Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics

1. Boring Location: From Place to Site in Williams and Smithson

Boring Location 15 1 Boring Location From Place to Site in Williams and Smithson The “boring,” like other “earth works,” is becoming more and more important to artists. Pavements, holes, trenches, mounds, heaps, paths, ditches, roads, terraces, etc. all have an esthetic potential. —Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” in Robert Smithson North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water North by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Northeast by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water East by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water East by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Southeast by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Southeast by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water South by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water South by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Southwest by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Southwest by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water West by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water West by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Northwest by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water Northwest by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water North by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water —Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” Robert Smithson I My sec­ ond epigraph is Smithson’s description, from the center of his The Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, of the context or site 16 chapter 1 of his environmental sculpture. Perhaps the most famous essays and artwork associated with the site-­ specific art that had been emerging since the mid-­ 1960s, Smithson panoramic and numbingly identical catalogue self-­ consciously echoes a passage from book 3 of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson , in which Williams details the results of a soil sample in Paterson, dug to a depth of 2,100 feet.1 Also set off from the page’s left margin and organized as a kind of vertical catalog of geology become poetry, Williams’s list, however, seems structured around variety: 65 feet. . . Red sandstone, fine 110 feet. . . Red sandstone, coarse 182 feet. . . Red sandstone, and a little shale 400 feet. . . Red sandstone, shaly 404 feet. . . Shale 430 feet. . . Red sandstone, fine grained 540 feet. . . Sandy shale, soft 565 feet. . . Soft shale 585 feet. . . Soft shale 600 feet. . . Hard sandstone 605 feet. . . Soft shale 609 feet. . . Soft shale 1,170 feet. . . Selenite, 2 x 1 x 1∕₁₆ in. 1,180 feet. . . Fine quicksand, reddish 1,180 feet. . . Pyrites 1,370 feet. . . Sand rock, under quicksand 1,400 feet. . . Dark red sandstone 1,400 feet. . . Light red sandstone 1,415 feet. . . Dark red sandstone 1,415 feet. . . Light red sandstone 1,415 feet. . . Fragments of red sandstone 1,540 feet. . . Red sandstone, and a pebble of kaolin 1,700 feet. . . Light red sandstone 1,830 feet. . . Light red sandstone 1,830 feet. . . Light red sandstone 1,830 feet. . . Light red stone 2,000 feet. . . Red shale 2,020 feet. . . Light red sandstone 2,050 feet. . . 2,100 feet. . . Shaly sandstone2 Boring Location 17 Where Williams mines, Smithson strip-­ mines. Where Williams uncovers buried difference, Smithson covers exposed sameness. Where Williams taps into energy, Smithson trips into entropy. And yet Smithson is by no means simply parodying Williams, whose geological sample seems to operate at a number of levels, or depths, within the context of Paterson. In his essay “The Virtue of History,” Williams writes: “Let us dig and we shall see what is turned up—and name it if we can.”3 If the entire poem of Paterson is a vertical mining of the city’s history, this passage might stand as the most literal enactment of that process—one in which a wide range of identity positions and models of contact between races and classes within Ameri­ can history gets mobilized as a critique of the narrower, Puritan-­based version of Ameri­ can identity put forward by America’s most influential nineteenth-­ century historians. Williams put the problem programmatically in The Embodiment of Knowledge: “The effect of education is surely to keep us, as Ameri­ cans, from each other; the history we are taught is particularly blank—or rather the history we are not taught is terrifying when one looks back at the years that have been spent solely to keep us ignorant. But the chief effect of it all is to have allowed time to pass during our most impressionable years without coming...