SMITHSON’S CRUDITY
Review of a new edition of Robert Smithson’s Collected Writings
Published in Art & Text, no. 65, February-April 1997
After Robert Smithson died, Carl Andre was quoted as saying that Smithson’s death would change the whole direction of contemporary art — that Smithson had been both the heart and mind behind a certain critical direction in contemporary art that, without him, would disappear. A couple years ago, I met Carl Andre and asked him, in light of his earlier remark, how he thought Smithson would feel about events in culture and society that had transpired since his death. “Grumpy,” was Andre’s reply.
Grumpiness was also my reaction to the publication of this new version of Smithson’s collected writings. In and of itself, there is nothing terribly wrong with this conscientiously-executed volume. But it was put together to replace the long out-of-print The Writings of Robert Smithson, published in 1979 and perfectly designed by Sol LeWitt, which was one of the few books on contemporary art that in every way exuded excitement, passion, and purpose.
What makes me grumpy is how such an important volume could go out of print. After all, it didn’t contain lavish (or for that matter any) color plates necessitating huge reprinting costs. It was a simple oversize paperback whose economy of means only served to enhance its elegance. While I have no idea of the specific course of events that led to the demise of the original version, I cannot help but suspect that it is tied to and symptomatic of the ominous changes that have generally affected publishing in the last decade or so — particularly the monopolization of the industry by a small group of corporate players whose rationalizing strategies have made it more and more difficult to publish and distribute anything that does not conform to the monopolists’ version of market law. This is a striking reversal of the traditional idea of censorship in which content was regulated. Today content is totally relegated to the realm of laissez-faire as long as the material adheres to certain forms required for production and distribution.
It is good to know that readers and particularly artists (for whom Smithson’s writing have had an almost talismanic value) can again get hold of Smithson’s work. However, it is also puzzling that it was necessary to modify LeWitt’s original exquisite design. The new book is smaller and more cramped and lacks the harmony between text and design that helped make Smithson’s writing accessible to a whole generation of artists.
The impact of Smithson’s thoughts on me has been so great and so global that, ironically, it is difficult for me to distill an idea of that impact in the form of writing. Most importantly, Smithson’s work was in the early ’70s my initial exposure to what would come to be known as post-modern thought. In many instances, Smithson’s essays introduced themes that have become part of the post-structuralist dialogue at the same time or even before they appeared in the work of the French critical writers who are more widely credited with initially articulating these concepts.
In his writings of the late ’60s, Smithson had already postulated the notion of the simultaneous disappearance and expansion of the center — and the accompanying discrediting of Eurocentric thought. He had redefined nature as both an historically-constructed and defunct concept. He had fully expounded on the end of utopian thought — advocating a future that is both dystropic and by nature obsolete. He had embraced the idea of anti-idealist entropy, seeking to supersede humanistic Enlightenment concepts of history with an anti-organic post-humanist metahistory based on geological time and crystalline, rather than organic, structures. Further, Smithson had attempted to break down traditional hierarchies and categories in cultural production by embracing the applied arts as equal in importance to the fine arts (in his essays on Olmstead and art deco) and continually introducing ephemeral, disregarded elements into his own imaginative lexicon.
There is a tendency today to believe that changes in the critical paradigm originate in the mind of the academically-trained critical theorist. The current retreat of the intellectual into the bureaucratic gulag of academia surely reinforces this view. University-affiliated intellectuals are only too happy to believe that Derrida invented deconstruction and the de-centered universe or that Deleuze originated the idea of a schizophrenic present.
However, in fact, the critical writer is usually the person who synthesizes the paradigmatic ideas of his or her time into a particular written form. It is the culture itself that produces theory through the collective manifestations of marginal, working-class, and mass-media culture as well as the expressions of both experimentalist and popular artists. It is the role of the critical writer to “read” this cultural production.
Smithson exemplifies this role of the critical writer. In Smithson’s writing, we can tangibly sense the various currents of his era blending into theoretical constructs. From literature alone, he amalgamated material from a staggering range of sources. Jack Flam, the new collection’s editor, focuses mostly on Borges’ influence in his introductory essay; but Smithson’s texts are brimming with references and borrowings from authors as diverse as J.G. Ballard, T.S. Elliot, Burroughs and Ginsberg, the nineteenth-century travel-writer John Stevens, and Lewis Carroll.
On a wider field, Smithson also incorporated an almost improbable array of popular sources. He was interested in pre-Columbian culture, science-fiction movies, nudist magazines, geology, the New Jersey landscape, Frederick Law Olmstead, and Jean-Luc Godard. He integrated all these sources not only with his own work, but with that of the emerging artists of his generation that he championed. In his encyclopedic interests, Smithson’s achievement parallels the earlier work of Walter Benjamin whom Hannah Arendt once praised for his “wide-eyed presentation of actualities.”
The final issue raised by Smithson’s oeuvre, also paralleled in Benjamin, is Smithson’s use of what Benjamin called “crude thinking.” There is also a tendency in critical circles today to believe that critical thinking must be precisely resolved, that it must be consistent and coherent, and that it must conform to specific analytic models. Along with its brilliance, one of the strengths of Smithson’s theoretical work is its free-flowing inconsistency and his insistence on synthesizing from contradictory theoretical models. Interestingly enough, during his lifetime, Benjamin (now the darling of critical correctness) was also seen by his contemporaries as a poor dialectician. In response, he wrote the following defense of crude thinking that could also apply to Smithson:
There are many people whose idea of a dialectician is a lover of subtleties... Crude thoughts, on the contrary, should be part and parcel of dialectical thinking, because they are nothing but the referral of theory to practice... a thought must be crude to come into its own action.
I cannot help but ask myself if a figure as unruly and uncategorizable as Smithson could emerge in our current conservative cultural climate. Would he or she be trashed by academia for lack of a coherent methodology and for sloppy use of source material? Would any magazine today publish “The Domain of the Great Bear” or “The X-Factor in Art” that actually appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1966?
One must keep in mind that Smithson was as much created by the cultural climate of the ’60s as he was instrumental in creating it. In a development similar to Warhol, Smithson went from being in the ’50s a maudlin practitioner of an expressionist, symbolist style in both his writing and art production to the revolutionary artist and writer of the ’60s. The collective spirit of the times cannot be discounted. Ultimately these essays remind me that all of us, and not just the future Smithsons, better get to work if things are going to liven up.