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  • Nature, Like a Person, Is Not One-SidedRobert Smithson in Search of the Picturesque in England, Wales, and Central Park
  • Joy Sleeman (bio)

In late summer 1969 American artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson visited England and Wales. The trip was occasioned by Smithson’s inclusion in an exhibition at London’s ICA. They took the opportunity to make an odyssey in search of their own roots (both had English forebears), to make art works, and to go in search of the picturesque. The picturesque of Uvedale Price and William Gilpin in particular.

“It was in England that the roots of that kind of thinking began… I always think of Gilpin. So I think that we were going back very much, in terms of our roots, our ancestral roots, and also finding out how the English treated their landscape, how the natural—having it fit into the existing landscape—transformed the formal garden.”1

The experience of the picturesque in Britain—actualised in real places rather than merely in ideas—captivated Smithson and evolved into what became his last published essay, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape” (Artforum, February 1973) which took the form of an actual picturesque tour of Olmsted’s metropolitan masterwork, Central Park, and [End Page 211] an allegorical tour of contemporary ecological thinking.2

The impact of their trip resonated in both artists’ subsequent work, and although Smithson died before he had time to return to the British work (he died in a plane crash in Texas in 1973), Holt felt certain that he would have had he lived: “Yes, I think you know, if he had lived, the Central Park [article] and all that was leading him back to England. I think that he would have gone back to England again.”3

What did Smithson see of relevance to his contemporary situation in the picturesque? And what might still be relevant today?

I hoped to find more answers to these questions when I continued my conversation with Holt, begun when she visited England in 2013. We planned to do this in New York around the time of the opening of an exhibition of Smithson’s work at the Montclair Art Museum on February 22nd, 2014. Sadly, Nancy died on 8 February 2014 and the conversation never took place, but I decided to make my trip to New York.

What follows is an account of my visit to Central Park in search of Smith-son’s ideas of the picturesque some forty years on. In part my own picturesque tour, it is also a tribute to the memory and inspiration of Nancy Holt who prompted my encounter with the park.

Central Park Frozen and the advancing/retreating ice cap

Smithson began his essay on Olmsted asking his readers to imagine themselves in Central Park one million years ago, standing atop a vast glacier that was slowly advancing south, leaving great masses of rock debris in its wake.

On February 23, 2014, when I took a walk through Central Park, the park was filled with an endless stream of joggers enjoying paths newly cleared of snow after several weeks of near permafrost. The thick mantle of snow that had covered the city was slowly retreating, leaving great masses of urban detritus in its wake. “It’ll take months for all this shit to melt,” I overheard a young man say. I assumed by ‘shit’ he meant ‘snow.’ It seemed unbelievable that he referred to this frozen coating as ‘shit,’ when in fact this ‘shit’ had temporarily covered and transformed heaps of real shit beneath a pristine white mantle.

In the park, as on the streets, a natural process of frozen precipitation had (temporarily) converted deformity into picturesqueness. [End Page 212]


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The Ramble.

Photo by the author.

The Ramble: dogs in shoes

In Smithson’s time, Olmsted’s Ramble—a “place to wander aimlessly and idly”—had “grown up into an urban jungle, [where] lurking in its thickets are ‘hoods, hobos, hustlers, homosexuals,’ and other estranged creatures of the city (see John Rechy, The City of Night).” Today the Ramble is “an ecosystem...

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