Sites of time: Organic and geologic time in the art of Robert Smithson and Roxy Paine

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 14, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 537-561

  Housefield, James ^a  

^a TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Contemporary art; Geologic time; Landscape representation; Modern art; Philosophy of time; Post studio art; Robert Smithson; Roxy Paine; Spiral Jetty

Indexed keywords

ART; GEOLOGICAL TIME; PHILOSOPHY; CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK;

EID: 38749105496     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474007082293     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: the collected wrifings (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996), p. 342.
2. George Kubler, 'Style and the representation of historical time', Aspen 5/6 (Fall-Winter 1967), item 3 (not paginated), http:// www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#kubler. Accessed 17 December 2006.
3. João Ribas, 'The ai interview: Roxy Paine', ArtInfo (undated, but January 2006), http://www.artinfo.com/News/Article. aspx?a=9448&c=253. Accessed 17 December 2006.
4. 'Roxy Paine: New Work' appeared at the James Cohan Gallery 14 January-25 February 2006.
5. During the closing months of 1999, a collective cultural obsession with time focused its energies in anticipation of millennia] calamity. As dire predictions of Y2K catastrophes echoed across the globe, many exhibits focused on time as a subject in art. Tempus fugit, the Nelson-Atkins Museum's catalogue of an exhibit of the same name, opens with a list of ten such exhibits that ushered in the new millennium internationally. Jan Schall, ed., Tempus fugit, time flies (Kansas City, MO and Seattle, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and The University of Washington Press, 2000). Although some emphasized recent art amidst a wide historical and cultural range of objects, others focused entirely on contemporary artists' investigations of time. Such was the case with 'Ruins in reverse, time and progress in contemporary art parts I & II', an exhibition at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 1998-99;
6. see Reine Hauser, 'Timeline: ruins in reverse, time and progress in contemporary art', Afterimage 26 (1999).
7. For an introduction to land art, see the survey by Brian Wallis in Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Land and environmental art (London, Phaidon Press, 1998). In an interview, Paine underscored his interest in Smithson's art, emphasizing his 'thinking about entropy and decay.' Roxy Paine, personal communication, 22 May 2004.
8. See, for instance, the complex array of responses to human presence in the landscape that characterize the art of Andy Goldsworthy, one of many artists (including Smithson) referred to collectively as 'land artists'. Whereas Goldsworthy's photographs (of a sculpture made of leaves, for instance) may emphasize the light imprint of a human presence in the land, his larger sculptures refer to the parceling out of land during the enclosures of the English commons from the 12th through the l9th centuries. In an interview with Goldsworthy for an early issue of this journal, he referred to 'an aesthetics of the erratic' in his art, aligned with the erraticism of glacial boulders;
9. David Matless and George Revell, 'A solo ecology: the erratic art of Andy Goldsworthy', Ecumene 2 (1995), pp. 423-48; p. 436 cited.
10. Goldsworthy's photographic documentation of short-lived creations parallels Smithson's statement about the places he photographed in his Incidents of mirror-travel in the Yucatan (1969): 'If you visit the sites (a doubtful probability) you will find nothing but memory-traces';
11. Flam, Smithson: collected writinqs, p. 132.
12. See also the discussions of Smithson's 'ebb and flow' and 'entropic mobility' in Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys 'Time lapses: Robert Smithson's mobile landscapes', Cultural geographies 13 (2006), pp. 444-50.
13. George Kubler, The shape of time (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1962), p. 13.
14. Although icon, index, and symbol, central terms from semiotic theory, are now widely used, they stem from the writings of C.S. Peirce.
15. See, for instance, Charles Sanders Peirce, The essential Peirce, ed. by N. Houser and C. Kloesel, 2 vols, (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992-1998).
16. Although many others merit discussion for the greater complexity of their theorization of time, Kubler is relevant to this argument because of the recurrent references to Kubler's writings that punctuate Smithson's published and unpublished essays (see Flam, Smithson: collected writings). Pamela M. Lee posits that the artist saw Kubler's writing in terms of then-current 'central tenets of cybernetics in particular: the notion of feedback and the related concept of circular causal systems' (p. 243). Her comments on art and technology, though relevant to Smithson and Paine, support different lines of thought than those pursued in this essay. Lee chooses to position time as inspiring phobic behaviors, while recognizing that 'there is a fine line between a phobic obsession with time and an almost perverse fascination with its unfolding' (p. xiv). Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: on time in the art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2004).
17. Daniel B. Rowland, Mannerism: style and mood (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1964).
18. This is the point of departure for the temporal-crystalline analyses of 'The deposition of time', chapter 4 in Jennifer L. Roberts, Mirror-travels: Robert Smithson and history (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004), p. 39 cited.
19. Leo Marx, The machine in the garden: technology and the pastoral ideal in America (London, Oxford University Press, 1964). Other influential authors to plumb the temporality contained within the pastoral tradition include those who have commented on Poussin's painting Et in Arcadia Ego (The Arcadian Shepherds) (Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1637-38), most notably Erwin Panofsky and Louis Marin.
