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 Published with the assistance of the Getty
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Zurich.
Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits
to Art
 Allan Kaprow,
Robert Smithson,
and the Limits to Art

By Philip Ursprung
Translated by Fiona Elliott

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ursprung, Philip.
[Grenzen der Kunst. English]
Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the limits to art / by Philip
Ursprung; translated by Fiona Elliott.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-24541-9 (hardback)

eISBN 9780520954182

1. Kaprow, Allan—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Smithson,

Robert—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Art movements—History—
20th century.
I. Title.
N6537.K27U7713 2013
709.2’2—dc23 2012025824

Manufactured in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum

requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of
Paper).

Cover image: Bundled performers at Grand Central Station ticket

counter for Allan Kaprow’s Calling, New York, 21 August 1965.
Cover © Allan Kaprow Estate courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Cover
photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, New York,
NY.
To Claudia
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

ALLAN KAPROW AND THE LIMITS TO PAINTING

“Oedipal—just for fun”: Allan Kaprow and Art History
The Happeners’ Bodies
The Triumph of Pop Art
Performing Architecture

THE LIMITS TO SCULPTURE: ROBERT SMITHSON AND

EARTH ART
The Excursions: Critiquing Minimalism
The Triumph of Minimal Art
Site and Nonsite
Earthworks

THE LIMITS TO ART HISTORY

Notes
Bibliography
Art Credits
Index
 ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Author’s feet on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

