 1961, Lester Letters). For a summary of prefigured by Benjamin's writings. The classic introduction to Benjamin's Smithson's family ties to Eastern Orthodox as well as Roman understanding of history is Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics Catholicism see Caroline A. jones, The Machine in the Studio: of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University MIT Press, 1989). Two more recent studies, both of which of Chicago Press, 1996), 280-81. focus specifically on art and art history, include Eduardo Cadava, The small catalogue for the exhibition at the Diane Brown Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Prince- Gallery, which includes an essay by Peter Halley, remains an ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Coles, The essential source of information and reproductions: Robert Optic of Walter Benjamin. Smithson: The Early Work, 1959-1962 (New York: Diane Brown 16 See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Gallery, 1985), unpaged. The other key sources on Smithson's Guide (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 43-86. early work include Eugente Tsai. "Reconstructing Robert 17 Smithson, "Fragments of a Conversation"; "A Sedimentation Smithson," Ph.D. dtss., Columbia University, 1995, 58-97; Tsar, of the Mind: Earth Projects"; "The Eliminator"; "A Museum of Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings 18 Language in the Vicinity of Art"; "Quasi-Infinities and the (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Jones, Machine Waning of Space"; interview with P. A. Norvell; all in Writings, in the Studio, 278-303. Both Tsai and Jones have interpreted 19°,112,327,88,34,194. Smithson's See Rosalind Krauss, "Entropy," in Formless: A User's Guide, that the unruly multiplicity of Smithson's early drawings, 73-78. P. W. Bridgman, The Nature of Thermodynamics collages, and writings, along with their failure to provide any (New early work in an antimodernist vein. Tsai argues York: Harper, 1961), 175. This passage was underlined in obvious indication of Smithson's future direction, serve to Smithson's copy of the book (Smithson Papers). unravel any KantianfGreenbergian 19 Smithson to Martin Friedman, n.d., Smithson Papers, reel narrative ofmodernist progress that might be applied to Smithson's 3834, frame 49. Smithson, "Can Man Survive?" in Writings, 368. development. Jones, whose psychoanalytic account was the first to offer an explanation of Smithson's unlikely transition from anguished CHAPTER 1. HISTORY IN SMITHSON'S RELIGIOUS figuration to crystalline abstraction, also defined the early PAINTINGS Robert Smithson to Nancy Holt, undated (probably 1959), in work as an antimodernist Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905-1987, reel gods, men, and monsters of the early images would be instrument. For Jones, the writhing 3832, frame 742, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institu- eventually sublimated tion, Washington, D.C. (hereafter Smithson Papers); Smithson, where they would lurk as a libidinal subtext ofthe "tech- into Smithson's landscape practice, interview with Paul Cummings for the Archives of American nological sublime" and would perpetually derail all attempts Art, in Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings at modernist closure. On the problem of Smithson's own (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 271, 283 (here- partial renunciation of his early work, see jones, "Robert Smith- after Writings). For a good biographical summary see Per. j. son's Suppressed "Pre-Conscious" Works: Intentionality Boym, ed.. Robert Smithson Retrospective: Works 1955-1973 and Art Historical (Re)Construction," in Memory (Oslo: National Museum of Contemporary Art, '999), 282-93. Proceedings of the XXIXth International Congress of the History c( Oblivion: For Sandler's review see Art News 58, no. 6 (October 1959): 18. of Art (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999): See McDarrah's photographs of Ted [cans's birthday party on 937-47. See also Paul Wood, "Dialectical Transformations: July 25, 1959, several of which feature Smithson. Fred W. Robert Smithson's McDarrah and Gloria S. McDarrah, Beat Generation: Glory Days (March 1989): 34-39. Early Work," Arts Magazine 63, no. 7 in Greenwich Village (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), For the use of "interest" in this context see Jones, Machine in 95-98; there is also a photo taken at one of Smithson's own the Studio, 280-81; Tsai, Robert Smithson Unearthed, 14-16; loft parties in McDarrah's The Artist's World in Pictures and Halley, Robert Smithson (unpaged). 142 NOTES TO PAGES 8_28 Smithson Marianne to Lester, May 17, 1961, Lester Letters. Lester had argued that a religious show would not be diverse enough. Lester Letters. Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 455-59. Smithson to Lester, undated, Smithson to Lester, undated, 10 Smithson to Lester, May 1, 1961, Lester Letters. admiration 11 Smithson to Lester, May 17, 1961, Lester Letters. literature 12 On Kerouac see Allen Ginsberg, "A Definition 25 library include Meister Eckhardt: A Modern Transla- also described 1941), and the Eckhardt texts anthologized Smithson's connections to Blake. See Boym, Retrospecti'.'e, recalled seeing Blake's drawings with him at a show at the Museum (New York: Meridian, 1960). The religious works by Chesterton ern Art in 1956 (Tsai, "Reconstructing 26 William Blake, "Ruth.-A Drawing," with reviewers A. Reinhold, ed., The Soul Afire: Revelations of the Mystics Macmillan, of Mod- Robert Smithson," 94). in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Random 1961), St. Francis of Assisi (New York: Doubleday, 1957), and The Everlasting Man (New York: Doubleday, House, 1957), 585. For a good discussion of Blake's relationship 1955). His books on mysticism to neoclassical by Evelyn Underhill included Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Dutton, 1961), Practical 1960), and Worship (New York: Harper (New York: Dutton, intelligentsia" Blake, "A Vision ofthe 28 Blake, "The Ghost of Abel," in Keynes, Complete Writings, 779. 29 Caroline Jones has also addressed Smithson's aries in her discussion scape," in Writings, 161. Smithson's touche." interests in Anglo-Catholicism Cummings in Writings, 282-84. son's conservatism about his (westfaltsches Landesmuseum Chesterton, 31 For Smithson's "Reproducing copy of the Buchsbaum significance text is in the Smithson Papers (Ralph "The Iconography (emphasis in original). of Desolation," 32 The phrase "Sea of Time and Space" appears in Blake's plate 49, in Keynes, Complete Writings, 614. "Jerusalem," for pointing 33 Blake, "The Bard, from Gray," in Keynes, Complete Writings, 576 of the hand. Smithson, Smithson me about the ritual of the bell, and to Jeffrey Hamburger out the aggressive motion 17 History as Smithson's Invertebrates [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948]). 1910),144. Ibid., 320. of Natural Buchsbaum, Animals Without Backbones: An Introduction to the William Blake (London: Duckworth & Co., Thanks to Kristin Schwa in for informing 16 in Writings, 279, and Ann M. Reynolds, Nature: The Museum Nonstte," October 45 (Summer 1988): 109-27. Munster, 1989),8-18. u G. K. Chesterton, of the car- interest in natural history see the interview with Paul Cummings fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte use of bound- "dialectics William Blake, 161. 30 Dan Graham discusses Smith- Drawingsfrom the Estate, exh. cat. of Smithson's See Jones, Machine in the Studio, 294-95. are from the interview with Paul of these years in an interview with Eugenic Tsai in Robert Smithson: in Keynes, Complete Last Judgment," Writings, 605. see Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landown comments Eaves, William 1982), 9-44· 27 Mysticism (New York: Dutton, 1943), Essentials of Mysticism Torchbooks, 1957). For "antidemocratic theories of line see Morris Blake's Theory of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, The Mystics of the Church (New York: Schocken, 1964), 15 of the early sixties as cosmological 44n.9. Alan Brilliant, a close friend of Smithson, in H. in the himself between Blake and Bosch (interview Ethos," in Boym, Robert Smithson "Sensuous included The Catholic Church and Conversion (New York: 14 mentioned in detail. Smithson in Writings, 289). Contemporary Paul Cummings tion, trans. Raymond Bernard Blakney (New York: Harper Torchbooks, his paintings images somewhere Robert Smithson Retrospective, 18. Key Eckhardt texts in Smithson's but not yet examined described of the Beat Friction 1 (Winter 1982): 50-52. Quoted in Boym, Generation," Lester Letters. Smithson's for Blake has been occasionally in Writings, 322 (emphasis in original); of Desolation," to Lester, undated, 34 Smithson Lester Letters. See also Smithson 19 Halley, Robert Smithson: to Lester, undated, had been interested Lester Letters. The Early Work, unpaged; Smithson to Nancy Holt, dated "Monday had brief1y entertained the idea of becoming an illustrator view with Paul Cummings, "The Iconography Smithson is referring and Schuster, 1960). 35 Smithson, interview with Paul Cummings, Smithson to Lester, undated, Lester Letters. 21 Smithson to Lester, undated, Lester Letters. 278-79. 22 Smithson to Lester, undated, Lester Letters. collage. Smithson's 23 Smithson to Lester, undated, Lester Letters. killed in a motorcycle 24 See Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, Mass: 36 Smithson Fogg Art Museum, 37 Tsai. Robert Smithson the Unconscious," diaries of North Africa, Sicily, and the rest of Italy: 20 Representing in Writings, 321. of Desolation," here to Bernard Berenson's Bernard Berenson, The Passionate Sightseer (New York: Simon (inter- in Writings, 276). 1965), 14; Michael Leja, "Jackson Pollock: 24" (probably July Papers, reel 3832, frames 744-45; Smithson, art-travel through in drawing since high school, when he "Iconography in Writings, 323. 24, 1961), Smithson ibid., 321. 18 "A Vision of the Last Judgment," in Keynes, Complete Writings, 614; Smithson, in Reading American Art, ed. close friend Danny Donahue had been accident in 1959. to Lester, undated, Lester Letters. Unearthed, 19; Smithson to Lester, two undated letters, Lester Letters. '43 in Writings, Other crashes are probably also at work in this 38 Chesterton, William Blake, 137, 166, 167. 39 fornia Press, 1995), 116-47. For some of the most inAuential Smithson to Lester, undated, Lester Letters; Smithson, "The discussions of the article see Hal Foster, "The Crux of Mini- Iconography of Desolation," in Writings, 320, malisrn," Smithson to Lester, undated, Lester Letters; Smithson to 1996),35-70; Nancy Holt, dated "Rome Friday July 29 1961 A.D.," Smithson ernism: Rethinking Representation, Papers, reel 3832, frame 785. New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 175-88. Indispens- 41 Smithson, interview with Paul Cummings, in Writings, 286, 287. able for a historical understanding 42 Henry James, "A Roman Holiday," quoted in Robert Spoo, later art history is a discussion between Fried, Rosalind Krauss, "joyce's Attitudes Toward History: Rome, 1906 -07," Journal and Benjamin Buchloh: "Theories of Art After Minimalism of Modern Literature 14, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 482. and Pop," in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, vel. 1, ed. Hal 40 43 Smithson, "The Iconography of Desolation," in Writings, 324. in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, Douglas Crimp, "Pictures," in Art After Moded. Brian Wallis (New York: of Fried's impact on Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 52-87. The precise dating of this essay has not been established. 55 Smithson, "The Iconography ofDesolation,"in Writings, 320, 323. The typescript at the Archives of American Art is labeled 56 Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Battcock. "1961," while in the Writings it is dated as "c. 1962." Based on the progression of Smithson's attitudes in his letters to Minimal Art, 145 (emphasis in original). 