Chapitre XVI. “A manifestation that purports not to be there”: monuments and monumentality in the work of Robert Smithson (1938-1973)
p. 277-287
Texte intégral
1It is hardly surprising that Robert Smithson, as a prominent figure of Land Art, should have shown interest in monuments and monumentality. The notion of monument often appears in his works as well as in his writings, albeit somewhat ambiguously—strikingly, his monuments are not always monumental. Moreover, the monuments Smithson remarks upon or creates appear to be strangely removed from the commemorative function usually associated with the term. Examining the recurrence of the term in his theoretical writing leads to question the efficacy of Smithson’s monuments in relationship to space and time. Moreover, in Smithson’s body of work, the monument is used as a metaphor before gradually gaining physical existence—however, this does not entail a clear-cut progression from immateriality to materiality. On the contrary, it is after Smithson has theorized his concerns with removal, dispersion, and absence that his work appears to become monumental.
2As early as 1962, Smithson uses monuments—if not yet monumentality—in his critical vocabulary, in a way that already differs from the most common definitions of the term. The monument is used as a metaphor for artistic creation before it enters Smithson’s own practice. The use of monuments is linked with and stems from a more general concern with architecture. In Smithson’s theoretical writings, architecture comes first, and “monuments” can be seen as a crystallization of his interest in architectural matters.
3Prior to 1965, architecture is only implicitly present in Smithson’s work: in the 1962 essay “The Iconography of Desolation”, there is mention of “the glass prisons on Park Avenue”1—one of the architectural features Smithson often refers to later on; fascination gradually replaces the dismissive way in which architecture was referred to, and in 1966, Smithson becomes the self-proclaimed champion of “the much denigrated architecture of Park Avenue known as ‘cold glass boxes”.2 It can be argued that his re-appraisal of such structures is linked to their ‘minimalist’ qualities. In Smithson’s 1965 review of Donald Judd’s minimalist structures (such as for instance the 1965 Untitled piece, a steel and plexiglas box), the architectural trope appears to be already well-articulated. Discussing the minimalist’s first exhibition in 1963, Smithson wrote:
Just as the Mannerist artists of the sixteenth century permuted the facts of the Classic Renaissance, so has Judd permuted the facts of Modern Reality. By such means, Judd discovered a new kind of ‘architecture,’ yet his contrary methods make his ‘architecture’ look like it is built of ‘antimatter’.3
4Smithson’s interest in Judd’s new architecture (and his qualification of the term by means of quotation marks) lies in the fact that it does not construct space: on the contrary, “each work offered a different solution for the dislocation of space”. This comment echoes the artist’s appraisal of his own work: in the 1965 “short description of two mirrored crystal structures” Smithson remarks on how this structure creates, through reflections, a space that is both “crystalline and collapsible.”4
5Thus, even in the earlier stage of Smithson’s architectural thought, both space and building are subject to a permutation of sorts—as matter shifts into antimatter, more equals less, and adding to the world is a way of subtracting something. Architecture is indeed the field where the forces of entropy—that essential energy-drain—are best made visible. The second law of thermodynamics, and the urge to foreground it and work with it, lie at the core of Smithson’s theoretical writing: it makes the collective space created by architecture—a space landmarked by monuments—a space for the revelation of what is chiefly a time process.
6In 1966, the architectural paradigm crystallizes into monumentality, suggesting a shift in the type of spatial efficacy which is to be generated. With the seminal essay “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Smithson moves one step further and defines a new type of monumentality, under the pretext of a mock-scholarly discussion of science-fiction, a genre which was dear to him:
Many architectural concepts found in science-fiction have nothing to do with science or fiction, instead they suggest a new kind of monumentality which has much in common with the aims of today’s artists. I an thinking in particular of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol Le Witt, Dan Flavin…5
7In other words, Smithson keeps discussing Minimalism, but he adds a new dimension to his critical evaluation. According to him, the “new kind of monumentality” is based not only on the dislocation of space but also on the disruption of time. Significantly, the monument, as both symbol and structure, appears in Smithson’s theoretical writings only when time is added to the equation. The shift from architectural monumentality (which deals with mass and scale) to monument per se clearly underlines the relationship to time and the implicit or explicit celebratory function of the monument—which is thus historical, in other terms temporal, while monumentality itself is more of spatial concept.