2. Sue Irion and the author in Allan Kaprow’s Performing Life
3. The Limits to Growth
4. Allan Kaprow, Untitled Environment
5. Rosalyn Montague rehearsing for Allan Kaprow’s 18
Happenings in 6 Parts
6. Allan Kaprow’s beard
7. Cover of Art News, January 1958: Jasper Johns, Target with
Four Faces
8. Allan Kaprow, A Spring Happening
9. Lette Eisenhauer and members of the audience for Allan
Kaprow’s A Service for the Dead
10. Allan Kaprow, A Service for the Dead II
11. Jeanne-Claude wrapped in silver foil for Allan Kaprow’s
Calling
12. Performers in a forest for Allan Kaprow’s Calling
13. Bundled performers at Grand Central Station ticket counter
for Allan Kaprow’s Calling
14. Book spread with Allan Kaprow in Yard and Claes Oldenburg
in Store
15. Allan Kaprow, Bon Marché
16. Students putting bread on car for Allan Kaprow’s Household
17. Allan Kaprow in front of a structure for Fluids
18. Allan Kaprow, Sweet Wall
19. Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Smithson in
 Passaic, New Jersey
20. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965
21. Robert Smithson sitting in front of his Untitled, 1964–1965
22. Black-and-white photographs of “The Fountain Monument”
for “The Monuments of Passaic”
23. Slides from Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque
24. Dan Graham, “Homes for America”
25. Robert Smithson, drawing for Wandering Earth Mounds and
Gravel Paths
26. Robert Smithson, A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey
27. Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language
28. Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown
29. Robert Smithson, Glue Pour
30. Robert Smithson on Spiral Jetty
31. Dennis Oppenheim, Radicality
32. Robert Smithson in a still from Nancy Holt and Robert
Smithson—Mono Lake
33. Life photograph of Michael Heizer in a helicopter over Nine
Nevada Depressions
34. Robert Smithson, Spiral Hill
35. Robert Smithson, Broken Circle
36. Robert Smithson, drawing for Lake Edge Crescents
37. Robert Smithson, drawing for Bingham Copper Mining Pit
 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The title of this book, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the
Limits to Art, recalls that of the book The Limits to Growth
(Meadows et al. 1972), which identified the changes in the Western
world’s self-image as a direct result of the recession of the 1970s.
My title indicates the importance that I attach to the articulation of
boundaries and artistic rules against the backdrop of the ongoing
deregulation of the art world since the 1960s. It refers to the
pressure on the autonomy of art, which increased during the 1960s
and was marked by Robert Smithson’s boycott of documenta (also
in 1972) and his essay “Cultural Confinement” (first printed as
“Kulturbeschränkung,” in documenta 5). It also points to the
correlation between the art world and wider historical changes that
lie outside the bounds of art-immanent analysis.
In this book I present a history of art in the 1960s and early
1970s that, rather than relying on the methodology of
periodization, focuses on the artistic conflicts of that time, thus
establishing a framework for comparing seemingly divergent
artistic positions and relating these to a wider horizon of historical
changes. In order to do this, I focus on the work of two artists’
artists, Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) and Robert Smithson (1938–
1973), who—although not familiar to the general public—have long
been highly regarded within the art world as the leading exponents
of Happenings and Earth Art, respectively.
The common ground shared by Kaprow and Smithson, broadly
speaking, was their (failed) endeavor to escape the gravitational
force of the historicist principle of Modernism versus
Postmodernism. Instead of reflecting particular features of artistic
means and delving ever deeper into the question of the nature of
art, as the exponents of Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art
did, Kaprow and Smithson turned their attention to issues such as
the duration of a work of art, its addressees, and the costs
associated with art. By visibly relocating the limits to art, they
demonstrated that, for them, it was not one absolute, all-
encompassing sphere but rather a tangible component of real life.
For many years standard art-historical terminology could not
accommodate the artistic praxis of Kaprow and Smithson, with the
result that until their recent comebacks, they languished in a blind
spot of art history. This makes it all the more desirable not only to
reassess the art of that time but also to reexamine the value
judgments of art scholarship and to explore their relationship to the
acquisitions policies of art museums and private collectors. The aim
of this study is not to rehabilitate supposedly marginalized artists—
neither Kaprow or Smithson fit this description—but rather to show
that the right assumed by art museum curators, scholars, and
critics to ascribe meaning and to prescribe values is closely
connected with the rationale of the Modernism/Postmodernism
model of interpretation and hence historically locatable.
Recognizing that the battle over who can mediate art—that is to
say, who has the authority in a vastly expanding art world to define
values and meaning—is a motor of artistic change allows us to shed
new light on many artistic phenomena of that time, for instance the
fact that artists themselves took over certain institutional functions.
I concentrate my investigation of these matters on the rivalry
between Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg on one hand, and Smithson
and Donald Judd on the other; in addition to this, I trace the
sequence of institutional decisions that led to the success of Pop
Art and Minimal Art. Ultimately, the museums and exhibition
curators won the battle, in the early 1970s. An outstanding
exemplar of trying to remind art of its limits was the exhibition
documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, in 1972, curated by Harald
Szeemann.
This study could never have been carried out without help from
many sides. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Kurt W. Forster
for the unfailingly challenging and motivating support he gave to
my work at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture
(gta) at ETH Zurich in the 1990s. I am also sincerely grateful to
him, Marc Angélil, Franz Oswald, Stanislaus von Moos, and Ralph
Ubl for their critical reading of the manuscript and invaluable
suggestions. Verlag Silke Schreiber in Munich first published this
study in German, in 2003. Luise Metzel, the publisher and editor
there, did much to give this work its final shape. Positive responses
and inquiries from colleagues in the English-speaking world have
led to this version, for which I have revised and updated the
German text.
My heartfelt gratitude also goes to Kaprow, who died in 2006,
and to Coryl Crane for so kindly welcoming me into their home in
Encinitas, California, and allowing me to view Kaprow’s private
archive before it went to the Getty Center in Los Angeles. I also
thank Nancy Holt for the extended conversation at her home in
Galisteo, New Mexico. Between 1996 and 2010 Dan Graham was
kind enough to make time for several lengthy talks, and I thank him
for that; my thanks also go to John Gibson, Richard Nonas, and
Richard Serra for generously sparing time for conversation.
Numerous colleagues and artists have helped me along the way,
and I am deeply grateful for discussions and more to John M.
Armleder, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza,
Peter Friedl, Daniel Hauser, Amelia Jones, Caroline Jones, Andrea
Kahn, Jeff Kelley, Rosalind Krauss, Mark Lee, Hélène Lipstadt,
Hikmet Loe, John Miller, Christian Philipp Müller, Robert
Rauschenberg, Ann Reynolds, Jan-Hendrik Röver, Niklaus Santschi,
Dieter Schwarz, Gregor Stemmrich, Blake Stimson, Lynnette
Widder, Mark Wigley, and Alan Zlatar.
I am also deeply indebted to the Getty Center in Los Angeles for
granting me a study visit in fall 1996 and for supporting me in my
use of its special resources and Allan Kaprow papers during several
later visits. I was also greatly helped by the staff of the John Weber
Gallery, New York; at the Archives of American Art; and at the
Library and the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art,
New York—and I thank all the individuals concerned. I also thank
Andrea Kahn and David Hess, Lynnette Widder, Olav Westphalen,
and Suzan Frecon for their kind welcome during my stays in New
York. Thank you to Sheila and Dick Hutman for always making me
feel so at home in Los Angeles. For the English version of the book,
I express my sincere gratitude to Stephanie Fay and Kari Dahlgren
at University of California Press, to Juliana Froggatt for her
excellent editing, to Paola de Martin for assisting me with the
illustrations, and to my two readers, Ursula Frohne and Peter
Chametzky. Special thanks go to Fiona Elliott for her meticulous
and sympathetic translation into English.
 Introduction
LIMITS TO GROWTH : THE SIXTIES AND EARLY SEVENTIES