57 Smithson, "Letter to the Editor," in Writings, 67, 66; Michael Lester, I would place the essay in the autumn orwinter Of1961, Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: after Smithson's show in Rome had ended and after he University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52, 73. Fried also notes that had returned to New York. His letter to Lester of September 22, "he alone among contemporary artist-writers seems to 1961, for example, is very similar to the second half of 'The have been aware of the implications for the question of linguis- Iconography of Desolation" in its vocabulary and ironic tone. tic meaning of my assault on literalism" (73-74). Note 44 Ibid. that Fried still gives himself critical priority on the question of 45 Ibid., 326 (ellipsis in original). literalism, characterizing Smithson's ideas as a response 46 Ibid., 324-25. to his own. For further analysis of the critical dialogue between Smithson, "The Spiral Jetty," in Writings, 150; Smithson, "The Smithson and Fried, see Amy Newman, Challenging Art: 47 48 49 50 Iconography of Desolation," typescript, Smithson Papers. "Artforum" 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), 11-12, Thomas Pynchon, "Entropy," in Slow Learner (Boston: Little, 256,290,506; Brown, 1984), 98. Robert Smithson, Michael Fried, and the New Critical Drama," Smithson to Lester, 22 September 1961, Lester Letters; "What Robert Linsley, "Mirror Travel in the Yucatan: res 37 (Spring 2000): 7-30. Really Spoils Michelangelo's Sculpture" and "Ultramoderne," 58 Smithson, "Letter to the Editor, in Writings, 67. in Writings, 348, 63. 59 See Smithson, "The Spiral Jetty" and "The Iconography of Smithson to Lester, May 1, 1961, Lester Letters. For Green- Desolation," in Writings, 143, 325. berg's take on Noland see "Louis and Noland," in The 51 52 Collected Essays and Criticism, vo]. 4, ed. John O'Brian {Chicago: CHAPTER 2. THE DEPOSITION University of Chicago Press, 1993}, 94-100. John Shearman, Pontormo's Altarpiece in S. Fe/iciM, 51st Chari- Clement Greenberg, "The Case for Abstract Art," in O'Brian, ton Lecture delivered at the University of Newcastle upon Collected Essays, 80-8l. Tyne (Westerham, Kent: Westerham Press, 1971), 14; Arnold Greenberg, "Sculpture in Our Time," in ibid., 60. Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin 53 I am indebted to Ann Reynolds's trenchant discussion of 54 OF TIME of Modern Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), Smithson's refutation of Greenberg's model of opticality. See 182; Daniel B. Rowland, Mannerism: Style and Mood (New Ann Reynolds, "Robert Smithson: Learning from New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 18. Jersey and Elsewhere," ph.D, dtss., City University of New Leo Steinberg, "Pontormo's Capponi Chapel," The Art Bulletin York, 1993, 45-89. 56, no. 3 (September 1974): 394. For a discussion of the Here I part company with Caroline Jones, who argues that "it quandary over the title of the painting see Steinberg, 385n2. was only after the publication of Fried's essay in June of 1967 Smithson himself would have known the painting as a Deposi- that Smithson began to identify ... his own emerging anti- tion (his several books on Mannerism referred to it as such). modernist position" (Jones, Machine in the Studio, 315). But Giuliano Brigante, Italian Mannerism (Edition Leipzig, 1962), although Fried certainly galvanized certain latent themes in 22; Steinberg, "Pontormo's Capponi Chapel," 394. Steinberg's Smithson's work, Smithson had already worked through the broader argument is that the painting functions as a kind of issues Fried raised by the time "Art and Objecthocd" was rotational hinge within the larger architectural space of the published. Few discussions of Fried's article can match the com- Capponi Chapel. The figures are, he argues, frozen at the end of plexity and eloquence of the article itself, so one should first the process ohurning the body of Christ around and outward consult the original. It is reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of Cali- toward the painting depicting God at the other side of the chapel. 4 144 Rowland, Mannerism, 12 (underlining Smithson's). NOTES TO PAGES 28- 50 For Smithson's understanding ism and modern Smithson: Learning press 11 Smithson, release for his second exhibition Timothy the Development of an Air Terminal Press, 1996), 53 (hereafter ley: University of California Smithson, quoted Site," 22 Wn'tings). Washington, See Smithson, "Donald D.C. [hereafter Judd"; "Entropy "The Crystal Land"; "Towards Site," in Writings, 4-6, Smithson, interview Smithson to Martin the Development of an happens Papers, terms reel express 11 Charles Bunn, Crystals: Their Role in Nature and Science (New and Polytypism Mathematical of Movements Crystallography and the Theory of Groups 13 Smithson, (1903; New York: Dover, 196)), esp. 92, 150; interview in Writings, 294. with Paul Cummings, 15 Smithson Papers; Smithson, in Nabokov's Derrida, was almost of the Human Hopkins 18 Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space or interviews. in Physics (Cambridge: Harvard cf Gilles Deleuze, Previous of Smithson's ist terms, son's and have focused critique examples Krauss, of modernist see Reynolds, "Entropy," University (Berkeley: 10 Immanuel "Robert in enantio- of vision. Smithson," of California Press, 1972). Although Smithson that he ever read the 67-89; Rosalind (Baltimore: University corrected Johns Other," MIT Press, 1997), 78; Gary (Chicago: 25 Smithson, Press, 1995), 68. Writings, Hopkins University Boyce Gibson 1967). [45 _ . Structure. in Of Spivak Press, '998), 65-73_ , Difference. Press, 1986), 3, 24. of the Mind: Earth Projects," owned two books of/nternal in by Husserl: to Pure Phenomenology, (New York: Humanities The Phenomenology Press, 1995), in Context: Literature and Philosophy of Chicago Ideas: Genera/Introduction Universe (London: University "A Sedimentation Smithson of Minnesota ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty in Deconstruction 110. hinge," of "The Hinge [La Brisore].' 24 Mark C. Taylor, "System. Krauss, drafts of writings, The Fo/d: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom discussion Grammatology, Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, quoted The Ambidextrous in On my notion of the "enantiomorphic and Dernda's For notable in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind University Sign, and Play in the Dis- which was reprinted to Derrida in any of his writings, Conley (Minneapolis: for Smith- Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel in Martin Gardner, Penguin, interest on its implications Formless: A User's Guide (Cambridge: Shapiro, Press, 1960), 1)1. it in strictly deconstruction- models of Demda's in Smithson's in 1972, near the end of his life. I have come across published, to interpret unaware essay; even if he had, he could not have done so until it was no reference have tended The Nabokov, Press, 1973), University certainly Sciences," University Bunn, Crystals, 192. discussions Vladimir in Speech and Phenomena owned the book, there is no evidence "Spiral Wreckage." morphism and can foresee. 1958), 202. "Dlfferance." Northwestern 17 19 of research Dozen: A Collection of Thirteen Stories 129-60. Smithson Johns annotations The Nature of Thermodynamics 1961), 174-75. (New York: Harper, 16 Smithson, since the Richard Macksey, ed., The Structuralist Contro",ersy (Baltimore: Smithson reel 3834, frame 55. See also Smithson's Papers, in his copy of P. W. Bridgman, tinge, dusty something, in reverse." Allison (Evanston: course "Spiral Wreckage," day (which an old-fashioned library. This was Demda's "Structure, Press, 2002), 9- University in the ten- of a distant work. I am aware of only one text by Derrida 14 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard and clothes no amount is but the obsolete See Jacques of and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. "The Spiral Jetty," in Writings, 147. Smithson, the tendency of the past, rendering 'not of our age,' and so on are in the long (New York: Doubleday, 23 The "Now if one is perfectly hon- in the future) a strangeness "Lance," Polymorphism in Crystals (New York: Wiley, 1966), 207. See also Harold Hilton, future Press, 1964), 45. Ajit Ram Verma and P. Krishna, concerns extraordinary badly groomed, 'out of date,' in reverse." along with a few others in terms is nothing to be placed fre- his favorite run the only ones in which we are able to imagine 3834, frame 49. York: Academic the future there a badly pressed. in Writings, 287. n.d., Smithson upon) underlined dency to give to the manners 10-2), 7-9, 52-60. with Paul Cummings, Friedman, variations "The future is but the obsolete to imagine "The of Mirror- in Writings, 34, 332, 131. Smithson which Smithson est with oneself, and the New Monu- and of Space"; "Incidents the two time fields interchangeable: Papers]). Chambers and the Waning cited (or invented writers Art, Smithson- Smithson analysee and the Architectural in his copy of the short story "Lance," 19°5-1987, 747-49, Archives of American ian Institution, Air Terminal to "Lcllie." n.d., (Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, reel 38)2, frames ments"; but a letter exists with not exact) wording Infinities Travel in the Yucatan"; quently Nabokov quote: (though "De-architecturisation "Quasi quote, Robert Smithson and visual effects of the Chambers of the Future and Memory"; not give a citation for this quote, of Mirrorwith de-, dis-, ex- 2 (1998): 89-114. Smithson, Shape (Berke- Robert Smithson: in Robert Hobbs, "Incidents Twelve"; interview A Tour of Robert Smithson's Sculpture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981),64. Hobbs does similar 12 Martin, Unconscious: "Robert ed.. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings Points"; "Minus Paul Toner; in Writings, 359, 131,115,240. For a Lacantan ph.D. Hotels," "Towards in Jack Flam, Vanishing sis of the structure one-man in Reynolds, "Pointless Travel in the Yucatan"; 141. Smithson, 10 Manner- "Robert of New York, 1993, 75-78. at the Dwan gallery, 1968. Quoted Smithson," between see Ann M. Reynolds, from New Jersey and Elsewhere," diss., City University Smithson, of the relationship painting trans. R. Press, 1967), and Time Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. University Press), James O. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana 30 1966. He also seems to have gleaned much of his information about Aims of Phenomenology: Husserl from Marvin Farber's Husserl's work explicitly in one of his drafts between urban and suburban York City, so much becomes as 'the phenomenology 26 Papers, of time Henderson identifies 35 collection. the fourth Edward books dimension in Smithson's (New York: Bantam "Daniel Graham"). American 36 bridge: 37 art include County Ann Reynolds has definitively in alternating perspective Smithson's use of these than a synthetic The Fourth Dimension 38 twinkling established images rearrangement the fourth figures Ibid., 58. Smithson's "Robert implications 41 rather For a discussion of reversing Yale University Press, 1996), 85-93. 42 in the Age Anniversary Linder, "Sitely Windows: icism," project Robert Smithson's Architectural Assemblage 39 (August 1999); Suzaan "Site/Non-sight: diss., Stanford Press, 2002), 52-69; Crit- Robert Smithson's University, Dialectics forthcoming, and the Fourth Penguin, 1961), 261. "Towards of Man's Spiritual Con- the Development ofthis period. In "Entropy essays he claims that the new art constitutes and the New Mon. a re-creation would title (Non-Objective library at the Archives of Vision," ph.D. ch. 3. 