8However, just as Smithson considered that space was not created but dislocated—or created in order to be dislocated, or created through its very dislocation—the New Monuments do not function the way monuments do. On the contrary, their efficacy is defined by their ability to disrupt time rather than celebrate it, and to negate history rather than commemorate it. Indeed, according to Smithson,
the works of many of these artists celebrate what Flavin calls “inactive history” or what the physicist calls “entropy” or “energy-drain”. They bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov’s observation that “the future is but the obsolete in reverse”. […] Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than into representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock. (11)
9Of course, this announces the debate which opposed Smithson to Michael Fried, who in “Art and Objecthood” dismissed minimalism as theatrical, literal, concerned with time and thus irrelevant to Laocoon-influenced Greenbergian modernism.
10Smithson’s own involvement with minimalism is obvious in the monument proposals he created at the time: The Proposal for a Monument on the Red Sea (1966), formerly known as Cube in Seascape, is a collage of paper and blackand-white photograph, which combines Minimalist influences and an attempt at site-specificity. The “monument” is a white cube set in the distance, while the foreground pictures an expanse of rock and water. The Proposal for a Monument at Anartica (1966) is even more striking. Formerly known as Untiltled (S. F. Landscape), it is a negative photostat featuring a shore and small human figures working their way to an abstract, geometrical megalith.6 The originals were only recovered in 2001 by mere chance, which is how their original titles became known.
11When pictured as the three-dimensional constructions they purport to be (when accepted illusionistically as actual monuments & not photostats), they strike one as a subtraction, as though three-dimensional space had been abstracted from the landscape—this is especially true of Anartica. The monument proposals point to Smithson’s concerns with site; after exploring minimalist possibilities, the artist gradually moves away into a budding Land Artist’s physical and archeological reveries, as well as a concern for site-specificity.
12Smithson’s reflections slightly shift away from New Monuments, the paragon of Minimalism, into a category he borrows from art historian George Kubler: “prime objects.” In early 1966, his concern with entropy has nonetheless already been defined, and this will be the thread running through all his subsequent works, materializing in the site-specific pieces known as Earthworks.
13In 1965, Smithson had already ventured the notion that Judd’s sculptures were made of “primary matter.” In the following year, he moved from “primary matter” to a concern for “prime numbers”, from which “prime objects” are derived. This is of major relevance as “prime objects” are a specific type of monuments, on the nature of which Smithson elaborates in 1966-1967 in “The Artist as Site-Seer; or, a dintorphic essay”., Smithson uses science-fiction as a pretext to discuss architecture and he starts with a quote from J. G. Ballard’s Terminal Beach:
The system of megaliths now provided a complete substitute for those functions of his mind which gave to it its sense of the sustained rational order of time and space […] Without the blocks his sense of reality shrank to little more than the few square inches of sand beneath his feet.7
14Monuments are increasingly considered in relationship not only with surrounding space to be disrupted, but also with human mind and functions of understanding and memory—which are here defined as a “sense of reality”, of the “order of time and space”. The relationship between the former and the latter is so strong that it amounts to substitution, and to monuments being considered as artificial or external memory. This aspect seems to have particularly appealed to Smithson, and allowed it him to expand, with a spin, on what is a traditional function of monuments: “the environment is coded into exact units of order, as well as being prior to all rational theory.” (Ibid.) For Smithson, examples of such ‘environmental coding’ are to be considered as “prime objects”, which were defined by George Kubler them in The Shape of Time:
Prime Objects resemble the prime numbers of mathematics because no conclusive rule is known to govern the appearance of either, although such a rule may some day be found. Prime objects do not decompose, because like prime numbers they resist decomposition because of their enigmatic origin […] In short the prime object is immobile and often indestructible. […] “buildings” constitute most of our primes. (Ibid.)
15For Kubler, prime objects constitute an opening, and signal the possibility of a new order. On the other hand Smithson, due to his catastrophist view of art, came to consider monuments as signaling a reversal into chaos. Interestingly enough, all examples Smithson gives of such “prime objects” are monuments. This includes Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid. As Lucy Lippard suggests, Robert Morris’s Observatory (1977, Flevoland, The Netherlands) might be considered as a more contemporary variation on the theme.8
16Smithson works within this range, however there is another crucial aspect that will structure his own monumental works in the early 1970s: the importance of language, a preoccupation he shares with Robert Morris. The 1966 Heap of Language drawing presents a mountain of words which all belong to the semantic field of linguistics and language (the term “language” is isolated at the top of the drawing). This drawing redoubles Smithson’s preoccupation with the pyramidal and towering forms, which are made obvious in Glass Strata (1969) and in the Earthwork Spiral Hill (1971). Language is a material; it can even exchange properties with physical matter, as is suggested in the layering of printed words and rocks and ore in Strata: A Geophotographic Fiction (1970).
