Robert Smithson’s “Monuments of Passaic” 1967/1979
This essay is a retrospective Critical Studies essay from the writer’s time as an art student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Edited for Medium:*
Robert Smithson’s notion of ruins in reverse (“Monuments of Passaic”, 1967/1979) functions as a naming strategy that grants monumental status to its objects whilst simultaneously inverting conventional temporalities of the monumental.
‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’ documents everything Robert Smithson was able to accomplish over the course of one day: Saturday the 30th of September 1967. The artist talks of his bus journey from New York City to Passaic, New Jersey. He then embarks on a walk where he maps out his surrounding environments, identifying common and relatively dull objects and spaces as ‘monuments’. In his writing, Smithson combines his descriptions with excerpts from texts with which he interacts along his journey. He also includes photographs to make for visual context. This renders the text itself multi-layered and makes it come across as a very densely structured piece of work, so much so that it is thought of as an experimental piece of writing considered to be a work of art in itself. According to Smithson these everyday spaces, materials, scenes, and objects are for a time physically transformed into ‘monuments’ as a result of their exposure to the artist’s writing. They come to serve the opposite of the traditional typical monument, representing a dying communal space in service of the decline of the social, economic, and artistic.
Throughout the text, Smithson is consistently posing the question of what is and what defines the monumental. Smithson paints a very detailed and explicit picture of Passaic portraying a very realistic rendition of his experience. The artist also reflects the physical destruction and the disintegrated state of Passaic in his writing through his own deconstruction and disintegration of what his eyes see in order to convey a visual context to the reader. He takes apart each scene and explains it carefully and in great detail, he refers to started projects which were meant to be finished but in the process of completing these mid-way structures have themselves become ruins before being fully recognized. They become the opposite of the romantic ruin because the buildings did not fall into ruin after they were built but are rather rising into ruin before they are even completed.
According to Smithson, these new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future rather than the traditional monument whose purpose was to help us remember meaning from the past. The new monuments are hence not built for the ages but rather built against the ages.
Smithson then goes on to compare New Jersey to New York, suggesting that Passaic’s holes are in a sense monumental because they define without trying, the memory traces of a set of “abandoned futures”. It’s as if Passaic as a place has been given up on. Smithson makes clear his belief that the future of Passaic has been lost somewhere in the piles of the non-documented past, he moves on to say that time turns symbolistic figures of speech into actual things and stores them up in rooms, places, or suburb backgrounds.
Finally, Smithson speaks of a sandbox or as he calls it a ‘modeled desert’. He asks the reader to imagine the sandbox divided into two portions of sand, one black, and one white. He is about to perform an experiment to prove to the reader the irreversibility of eternity and the therefore inevitable entropic cycles that will follow. We are asked to visualize a child running circles in an anti-clockwise motion within the sandbox until the sand has mixed. He then suggests that we have the child run anti-clockwise to restore the previous order, therefore go back to a sandbox split in black and white sand. However, we all know that this is illogical, and he knows it too. His alternative to this “problem” is to record the process of the child running clockwise and then playing the tape in reverse, however, this process also has its inevitable end because the tape is made out of matter, which will deteriorate throughout the course of time, become antiquated technology or simply be lost. These statements suggest that a temporary solution or escape from the entropic reality is possible, but these would only prove to be illusions of control over eternity.
Although perhaps differently, in studying other artists which were contemporary to Smithson I have been able to notice a reflected want and likeness to be in control and to escape from the inevitable in similar ways to what Smithson describes as he talks about the sandbox in “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic”. However, these artists which include the likes of Robert Morris and Dan Flavin approach the reality of inevitable entropy differently.
Robert Morris’s work is well known for its attempts to restore the idea of immortality by embracing its empty qualities. A prime example of a Robert Morris piece that personifies this idea is the “bra out of lead” which like the majority of his work very clearly conveys this aura of great immobility. These are works that seek no natural function, but simply long to exist between the constructs of mind and matter while being disconnected from both and speaking for neither. Morris’s work is characteristic of taking bland and monotonous elements and evolving them into a monumental representation of the “idea”.
A lack of movement features very heavily in Morris’s work in a variety of ways including action delay, insufficient energy, an all-around slowness, and a general annulment of movement. In his wall structures, Morris does not shy away from paying homage to Duchamp, here he reproduces the ready-made and makes plenty of references including to Bergson’s idea of “creative evolution” by the concept of the “ready-made categories”2. These “ready-made” structures are unquestionably outside of Bergson’s creative evolution concept and therefore according to Bergson’s writings, Morris and Duchamp would be considered uncreative. However, by the same argument, one could also say they are decorating that which is real. In his own words, Morris claims that his artistic career has been all about making investigations into the real.
“I never set out to prove or demonstrate so much as to investigate. And I never set out to affirm so much as to negate.” — Robert Morris
Apart from introducing a new notion of the abstract, Robert Morris’s minimalist work sets up a new relationship between the audience and the artwork because it lacks the complexity of the traditional composition emoting a radical simplicity. Due to this lack of complex composition, the audience would turn its focus toward the object’s relationship to its environment and this has an effect on how the individual perceptually experiences the space. This would make way for the emergence of new kinds of artistic expression and bring a change in a direction whereby environmental and performance pieces would take center stage over art expressed as objects. These new works by Morris would take relationships and relate them to the space, light, and the audience’s vision. The object would now become simply one of the elements in the fresh aesthetic of the work. By his insistence on the inclusion of the audience and their state, Morris would come into contact with key aspects which would a few years later inform the term Postmodernism.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Robert Morris pushed the boundaries of minimalism and sculpture in a selection of different ways. During this time, he produced repeated forms, and perceptually confusing works and also built labyrinth-shaped works through which he began to explore different ways of going through the process of space activation.
