Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967) Close Reading Essay- Mapping Entropy of Passaic

Robert Smithson, an artist and a writer of “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967)”, observes geologic change and acknowledges nothing is permanent or everlasting. He describes this change as entropy, an accidental or situational happening that naturally occurs as time passes. Through this writing, Smithson explains the ideal beauty is the false future, and the true reality is seen through connecting the ideal to the imperfections of ruins. To help with the explanation, Smithson maps entropy by deterritorializing the artificially controlled area and reterritorializing with the natural occurances. The monuments he sites symbolizes the artifacts and nature’s coexistence.

Artificially controlled monuments are against the law of entropy and subjects for deterritorialization. When describing a painting by F.B Morse, Allegorical Landscape, in Canaday’s column, Smithson debases Morse’s presentation of soft floating clouds as “sensitive stains of sweat”(Smithson, p.69). What was included to bring awe seemed to Smithson as an imagined form of nature we idealize. The Clouds seem smeared into the sky rather than actually occupying the space and flowing. The calm lake, foggy buildings, frozen statue of a man with his hand held up high, and the “unnecessary” tree are nebulous fantasy of idealization. Nature made artificial is what Canaday describes as “high ideals that universities foster.” However, idealization of the place takes out the reality, and it takes away from the true beauty. “The sky over Rutherford (the real place Smithson is observing) was a clear cobalt blue… but the sky in Earthworks (signet paperback Smithson bought) was a “great black and brown shield on which moisture gleamed””.(p.69) Again when he encounters the first monument, the bridge over Passaic River, he denotes the already-made, sculptured situation. To make a gateway for a barge, the bridge opens in which one part rotates to north while the other part to south. (p.70) Its socket movement allows only limited movement and it turns the landscape into controlled, inert space. The monument is still that it resembles a pictured photograph, and the sun illuminating the bridge feels like a “glass” because the place seem foreign and inhabitable, because it does not interact with the current of static river. It pursues permanence that is impossible and it is this awkward juxtaposition of controlled monument and motionless river that creates false depiction future. Kodak Verichrome Pan cautions the camera users that the picture stills could be false, as there is possibility of “defective in manufacture… caused by negligence or other fault.” (p.73). It proves Smithson’s point that what we see could be false landscape. Mechanic tools like cameras and our eyes can see the landscape with false view, and such stability can lead us to see our surrounding as the “self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur”. (p. 74)

The monuments such as the pipes, crator, and sandbox can be the real examples of entropy. They are the best representation of the Passaic, the traces of human work in earth. It is the “Everyday life, unexplored, and the repressed,” (Corner, p.232) what we refuse to recognize as a part of the landscape. The pipes for example, have active flow of water and its remnants. The great pipe that we see as relatively permanent was “secretly sodomizing some hidden technological orifice.” It is the pleasure of movement and the pain of erosion that creates such excitement, a live view of nature interacting with artifacts. Smithson turns to the ruins, not to contrast with the ideals, but to look at the fundamentals of what provides the current landscape. “Buildings rise into ruin before they are built”(74) The incomplete resurrection of the developing town, Passaic suggests what came before the process of New York City and such big city. It could also be seen as the missing link between the Rome and New York City, the process of evolution between the two cities. Somewhere in the disintegration of digging bare nature and embedding human artifacts, the landscape undergoes accidental happenings and creates a more dynamic, entropic landscape. Prehistory is the foundation that allows another process to, not overcome, but merge into. (Interview with Pettena, p.298) The ruins therefore are still undergoing evolution to something else in timely manner. “Discredited idea of time and “out of date” things” (74) thus returns to Smithson's mapping.

Smithson maps the area through drifting, siting the interaction of artificial activities and Earth's reaction, what he calls monuments.  He let the steel lead him to explore and observe the area, hence “destabilizing the fixed” (p.233) path by “incorporating the nomadic, transitive and shifting character... into spatial representation”(p.233) The Passaic is dissected through Smithson's subjective excavation and the resultant called monuments  reterritorialize and create a comprehensive map.  

Acknowledgement of temporality and entropy connects the two opposite personalities of nature. Smithson mapped the area by viewing the two seemingly different artifacts and nature in one situation, and recording the process of their interaction.