Smithson, eternity, and Krauss

Like a lot of others here, I found Smithson's text to be fascinating. As a Lit Arts concentrator, I couldn't help but concentrate on his language and the intriguing conjunctions of theory and humor, beauty and detritus, ethereality and banality, eternity and temporality... It's interesting that someone (I already forgot who) said that the text read like a photograph, because I agree, but moreover I think that Smithson meant to write his "Tour" as a film. My understanding is that this was written for an art magazine, so I'm not sure what that would mean for the reader, but I definitely saw the narrative as entirely cinematic. There is an overabundance of banal details, just as in a photographic image, but also movement and a story. I could almost see it as a silent film, complete with shots of Smithson looking pensive, making 'Aha!' gestures, and intertitles explaining his thought processes. There would also be other images cutting in, eg shots of Rome. The emphatic, often caricatured, quality of silent film would be perfect to evoke a sort of "jejune experiment" in narrative and decay.

Of course, Smithson is doing more than create a narrative. He describes (and documents) a nondescript town at a particularly transformatory moment in its existence. He thus preserves it for as long as not only the physical photographs will last, but also as long as the written document will. Writing is perhaps considered an even longer-lived form of preservation; like photography, it need not be tied to an original and can be copied ad nauseam [particularly 40+ years later, in digital]. However, it is hierarchized as a form of eternalization by a historical tradition that has been able to retain the (supposed) content of writings from thousands of years ago. Thus, Smithson's particularly photographic style of writing could potentially preserve both Passaic, NJ, and his 1967 thoughts on it, for as long as the images and the writing survive.

The fact that Smithson chose Passaic, of all the nondescript suburbs in America, and then "eternalized" it reminds me of a line in Krauss's "Reinventing the Medium." She paraphrases Benjamin, and says,

"The perceptual act that extracts 'the sense of the universal equality of things,' even from a unique object, is understood as that of the photographer framing pieces of the world through the camera's lens whether he or she takes the picture or not. That this act alone is aesthetic means that an entire world of artistic technique and tradition drops away..." (293)

This line struck me as relating to Smithson and his photoessay in several ways. First of all, there is the sense in his essay that the entire scene (and by extension the entire world) is pre-photographed, and any picture taken/made of that landscape is in fact a picture of a picture. I know someone else talked about this, and I definitely think it relates to the Krauss quotation. The part where she says, "That this act alone is aesthetic" is particularly striking to me in light of (no pun intended) Smithson's photographs. As an established artist, Smithson could arguably photograph anything and call it art. But Krauss's idea brings it to the next level: one need not be an established artist, and one need not even click the shutter. The very act of framing something in the lens is an artistic act, a way of positing the subject, any subject, as a photographable aesthetic object, and Smithson's wry commentary on Passaic, 'The Eternal City,' posits the same of this unextraordinary town. The very mechanical way in which he describes the act of taking the photographs seems to point to a deliberate lack of technique (though the resulting images are certainly composed), and by calling it a "Tour of the Monuments," Smithson ironically invokes an artistic tradition. In fact, he plays with the idea of extracting "universal equality... even from a unique object," by ironically taking the ordinary and calling it monumental, while maintaining its position as an imminently repeatable (and repeated) site, both universal and specific.