his monumental Earthwork Spiral

SHORTLY AFTER ROBERT SMITHSON COMPLETED

Jetty in the summer of 1970, the level of the Great Salt Lake in
Utah rose several meters. Spiral Jetty was submerged under water
and hidden from view for many years. It was only visible by
airplane, as an outline beneath the waves. More than twenty years
later, in fall 1993, Spiral Jetty at last reappeared. Initially it could
be seen only during the fall and winter, but now, with the water
level continuing to recede, it is often completely dry. When I visited
the site in October 1996, Spiral Jetty had only recently loomed into
view again. The snow-white spiral—with years of salt deposits—
contrasted with the red hues of the water, rich in bacteria and
algae, the black of the volcanic core rising up on the shoreline, and
the blue of the sky. At times up to my knees in water, I waded out
into the lake along the uneven boulders (see figure 1). The surface
of the lava rocks was unexpectedly grippy, but in some places I
could not see the ground underfoot and had to edge my way
forward, step by step. When I finally reached the center of the
spiral, the point where the boulders suddenly fell away under my
feet and I would have had to start swimming to go any farther, I
found myself gazing at the view that Smithson himself described in
the film The Spiral Jetty:

From the center of the Spiral Jetty

North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
North by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Northeast by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Northeast by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
East by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
 East by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Southeast by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Southeast by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
South by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
South by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Southwest by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Southwest by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
West by South—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
West by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Northwest by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
Northwest by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water
North by West—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water1

FIGURE 1. Author’s feet on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Great Salt Lake, Utah,
October 1996.

