Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics

7. Smithson’s Prose: The Grounds of Genre

192 chapter 7 7 Smithson’s Prose The Grounds of Genre brang the thing out, the Monogene the origi­ nal unit survives in the salt —Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems In the darkness the white-­ roofed houses of the mining town gleamed like the funerary temples of a necropolis. Their cornices were ornamented with countless spires and gargoyles, linked together across the roads by the expanding tracery. A frozen wind moved through the deserted streets, waist-­ high forests of fossil spurs, the abandoned cars embedded within them like armoured saurians on an ancient ocean floor. —J. G. Ballard, The Crystal World Old piers were left high and dry. The mere sight of the trapped fragments of junk and waste transported one into a world of modern prehistory . The products of a Devonian industry, the remains of a Silurian technology, all the machines of the Upper Carboniferous Period were lost in those expansive deposits of sand and mud. Two dilapidated shacks looked over a tired group of oil rigs. . . . Pumps coated with black stickiness rusted in the corrosive salt air. . . . A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent structures. The site gave evidence of a succession of man-­ made sys­ tems mired in abandoned hopes. —Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Robert Smithson Like geological writing and travel narrative, science fiction is one of the elemental materials of Robert Smithson’s prose. If all of these materials (and Smithson’s Prose 193 others) are transformed and retrofitted, their tonal and epistemological traces are nonetheless fundamental to our experience of Smithson’s heterogeneous writing. The derelict space, for instance, that generates Smithson’s 1970 outdoor sculpture, Spiral Jetty, owes its special illegibility in large part to recent science fiction’s imagination of environmental ruins. Likewise, the derelict time evoked by this space. Each set of “abandoned hopes,” each failed attempt to exact a profitable future from the lake, is treated as one of the site’s geological layers. Technological ruins in the landscape thus seem for Smithson to open potholes in the present, projecting us at once toward wildly unrealized futures and toward radically inaccessible pasts—human aspirations as discrepant deposits.1 Time as universal measure thus gets replaced by time as particular claim. In “The Spiral Jetty” essay (and in other essays, too), Smithson makes a similar suggestion about size, which he seeks to drive out of existence by endless claims of scale. “Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar sys­ tem. Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain” (RS, 147). Considering these passages, one could argue for a basic homology in Smithson’s thought: temporal claim is to time as scale is to size. In both cases, relative terms destabilize the naturalistic frames that would measure and bind them. And this dual gesture is part of why we remember Smithson now. His model of the temporal claim could be used not only to think culturally and criti­ cally about the time (and ultimately the history) of oil wells or suburban developments —but also art his­ tori­ cally to disrupt progressive narratives of the avant-­ garde. His model of scale could similarly be used not merely to activate or defamiliarize objects or surfaces within a gallery space but instead to question the gallery or museum space as the natural frame or container— to put nonsites into dialogue with sites and vice versa. While extrapolating such models of time and space from his writing may be indispensable in navigating Smithson’s work, there remains a sense in these passages that some other processes are operating in the prose itself, that its strange tonalities, its generic quotations, its fascination with materiality all function as a complex form of embodiment, of enactment. Smithson was especially adept at proposing the radically unconventional terms of such enactments in the writings of his peers. In his 1968 essay “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” he suggests, for instance, that “[Carl] 194 chapter 7 Andre’s writings bury the mind under rigorous incantatory arrangements” and crush thought “into a rubble of...