17Verbal metaphors, especially the dissemination of language, were already present in Kubler’s discussion of prime objects. That may have influenced the increasingly hybrid way Smithson related to his own work, which he came to consider as a “quiet catastrophe of mind and matter.”9 In his mock-scholarly discussion of Ballard’s imagined monuments, Smithson noted in his usual tongue-in-cheek tone:
Is language at the root of those megaliths, the way mathematics is at the root of geometry? Is the verbal prior to the material? The “noise of history” is contained by Ballard’s megaliths. The abyss of language erases the supposed meanings of general history and leaves an awesome “babel”. These megalithic rectangles are Ballard’s memory traces of that elusive prime object—the Tower of Babel. (Collected Writings, 341)
18The combined interest in the tectonics of language and the forces of entropy leads Robert Smithson to define the type of monuments he will produce as “ruins in reverse”—as language and matter share the same properties, ruins are to be understood as physical but also metaphorical remnants of a once-signifying form. Smithson’s growing concern with ruins is revealed by a seemingly blatant case of self-contradiction—which can nevertheless be read as a sign of the theoretical evolution undergone between 1966 and 1967. This shift is made apparent through yet another ruined tower: not the Tower of Babel but the one that architect Philip Johnson had designed for his Ellis Island memorial project. (Philip Johnson was famous—or infamous—for designing the “glass boxes” on Park Avenue as well as the museum of art in New Canaan, Connecticut—two structures Smithson often mentioned in his writings). The evolution of Smithson’s thoughts concerning Johnson’s architecture aptly reveals the evolution of his own ideas on monuments.
19In 1966, Robert Smithson deemed Philip Johnson’s proposal for an Ellis Island monument “awful”, according to the opening paragraph of the short essay entitled “Colossal Nullifications—part 1.” After the straightforward and unequivocal dismissal, he described Johnson’s proposal:
[…] the utilitarian buildings now standing on the island are to be turned into ‘stabilized ruins’, evoking not only the ‘hopes of the immigrants’, but also the unresolved nihilism and hidden fears of the 19th century. The main structure to be built by Philip Johnson could be considered a ‘stabilized void’. A spiraling ramp runs around “The Wall of 16 Million”, upon which there is a dizzying collection of immigrants’ names. This could also be a monument to Edgar Allan Poe’s Roderick Usher. […] The moods of Mr. Poe and Mr. Johnson cross paths. (Collected Writings, 331)10
20In 1967, only a year after his dismissal of Johnson’s proposal, Robert Smithson discussed the Ellis Island project in “What is a Museum”, a dialogue with Allan Kaprow.11 Smithson used almost exactly the same terms, but the judgment passed on to Johnson’s proposal had changed dramatically:
“I am all for a perpetuation of […] distancing and removal, and I think Johnson’s project for Ellis Island is quite interesting in that he’s going to gut this nineteenth-century building and turn it into a ruin, and he says that he’s going to stabilize the ruins, and he’s also building this circular building which is really nothing but a stabilized void.12”
21The terms are strikingly identical, which highlights the fact that the judgment Smithson passed on the proposal had changed radically, from “awful” to “quite interesting.” Johnson’s architecture does come across as acquired taste, yet there is another explanation: indeed, Smithson himself expressed interest in ruins and voids around that time. In one of his best-known essays, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey,”13 he indulges in a mock-gothic mood himself—he uses the term “gothic” at the onset, but in between quotation marks14—and discusses another type of ruin: the “ruin in reverse”.
22The city of Passaic, New Jersey, is treated as a mock-allegorical landscape throughout the photographic series, as the frontispiece for the photowork clearly reveals: it indeed consists of a newspaper cutout of a “Allegorical Landscape”, a painting by Samuel F. B. Morse which was on display at Malborough-Gerson Gallery. What is more, in Passaic the scenery recedes into its own representation (according to Smithson, it’s like “photographing a photograph”). The artist endeavors to give his audience a tour of the monuments of the suburban city. A bridge is thus renamed “Monument of Dislocated Directions” an unimposing derrick becomes a “Monument with Pontoons: The Pumping Derrick”, while a pipe and metal scraps and tubes, set on an unimpressive water-bank, are celebrated as “The Great Pipe Monument.” “The Sand-Box Monument (also called The Desert)” is, as its name suggests, a sand-box set within a greater sandy area bordering a children’s playing area. Like the previous pieces, it is quite the anti-monumental monument—a oxymoron if there ever was one: and of course, it is precisely the anti-monumentality that is worthy of focus. There is not much to see and that is what we are to see; there is not much to remember, and that is precisely what we are to remember. In other words, these are ironic monuments to anti-monumentality.