146 be a comparison World) is not in Smith- of American Art, but Smithson of the Mind: Earth Projects" to Malevich; between and Malevich's theories "Transcending the Present: NOTES TO PAGES 5:l-66 of world (Writings, 14). Malevich's non-objective (Writings, 103-4, 109). It would be interesting Evans, Site," in two of his published relationship Papers); (New York: of an Air Terminal refers to Malevich uments," Smithson's of Art (New Mysticism: A 1961), 259 (Smithson twice cites it in "A Sedimentation Boettger, Carlton Romanticism, 1986), 219-37; Evelyn Underhill, book of the same Earthworks: Art and the Landscape o/the Sixties (Berkeley: Uni. versity of California "Mysticism, Smithson, son's instal- in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting Malevich's see Mark For the sculptural St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin For more on Smithson's with TAMS on the airport Papers. well-known Study in the Nature and Development of Artforum," in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven: collaboration Linda D. Henderson, Site," Robert Smithson: Sculpture, 72. sciousness (New York: Dutton, "The sort of Crow, "Art Criticism Values: On the Thirtieth of an Air Terminal form in Proposal for a Monu- the crystalline in Writings, 60; Smithson see Thomas of in original). copy of Bunn, Crystals, Smithson York: Abbeville, (Boston: through "an excess "The Jet-Man," 1890 -1985, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum Smith- to a rotation Site, Barthes Lavers (New York: Noonday, "towards the Development Dimension," place [when alternating is equivalent Press, 1949). to what Roland Roland Barthes, Annette Weyl, who of an Air Terminal of the jet pilot, wherein into repose." link between dimension." of Incommensurate 7, Smithson and Natural Sci- University the Development ment at Antarctica and Smithson's interest from a deconstructive that takes reverse] N.J.: Princeton "Towards Smithson, 40 she interprets See Reynolds, Smithson, 39 in Robert Smithson's (although Mifflin, 1984), 46. As Rucker explains, perspective of Passaic," An Experiment with Time, in Dunne, lation Plunge, see Hobbs, see Rudy Rucker, The Fourth Dimension Houghton quoted was dis- and Martin Gardner; 1186. in Writings, 53 (emphasis Grave photostat 1966. It is reproduced son," 25-32. For the four-dimensional figures draft of "The Monuments in Mythologies, trans. 2004). The cutout of the figures standpoint). and the Waning of Space," texts by Max Jammer reel 3834, frame Site," 1972),71. of Art, 1993), 20. Museum of an Air Terminal reel 3834, frame 375; Ouspensky in Smithson's speed turns Robert Smithson: photo Works (Los Angeles: Los Sobieszek, Angeles draft of "Quasi-Infinities Papers, calls the coenasthesis 1965); copy is inscribed up in Smithson's Mounds with Object of around (New York: mine). Smithson, C. H. Hinton, Bragdon in original). the Development in Writings, 52, 53. This is similar Geometry in Modern Art, new ed. (Cam- crystal ended "Towards ence (Princeton, of ideas and Schuster, Books, 1964) (Smithson's MIT Press, forthcoming "Romantic" and Claude used it in his Philosophy of Mathematics eds., Mathematics Newman, (New York: Simon Linda Henderson, and Non-Euclidean Bessaraboff Smithson Papers, Marks, ed., Space, Time, and the New Mathematics Robert Smithson, Smithson, library that for the propagation in postwar Kasner and James and the Imagination Nicholas cussed N.J.: Princeton Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, P. D. Ouspensky, in Writings, 52 (emphasis Universe (New York: Basic as influential Site, Faber and 113. The term block universe derives from Herman The Ambidextrous Books, 1964), 169. Other 29 34 refers to Press, 1983), 7m3. Martin Gardner, W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time (London: Knopf, 1950), 100, 102 (emphasis draft of "The Monuments Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, 28 in New time-consciousness" unprocessed J. trans. The Fourth Dimension and Non- Henderson, University about 33 Derbarycentrische Calcul (Leipzig, 1827), cited in Linda Mobius, Dalrymple 27 of acute consciousness Smithson, Smithson especially of an Air Terminal Faber, 1952), 117. "The duality to relate to what Husserl of internal Smithson's). of Passaic," seems so that one's dual. This seems (emphasis of Passaic": the Development 31 Ibid., 53. 32 of Husser/'s Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Smithson mentions "Towards in Writings, 58, 52, 53. The Motives, Methods, and Impact the 1967 essay "The Monuments Smithson, Smithson's of "alogical to trace especially realism." The Fourth suggestive "Alogons" See Henderson, Dimension in the Philosophy of Ouspensky and in Russian Futurism and Suprem- Elsewhere," Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1993, attsrn." in Fourth Dimension (1Sted.), 238-99. There are also 175. Even several years later, Smithson appears to have been many intriguing similarities between Smith and Smithson. Both offering Passaic tours to fellow artists, as suggested by the grew up Catholic in New jersey, both studied at the Art Stu- letter dated January 4,1970, to Smithson from British artist dent's League in New York City, and neither man went to col- Hamish Fulton, proposing that Smithson meet him in Pas. lege but both became known as broad-ranging, articulate, saic for a joint tour project (Robert Smithson and Nancy and humorous autodidacts sought out for their bar conversa- Holt papers, 19°5-1987, reel 3833, frame 57, Archives of tion. They shared admiration for Alexander Graham Bell and American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Buckminster Fuller, and, most importantly, adopted crystal- [hereafter Smithson Papers]). lography as a morphological and ontological principle. There Smithson's appointment were, of course, major differences, notably Smith's human- frequency of these trips, and they also occasionally men- ism; see Robert Storr, Tony Smith: Architect Painter Sculptor tion the names of the artists and friends that accompanied him books give a good indication of the (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998). Smithson (Smithson Papers). Smithson's "Nonsites" are well known admired Smith greatly; for his comments on his work see Writ- for questioning the efficacy and transparency of the representa- ings, 49, 58-60, 66, 96, 102-3, 106, 340. tional strategies of the landscape tradition. (The Franklin Nonsite 43 Smithson, "Entropy and the New Monuments," in Writings, shown in figure 31, for example, conflates perspectival structure, 12-14. Smithson's interpretation was not particularly well mapping, and specimen display into a Single unstable "refer- received by the artists mentioned in the article. In fact, his rela- ence" to the city of Franklin, New Jersey.) The best overview of tionship with the artists now known as minimalists, who felt the Site/ Nonsites and other sculptural works that resulted that he was misrepresenting their work, was strained at the from these expeditions is in Robert Hobbs, Robert Smithson: time. In the February 1967 issue of Arts Magazine Donald judd Sculpture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 88-122. For contributed a single-sentence letter to the editor that read background on the specific New jersey sites visited by Smithson "Smithson isn't my spokesman." The sentence became a slo- see William R. Klink,"Robert Smithson: New Jersey Artist of gan-"Robert was the Earth," New JerseV History 99, nos. 3-4 (1981):183-92. printed on buttons that the artists wore to exhibitions. See For the Passaic project's critique of art-world pieties see Smithson is not my spokesman"-and James Sampson Meyer, "The Genealogy of Minimalism: Carl Reynolds, "Robert Smithson," 110-79; Suzaan Boettger, Earth- Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris," works: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: Uni- phD. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1995, 300. On Smith- versity of California Press, 2002), 45-69. On Smithson's use son's difficulty fitting in with the minimalists at this time see of photography see Craig Owens, "Photography en abyme," "Interview with Dan Graham by Eugene Tsai," in Robert Smith- in Bevond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berke- son: Drawingsfrom the Estate, exh. cat. (MOnster: westfahsches ley: University of California Press, 1992), 27-28; Robert Landesmuseum fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, 1989), 8-22. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Photo Works (Los Angeles: Los The lesson to take from all this is that "Entropy and the New Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993). 30-32 and passim. Monuments" reveals more about Smithson's evolving aesthetic For a recent discussion of the Passaic project in the context agenda than it does about the other artists' concerns. of architecture and urbanism see Sebastien Maret, Sub· 44 Smithson, "Donald Judd," in Writings, 6. Urbanism and the Art of Memory, trans. Brian Holmes (London: Architectural Association, 2003), 36-55. On the idea of CHAPTER 3. FORGETTING terrain vague see Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio, "Terrain Vague," PASSAIC Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," in Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings in Anvplace, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). 4 The original negatives and Instamatic snapshots from (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 68-74 (here- Smithson's after Writings). The date of Smithson's tour is misquoted Smithson and the Archives of American Art, respectively. Passaic tour are now held by the Estate of Robert in the first printing of Writings as September 20, 1967. Smith- Small contact prints of all of the negatives, showing the scope son's field notes confirm the date as the joth. and it is on this and sequence of Smithson's photographic activities on date that the New York Times printed the art reviews that the tour, have been published in Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Smithson mentions reading on the bus in his travelogue. Photo Works, 90-93. Smithson's "advertisement" for the Passaic tours is "See the Smithson, "Fragments of a Conversation"; "The Monuments Monuments of Passaic New Jersey," in Writings, 356 (ellipsis in of Passaic"; in Writings, 190, 72. original). Smithson later led at least one group of friends Smithson, "The Monuments of Passaic," in Writings, 70 along his tour route in Passaic. He took artists Claes Olden- (ellipses Smithson's). burg and Allan Kaprow on a tour in January Of1968, according See Citizens' Improvement Association of Passaic City, Passaic to Nancy Holt in an interview with Ann M. Reynolds. See City, New Jersey, and Its Advantages as a Place of Residence Reynolds, "Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and and as a Manufacturing 147 Centre (Citizens' Improvement Asso- William Carlos Williams and Robert Smithson," Borderlines: elation, 1886); Michael Ebner, "Strikes and Society: Civil Studies in American Culture 5, no. 3 (1998): 240-52. Behavior in Passaic, 1875-1926," New Jersey History 97, no. 1 (1979): 7-24; David J. Goldberg, A Tale of Three Cities: Labor 10 Eric Wm. Allison, "Historic Preservation in a Development- Orgcmization and Protest in Paterson, Passaic, and Lawrence, Dominated City: The Passage of New York City's Landmark 1916-1921 (New Brunswick, N.j.: Rutgers University Press, 1989). Preservation Legislation," Journal of Urban History 22, no. 3 For concise accounts of Passaic at around the time of (March 1996): 350-76; Joseph B. Rose, "Landmarks Preser- Smithson's tour see "Passaic Debating Uncertain Future," New vation in New York," Public Interest, no. 74 (Winter 1984): 132- York Times, jul 8, 1968, 41; Michael Ebner, "The Future of 45; Ada Louise Huxtable, "Downtown New York Begins to River City: Passaic, New Jersey's Contemporary Urban Political Undergo Radical Transformation," The New York Times, Mar History," Urbanism Past G[ Present, no. 3 (1976-77): 16-20. For 27,1967,35. See the following articles in the New York Times for the basic the industrial profile of mid-century Passaic see James Bryon Kenyon, Industrial Localization and Metropolitan The Paterson-Passaic 11 outlines of the debate: Thomas W. Ennis, "'Villagers' Score Growth: Landmarks Move," Dec 10, 1965, 71;Thomas W. Ennis, "Land- District, Research Paper no. 67, Uni- versity of Chicago Department of Geography (Chicago: Univer- marks Unit Cuts Up 'village," Nov 24, 1966, 70; "Villagers' sity of Chicago, 1960). On the retail patterns in this area Fight Landmark Ruling," Dec 22,1966,28; of New Jersey: Lizabeth Cohen, "From Town Center to Shopping a Single Landmark," Mar 17, 1967, 27; Maurice Carroll, "village' Is Named a Landmark," Apr 3°,1969,44. Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America," The American Historical Review 101, no. 4 12 25 (Fall 1982): 32. River: Norman F. Brydon, The Passaic River: Past, Present, Future 13 Smithson, "ultramodeme," "Ultramoderne" A concise chronological biography can be found in Per. j. in Writings, 63-65. Because is so short I will not cite specific page num- bers from the article in these notes. Boym, ed., Robert Smithson Retrospective: Works '955-1973 (Oslo: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 282-93· Alois Riegl, "The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin," trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions (October 1996): 1050-81. On the pollution of the Passaic (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1974), 270-317. "Viilage' Is Named 14 The Landmarks Preservation Act stipulated that only buildings As is well known, another essential piece of historical context thirty years and older would be considered for preservation. for the Passaic project is William Carlos Williams's five- Although many of the buildings in "Ultrarnodeme" were just part historical poem Paterson. Smithson revered Williams, who over that limit and therefore technically eligible, it was not had actually served as Smithson's pediatrician when he until 1985, almost twenty years after Smithson's "Ultramoderne" was growing up in Rutherford. Although Smithson does not article was published, that the group of twin-towered apart- allude directly to Williams in the Passaic essay itself. in a ment buildings Smithson explored along Central Park West later interview he pointed out that his Passaic travelogue "could would be designated as landmarks. be conceived of as a kind of appendix" to Williams's mod- 15 See Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick ernist landmark. Paterson had an obvious impact on Smithson's Etchells (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1927). Joseph Masheck own writing at all levels, particularly on his tendency to has also noted this connection. Masheck, who is one of the equate language and thought with geological processes. Smith- few commentators son's famous assertion that "One's mind and the earth son's historical references, goes on to compare Smithson's to have attached significance to Smith- are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away Fountain Monument abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, film Metropolis and to Charles Sheeler's River Rouge paintings. ideas decompose into stones of unknowing" is not much of a See Masheck, "Smithson's leap from Paterson, where "red basalt, boot-long.j tumbles Historical Present: Essays of the 19705 (Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI al Earth: Spontaneous Retrievals," in Research Press, 1984), 129. On industrial and "negative from the core of his mind, / a rubble-bank disintegrating beneath to the monumental forms in Fritz Lang's tourism" see Kenneth W. Maddox, In Search of the Picturesque: tropic downpour." A notable similarity between Paterson and "Passaic" is the citational brand of history Nineteenth applied by both Williams and Smithson; both incorporate undi- Valley, exh. cat. (Annandale-on-Hudson, Century Images of Industry Along the Hudson River gested source material throughout their texts. Smithson 1983); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the N.Y.: Bard College, Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 40. discusses Paterson in his interview with Gianni Pettena, in Writings, 298, and in his interview with Paul Cummings, in 16 Writings, 285. His Patersonian quote about the "stones of 17 Smithson, "The Monuments of Passaic," in Writings, 71-72. Smithson, "A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey," draft of "The Monuments of Passaic," Smithson Papers. unknowing" is in his 1968 essay "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects," in Writings, 100. For the Williams 18 Ethel Schwartz, quoted in "Passaic Debating Uncertain Future." quote see Paterson, rev. ed .. prepared by Christopher Mac- 19 Smithson, 'The Monuments of Passaic," in Writings, 74. Pas- Gowan (New York:New Directions, 1992), 47. See also John saic's passivity in the face of economic development was Beck, "Prolapsed Metropolis: The Entropic New jersey of likely an important part of its entropic appeal for Smithson (I 148 NOTES TO PAGES 66-79 will be discussing Chapter Smithson's 4). However, that some thought Landscape architect revisitation cation protecting figure 42 was probably located Passaic Mitchell Rasor, "Revisiting Hours: remarkably was brewing citizens had managed Highway the Great industrial A group structures there. Paterson's Register Walking Tour." Smithson's stands in conspicuous, trast to the situation Great Falls/S.U.M. N.J.: Paterson upstream. Historic Museum, The photographs 1976); Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Robert Smithson: in contact attributed, been able to determine mausoleum that a pyramidal photographed still) located repeatedly and Fragmentation "Five Notes Phaidon, (New Haven: Smithson, Yale University "A Museum Writings, 91; john Perreault, tation Elizabeth Cornell 26 in the News," 24, 1969): 46; Smithson, New University ing has been influenced of Bruce Nauman's as an en tropic 'rve-Alarn Although engaged of space. James contained specifically with this image. polyhedrons like the gram- can unfold and evolve." ed., Cen- Newman, 1996). Smithson 2] Clement presented figure." (reel 3834, frame Greenberg, versity of Chicago s! ngle word" in unsteady Smithson that deconstruction that he ever physical For a useful discus- '49 idealism. land- by disquieting equilib- Papers, Note- 80). "The Case for Abstract Art," in The Collected Press, 1993), 81. of course (Chicago: Greenberg's of the art object with "a mouth tri ps off a battery for it is precisely and seventeenth- geometrical world is replaced and globes "The Geometric et as examples Essays and Criticism, vet. 4, ed. John O'Brian in Cornell Univer- wrote ofStoer: in his slim treatise, for the human book III, undated knew de Vries's work through evidence much to a particular review of Robert in which the vegetable tion of the presence there is no concrete the idea by Renaissance but they are, in fact, veritable rium substitute Formless: A User's Cuide study of sixteenth- medium Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: eleven woodcuts MIT Press, 1997), 215. perspective, ... and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca: Press, 154-59. discussion "Entropy," century or social time is the medium of modernity sity Press, 1994), on cast- which she interprets Krauss, Krauss, it is likely that Smithson his comprehensive century Krauss's early cast sculptures, "cooling" Bois and Rosalind (Cambridge: 23 by Rosalind objects 1998): 103. See also Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: helixes, where Press, 1997), 59. My thinking by the convention according this 'human' University scapes Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, N.j.: Princeton construc- illusion "historical first constructed Ermarth, of perspective, 112. see Eduardo an optical homogenous Perspectiva (1567), are modestly "A Sedimen- in Writings, as "gorgonization" that field into a series of bounded Conceived Historical Imagination 289. has argued this kind of perspectival time as a neutral space .... Deeds (February Damisch, in the Vicinity of Art," in "Ncnsttes historical of wries' Ends, Narrative Means, History and Theory 37, no. 1 ed. Alan Trachtenberg Press, 1980), of the Mind: Earth Projects," For photography Hubert Ermarth into its own, adopting neutral upon the history 1967): 14. More "After the turn of the nineteenth comes drawn in its nineteenth-century produces a neutral, 'in' which the forms On the of the Photographic of Language York 2, no. 8 (February that inhabit mar of perspective, see Jeff Wall, "Unity 78~89; for a Phenomenology in Classic Essays on Photography, Image," the temporal A to the conditions By this token Deeds (especially reorganizing realist painters in Thierry de Duve et al., 1996), Elizabeth Historicism analogous that .... the relaof duration. as a visible design relied upon precisely which treats but I have in Bergen. of perspective in Manet," (London: print key library. Kubler, "Style and the Representation tion oftime. of history in this series was (and is in the Flower Hill Cemetery as a mechanization Jeff Wall historian historicism (events) Photo Works. The loca- much stands Aspen 5-6 (Fall/Winter modern space": tion of this tour has not been previously Smithson 22 "A Pro- have to decide in their representations for instance, George Time:' recently, zenith) "The Walking Tour" (Paterson, from Bergen are reproduced form in Sobieszek, 21 See Sarah j. Gibson, 1970): 72-n February camera Historical con- O. Churchill 1966), 47: George Kubler, one of Smithson's to its background is like sight." a "Historic Press, out that "historians his actions page stands own walking tour of Landmark George personage, limiting Architectl)ral Forum 132, no. 1 (January/ posal for Paterson:' 20 historical riverfront and possibly conscious, University tion of figure to ground of of Internal Timetrans. james also made this analogy in a text in Smithson's Kubler points if not its of Historic Places by 1970 and would even come to feature Passaic influences, of Paterson construction Indiana 2. in Writings, 358. Points," Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1955), Santayana, ist preservation Vanishing 151. The art historian Falls area in order to conserve area would be listed on the National Landmark (Bloomington: French Thol)ght (Berke- The Phenomenology Husseri, perspectives Eyes: The Press, 1993), esp. chapter Consciol)sness, ed. Martin Heidegger, Passaic," in its outlines Paterson. "Pointless Edmund 25 the city}. See to halt the planned 80 through the historic to Passaic's in nearby Smithson, 24 in Robert Smithson's Another similar results, the eradi- which Smithson's see Martin jay, Downcast Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Centwy since the doomed path through http://www.mrld.net/passaic.pdf. battle, involved {the monument perspectivism, oppose, ley: Un iversity of California his own has shown that the there, was on Smithson's implicitly from the highway. monuments, of Highway 21 through sion of Cartesian in monuments Mitchell Rasor, in an article about of most of a Civil War cemetery cemetery of passivity did have historical were worth of Smithson's construction own strategies Passaic of poststructu the instantaneous has placed equa- repeating ral ist alarms, self-presence of the voice at the root of Western The voice (as opposed Uni- to the written metaword) a ing lot superseding it see Bob Rosenthal, Wonderful Passaic: is that which supposedly brings the subject and the object of speech together in a moment of perfect simultaneity and prox- Memories and Recollections (San Jose, Calif.:Writer's Showcase, imity, and which has the power to make of the referent an "ideal 2000), 56-62. For a detailed view of the "railroad problem" object." As Derrida explains, "An ideal object is an object in Passaic see Columbia University School of Architecture, Plan- whose showing may be repeated indefinitely, whose presence ning and Housing Division, "A Development Program for to Zeigen is indefinitely reiterable precisely because, freed the Fourth Ward Area of Passaic with a Note on Regional Needs," 1949. from all mundane spatiality, it is a pure noema that I can express without having, at least apparently, to pass through the 34 Future," 41; Ebner, "The Future of River City," 16-20. Bythe world." Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: late sixties Passaic was seen as a case study in urbanism Northwestern University Press, 1973), 75. Fried inherits this for its particularly acute ethnic fragmentation. See Francine F. notion from Greenberg and recasts it in the epigraph to "Art Rabinovitz, City Politics and Planning (New York:Atherton and Objecthood." which had just been published when Press, 1969), 73-77- Smithson set out for Passaic. Fried quotes Perry Miller quot- 35 Smithson, "The Monuments of Passaic," in Writings, 74- ing Jonathan Edwards: "Tt is certain with me that the world 36 R. J. Blin-Stoyleet aI., Turning Points in Physics (New York:Harper exists anew every moment; that the existence of things every Torchbooks, 1961), 50; Smithson, "Monuments of Passaic," moment ceases and is every moment renewed.' The abiding assurance is that 'we every moment see the same proof of a 28 29 in Writings, 71. 37 For Smithson's donation see the acknowledgment of receipt God as we should have seen if we had seen Him create by the fund, and related materials, in the Smithson Papers, the world at first." Fried, "Art and Objecthood." in Minimal Art: correspondence A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: Univer- berg, "Passaic Quiet as Negro Officials Warn Youth Gangs files. For violence in Passaic see Martin Cans- sity of California Press, 1995), 116. to 'Cool lt," New York Times, [ul 31,, 967, 18.The most destruc- Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorfous." in Labyrinths, trans. tive rioting was still to come, particularly during the sum. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 59-66; mer of1969, when a weeklong series of disturbances broke out Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, vol. 2 of In Search of Lost over slum rents in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrteff and Terence Kilmartin, Fox, "Passaic Violence Enters 5th Night," New York Times, Aug rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Random House, Modern Library 8,1969,42; Edition, 1992), 67. Costs of Rioting," New York Times, Aug 17, 1969, 49- The Sand- See Sylvan and Martin Gansberg, "Passaic Assesses Box Monument's Wall, "Unity and Fragmentation in Manet," 8l. 30 Smithson, "ArtThrough the Camera's Eye";"Incidents of Mirror- 3' Wallace Haddon, quoted in "Passaic Debating Uncertain entropic commentary on difference applies not only to the history of race relations in Passaic, but Travel in the Yucatan"; in Writings, 373, 120; Jill Bennett, also to its history of immigration. The sandbox, along with the "Stigmata and Sense Memory: St. Francis and the Affective leaky fountain monument (fig. 33), were both located in a Image," Art History 24, no. 1 (March 2001): 1-16. The park near Passaic Stadium. This park, like the Parking Lot Mon- underlined passage by Saint John ofthe Cross was from an ument, was a recent addition to the landscape of Passaic excerpt in Smithson's copy of H. A. Reinhold, ed., The Soul it had been dedicated as Taras Shevchenko Park in June Of1964. Afire: Revelations of the Mystics (New York: Meridian, 1960), Shevchenko was a nineteenth-century 76. Regarding "stigmatic" photography, cf. Roland Barthes's artist of picturesque landscapes. slightly different formulation of the "punctum" in his Camero Ukraine," he was a national hero for the large contingent of Ukrainian poet and Known as the "Bard of Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard Ukrainian immigrants in Passaic. Lawrence Alloway identifies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), esp. 25-27. Shevchenko Park as the location of the sandbox in "Robert 1. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets," in Complete Poems and Plays Smithson's Development," Artforum 11,no. 3 (November 1972): '909-1950 57. On the dedication of the park see the website for the Ukratn- (New York: Harcourt and Brace, , 934), 142. 32 Smithson, "Monuments of Passaic," in Writings, 73. ian American Veterans Post in Passaic http:/ fwww.uavets.org/Post17fPost.7.html. 33 See Passaic Valley Citizens Planning Association, "Parking in On Shevchenko Passaic's Central Business District: A Report Submitted see Pavlo Zaitsev, Taras Shevchenko: A Life (Toronto: Univer- to the Citizen's Committee on Parking and Traffic," (October sity ofToronto Press, 1988). 1955); "Center of Passaic Will Lose Tracks," New York Times, Jun 30, '962, 21; "Middle of Passaic Loses Its Railroad in CHAPTER 2-CityCeremony," New York Times, Apr 3,1963,49. For residents Epigraph: Smithson, "What Is a Museum?" in Jack Flam, ed.. of Passaic, the loss of the tracks was momentous. felt that they had lost a vital link-not Many 4. SMITHSON AND STEPHENS IN YUCATAN Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University only to the other cities of California Press, 1996), 47 (hereafter Writings). served by the railroad but also to Passaic's own historical John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, past. For a memoirist's reflections on the railroad and the park- Chiapas, and Yucatan, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, IS0 NOTES TO PAGES 80-92 1841),1; Smithson, Smithson appointment and Nancy Holt papers, 544, Archives of American Washington, book for 1969, in Robert ruminations on the glyphs he found reel 3832, frames 531-2, 542, in a circular coincidence Art, Smithsonian D.C. (hereafter Smithson Institution, Papers). referred to "The Yucatan" (with the definite out his essay to designate the entire Smithson article) Yucatan aware, son's through- then went on to inspire reference Smithson's Holy Land, by John Lloyd Stephens, way to denominate the entire area of Maya influence, (October comprised Mexican states several not to repeat it here except when quoting have likewise restored Smithson, the accent "Four Conversations Robert Smithson," cussions Smithson Dennis 'rucatan project mention various parodic-allegorical inversions. chapter "The Displacement diss., in Contemporary American of Pennsylvania, focuses themes and strategies concentrates on Smithson's associated visual analogies) the landscape fieldwork, project Reflections themselves are Marjorie (1839-40) Stephens ern areas the second of archaeological etc.}, while mine (and its Other than primarily upon Butterfield, to the northern by malaria), a single for the purposes also published Views of Ancient Monuments this period of 'And': see Michael York: Thames Critical Quarterly lbld., 118. For the classic res 37 (Spring 2000): 7-30. Brief discussions Critical Drama," endary Earthwards: in longer works include Gary Shapiro. Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (Berkeley: University of mance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970 (Chicago: versity of Chicago 151-65; Ronald Graziani, Enframement University "{De)terminating of California, Los Angeles, Von Hagen, Press, Robert 1981), of Oklahoma 1992, 139-43. influence about among Stephens's the literati. Melville, his own boyhood awe of Stephens, closely involved with Stephens's ofthree appear reputation of his four travel books. on the fictional 1841, 1: 98; Catherwood, "Mimicry implica- and Leg- October31 (Winter Views of Ancient 3. R. Tripp Evans has discussed the detachment ures from their architectural heritage Frontiers: of indigenous more extensively New World Antiquities fig- in in the American 1820-1915," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1998, Anthropology, John Lloyd Stephens in Hegemony 1841-1851; Reflections in on Proceedings of and Henry Lewis Morgan." the American Ethnological Society (1985): 28-40. Although 1944), Hinsley does not discuss on Stephens's in Redburn, wrote a population and Poe was very work, having published of degraded with particular reviews Catherwood's "imaginative sensitivity he focuses of the ruins from villages and marauding soldiers" to the effects of the Central ican civil war that was brewing around which drawings, detachment Stephens (31), Amer- throughout the first expedition. in Poe's Narrative of 10 Stephens 1841, 1: 118. were inspired by Stephens's 11 Stephens 1843, 1: 111;Thomas island ofTsalal Arthur Gordon Pym, for example, of the ontological trans. John Shepley, 1843, 1: 95. Early American in New York and his The hieroglyphics discussion 60-82. See also Curtis Hinsley, "Hemispheric Press, 1947). xiii. Van Wyck Brooks, of in 1992), 73-98. Stephens Imagination, Maya Explorer:)ohn Lloyd Stephens his World of Washington lIVing (New York: Dutton, 491-99, discusses in "rediscovery" Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (New Stephens "Classical Ph.D. diss., and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatan (Norman: University of twenty-five in Central America, 1844). For a good summary involved see Roger Caillois, Psychasthenia," Monuments, the Political in the Art by Robert Smithson," Victor Wolfgang Uni- Press, 1989), 222-26; Robert Hobbs, Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaca: Cornell University as 1984): 17-32. Press, 1995). 98-104; Henry Sayre. Object of Perfor - California his own folio edition and Hudson, tions of camouflage of the project them 1841, 1: 117-18. Stephens Fried, and the New Since of this discussion. lithographs: and personalities (1841-42) of the first (which I will be treating Catherwood the 'rucatan: Michael as an extension had been cut short the issues and west- expedition part of the peninsula. trip was conceived 32, no. 3 (1990): 81-101. and Robert Linsley, "Mirror Travel in Robert Smithson, sites in the southern The second Chiapas and Yucat6n (London, the to Smithson's Mirrors," explored expedition 1843) (here- 1843). During the first expedition of Maya influence, Earth Art," ph.D. indifference 1841), and Incidents of Travel cited as Stephens after cited as Stephens was restricted Perl off, "The Demise on Robert Smithson's 1841) (hereafter is the that each traveler predicates and its inhabitants. only texts that devote Yucatan (burial, are Incidents of Travel in Central America, in Yucatan (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1998, 14-8). Butterfield's on the motif of historical Graham's Magazine XIX (August 1841): 94. The two publications and the Archaeolog- employment New 1838): 460-63, review of Incidents of Chiapas, and Yucat6n (New York: Harper and Brothers, Ann Butterfield, References University dis- Robert Smithson's in Rebecca the Past: Archaic chapter 4 of Smithson's The exception of History: Time Travel in the Yucatan" and Stephens object 1 Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, by John Lloyd Stephens, in Writings, 231. Most of the existing of Smithson's ical Paradigm directly. Wheeler The New York Review 1837): 351-67; review of Incidents ofTrallel in Greece, York Relliew III (October in the final syllable. between of the Mind: Earth reviews of Stephens, Turkey, Russia and Poland, by John Lloyd Stephens, and I have elected only briefly, if at all. as an uncomplicated "Colonizing which as well as Belize, Guatemala, but the usage is incorrect not see: review of Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the and its outlying areas. This may have been the most convenient and Honduras, was probably work (see Smith- to Tsalal in "A Sedimentation in Writings, 108). For Poe's Projects," Peninsula at Sinai. Poe's glyphs, of which Smithson Pynchon traces the history of the concept of sloth in the United States in his essay "Sloth," Hamilton, Monograph on Strabismus, in Pynchon et al.. Deadly Sins (New York:William Morrow, to know that among the ancient Maya strabismus had 11. Stephens did not seem 1993),10-23. been considered a mark of distinction. Its onset was encour- 12 Stephens 1843, 1: 118. aged in newborns by attaching small balls of wax to hair 13 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology that dangled between the eyebrows. Robert J. Sharer, The Ancient Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Maya, 5th ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, Although the entire book takes the denial of coeval ness 1994),482. as its theme, see page 31 for a concise discussion of the term; 14 17 Modernity in the Nineteenth For the "sovereign gaze" see Michel Foucault, Discipline and 199°),1°4,131-32. and idem, "The Eye of Power," in Power/ oscope, and proving that binocular vision involved "two Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, different perspective projections ... being simultaneously pre- ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, sented to the mind." See Wheatstone, "Contributions to 1980), 146-65; Alan Wallach, "Making a Picture of the View the Physiology of Vision-Part from Mount Holyoke," in American Iconology, ed. David and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision," the First. On Some Remarkable, Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, '993), 80-91; Ken- in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade (Lon- neth John Myers, "On the Cultural Construction of Land- don: Academic Press, Published for the Experimental Psy- scape Experience: Contact to 1830," in American leonology, 74. The term contact zone is Mary Louise Pratt's and invokes chology Society, 1983), 65-93. 