It seems to be new world, a world not even built yet in fact (Haussman-isation). Like the Sci-Fi paperback Smithson carries with him, the information this world imparts canot be called knowledge.
But is it the world, or the man moving through it that seems to make knowledge unattainable, unwanted? What is the artist’s relationship to the environment in this post-war, Amercanised landscape of spreading suburbia?
Smithson seems to pastiche or mock earlier arts, artists and artist’s writings. He tours this non-place, a short bus-ride from the city (and we can assume by now it has been consumed by the metropolis), as if he were an 18th Century aesthete completing his education among the ruins of Rome or Pompeii. But his response is not awe or wonder at the greatness of a lost civilisation, what he sees are ‘ruins in reverse’, the emergence of a certain kind of future which he senses is not necessarily the only one or the right one.
Media play a large part in expanding and replacing ‘natural’ human senses. They are prostheses, extending or supplanting natural experience. He sees the sky through the poorly reproduced painting in a newspaper that makes it ‘newsprint grey’, his vision seems influenced by the Sci-Fi paperback he is reading, the speed of the bus and passing traffic give him a different view of the world, along with shiny paint on rows of parked cars. Most of all he is influenced by photographies, by the little ‘Instamatic’ he carries with him and which seems to make everything either valuable or not valuable depending on whether it should or should not be photographed.
When his film runs out he also becomes hungry, suggesting a link between his camera and his own energy. He talks about a bridge as a ‘photograph made of wood and steel’ and also repeatedly invokes cinema, which seems to have made life into a kind of movie.
By referring to certain constructions as ‘monuments’ Smithson connects his own practices to a long Sculptural tradition and questions the image of time, history, and the valuation of events, according to 60s America. A kind of equality, flatness, of victorious democracy perhaps (Baudelaire), or perhaps the effect of portable photography, seems to have rendered everything of equal merit. So who or what should be ;’great’ or remembered in this land without values? Rather, Smithson meditates on the banal signs, information given by the state highways or on the back of his film pack, while considering the biggest picture of the world, made of materials, and governed, not by god, man, or history, but by the inexorable force of entropy –a gift from recent science.
All this adds up to a journey of speculations, empiricism celebrating the limits of what we can know, prioritising the senses over the more presumptuous workings of the mind, holding the world at the level of a sensual encounter –all of which might seem appropriate to an artist, but which has also been the concern of certain philosophers –such as David Hume, Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty.
‘Knowledge’ becomes something fleeting, personal, never established or objective (Dion, Beuys, and the workings of the museum). The particular tools we use to gather information transform the kind of information we gather, selecting and omitting, like different filters or sieves, allowing certain things to be caught while others pass through. Carrying a camera makes Smithson see the world as a series of what he calls ‘stills’.
Smithson’s text, therefore gives us a glimpse of the artist’s relationship and responsibilities to knowledge. We could look at artists of the 1970s, like Susan Hiller or Mary Kelly, to see a perhaps more close and conscious engagement with scientific procedures and approaches to knowledge. Yet still here, we will notice that the artist holds these apparatuses at bay, keeping them ‘at arm’s length’, intent on bringing something to them that art and the artist has to contribute.
Today, artists like Charles Avery, Lindsay Seers, and Grayson Perry, all seem to claim that the artist necessarily inhabits and maintains a ‘world-of-their-own, a kind of ‘bubble’ or ‘island’ (Deleuze), even more removed and subjective than the moody journey performed by Smithson.
How do we inhabit and explore our world? What kind of locations would provide an example of the way we feel about our environment? What kind of ‘prostheses or technologies affect the way we perceive? Is our environment increasingly virtual? And what does that mean for the artist? How do we respond to our current environment? Are these still important questions for artists today? Do you have some answers?
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