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scène suggests the discredited idea of time and many other ‘out-of-date’ things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the ‘big events’ of history. (Smithson, Collected Writings: 72)
23In other words, while still taking an implicit stand against Fried, Smithson steps radically away from the optimistic possibilities that “prime objects” entailed. These monuments structure nothing, open nothing up. On the contrary, they signal blocked alleyways of time: “Passaic seems full of ‘holes’ compared to New York City, which seems tightly packed and solid, and those holes in a sense are the monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” (Ibid.)
24If a monument is meant for celebration and remembrance, Smithson wants to celebrate the shapeless fringes of history—“Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?” (74), he asks. The question is at the same time ironic and very serious. Plain, pedestrian, un-heroic duration wins over any heroic moment which belongs, according to the artist, to fictitious modernist history.
The last monument was a sand box or a model desert. Under the dead light of the Passaic afternoon the desert became a map of infinite disintegration and forgetfulness. This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleakly glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans—no longer were there green forests and high mountains—all pulverized into dust. Each grain of sand was a dead metaphor that equaled timelessness. (74)
25In this entropic context, the so-called monuments, instead of legitimizing, reassessing or re-founding identity, cast a ghastly doubt on it. No collectivity is constructed; none emerges from this anti-monumental anonymity. Even the artist is alienated from himself: “If the work of art is not a monument for the ages, it cannot bear the name of its maker into the future, assuring the vicarious immortality that art has so often promised. […] it would seem to entail an abandonment of the heroic persona of the individual artist.” (Shapiro 192)
26This is all the more pertinent as, in this work, Smithson used what could be described as “found sculpture.” In a fragmentary text related to Passaic, he stated his own doubts:
Why should any artist be concerned with the monuments of Passaic? Should one feel sad or glad about such a visit? What value […] is behind that ‘unstressed’ landscape? Is there some kind of secret motive for going to such a place? Is the artist who goes there a debased romantic, or an astoundingly brilliant artist pretending to be a debased romantic? […] Who am I to propose such questions?15
27This road-trip, which was far from being Smithson’s first one, differs in that it is one the first that elicited such a complex combination of writing and photo-works. The map construction is also revealing, and the reason for this new formal proposition is to be found in Robert Smithson’s position as artist-consultant for T.A.M.S. On July 1, 1966, Smithson began his six-month contract as “artist-consultant” to Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton, Engineers & Architects, one of the firms in charge of the initial planning and design of the new Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport. Smithson was expected to be available for meetings with the staff and field trips to the site. His contract was renewed on Jan 1, 1967, for another term (see Linder 188-199). According to Mark Linder, this experience led Smithson to refine—if not redefine—his concerns with both architecture and entropy, as is already clear in the “Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” In a letter quoted by Eva Schmidt, Smithson himself acknowledged that his theoretical breakthrough, the Site/Non Site theory, was closely linked to his experience at Dallas Fort Worth and his involvement in the design of the terminal building:
I was interested in capturing the sense of expanse and remoteness outside of the room space… The nonsites came as a result of my thinking about putting large-scale earthworks out on the edge of the airfield, and then I thought, how can I transmit that into the center? The terminal was there, yet there was no evidence of these things out there. (Linder: 192)
28The Nonsites were produced in 1968. Each Nonsite represents a remote, fringe area, and consists of samples and documents such as photographs or maps. According to Linder’s definition, “In Nonsites, space in not ‘represented’ visually through pictorial illusion; rather, it is a matter of linguistic and formal structures, or, more provocatively, a structure of linguistic and formal matter” (Linder: 193-194)
29Because the work of art is neither on site nor in the gallery, because it is neither pure object or pure verb, but rather a combination of both, it exists only in what Robert Smithson called the unending “back-and-forth thing.”16 Meaning is thus dispersed: its strength lies precisely in this tension. Works functioning according to the Site/Nonsite dialectic inevitably deal with dematerialization. There seems to be little room left for monuments. In his work, he focuses more on mirror stops and displacements, as for instance in the Mirror Trail set in Ithaca, New York, in 1969. In other words, in a few years, the minimalist-inspired monument has suffered the debasement of irony and mock-heroism in Passaic, and the six sides of the blank cube featured in Proposal for a Monument at the Red Sea seems to have been blown away into its six flat sides, dispersed along the 6 Stops at a Section (1968).
