excerpt of an ongoing research into Rosalind Krauss’ expanded field, architecture, and a non-naturalistic ontology of natutre-culture relationships
Gary Shapiro’s Rifts: Beyond the Garden to the Sites of Time (in Earthwards, 1995) is an account of Robert Smithson’s built works and writing, in particular focusing on his Spiral Jetty of 1970. He situates Smithson’s conceptual project in a philosophical milieu, focusing on alternative definitions of concepts such as nature and the sublime suggested by Smithson, by way of making visible their relations to humanity.
Shapiro begins the text by distinguishing several conceptions of nature. He remarks that Smithson’s preferred term when referring to the natural world was not the overly associative word ‘nature,’ but the word ‘earth,’ “since this is more concrete, less ethereal, and does not encourage us to abstract from its heavy mass, its chaotic formations, continental drift, confused strata, cataclysms (like earthquakes), and its sheer thereness.” (Shapiro, 115)
This has the effect of grounding Smithson’s work in Krauss’ expanded field as site specific (marked site or site-construction), fundamentally his work is definitely related to landscape, as opposed to what she describes as the modernist tendency of homelessness and self-referentiality.
Two common conceptions of nature are discussed by Shapiro in order to introduce Smithson’s “gardens of history,” the pythagorean and the pastoral. The pastoral, as we have seen in previous weeks, exists as a domesticated nature whose purpose is to provide aesthetic pleasure, epitomizing a contrast between nature and culture. Shapiro draws the similarities between these “natural gardens,” as Smithson would call them, and their commodified evolution to the vacation industry, representing an escape from culture, or the city. The Pythagorean conception of nature is rooted in Platonic idealism, in which nature’s role is one of providing a cosmic harmony with the universe, accessible through mathematical and formal intelligence.
These conceptions of nature have informed the progression towards what Smithson calls “gardens of history.” Importantly these are not, though they purport to be, timeless and universal. Rather, they are deeply informed by and situated in history; “they reflect specific ways of construing nature and the earth that we are now in a position to analyze and criticize.” (120) In particular, Smithson is critical of their disguised humanism (or anthropocentrism) and their illusion of timelessness, and their aesthetics can be more closely related to beauty than to truth.
In contrast to the gardens of history are Smithson’s sites of time. Importantly Sites of Time make no pretension of timelessness, in fact they confirm the temporality of nature, and humans, equally, qualified as “growth, change, decay, spoliation, mixture, and drift.” (120) They are aligned more closely with truth than with beauty. Sites of time, in which we may count Smithson’s Earthworks, are in opposition to the “garden.”
In order to understand the concept of the “Rift,” Shapiro proposes a dichotomization of nature conceived as ‘earth’ and nature conceived as ‘world,’ the metaphysical distinctions of which we have just seen. Specific to the conceptual work of Smithson and the earthworks’ artists, “world” comes to signify “a structure of meanings which aspires to dominate and comprehend the earth … in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it.” (134) In response, earth “withdraws into self-seclusion, refuses to completely yield itself, and always hinders the world’s aim at self-sufficiency.” (134)
The “Rift” is the result of this tension between world and earth. It is also the occasion of the work of art. My understanding is that the importance of the rift, and its vital role in the “working” of art, is that it represents the success of the world in its desire to comprehend and dominate the earth, no matter how small of a comprehension or domination this is. The occasion of meaning being drawn out from entropy is the measure of this success. I would say that the new offering of this conception of nature is an attribution of power to it. Whereas domination of nature in the pastoral or Pythagorean sense would result in a full taming of it, the occasion of the rift is an attribution to the strength of the earth. Art occurs at the moment when man’s force can—even momentarily—equal that of the earth, resulting in a rift.
It is here that man’s (and it is, in Smithson’s writing, always a man’s) relationship to earth is elucidated by Shapiro in two ways. The first is earth as mother. From his invocation of a Hesiodic origin story, in which Father Heaven inflicts a primal violence on Mother Earth, to be avenged by Chronos (Tiime) with a weapon (or tool) of earth’s own making, Smithson situates himself in an ancient genealogical conflict, arming himself with instruments that are made of earth herself.
From the passage quoted from Heidegger, a reading of the relation of man to earth as sexual is unavoidable. If the rift is “the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other,” the understanding of the fundamental violence to the relationship becomes increasingly complicated, especially as the content of the work of art.
Shapiro insightfully remarks that although Smithson at times seems to want to avoid anthropomorphizing the earth and rejects a sexualization of the relationship between man and earth, he also cedes that “the relation might be sexual after all, although he wants to insist that it is not the equivalent of rape.” (150) The way in which he does is to reject a separation between man and earth, claiming that this ontological premise “fails to recognize the possibility of a direct organic manipulation of the land devoid of violence and ‘macho’ aggression. Spiritualism widens the split between man and nature. The farmer’s, miner’s, or artist’s treatment of the land depends on how aware he is of himself as nature; after all, sex isn’t all a series of rapes.” (150)
He further qualifies this position by recalling the Hesiodic genealogy in which Smithson situates himself, his affinity for earth-moving machines is defended by the ancient assertion that these are not “‘extensions’ of man” but “aggregates of elements. … made from the raw matter of the earth.” (124)
The second relation between man and earth is perhaps more universal, in that it cedes human power, and fully embraces the entropic reality of nature. Shapiro writes “Human intervention in the earth should be thought of as part and parcel of its chaotic diversity. … with the use of heavy equipment “construction takes on the look of destruction,” … what should attract our interest in a building project is not the finished product but the “processes of heavy construction [which] have a devastating kind of primordial grandeur.” (121) In a poetic and insightful phrase, Shapiro sums up this view, that the earth is “surd and ineluctable.” (133)
In this understanding of man’s relation to earth, the work of art achieves a post-modern meaning—one that isn’t fixed but can be and continually is (re)constructed.
Shapiro sets up two scales and situates Smithson along these lines. Between entropy and meaning (in the worldly sense) is a dialectic, and between the sublime and the beautiful, the picturesque.
The concept of the picturesque is interesting because in this use it acquires a dialectical role in mediating the beautiful and the sublime, in that it makes use of time in orchestrating the human relation to nature, and exists as a means of communicating this relationship, through the artist, to other people. Smithson offers Central Park as the prime example of a picturesque work, suggesting that the ongoing interaction between man and nature and the resulting changes makes it a site of time. Crucially, this leads to a new definition of the sublime, which defies Platonic transcendence, and instead embraces an earthly entropy and chaos, and invites man to participate in it.
I thought I might take up Smithson’s assertion that man’s relationship to nature doesn’t necessarily have to be interpreted as reprehensibly violent, and to turn the tables on him. Because obviously thus far the earthworks have been originating in man, and are done to the earth, so as a way of testing the acceptance of violence, carving the spiral into his skin makes the body itself a kind of landscape. On this photograph of Smithson, by Gianfranco Gorgoni during the construction of spiral jetty, we have a kind of violence done to his skin in the same formal imposition of the spiral.