There was nothing here, yet from here everything suddenly looked
different. Having driven for ten hours through the monotony of the
American West, instead of being swept up in the expected aesthetic
experience of “presentness” and “the sublime,” I found myself
balancing on piles of rubble, in the blazing sun, soaked in itchy
brine. Yet I felt no disappointment. I didn’t even really know
anymore what I had been looking for. As though I were caught in
the eye of a hurricane, all my existing notions of art were suddenly
blown away. I would never again be able to write about art without
saying I, and I would never again be able to ask the question “What
is art?”
A few months earlier I had had a similarly decisive encounter
with another work of art. At the time, Hedy Graber and I had been
curating the Kunsthalle Palazzo, a small alternative space in
Liestal, Switzerland, near Basel. We had invited Allan Kaprow to a
workshop on 15 June 1996, where he and a handful of participants
engaged in a series of Activities. The title was Performing Life. One
of these Activities required one person to draw a chalk line on the
ground in a street, followed by another person rubbing it out with
an eraser. This event lasted until either the chalk or the eraser was
used up. As I knelt on the ground outside the town’s train station,
drawing my chalk line, with my partner diligently rubbing away at
it, a woman—waiting nearby—watched what we were doing (see
figure 2). In the end she asked what we were up to. I replied that I
was drawing a line, which my partner was rubbing out, until either
the chalk or the eraser was used up, at which she cried out, “Oh,
but that’s just like life!” What became clear to me in that moment—
that I could not detach either my own physicality or the immediate
context from a work of art—came back to me on my visit to Spiral
Jetty. The experience of Kaprow’s Performing Life crucially
impacted the way I perceived Spiral Jetty. And by the same token,
my experience of Spiral Jetty sharpened my focus on Kaprow’s
work. In the years to come both of these experiences clung to my
consciousness. They had not only changed my perspective but also
affected the way I handled historiography.
FIGURE 2. Sue Irion and the author in Allan Kaprow’s Performing Life, Activity, Liestal,
Switzerland, 15 June 1996.

My intention in describing these encounters is not to bring my

subjective reaction into play. The point is that it seems to me that
the act of identification plus mimetic reenactment exemplifies the
way in which object and historical accounts intermingle. By
exposing myself as an art historian-author, I am hoping to underline
the contingent, mutable nature of meaning. In so doing, I am
referencing the concept of performative writing, elaborated in the
mid-1990s by the art historians Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider,
and Amelia Jones, on the strength of the writings of J. L. Austin and
Judith Butler. The purpose of performative writing is to convey to
the reader the conditionality and changeability of the author’s
perspective, not in order to nurture a new kind of subjectivity but
rather to illuminate the fictionality and contingency of historical
description. The position of the author should be locatable and
exposed (to attack if necessary), hence the repeated occurrence of
the first-person pronoun I in this text. Or, to put it in a nutshell, the
text itself becomes a performative act. In the words of Jones and
Andrew Stephenson:

Adopting the notion of performativity as a critical strategy

within the study of visual culture thus enables a recognition
of interpretation as a fragile, partial, and precarious affair
and, ultimately, affords a critique of art criticism and art
history as they have been traditionally practiced. Since
meaning is negotiated between and across subjects and
through language, it can never be fully secured: meaning
comes to be understood as a negotiated domain, in flux and
contingent on social and personal investments and contexts.
By emphasizing this lack of fixity and the shifting, invested
nature of any interpretive engagement, we wish to assert
that interpretation itself is worked out as a performance
between artists (as creators, performers, and spectators or
their work) and spectators (whether “professional” or non-
specialist).2