30And yet, Smithson starts producing the undeniably monumental site-specific sculptures known as Earthworks: Spiral Hill (Emmen, The Netherlands, summer 1971), with its 75 ft. diameter base is Smithson’s ironic take on Babel. Broken Circle, a 140 ft. diameter earthwork (Emmen, The Netherlands, summer 1971), is another example of the gigantism of Smithson’s pieces. Of course, he most emblematic Earthwork is the Spiral Jetty (Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970). This Earthwork is 1,500 ft. long and more than 3,000 tons heavy: it is undeniably monumental—but is it a monument?
31It can hardly be seen—its scale itself makes it invisible onsite; you cannot face it, and it even evades verticality, which is perhaps the most consistent formal feature of monuments. It partakes of the Site/Nonsite dialectic as it exists through pictures and a film: like a Nonsite, it is at the same time here and there, on site and on gallery walls. It is a “prime object”, certainly: its meaning resists any easy reduction to historical commemoration.
32Although it strangely endures, it has no pretense whatsoever at duration, and was drowned in by the lake in the 1970s before it re-emerged in 1999. From Sir Thomas Browne, to whom George Kubler alludes, we know that hopes for permanence are illusory: “But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration—to hold long subsistence, seems but a scape in oblivion.”17
33Best then commit remembrance to the immaterial verbal monuments or to what critic Ann Reynolds, on her way back from a disconcerting trip to the Spiral Jetty, called “a narrative of one’s own”: “One is forced to invent a story of one’s encounter, to create a fictional space for this experience to inhabit, and a way of speaking and operating in relationship to it” (Reynolds: 73-74).
34Yet, in the light of the meanings previously bestowed by Smithson on monuments, I am tempted to say that Spiral Jetty is one. A monument to disorientation, an elusive 3,000 ton monument to dematerialization. A monument to entropy, of course, which is made visible through the ebb and flow that continually wears at the structure. And in the end, as a Nonsite blown to the scale of an Earthwork, a monument to its own elusiveness—an elusive monument to what Smithson might have called the impure syntax of art, that always seems on the verge of dissolving in the salted waters, and in our minds: in Smithson’s words, a manifestation that purports not to be there. (Schmidt: 204)
Notes de bas de page
1 Robert Smithson, “The Iconography of Desolation”, in Collected Writings, p. 322.
2 Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments”, in Collected Writings, p. 12.
3 Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd”, in in Collected Writings, p. 5.
4 Robert Smithson, “A Short Description of Two Mirrored Crystal Structures”, in Collected Writings, p. 328: “Both structures have symmetric frameworks, these frameworks are on top of the faceted mirrored surfaces, rather than hidden behind the surfaces […] Each framework supports the reflections of a concatenated interior. The interior structure of the room surrounding the work is instantaneously undermined. The surfaces seem thrown back into the wall. “Space’is permuted into a multiplicity of directions.”
5 Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments”, in Collected Writings, p. 10 (my italics).
6 “In his 1981 publication on Smithson’s sculptural works, Hobbs […] connected the ‘rhombohedral diagram’ (the polygonal structure) to Smithson’s crystalline sculptures of the same year, Plunge and the Alogons, and suggested its geometry was an ‘absurd and monstrous monument to logic” (Sobieszek: 144). See also Robert Hobbs, “The Works”.
7 Robert Smithson, “The Artist as Site-Seer”, in Collected Writings, p. 340.
8 See Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory.
9 “Fragments of an interview with P. A. Norvell,” 1969, in Collected Writings, p. 194.
10 The parallel between Johnson’s proposal and Poe’s short story is not as arbitrary as it appears: it is precisely the figure of the tower which links them, as the House of Usher was associated with various representations of ruined buildings, including towers, such as the ones represented in Thomas Cole’s paintings for instance. See Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in 19th century America.
11 “What is a Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson”, 1967, Jack Flam, op. cit., pp. 43-51.
12 Robert Smithson, What is a Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson”, 1967, in Collected Writings, p. 45.
13 See Chaper 11 by Vincent Bucher.
14 “Gothic” building in the allegory had a faded look,” (Smithson, Collected Writings: 69).
15 Smithson further comments on the relationship between the “end of selfhood” and sites that “strike the kind of timeless chord” in “Fragments of an interview with P. A. Norvell,” op. cit., p. 194.
16 Eva Schmidt, “Four conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,” Complete Writings, p. 204.
17 Sir Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia: Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk, 1869, n.p.
Auteur
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Jakuta Alikavazovic
écrivaine
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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