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Robert Smithson's Toxic Tour of Passaic, New Jersey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2014

ANDREW MENARD
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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.

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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 

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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.

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