18 Although Stephens is mentioned in innumerable survey discus- "the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously sep- sions of nineteenth-century arated by geographic and historical disjunctures." american archaeological history, most of them rely either on Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation travel literature and Meso- Stephens's own accounts or on the single existing (and (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. largely hagiographic) monograph, Victor W. Von Hagen's 1947 Stephens 1843, 1: 64. The strabismus operation was still biography, Maya Explorer. The most thorough critical analy- in its experimental phase at this time; the first successful oper- sis of Stephens is also the most recent: R. Tripp Evans, "Clas- ation on a living patient occurred in Germany in 1839. For sical Frontiers." Other exclusive or near-exclusive treat- the early history ofthe operation and its practitioners see Daniel ments of which I am aware include David E. Johnson, '''Writing M. Albert, introduction to Three Treatises on Strabismus in the Dark': The Political Fictions of American Travel Writ- (Birmingham, Ala.: Gryphon Editions, Classics of Ophthalmol- ing," American Literary History 7 (Spring 1995): 1-27 (Johnson ogy Library, 1987). The volume includes facsimiles of three divides his discussion between Stephens and Paul Theroux); American texts on the subject, all contemporaneous with the Richard Preston, "America's Egypt: John Lloyd Stephens Stephens expedition: Alfred Charles Post, Observations on the Cure of Strabismus and the Discovery of the Maya," Princeton University Library Chronicle 52, no. 3 (Spring 1992); and Curtis Hinsley, (New York: Charles C. Francis, 1841) (Post's book is illustrated with engravings by Nathaniel Currier; "Hemispheric Hegemony." Jean Frederic Waldeck, a naturalized see fig. 52); John H. Dix, Treatise on Strabismus, or Squinting, French citizen who had visited Uxmal and who had lived and the New Mode of Treatment (Boston: D. Clapp, 1841); Frank among the ruins of Palenque, was convinced that the ancient H. Hamilton, Monograph on Strabismus builders were "Hindoos," and went so far as to include (Buffalo: Jewett, Thomas & Co., 1845). See also Daniel M. Albert and Diane D. elephants in his lithographs of the sculptural reliefs at Palenque. Edwards, eds., The History of Ophthalmology Jean Frederic Waldeck, Vayage pittoresque et archeologique (London: Blackwell Science, 1996), 240, 259. Ironically, although Cabot dans de province d'vucotan pendant les oonees 18]4 et 18]6 (paris, made sure that the eyes of his subjects were physically 1838). Stephens states his case against Old World origination aligned, his operations alone would not likely have improved theories in Stephens 1841, 2: 436-57, and 1843, 2: 307-13. the patients' vision. Even today, the surgery must be followed For a livelyintroduction to Old World and lost continent theories, by an extensive program of visual training to ensure that including their perseverance through the twentieth century, see the once "lazy" eye learns to work in concert with the functional Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth eye. But postsurgical care not being among the priorities and Method in the Study of American Indians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). of their expedition, Stephens, Catherwood, and Cabot left town the day after the operations. It does not seem too farfetched 19 Brooks, World afWashington 20 453,456. Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation to say that these eye operations were worth more to the establishment of ethnohistoncal 16 Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, It was in 1838 that Charles Wheatstone published his famous paper describing his invention, the stere- Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:Vintage Books, 1979),195-228; 15 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Stephens 1843, 1: 111. hierarchies in Stephens's nar- Irving, 494; Stephens 1841, 2: rative than they were to the visual health of the patients. and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca: Cornell Stephens 1843, 1: 58; Dix, Treatise on Strabismus, University Press, 1993), 34. For a useful discussion of the sal- 27-28; 152 NOTES TO PAGES 92-101 21 vage paradigm see James Clifford, Virginia Dominguez, west to Campeche, and southwest to Palenque. They took and Trinh 1. Minh-Ha, "Of Other Peoples: Beyond the 'Salvage' a plane east from there to Bonampak and then another further Paradigm," in Discussions in Contemporary east to the Usumacinta River,where they embarked on a Culture I (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 121-50. downstream dugout trip, returning upstream again after reach- Stephens 1841, 1: 115.He did end up purchasing the site, snick- ing Yaxchilan. Then they looped through Villahermosa, ering at the credulity of the seller, for fifty dollars. Frontera, Ciudad del Carmen, and the aptly named Laguna de 22 Ibid., 115-16. Terminos, where the "Incidents," at least so far as they 23 Catherwood owned and operated a panorama rotunda were recorded in Smithson's article, ended. Virginia Dwan inter- which he had built in New York in 1838, immediately before views with Charles F, Stuckey, March 21-June 7, 1984, embarking for Central America. Stephen Oettermann, transcript, pages 9:39-9:44, Archives of American Art, Smith- The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas sonian Institution; and Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel Schneider (New York:Zone Books, 1997), 317-23, For information on the fire see Victor W. Von Hagen, Frederick Cather- in the Yucatan," in Writings, 126-31. 27 wood Architect (New York: Oxford University Press,1950), 82-84. The painting in question was Moonlight, 1833-34. On in Art in Modem Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. Fran- the tenure of the Maya artifacts on Cruger's island and cis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (New York: Harper Collins, their eventual acquisition by the Museum of Natural History, see Phil Santora, "Trip to Yucatan on the Hudson," New 1992),203. 28 The term infinite myopia derives from Smithson's earlier, York Sunday News, Sep 5, 1971, 12-14 (American Museum of somewhat cryptic entry in the catalogue for the 1966 show Art Natural History, Special Collections Files); Herbert J, Spinden, in Process at Finch College: "Interpolation ofthe Enantio- "The Stephens Sculptures from 'rucatan," Natural History morphic Chambers," in Writings, 39-40; Smithson, "Pointless 20 (Sept-Oct 1920): 179-387; Carl C. Dauterman, ''The Strange Vanishing Points" (1967), in Writings, 359. For my under- Story of the Stephens Stones," Natural History 44 (December standing of and interest in the Chambers I am indebted to Ann 1939): 288-96. On the collection as it was installed in Reynolds's detailed analysis in "Robert Smithson: Learning 1944, see Harry l. Shapiro, "Middle American Culture on from New Jersey and Elsewhere," Ph.D. diss., City University Review: Treasures from the Past Dramatically Exhibited of New York, 1993, 67-89. For a Lacanian analysis of the in a New Hall of Mexican and Central American Archaeology," structure and visual effects of the Chambers see Timothy Mar- Natural History 53 (March 1944): 100-18. For Smithson's tin, "De-architecturisation relationship to the American Museum of Natural History see A Tour of Robert Smithson's Chambers and Hotels," de-, dis-, Ann M. Reynolds, "Reproducing Nature: The Museum of Natural History as Nonsite," October 45 (Summer1988): 24 Hal Foster discusses these and other methods of recoding tribal objects in "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art," 109-27. and the Architectural Unconscious: ex- 2 (1998): 89-114. 29 Stephens 1843, 1: 61; Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in Dwan, Holt, and Smithson had been planning the trip the Yucatan," in Writings, 130. for at least a year. A postcard from Virginia Dwan, postmarked 30 Smithson, ibid. February 20, 1968, from Mexico, reads in part: "Met some 31 Reynolds, "Robert Smithson," 67-89; Shapiro, Earthwards, people here who had explored Mayan area, so have some ideas 68; Rosalind Krauss, "Entropy," in Yve-Alain Bois and Ros- for ourtrip.-should alind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (Cambridge: MIT Press, plan it for no later than April (mid.)" Smithson Papers, unprocessed collection. Smithson's Dover copy was an unabridged republication of the original 1843 1997),78. 32 Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," in Writ- volumes (New York: Dover, 1963). Smithson Papers. The nine- ings, 131. See also Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: teenth-century frontispiece is on film in the Smithson The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," in The Location of Papers, reel 3833, frames 660-63. 25 Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," in Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85-92. 33 Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," in Writings, 119. 26 By combining the information in Smithson's article with Writings, 129. 