D/A: Monumentality
Robert Smithson's photographic “meandering” essay of a post-industrial landscape reads like a clever a parody of a Western European’s expedition journals in the 18th and 19th Century (linke). Writings from that time period come from a time when the Western engines of industrialization not only capitalized on the raw physical materials of its far flung colonies but also for its cultural materials. The West’s fascination to understand the native culture began with their systematic, although presumptuous and haphazard, approaches of archiving and categorizing their ancient subjects. These efforts would lead to collections, amateur archeology, and Egyptomania.
Parallel to this travel-literati culture were the works from visionary and utopian French Neoclassical architects such as Nicolas LeDoux and Etienne-Louis Bouullee. These architects were experimenting with monumental architecture that sought to memorialize great canonical figures of their past through expressive or metaphorical means, often times borrowing formal geometric language of the past (see Newton's Cenotaph).
One could start to argue then, that Smithson has similarly pieced together a highly choreographed writing of disparate memories of past artifacts, (i.e., monumental landscapes) from his happenstance day into a “sublime” tour that is equally metaphorically and expressive in its own purpose. Can he be accused of being more than flâneur in not only his own home town but of his own writing? Casual name dropping of critical contemporary art figures, insertion of literary titles into the piece, even casting and framing himself as a character fully aware of the cinematic experience taking place in the narrative adds a touch of self-monumentalization to the intellectual discourse at hand
Aside from conjectures of canonizing oneself, the topic of concern here for Smithson is to unravel what effects time and history play within our perception of aesthetic sensibility. Specifically, his case study deals with how a post-industrial landscape of Passaic, NJ can become monumentalized. He speaks of his present day Passaic as:
"ravaged present that almost appears to be part of the past...the eternal city of Rome lives on in the burnt out shells of suburbia wasteland.... Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs."
So what then are examples of those monuments on tour? The highlight of the tour is the “Monument of Dislocated Directions” a rotating bridge over the Passaic River. Smaller monuments ground themselves along the way of this industrial river site: concrete abutments, prehistoric mechanical creatures stuck dead in their tracks, horizontal smokestack fountains, a desert sandbox, and a used car and parking lot. The “monumental” landscape that one might experience on a grand tour of a riverfront civilization is stripped of all its grandeur, aesthetic, and sacredness of the site. The tour does not reveal stereotypical Western monumentality of aggrandizement, hierarchy, of an identifiable political and cosmological authority (oftentimes embodied by a pharaoh-like figure). Instead, they are of infrastructure and industrial production. They are vast and decentralized, upholding a technocratic ideal of efficiency and mobility that owes no iconography to a particular figure or time. The new monuments that are being built causes us to forget the future by quickly bleeding into the mundane consciousness of our built environment.
What Smithson finds as beautiful is not so much the zeitgeist of political-cultural values (i.e., progress, nostalgia, sublime) that are attached to these post-industrial sites, but a more holistic appreciation of how these sites show the renegotiation of those values continually changing over time. Assume that a monument is a creative act (sometimes physically built) to remember an event, person, or thing which has become important to a social group as part of their remembrance of past events. Archeologists claim that the construction of social memory in the past existed just as it does in the present. It involved creating links to ancestors and antiquity and often (re-)interpretations of monuments and landscapes. However, especially in instances of social change, individuals who belonged to multiple and overlapping social groups had to negotiate their economic and social status to the extent possible. This would mean exploiting the ambiguities of inherited forms, evaluating their options, borrowing ideas from other groups, and creating new identities to answer to changing circumstances.
Similarly, Smithson exploits this grey negotiating area via his monumental landscapes. Probably the best sites for his "Earthworks" are ones that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, and even natural disasters. His masterpiece Spiral Jetty is the best example of a monument commenting about monuments.
If monumentality is about the act of memory making, why then resort to the medium of landscapes? One could argue that the layers of earth keeps the best preserved long-term records of man’s evolving impact on his environment, but perhaps something more essential and dynamic could be used to show this: air and water. A grey area opens up for possibilities such as smog, acid rain, or meting of ice caps as more monumental than Passaic. Quicker destructive forces such as nuclear fallouts, biochemical sprays, or even an accumulating belt of space junk are all candidates. While these atmospheric examples may not initially be a deliberate or conscious act of monumentality, perhaps even the more physically removed and scaled down act of say writing or generating one more website through this website could!
Thus the expansion of monument making materials into the memory making act inevitably leads to the inherently socio-political driven question of matching intent and acknowledgement. Who decides what a monument is? The original actor? The receiver of the monuments? The elites? The masses? Another group in the future?
Archeologists have certainly recognized these questions as they seek to reassess their early Eurocentric biases that favored large monuments which paid less attention to the everyday lives of the societies that created them. As designers, our well thought intentions to create monuments (if we ever do) may never be acknowledged by society during our lives. Society not only misinterprets the intent but affixes different social meanings and redefines what constitutes a monument.
Realizing that potentially many actors in the past and present are up for acknowledging the intent of a monument, doesn’t simply mean that anyone can make a monument in their backyard. At a minimum, monumentalizing is a two part act that requires a dialogue between two entities. The actors can be living or non-living, as man has monumentalized mountains, rivers, and even trees. A relationship evolves between the two when one of them becomes conscious of the act taking place. Then it is ultimately up to that awakened actor if they are to continue.
If we assume that monuments are a kind social-temporal act of memory making that occurs overtime, then the design possibilities seem to be endless and unpredictable! What then is the right "monumentality" we designers should carry into the future of monuments?
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