Inherently critical of the fixity of meaning, Phelan, Schneider,

and Jones have provided a valuable alternative and complement to
revisionist art scholarship in the tradition of the Frankfurt School.
However, whereas Jones and Stephenson regard performative
writing specifically as a means to interpret the relationship
between the work and the viewer, my interest is in the possibilities
of performative art history. My focus is less on the act of
interpretation than on the act of historiography. In other words, I
am less concerned with the interaction between work, viewer,
interpreter, and reader than with the relationship between art
historian and art history. And in this connection the alternately
sinking and reemerging Spiral Jetty and my drawn and erased
chalk line in Kaprow’s Performing Life present themselves as
allegories of the process of writing art history. For just as the
terrain around Spiral Jetty changes and a mark left by one person
is eradicated by another, so too the history of art in the 1960s and
1970s is a terrain that is constantly being dug over and reassessed,
precisely because it has not yet broken free from our own time.
The fact that our picture of the wider history of the United
States in the 1960s is more or less fixed is both an opportunity and
an obstacle for the art scholar. It is virtually impossible not to
regard that decade as an optimistic time of new beginnings,
reforms, and boundless growth. The “change,” as Richard
Kostelanetz pointed out in 1968, was in the metaphysics of that
time.3 Buzzwords and phrases like “civil rights movement,”
“women’s liberation,” “sexual liberation,” “May 1968,”
“Woodstock,” and “Apollo 11” and names like John F. Kennedy and
Martin Luther King merged into one giant projection screen that is
still available for nostalgic recollection on one hand and utopian
hopes on the other. In his study The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of
Rage, Todd Gitlin has aptly described that period as one of
“incomplete Reformation,” which still lingers today: “The genies
that the Sixties loosed are still abroad in the land, inspiring and
unsettling and offending, making trouble. . . . For better and worse,
the ideas and impulses remain, transposed into other keys,
threatening, agitating, destabilizing.”4
However, generally absent from the image of the Golden Sixties
is the fact that this high point was already over by the early 1970s
and was replaced by an extended period of recession.5 Almost like
an emblem of this change, The Limits to Growth came out in 1972
(see figure 3).6 For a long time in the United States it was known
only to specialists in the field—the wider public may well have
preferred not to hear the book’s pessimistic message—whereas in
Europe, particularly in the German-speaking communities where
environmental protection was already coming to the fore, it became
a best seller overnight. I was a ten-year-old schoolboy in
Switzerland when my father brought a copy of this book home one
day, and I had my first dawning awareness that I was part of a
historical process. The book prophesied catastrophic consequences
for humanity if efforts were not made to rein in the incessant
growth instigated by industrialization and to somehow strike an
ecological balance in the world. It demonstrated that the whole
planet was in danger, that human beings were consuming too much
energy, that the world population was constantly growing, and that
natural raw materials were threatening to run out. The earth, we
were told, did not have an endless supply of resources but was a
fragile and vulnerable closed system.
FIGURE 3. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W.
Behrens III, The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972).