Unlike the sandbox case study mentioned in Smithson’s ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’ which exclusively fights and seeks an escape or solution from the entropic reality, Morris’s work and its stance towards this truth seem to be to adopt and embrace that which has not changed, that which remains the same, and that which some may call the real. Through this acceptance, Morris is knowingly activating and channeling a notion of immortality through his work.
This lack of complexity has also been reflected in other crafts including architecture. Structures such as the Union Carbide Building in New York whose architectural style lacks “value of qualities” and is relatively undistinguished from other buildings are good examples of minimalistic architecture. The artistic execution of these architectural pieces gives the audience a clear understanding of the physical reality with a clear-cut distinction between the purist and idealistic forms.
When one looks at the history of the monumental idea a large list of documented works that exhibit triumph and pride in regard and in service to significant military victories is accessed. This list would include a range of objects and structures, such as pyramids and freestanding arches.
There is however another class of monumental works that have been around for longer and which require greater attention if one intends to fully understand. These are works that have surpassed their object status and have become something else. This class of works is initiated with the cave art of thousands of years ago, later evolving into temples, fortresses, and palaces, often taking their foundational form from the labyrinth enclosure.
As this class of works continued to evolve it pushed for the construction of more complex interiors that more clearly represent the labyrinthine foundation and pushed further away from the objecthood of the traditional monument. Only through a bird’s eye view would it be possible to see this class of monuments as objects, therefore to encompass them as a whole.
The Great Wall of China is an example of such a monumental structure that pushes beyond the human vision’s capability to perceive a view in its entirety. These structures of great physical scale render the audience in awe, and this has always been and will be their primary intention. These spaces manifest power and define status. Expressed in the sublime they induce submission, they ask the audience to look up and be aware of their insignificance within the larger scale of the space, a reflection of authority is represented by these monuments.
Yet being in the presence of these intimidating structures is not enough for domination, because one still remains independent, autonomous, and in the extension of the object. This safe space is surrendered once the audience is enclosed within the structure, hence entering the labyrinth.
By definition the labyrinth blinds the navigator, it is by form built to get lost, rendering one’s sense of direction helpless. It also exhibits submissive characteristics whereby the body must submit to being led and it must follow without thinking.
When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly — Robert Morris
In reading segments of “A Rhetoric of Movement” the text explores how experiencing the urban capitalist society may help define and ignite the development of new artistic techniques, forms, and sensibilities. Artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Smithson refused to consider geographic, domestic, and suburban environments as irrelevant in regard to general artistic craft. They believed that capitalist-related characteristics such as repetition and excess were representative of current social and aesthetic ways of thought and constraints. They strove towards investigating the developments of surrounding spaces as a result of individual actors resisting being controlled by the strategies of a hierarchical society. To this group of artists, it seemed back then that there had been a reality that had as of yet been neither explored nor investigated in the artistic community.
Dan Flavin’s “Monument 7 for V. Tatlin” places the future and the past into the present by presenting an entirely original notion of the structure of matter which is made of time itself. Ultimately this piece of work with all of its fluorescent lights does not encourage any kind of lengthy viewing because there is really nothing to see. The gallery space is transformed into time at the gallery. In much the same way time is stopped inside the moving picture house providing the viewer with an entropic condition because the experience has an inevitable end, and this is subconsciously agreed by everyone who enters the space. To spend time here is to effectively steal time from someone’s life.
In studying Robert Smithson’s, Robert Morris’s, and Dan Flavin’s work and making potential comparisons of their craft and their ways of thinking, it would seem as though all three artists were very interested in the “monumental idea” yet their ideas of what constitutes the monument and their “solutions” in the face of an entropic eternity come across as very subjective to the artist themselves. Each of the artists comes up with their solutions to this “problem” which are drastically different from one another and this is reflective of their different ways of thought. They have all posed questions and employed individual investigations and they have acted on these in different ways.
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References
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— — — . Robert Smithson — The Collected Writings — Some Void Thoughts on Museums 1967. University of California Press, 1996.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces,” n.d.
Gaillard, Cyprien. Cities of Gold and Mirrrors. 2009.
Govan, Michael, Tiffany Bell, and Brydon Smith. Dan Flavin: A Retrospective. Yale University Press,2004.
Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time — An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Cornell University Press Ithaca and London, 2006.
Johnson, Ken. “Robert Morris, 87, Dies; Founding Minimalist Sculptor With Manifold Passions.” The New York Times, November 29, 2018.
Land Art: Celebrating the Work of Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter De Maria. NOWNESS, n.d. https://www.youtube.com/watchv=FVRgwEQX3zs.
Maria, Walter de. The Lighting Field. n.d.
Morris, Robert. “The Labyrinth and the Urinal.” University of Chicago Press, 2009. Muir, Peter. “Robert Smithson — A Rhetoric of Movement.” Word & Image, n.d. “Robert Morris, Pioneering Minimalist Sculptor Dies Aged 87.” The Guardian, n.d. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/30/robert-morris-pioneering-minimalist-sculptor-dies-aged-87.
Smithson, Robert. “Robert Smithson — A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” n.d. — — — . Spiral Jetty. n.d.
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