34 For Smithson's celebrations of sloth see especially his essay Virginia Dwan's later recollections, it is possible to reconstruct "What Really Spoils Michelangelo's Sculpture," in Writings, a rough outline of Smithson's travels through the area. On 346-48. On Flaubert see Victor Brombert, "An Epic of Immo- their journey from New York,Smithson, Holt, and Dwan stopped bility," Hudson Relliew 19, no. 1 (Spring 1966): 24-43- Smith- first in Florida, visiting Sanibel Island and then spending a son cites this article in his footnotes to "The Artist as Site-Seer; day with Robert Rauschenberg at his home on nearby Captiva or, a Dintorphic Essay," an unpublished text in Writings, 343- Island. They then flew from Florida to Merida, near the Smithson's copy of the Hudson Relliew issue is in the Smith- north coast of the 'rucatan Peninsula {where Stephens, Cather- son Papers. For an excellent discussion of the "geometric nar- wood, and Cabot had performed their strabismus surgeries ratives" of Valery, Robbe-Grillet, Borges, and others, and their 128 years earlier). From there they drove south past Uxmal, then relation to spatiotemporal '53 modeling, see George Slusser and Daniele Chatelain, "Spacetime Geometries: the Modern Geometrical Narrative," Time Travel and Science Fiction Studies (1995): 161-86. On the lyrical novel see Ralph Freedman, 41 Ibid., 125, 124, 125, 130. Stephens The Von Hagen, Maya Explorer, 1947, 271-97. For a discussion infection as an analogy for disintegration ginia Woolf(Princeton, tury, see David C. Miller, "Infection and Imagination: copy in the Smithson N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963). in Smithson's Papers. For indifference Roth, "The Aesthetic of Indifference," see Moira Artforum 16 (November 3S Smithson, "Fragments of a Conversation," California Press, 1967), 20-21, 29, 42; Smithson, stons with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson frequently acknowledged influence on his conception in Smithson's 43 "Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space," in Smithson, draft of "Incidents Smithson Papers, reel 3834, frame 573: Samuel Beckett, of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," cussion of involuntary memory see pages 17-21. There are other references the sites to to Beckett's book in Smithson's notably on page 127, where Smithson's of Dullness c--ha bit-lurks of the Mind: Yucatan essay, phrases "The Caretaker everywhere" and "the futile and stupefying mazes" are both near-transcriptions many of his ideas about the Site/Nonsite Smithson role of expedition dialectic and about the artist experiences or unbounded of procedure methods had underlined to "futile and stupefying in his work: "At the low levels of consciousness focused limits of rational technique" Aesthetics undifferentiated habits" in his unpublished of Disappointment," cites Beckett's book in "Quasi-Infinities," tinguished 37; Aristotle had dis- in his De Memoria et Reminiscentia remembering, essay "An in Writings, 334-35, and that break with the "Incidents of Mirror- of text that in Beckett's book. He also refers (102). Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order, 33; Smithson, between which he classified as something which simply Travel in the Yucatan," in Writings, 129-30. besets the lethargic and dull-Witted, and recollection Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena reminiscence, and Other Essays or which he privileged as active and productive. See on Husser/'s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London: Duckworth, Northwestern 1972),47, and David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and 38 Smithson, University Press, 1973), 82. "Earth" (a group interview for the 1969 Earthworks show at Cornell), in Writings, 181; Smithson, dents of Mirror-Travel," Smithson 573; Smithson, "Incidents 129 (emphasis in original). Smithson, "Incidents draft of "Inc i- Papers, reel 3834, frame Indiana University Press, 1990), 13-19. J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), n 94-95· 45 Claude Levi-Strauss, "Overture to Le Cru et te Cuit," Yale French of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," in Writ- 46 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weiden- Studies 36 (1967): 61. Smithson's "Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson," 215,214. In his attempts his landscape Writing (Bloomington: 44 of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," ings, 208, 133n1, 127, 124; Smithson, to apply a philosophy Press, 1966), 36, 263. Smithson of inaction to Strauss's practice, Smithson was well aware of the dis- timeless timelessness, to the pastoral, he did adopt many of its tradion passive contempla- Concreto: in one of his books, de Papers). But Smithson annotated copy: Smithson 47 several steps further, from calmness Smithson, "Incidents Interview with Robert Smithson "Tempo by Achille Bonito 1969): 42-43. This Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," in Writings, 119. 48 takes this "calm eye" of contemplation G. Charbonnier, ed., Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss (Lon- don: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 32-33- The entirety of Chapter 3, "Clocks and Steam Engines," is relevant in this regard. to stupor, from leisure to exhaustion. involved in a world of interview is not included in Writings. Grana. Of Time, Work, and Leisure [New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1962), 1]; Smithson's his interest in Levi- that's made up of all these moments." Oliva," Domus, no. 481 (December looks upon the world and man with the calm eye of one who has no design on them" (Sebastian reiterated ber of the year of his Yucatan trip (1969): "Levi-Strauss describes be anathema "The contemplator Papers. primitivity in an interview given in Octo- the primitive mind as constantly tion. To cite a passage that he underlined copy: Smithson feld and Nicolson Ltd. (Chicago: University of Chicago in Writings, course of the pastoral. Although his work might be argued to tional aspects, not least its emphasis 40 Smithson, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1965). For Beckett's main dis- "low- influence is particularly essay "A Sedimentation historically predicated upon see Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Earth Projects," in Writings, 100-13, in which he developed the increasing 39 "Discus. Ehrenzweig as an level" working method of seeing and experiencing apparent Prospects 13 (1988): 37-60. For the connota- Writings, 36. (1970)," in Writings, of "primary process"-his which he traveled. Ehrenzweig's 42 (Berkeley: University of the Psychology of Artistic Imagination 249. Smithson in America," Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). in Writings, 189; The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in The Analogy and the Problem of Romantic Culture tropical landscapes, Anton Ehrenzweig, of in the nineteenth cen- Atmospheric tions of infection and degeneration 1977): 46-53- 37 to malaria in of the Panama railroad. Lyrical Ncvet: Studies in Herman Hesse, Andre Cide, and VirSeveral passages in this book are underlined 36 succumbed 1855 while overseeing the construction 22 49 of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," in Writ- "I would recommend that you read The Savage Mind .... It's a difficult book. This is probably the most difficult area, this whole idea of primal consciousness, Ings, 133m, 127, 125. 154 NOTES TO PAGES 102-116 primitive consciousness. This is really what I'm interested in. I'm not interested in 60 anistic and electronic ica: Myth and Reality (New York: Knopf, 1964). of understanding, technologies which he calls hot. It's consciousness." where there is a sort Smithson, "Four Con. ver sations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson," 61 Smithson, 62 Nehemkis, in The So __oge Mind, 233-34. 50 Levi-Strauss, Octavio Paz, Claude Le__ i-Strouss, An Introduction, J. S. Strauss, in Charbonnier, 38. Smithson (Smithson interview with Willoughby Sharp, 1968, transcribed Art in lished in Writings. 64 Lucy Lippard. "The Art Workers' Coalition: Not a History," Studio International 180, no. 27 (November Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass 1970): 171-74. See in Hobbs, Robert also idem, "The Politics of the Primitive," of Chicago Press, '978), 291, 292. Smithson: Sculpture, 36, where she writes: "He watched the AWC in Writings, 65. "Ultramodeme," manu- of Mirror- America 86 (December 1998): 76. This interview is not pub- Papers); Levi- Con __ersations with Claude Le__i-Strauss, as a detached bystander, too aware of our powerlessness Victor W. Von Hagen, World of the Maya (New York: Mentor, to join in, and amused by the spectacle of all of us 'idealists' 1960), 1'. Smithson the scrapping in the confused mentions the book while discussing objects inside his rental car ("Incidents of Mirror-Travel Yucatan," 120). The book is not, however, in the Smithson Papers; Paz, Claude Le __i-Strauss: An Introduction, Adam Gopnik, "Basic Stuff: Robert Smithson, entropy was his natural element." Science. and 65 in David Wyatt, "Hot and Cool in Anthropology: the Structuralists," "Art and the Political Whirlpool McLuhan and or the Politics of (1970)," in Writings, 134. Originally of a symposium Journal of Popular Culture V (Winter 1971): 552; Smithson. "The Monuments Smithson, Disgust Interview, Playboy 16 (March 1969): 59. Quoted McLuhan, with each other. He was probably as politically about the role of the artist as the rest of us. but he also probably enjoyed it more, since chaos moving toward 90. Arts Magazine (March 1983): 74-80; Marshall Primitivism," 56 "Incidents in Suzaan Boettger, ed., "Degrees of Disorder," marked this passage in his copy of the book (Chicago: University 55 Projects," undated, unpublished Papers, 8; Smithson, Travel in the Yucatan," 127. library, Dennis Wheeler mentioned (Smithson Unrealized 63 Smithson, Papers). 53 Smithson, 120. & Politics in Latin America," TriQuorterly, no. 15 script, Smithson I have not been able to locate it in a 1970 letter to Smithson of Mirror-Travel in the 'rucatan.vuc, Latin America: Myth and Reality. 4; Richard Gatt, Smithson's trans. Bernstein and Maxine Bernstein (Ithaca: Cornell University Paz's book in Smithson's Latin Amer- Peter Nehemkis, (Spring 1969): 258, 260. Holt, quoted in Janet Kardon, "Robert 51 Press, 1970), 85. Although "Incidents "Intellectuals Writings, 207 (ellipses in original). 54 New York Times is a Battleground," Magazine, Jun 16, 1968, '4-24; the cool kind of cold tribal technologies 52 Henry Giniger, "Guatemala what Levi-Strauss would call the hot cultures, with their mech- in Artforum, published 1970. Smithson, as part "The Monu- ments of Passaic," in Writings, 74. 66 Smithson. of Passaic," in Writings, 74. "A Refutation Aesthetics Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal of Historical of Disappointment"; pool"; "What Is a Museum?" Humanism"; "An "Art and the Political Whirlin Writings, 337, 335, 134, 51. Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959). 42. Smithson's copy: Smithson Papers; Butterfield, CHAPTER the Past," 23-37, provides an excellent discussion "Colonizing of the logic behind Smithson's following "Incidents JETTY jGOLDEN SPIKE Issue facsimile eiers' Official Railway Guide. Ann Arbor: of the June 1869 Tra__ selection of certain gods to appear in his narrative. 57 Smithson, 5. SPIRAL Quoted in the Golden Spike Centennial UMI, '969. of Mirror-Travel excerpt is underlined in the Yucatan," 120. The in Smithson's Martin copy of Degrees: Hetdegger, Being and Time. trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 417-18. For "All the maps you have are of no use, all the work of discov- the punctual ery and surveying; you have to start off at random, and Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena like the first men on earth; you risk dying of hunger a few miles from Now and its history see Heidegger, ibid., 417, the richest stores." Michel Butor, Degrees (New York: Simon & ton: Northwestern University Schuster, 1961), 33. Smithson talizing theoretical model for the function Papers. Smithson and Other Essays on Husser/'s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evans- had also Press, 1973), 61-62. Another tanof the spike quoted this excerpt in his essay of a year earlier. "A Museum (which I will not follow here) is Jacques Lacan's notion of the of Language in the Vicinity of Art," in Writings. 91. "point 58 Smithson, "Robert Smithson: Hotel Palenque. 1972," Parkett de cap.ton," and an upholstery variously translated as a quilting point nail, which secures the subject into the 43 ('995), unpaged insert. The Parkett insert is a transcription symbolic field. of Smithson's See Robert M. Utley and Francis A. Ketterson, Jr., Golden commentary and a reproduction slides from the lecture he gave at the University of all of the Spike (Washington: of Utah in 1972. The lecture is not included in Writings. The term in__incible idleness is from Smithson's 1967 essay "Ultramcdeme," 4 in "Hotel Palenque.' U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969). had been created by executive order in 1967. For details about the ceremony and the event schedules see Writings, 63-65. 