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6. Smithson’s “Judd” : Androids in the Expanded Field
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150 chapter 6 6 Smithson’s “Judd” Androids in the Expanded Field When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble and fall like The House of Usher, so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded. Deliverance from the confines of the studio frees the artist to a degree from the snares of craft and the bondage of creativity. Such a condition exists without any appeal to “nature.” Sadism is the end product of nature, when it is based on the biomorphic order of rational creation. —RobertSmithson,“ASedimentationoftheMind: EarthProjects” in Robert Smithson [after picturesque aesthetics] A tree . . . struck by lightning was something other than merely beautiful or sublime—it was “picturesque.” This word in its own way has been struck by lightning over the centuries . Words, like trees, can be suddenly deformed or wrecked, but such deformation or wreckage cannot be dismissed by timid academics. —Robert Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectical Landscape” in Robert Smithson I For many artists in Smithson’s generation, site- specific art that took place in the landscape and explored the sculptural qualities of nonartistic materials (like rocks, mud, ice, and salt crystals) was celebrated because it denaturalized the studio as the inevitable site of artistic production, collapsing it like the House of Usher. But most of these artists (and many of their later critics) shared neither Smithson’s distrust of rheotrics of naturalism nor his sense of the driving force of this movement as the “fissures between mind and matter.” And it is precisely this disagreement about how, when we look at site- specific art, we understand the relation between things and language , between empirical sites and conceptual categories, between artistic practices and art- his tori cal frames or contexts, that makes site- specificity, too, a term that has been “struck by lightning” repeatedly since the 1960s— Smithson’s “Judd” 151 since Smithson, that is, formulated many of its most significant features in his practice and theorization. In this chapter, I want to return to Smithson in order to excavate the richness (and strangeness) of his early articulations of site-specificity so that these models can be seen in relation both to the poetics of place that preceded them and to the history of site- specificity in art that followed—after, that is, a series of deforming lightning strikes. Looking in depth at a single case study—the Smithson/Judd relationship, both in Smithson’s powerful and generative reading of Judd, and in Judd’s minimalist outpost in Marfa, Texas—will allow me to demonstrate that, from the beginning, the legibility of site- specific art (that is, its “specificity” to its asserted context) depends both on immediate rhe tori cal and on larger historiographic framing.1 Having considered models of the poet as place-based ethnographer and historian in the New American poetics of Williams, Olson, Snyder, Rothenberg , Baraka, Ginsberg, Creeley, Kyger, Sanders, and others, we have now covered much of the his tori cal distance between Smithson and Williams. But if a new emphasis on enactment transformed the poetics of place between the Williams and Olson models and those of the poets of the 1960s, what did not change—at least for Smithson—was the attention to mediation that he encountered in Paterson, the interest in “fissures between mind and matter,” in the “infinity of gaps” that open up for the ex peri men tal ethnographer , the place- based poet or artist. It was precisely this attention that separated Smithson from many of the artists associated with Earthworks. Williams had recommended that the writer who was “blocked” by such fissures or gaps should “make a song out of that: concretely” (P, 62). Smithson explored precisely such blockages in the work he made, not out of concrete , but out of asphalt, glue, broken glass, and huge boulders. The crashing of boulders from the loader of a dump truck in the fantastic film sequence of The Spiral Jetty might be imagined as yet another return to the primal sound—the origi nal blockage of the relation between matter and sound— of Paterson Falls.2 When Smithson began to explore the expanded field of New Jersey, then, and turned to Williams as a guide, the artist as ethnographer model that Smithson developed followed in the wake of the poet as ethnographer model that Olson had been articulating, also in criti cal dialogue with Williams , since about 1950.3 Just as Smithson was getting under way...