Bayyinah C. Pierre

Prof. Sacha Frey

Intro Lit/ Crit Arch I

September 24^th 2012.

Robert Smithson; A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.

“But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the “big events” of history. … but no past-just what passes for a future.” writes Robert Smithson. In his essay, A tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, Smithson devalues the modernization of the suburb of Passaic. In saying this, he emphasizes the value of the past by relating a bridge, pipes, a fountain, a sand box, and a map to monuments. What are monuments?  Events, structures, statues of political figures, notable examples.

Why are “dumps” so important to Robert Smithson? Most of his artworks are related to entropy, meaning change, how time and humans affect earth. Smithson is not interested in the beauty of nature but the “ruins” built around and in it. In A Tour of the Monument of New Jersey, he discusses how the structures and materials used today are affecting our future, in fact, he continues his discussion by saying: “Passaic seems full of holes compared to New York City,… and those holes in a sense are monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory traces of an abandoned set of future.” By building more structures that does not resemble the ones built in the past, we are without a doubt erasing a future.

In his essay, Smithson mentions a lot of monuments that he stepped upon while “traveling” the Passaic. The monuments have many things in common, like the fact that are all situated in the Passaic, but one similarity steps out form the others, a time frame. Time in a sense is represented in some way in all of the mentioned monuments. He talks about eternity and its irreversibility by using a jejeune experiment for proving entropy. “We take a child and have him run hundreds of time clockwise in the box (sand box full of separated black and white sand) until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him running anti-clockwise but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase in entropy.” We, human beings cannot replace the past; we cannot erase what we have already done. None of us has invented a time machine yet or at least made it public to the world. He convinced the future is lost somewhere in the non-historical places, like the Passaic. The small areas, reminding him of the past are monuments to him, they’re monumental, and they’re in a sense Rome.

In some areas, I agree with Smithson’s arguments, day by day, we devalue valuable ground set rules our ancestors set for us. Day by bay we step further away from ourselves and neighbors by only caring about ourselves. We’re stepping further away from the society that got us here. We’re stepping further away from our future. This might be it; we may no longer see a tomorrow. We are in trouble!