Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T04:00:51.478Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Robert Smithson's Toxic Tour of Passaic, New Jersey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2014

ANDREW MENARD
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

No land artist of the 1960s was more influential at the time than Robert Smithson. If anything, earthworks such as the Spiral Jetty and essays such as “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape” have only added to his importance over the years. One of the reasons Smithson still seems so relevant is that his work responded so directly to a nostalgic trend that arose in both American studies and American environmentalism during the 1950s and 1960s. On the whole, it was a nostalgia for nineteenth-century pastoralism, but it also led to a revival of interest in such figures as Thomas Cole, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Olmsted himself. To counteract this elegiac tendency Smithson developed a “toxic discourse” in which he treated the nineteenth-century landscape as a totally engineered prototype for the twentieth. The first fully formed expression of this toxic discourse was an essay he published in 1967, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” It was there that Smithson began to elaborate an aesthetic that treated the open-pit mine, the suburb, and the desert as mirror images of each other.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2014 , pp. 1019 - 1040
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Speaking of Smithson in particular: criticism of his work has varied over the years, but for some reason his relationship to nineteenth-century landscape has always been undertheorized. It is occasionally referred to but largely treated as minor among the many monographs which appeared in the 1980s and 1990s – e.g. Hobbs, Robert, ed., Robert Smithson: Sculpture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Tsai, Eugenie, ed., Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Shapiro, Gary, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar. In the early 2000s, several studies made a more concerted effort to examine Smithson's view of history – the most important being Boettger, Suzaan, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Graziani, Ron, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Reynolds, Ann, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Roberts, Jennifer L., Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Tsai, Eugenie and Butler, Cornelia, eds., Robert Smithson (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Although Graziani makes glancing references to the cumulative history of nineteenth-century industrialism, Boettger identifies earthworks with a renewed interest in the pastoral, and both Reynolds and Roberts make some important connections to the nineteenth century in their discussions of “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” and Spiral Jetty, even these works focus overwhelmingly on the 1960s and 1970s while treating Smithson's link to the nineteenth-century landscape as a relatively negligible or incidental aspect of his aesthetic. Recently, Martin, Timothy, “Robert Smithson and the Anglo-American Picturesque,” in Peabody, Rebecca, ed., Anglo-American Exchange in Postwar Sculpture, 1945–1975 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 164–74Google Scholar, has taken this relationship more seriously, and what follows is an effort to foreground it still further in one of Smithson's most iconic and important works. This approach could be extended to his other writings and to his most celebrated earthworks: Spiral Jetty, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, Amarillo Ramp. Of course, even then it has to be seen as just one of many ways to approach the work of an extremely complex artist.

2 Blake, Peter, God's Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape (New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1964)Google Scholar.

3 On why environmentalism became important at this time see Rome, Adam, “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History, 90 (2003), 525–54Google Scholar. Graziani details the specific environmental legislation Smithson faced in the early 1970s.

4 Noble, David W., Death of a Nation: American Culture and the End of Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxvii, 107Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 14, 116.

6 Yablon, Nick, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2Google Scholar.

7 Flam, Jack, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 165Google Scholar; all subsequent page numbers are given in the text in parentheses. Buell, Lawrence, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and the Environment in the U. S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30Google Scholar.

8 Posthumous catalogues of Smithson's library have been published in Reynolds, 297–345, and Tsai and Butler, 249–63. Both show that Smithson owned Marx's Machine in the Garden, John A. Christie's Thoreau As World Traveler, Albert Fein's Landscape into Cityscape, and Elizabeth Barlow Rogers's Frederick Law Olmsted's New York. Although Novak's American Painting was not in the library at the time of his death, Nancy Holt, who married Smithson and sometimes collaborated with him, has indicated in personal correspondence that Smithson and Novak met in their loft on several occasions – resulting in “an exchange of ideas which stimulated her thinking about the book.”

9 Royce, Sarah, A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California, ed. Gabriel, Ralph Henry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 3Google Scholar.

10 Thoreau, Henry David, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1985), 593Google Scholar.

11 Arac, Jonathan, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3, 76–120Google Scholar.

12 Blanke, Gustav H., “Remarks on the Transit of Ideas: ‘America Is West,’” in Herget, Winfried and Ortseifen, Karl, eds., The Transit of Civilization from Europe to America: Essays in Honor of Hans Galinsky (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1986), 59–73, 59Google Scholar.

13 Tamarkin, Elisa, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 320–21Google Scholar.

14 Krauss, Rosalind, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodern Repetition,” October, 18 (1981), 59–60Google Scholar.

15 Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 111Google Scholar.

16 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The Poet,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 445–68, 455Google Scholar.

17 Emerson quoted in Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, 234; Thoreau, 416.

18 Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 191Google Scholar.

19 26 Keith F. Davis, “‘A Terrible Distinctness’: Photography of the Civil War Era,” in Sandweiss, Martha A., ed., Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991)Google Scholar, 133, 154.

20 Snyder, Joel, American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy O'Sullivan, 1867–1874 (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1981), 14Google Scholar.

21 Harvey, Eleanor Jones, The Civil War and American Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 171Google Scholar.

22 Current, Karen, Photography and the Old West (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 33Google Scholar.

23 C. T. Thompson, Esq., “Photography. – Class 9,” Illustrated London News, 1445 (14 September 1867), Supplement: “Paris International Exhibition,” quoted in Naef, Weston J., The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860–1885 (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Boston: Distributed by the New York Graphic Society, 1975), 39Google Scholar.

24 Harvey, 60.

25 Olmsted, Frederick Law, The California Frontier, 1863–1865, Volume V, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, ed. Ranney, Victoria Post (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 488–89Google Scholar, 500.

26 Buell, Lawrence, “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U. S. Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale,” in Dimock, Wai Chee and Buell, Lawrence, eds., Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 227–48, 227Google Scholar.

27 Markonish, Denise, “Introduction,” in Markonish, , ed., Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape (North Adams: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), 13–14Google Scholar.