Robert Smithson's Toxic Tour of Passaic, New Jersey

Abstract

No land artist of the 1960s was more influential at the time than Robert Smithson. If anything, earthworks such as theSpiral Jettyand essays such as “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape” have only added to his importance over the years. One of the reasons Smithson still seems so relevant is that his work responded so directly to a nostalgic trend that arose in both American studies and American environmentalism during the 1950s and 1960s. On the whole, it was a nostalgia for nineteenth-century pastoralism, but it also led to a revival of interest in such figures as Thomas Cole, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Olmsted himself. To counteract this elegiac tendency Smithson developed a “toxic discourse” in which he treated the nineteenth-century landscape as a totally engineered prototype for the twentieth. The first fully formed expression of this toxic discourse was an essay he published in 1967, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” It was there that Smithson began to elaborate an aesthetic that treated the open-pit mine, the suburb, and the desert as mirror images of each other.