20. See Panofsky, 'Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the elegaic tradition', in Meaning in the visual arts (New York, Anchor, 1955), pp. 295-320;
21. and Marin, To destroy painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
22. A catalogue of Smithson's personal library appears as an appendix to Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: learning from New Jersey and elsewhere (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2003), pp. 297-345.
23. William Thomas, ed., Man's role in changing the face of the earth (2 vols) (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1956).
24. E.A. Gutkind, 'Our world from the air: conflict and adaptation', in Thomas, Man's role (vol. 1), pp. 1-44. Smithson's fascination with such synoptic views is well documented;
25. see, for instance, 'Aerial art (1969)', in Flam, Smithson: collected writings, pp. 116-18. In her analyses of Smithson and cartography, Ann Reynolds points to the artist's use of David Greenhood, Mapping (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964), also in his library, as a source on aerial vision;
26. see Reynolds, Learning from New Jersey, especially chapter 3.
27. Thomas, Man's role, pp. xxxiii and xxxviii. Smithson referred to himself as a 'geologic agent'; see below.
28. Flam, Smithson: collected writings, p. 161.
29. Thomas, Man's role, p. xxxiii
30. Stephen Jay Gould, Time's arrow, time's cyle (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 63.
31. David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the earth (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 49.
32. Gould, Time's arrow, time's cycle, p. 62.
33. Rebecca Solnit, River of shadows (New York, Viking Penguin, 2003), p. 13.
34. See Rebecca Bedell, The anatomy of nature (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001);
35. Elizabeth C. Childs, 'Time's profile: John Wesley Powell, art, and geology at the Grand Canyon', American art 10 (1996);
36. Timothy Mitchell, 'Frederic Church's The Icebergs: erratic boulders and time's slow changes', Smithsonian studies in American art 3 (1989);
37. Barbara Novak, Nature and culture (London, Oxford University Press, 1980).
38. Solnit, River of shadows, p. 13.
39. Flam, Smithson: collected writings, p. 87.
40. Ibid., 76. Originally published in Aspen 8 (Fall-Winter 1970), item 12 (not paginated), http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen8/ strata.html. Accessed 17 December 2006.
41. Elizabeth C. Childs, 'Robert Smithson and film', Arts magazine 56 (1981), pp. 74-5.
42. Melissa Sanford, 'The salt of the earth sculpture: debating intervention as nature does its work', The New York Times, 13 January 2004.
43. Flam, Smithson: collected writings, p. 157.
44. Ibid., p. 158. Smithson's interest in fictions of time travel, though beyond the scope of this essay, resonates with his simultaneous investigations of organic and geologic time frames. Chris Marker's 1962 experimental film La Jetée, a 'photo-roman' about time travel, likely had a decisive impact on Smithson's art and thought. At a key moment in Marker's film, the time traveler and his lover meet in the Paris Jardin des Plantes. As Marker's narrator indicates, 'They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn't understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, "This is where I come from...", and falls back, exhausted.' Smithson would have appreciated the temporal folds that occur as this pivotal moment quotes a famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).
45. Ibid., p. 170.
46. Ibid.
47. My appreciation of the nonsites is indebted to Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the studio (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996);
48. Ann Reynolds, 'Reproducing nature: the Museum of Natural History as nonsite', October 45 (1988);
49. Reynolds, Learning from New Jersey.
50. Reynolds, 'Reproducing nature', pp. 110-15.
51. Ibid, p. 115.
52. Jones, Machine in the studio, p. 328.
53. See above on the importance of this book in Smithson's thinking.
54. Flam, Smithson: collected writings, p. 104.
55. See Joseph Ketner, Lynn M. Herbert, and Gregory Volk, eds, Roxy Paine: second nature (Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, 2002).
56. Ibid., p. 18.
57. Ibid., p. 17.
58. Ibid., p. 24.
59. Roxy Paine, Personal Communication, 22 May 2004.
60. ibid.
61. ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Loren Eiseley, The immense journey (New York, Vintage Books, 1959);
64. John McPhee, Annals of the former world (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
65. W.J.T. Mitchell, The last dinosaur book (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998).
66. Ibid., p. 167.
67. Paine, Personal Communication.
68. Ibid.
69. Paine programs different data into the Erosion Machine to produce distinct sculpted blocks. During my visit to the James Cohan Gallery in February 2006 the dataset used by the Erosion Machine was derived from weather statistics collected in Binghamton, New York, in recent decades. The resulting stone thus becomes a vehicle to imagine how a different local geology and a cataclysmic intensification of the weather might transform Binghamton to resemble the canyonlands of the Southwestern US. Other data may be harnessed for similar effect while creating distinct objects and opportunities for interpretation, as in Paine's use of stock market data as the basis for programmatic erosion.
70. Flam, Robert Smithson: the collected writings, p. 105.
71. Schall, ed., Tempus fugit. Jones and Ginzel, the creators of Metronome (1996-99), write that 'the impossibility of knowing either time or truth, present or past is at the core of our fascination with the world and the genesis for our work for more than sixteen years'.
72. See Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, Artist's statement, http:// www.jonesginzel.com/Artist's%20Statement.html. Accessed 17 December 2006;
73. For a discussion of their 'poetic testament to time' as public art, see Patricia Phillips, 'Public art: a renewable resource', in Malcolm Miles and Tim Hall, ed., Urban futures (London, Routledge, 2003).