59 Smithson, The commission n.p. '55 Golden Spike Centennial Celebration Report, 1970 (typescript, Utah State Historical Commission, Final Society, MSS A86). Independently driving but the Golden nated organized of the Golden annual Spike National Historic as a part of the National the aegis of the National archive Park Service's Site, Nathan director of field operations tograph Mazer Papers. came historical for Production's through: commission.) pho- Art, 2000), 12 in original). see Katy Siegel, "Break- Bataille, (London: "The Notion Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, Historic Stoekl "(They Were Called 'Crocker's Pets') Little Yellow Men: Driven the Rails, 1869 to 1969, Robert Smithson 19°5-1987, Archives of American Washington, rifle advertisement Smithson Smithson during arrived the month Smithson Mazer Derrida, ed. and trans .. allan of Minnesota See Alexander O'Dell, Papers); the Spike National Alberro, Art," in Schall, Tempus Fugit. in Performance "The Spiral Jetty," in Writings, 146. Smithson, 15 The best source tion process, of information including on the specifics revealing interviews Local Reaction to Robert Smithson's Master's thesis, College of the City University Smithson was likely aware of the centen- in Utah, since the ceremony had of Nation Mark Saal, "Construction Alloway, "Robert Smithson, 17 On Morelli see Edgar Wind, "Critique Writings). The special centennial edition of the paper is in the Smithson Papers. Smithson also Tedeschi 96-125. Spike Motel, Dwan noted: the wall. To Bob the Golden Spike was not just a dump, a place of mystery, so strange heaters nowheresville rugs and strange high up on Wind, 19 Smithson, invent one in Robert Cornell University Hobbs, plans see Kynaston Greenberg, museum of Modern Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. john O'Brian (Chicago: Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Battcock in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, (Berkeley: 145; Robert Smithson Papers, 1993), 81; Michael University of California to Enno Develing, reel 3833, frame 366. Hopkins 'The Uni- in Clues, 20 of natural he was a land specialist resources. did not in the Utah Crystal handled the special use Smithson Papers, from Crystal see the Smithson to proper names of California treatment (especially Smithson's 21 Smithson, 22 Ibid. NOTES and Art After Babel (Berkeley: (New York: All photographs in the summer were taken of 1970 under direction. "The Spiral Jetty," in Writings, 147. TO PAGES 116-138 rela- his own) see Gary Shapiro, Press, 1995), 191-233. Braziller, 1972), 222-32. Gorgoni reel 3833, of Smithson's Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Arts of the Environment by Gianfranco 156 Press, 1989), For a letter to George Press, 1995), University lease for the land that the Jetty occupies. University ed. Gregory ca. 1971, Smithson Paradigm," Spiral jetty," 143, 145, 153. Smithson Earthwards: Robert Smithson Art," in The Colleried versity of Chicago Press, johns "Mark Crystal"; tionship Art, 1999), 86-89_ "The Case for Abstract Roots of an Evidential frame 425. For a sustained ed., The Museum as Muse: Artists McShine, Reflect (New York: Museum Clement Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaca: Press, 1981), 20. On Smithson's in ibid., 44, department would swear he was in a science fiction world." Virginia Dwan, quoted "Clues: (Baltimore: 18 it was and exciting of Connoisseurship," Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne tory: Building the Union Pacific (Palo Alto, Calif.: American West, Spike Motel, for example, that dumpy and "The Spiral Jetty," in Writings, 147. Ginzburg, 1969). of Smith son and the Golden kind of place with linoleum Project Art and Anarchy (New York: Knopf, 1965), 32-51; Carlo Westward to Pramon- had a copy in his library of Barry Combs's 1972): 53-91, and 23, Jun 1996, 6-70. 16 nia Press, 1996), 145 (hereafter of New Smithson's Crew Took on 'Nutso' Won," Ogden Standard-Examiner May 11, 1969- SpiraIJetty," Artforum 11, no. 3 (November Development," Mar 23,1969; in 1869 Is Observed," Hunter construc- Dogu, "An Intermittent is Hikmet York, 1996. See also Lawrence news. The New York Times ran at least two artito Promontory," team, "The Spiral Jetty," in Jack Flam, ed., Robert an adventure, ofthe with leaders Illusion: book for 1970, Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of Calif or- "The Golden Art," and Kathy On Labor and Temporality of the construction cles: "Rail Fans' Pilgrimages Robert Smithson, 1992): 170. "Time and Conceptual "Time Clocks and Paradox: 14 Papers. Press, 1985), "Given Time: The Time of the of April (appointment nial even before arriving "Rail Spanning jacques University in Utah in March 1970 and built theJetty Papers). been national 13 in Trains: The Magazine of Railroading, May 1969. Golden Site, Nathan 116-29; Art, Smithsonian appeared (Minneapolis: King." Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter and Nancy Holt D.C. (hereafter Institution, Winchester Historic Papers. in The Story of the Wedding of to Achieve the Impossible," papers, Mazer 1989), 176; in Visions of of Expenditure," San Francisco Chronicle, 12 May 1969. of 137. Basil Blackwell, Gold Spike Ceremony," Site, Nathan Museum in The Lyotard Reader, Lyotard, "Actnema," Benjamin Golden Spike National in Tempus Fugit, ed. Fried, "Art and Objecthood," See [ean-Francois Georges Men at leisure from his own work," City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins 116-31; 2002),160-61. see "The Forgotten of a confused Time in the 1950S and 1960s," ed. Andrew speech more a condition Jan Schall (Kansas essay Sake," written in 1972: "The 'object On the idea of the breakthrough phy and the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, On Volpe's in Writings, 111-12 of the Mind," See also his unpublished Writings, 378 (emphasis 11 Print the Legend: Photogra- A. Sandweiss, in original). class, and as a result the artist is separated section. from Russell's "A Sedimentation (emphasis of art' becomes under (Mazer was the executive workers Smithson, "Production Spike National for the centennial of the Chinese see Martha 10 until 1965, and it ceremonies is held at the Golden Historic On the exclusion of the Site was not desig- Park Service was only then that the reenactment The centennial reenactments Spike had been going on since 1952, 23 lbid., 148; Smithson, "A Cinematic Atopia," in Writings, 141. Photo Credits See also his interview with Dennis Wheeler, "Four Conversations 24 Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson," in Writings, All art and text by Robert Smithson © Estate of Robert 203-4,211; Gary Shapiro, Earthwards, 223. Smithson/Licensed Symbolic Significance of Salt in Folklore and Superstition," in Lee B. EWing'(figs. 2, 72); Photo courtesy MIT List Visual Arts C. G.Jung (J{james Hillman, ed. Stanton Marian (Woodstock, Center (fig. 4); photo courtesy james Cohan Gallery, New York (figs. Conn.: Spring Publications, 1995), 47-100. 27 Photography by Lee B. Ewing (figs. 1, 37, 38, 46, 48, 65); Print by Salt and the Alchemical Soul: Three Essays by EmestJones, 5,6,10,13,16,22,29,35,39,47,68, 2S "Scale" derives from the old French escaille, meaning husk or 26 by VAGA, New York, NY On the metaphorical history of salt see Ernest Jones, "The 7J, 75, 77-80); Reproduced courtesy of john Pearse and Vicki Buchsbaum Pearse (fig. 7); shell, a term that evokes accretion and inorganic growth. Photo by David Ottenstein (figs. 8, 9, 23-25); Courtesy of the Col- Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. "scale"; Smithson, "Can lection of Andrea Rosen, New York (fig. 11); Photo by Ken Hey- Man Survive?" in Writings, 368. man (fig. 12); ©Alinari/Art N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contem- Stalsworth (fig. 15); ©Academic Press (figs. 17, 21, 26, 30, 81); porary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University ©The Royal Society, London (fig. 18); Photo © The Metropolitan Resource, NY (fig. 14); photo by Lee Press, 1990), 15.The classic "manifesto" offractal theory as Museum of Art (fig, 19); Photo by Thomas Cinoman © 2002, applied to natural systems is Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The The Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved (fig. 20); Courtesy Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York:W. H. Freeman, 1977). Cubic Corporation, San Diego, California (fig. 27); Photo © For the best generalist account of the development of 2002 The Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 28); Photo © chaos theory see james Gleick, Chaos: The Making of a New Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (fig. 31); Photo by the Science (New York: Penguin, 1997). See also Mark C. Taylor, author (figs. 33, 34, 36, 40-43, "Figuring Complexity," in The Picture in Question: Mark Library of Congress (fig. 52); Neg. no. 6°49, 1858.5, New-York Tansey and the Ends of Representation Historical Society (fig. 53); Neg. no. 2A7945, Courtesy American (Chicago: University of 52, 66, 69, 70); Courtesy of the Chicago Press, 1999), 99-128. Museum of Natural History Library (fig. 54); AllYucatan Mirror jacques Derrida, "What is a 'Relevant' Translation?" Critical Displacement images purchased with funds contributed by the Inquiry (February 2001): 195 (emphasis in original). Photography Committee and with funds contributed by the 28 Smithson, interview with Paul Toner, in Writings, 239. International Director's Council and Executive Committee Mem- 29 From an unpublished list of references in one of Smithson's bers: Edythe Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Linda notebooks in the Smithson Papers, reel 3834, frame 122, Fischbach, Ronnie Heyman, Dakis joannou, Cindy Johnson, Barbara which traces historical and literary meanings of the spiral. Lane, Linda Macklowe, Brian Mciver, Peter Norton Foundation, 30 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Blackwell, Willem Peppler, Denise Rich, Rachel Rudin, David Teiger, Ginny 1990),9,25; Hal Foster, "Postmodernism: The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodem A Preface," in Culture (Seattle: Bay Williams, ElliotWolk, 1999 (99.5269). photo courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York (figs. 56, 57, 59, 60, 61); Press, 1983), xv; William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence," Hotel Palenque: purchased with funds contributed by the Photog- in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes raphy Committee and with funds contributed by the international (New York: Random House, 1957), 431. Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Edythe 31 See Hobbs, Robert Smithson: Sculpture, 196. Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Linda Fischbach, Ronnie 32 See Smithson's 1968 essay, "A Museum of Language in the Heyman, Dakis joannou, Cindy Johnson, Barbara Lane, Linda Vicinity of Art," in Writings, 88-90, where he twice mentions Poe's story. 33 Edgar Allan Poe, "A Descent into the Maelstrom," in The Com- Macklowe, Brian Mciver, Peter Norton Foundation, Willem Peppler, Denise Rich, Rachel Rudin, David Teiger, Ginny Williams, Elliot Wolk, 1999 (99.5268). Photo courtesy The Solomon R. Guggenheim plete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, Foundation, New York (fig, 62); Used by permission, Utah State 1975),127-4°. Historical Society, all rights reserved. photo no. 8-328 no. 30 Fd4 (fig. 64); Reproduced courtesy the Box Elder News-Journal (fig. 67); Photo available from U.S. Geological Survey, EROS Data Center, Sioux Falls, SO; NAPP Roll 5973, Frame 187 (fig. 71); Photo by john Cook (fig. 76). IS7