Un recorrido por los monumentos de Passaic, New Jersey, al parecer recoge el testimonio textual del artista, y -posiblemente- la serie de fotografías que Smithson realizaría en aquel 1967 donde volvería a aquella, su ciudad natal. Una pieza que resulta más significativa aún si logramos enmarcarla dentro del horizonte de enérgica transformación y 'desmaterialización' del objeto escultórico desde el último lustro de los 60's. A tour of the Monuments of Passaic, N. J. sería inicialmente publicada en el número de febrero de la revista Artforum de 1967, documentando su trayecto y encuentro con esta suerte de ruinas postindustriales.
Para entender esta noción de 'monumento' de Smithson es necesario no pensar tanto en las dimensiones imponentes a las cuales estamos habituados, sino en una concepción horizontal desplazada y atravesada por el tiempo que toda transformación material atestigua. Así, los monumentos de Passaic (re)presentan el encuentro entre un sujeto y un fragmento de un espacio natural alterado significativamente por las modificaciones de un industrialismo creciente. Para nuestro artista es fundamental que todo señalamiento de un espacio natural advierta la 'contaminación' de la propia intervención humana, evocando una serie de procesos y cambios que finalmente parecen generar nuevas perspectivas de paisaje. Y a diferencia de algunos de sus contemporáneos, Smithson se rehusaría a tratar el entorno físico como una plataforma de preciosismo estético, intentando siempre remarcar un diálogo abierto e instintivo entre el ser humano y su ambiente.Una reseña de Art-Forum
One Saturday in September 1967, Robert Smithson, equipped with a Kodak Instamatic and a copy of Brian Aldiss' science-fiction novel Earthworks, took a No. 30 bus out of Port Authority, bound for Passaic, New Jersey. Passaic is, to put it mildly, an unprepossessing burg, a transit corridor between Smithson's two childhood homes, Rutherford and Clifton. Famously, Smithson had been assisted into the world by Rutherford's kindly pediatrician-poet, Dr. William Carlos Williams, author of the epic Paterson, which ponders the Passaic River, its falls, its power, its prehistory and history, and the social, economic, and spiritual consequences of that history. Smithson was on his way to consider the further corruption of those consequences.
He got off the bus just past the bridge that leads into town from Highway 3. He had found his first monument, the bridge itself. "Noonday sunshine cinema-ized the site, "he wrote in his account, originally published in this magazine, "turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. . . . When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that snowed nothing but a continuous blank."He found other monuments: a parking lot, a sandbox, the concrete abutments of a highway-in-progress, a pumping derrick partly supported by pontoons, and a set of six pipes - which he viewed as a horizontal fountain - that pumped water from a pond into the river. These last two monuments were locked in some occult bond: "It was as though the pipe [attached to the derrick] was secretly sodomizing some hidden technological orifice, and causing a monstrous sexual organ (the fountain) to have an orgasm."
En el Spiral Jetty. 1970
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