The first signs of the crisis were already making themselves felt.
The price of crude oil was rocketing, wages were sinking, people
were being laid off, and the prosperous market economy was
turning into an uneasy mixture of inflation and stagnation, so-called
stagflation. In autumn 1973, Germany and Switzerland (where my
family had moved, in 1969, from the United States) declared a
Sunday driving ban. We went for walks on the new, deserted
Autobahn: great fun for us children, but not something the adults
could enjoy. They were as concerned by the rise in oil prices as they
were about the Watergate scandal, the war in Vietnam, the military
coup in Chile, and the looming recession. Something had broken.
The seemingly blind faith in progress among members of my
parents’ generation, born before the Second World War and
witnesses to the economic miracle in postwar Europe, turned into
fear of the future. The end of the gold standard in 1971 and the
devaluation of the dollar marked the beginning of a new,
deregulated phase in the world economy and a widespread sense of
insecurity. The Bretton Woods System, which had guaranteed
growth and stability since 1944, was terminated, and the
marketplace now ruled the economy. The European and American
middle classes, whose living standards had steadily risen for three
decades, were now under pressure. The euphoria of the Golden
Sixties, the optimism of 1968, the thrill of the landing on the moon
had all vanished into thin air. The festival spirit of the fields of
Woodstock withdrew into the mirror world of the disco. Steven
Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) was to become the most successful movie
of the decade and “no future” the catchphrase of a whole new
generation.
One of the first theorists to examine the cultural impact of the
crisis in the early 1970s was David Harvey, who paid particular
attention to the role of economic history. According to him, the end
of the gold standard marked the beginning of not only the
deregulation of the labor and financial markets but also a general
crisis of representation: “The breakdown of money as a secure
means of representing value has itself created a crisis of
representation in advanced capitalism.”7 If we, taking our lead
from Harvey, look at the ways in which the realms of art and art
theory dealt with the crisis of representation in the early 1970s, we
can, in fact, identify two tendencies: on the one hand the trend to
describe the crisis, to explain it, to transform it into concepts,
images, narratives; on the other hand the trend to analyze it and to
articulate precisely the discontinuity of time and space that it
produced. The most influential interpretation, which in some sense
“naturalized” the crisis, was that it constituted a break between
two periods, namely the Modern and the Postmodern.
This dualistic model of course crucially fanned the flames of
theoretical debate in the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time it also
narrowed the focus by turning historicity into the main criterion of
the interpretation of art, which led to much valuable energy being
expended on the definition of epochs and periods. Since the 1980s,
art historians have squandered too much energy on the
permanently irresolvable question of when, exactly, the break
between Modernism and Postmodernism occurred.8 The search for
the origins of Postmodernism merely reflected the rhetoric of
eternally new beginnings that was coming from the main exponents
of art and art criticism at that time. Harold Rosenberg aptly
highlighted this paradox in 1960 with his striking book title, The
Tradition of the New, which described a logic he posited as
intrinsically Modernist.9 And in The Origin of Perspective, Hubert
Damisch showed how the interests in establishing beginnings and
endings and in locating authorship related to the value systems of
Modernism.10 Whether the neo-avant-gardes are regarded as a
delayed rear guard or as the fulfillment of an artistic promise that
had fallen into abeyance because of the Second World War,11 they
attained their art-historical significance by virtue of what Smithson
ironically described as “re-birth myths.”12
Art scholarship thus found itself in an awkward position. On one
hand it was still in thrall to principles and stylistic and formal
models of interpretation that were rooted in the mid-twentieth
century. On the other hand it sought to analyze artistic processes in
the 1960s with reference to the same historicist models that the
artists themselves relied on as the basis of their praxis and that—as
we shall see—some even used as artistic material. Some attempted
a problematic escape route from this historical bind by seeking a
causal connection between art production and the processes of
social transformation that were under way at the time. Thus the
significance of Pop Art appears to reside in the fact that it was
either a critique or an affirmation of American consumer society.
But why can it not be seen very differently, for instance as a
nostalgic reminder of the early history of consumerism? Earth Art
is generally interpreted as a breakout from galleries and museums.
But might it not be that these interventions in the American desert
were in fact signs of unprecedented expansion as artistic
institutions flexed their muscles? Moreover, it seems
unquestionable that the main players in the American and
European art worlds were politically engaged and, in the spirit of
the classical avant-garde, in the vanguard of society. However, what
if they were not in advance of society but, on the contrary—as
Smithson believed—being overtaken by it? In other words, what
would the art history of the 1960s look like if it were written from
the perspective of the crisis in the early 1970s?
This is one of the questions guiding my inquiry. I am less
interested in the hypothetical break around 1960 than in the actual
impact of the economic revolution of the early 1970s. Like Harvey, I
take the view that an irreversible sea change occurred at this time.
However, I believe that this change was so fundamental that it
could hardly be adequately grasped by theory at the time it
occurred. To focus on a break a decade earlier meant, I would
argue, to compensate for the fact that one could not adequately
represent the present situation during the 1970s. In consequence, I
want not to focus on this change as a historical phase but rather to
explore the effect it had on the existing view of history. I am
therefore more interested in modes of representation in art or
theory that try to articulate the crisis from within and to cope with
the new reality it produced than those that seek to weather it by
naturalizing, interpreting, or explaining it from the outside. I am
interested in procedures that challenge representation as such by
disrupting the very structure of language and images. Endeavors of
this kind can be found in not only the art of Smithson and Kaprow
but also architectural performances by Gordon Matta-Clark, J. G.
Ballard’s novel Crash (1973), Francis Ford Coppola’s film The
Conversation (1974), Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973), and Jean-François Lyotard’s book Libidinal Economy
(1974), in which the author asks, “What have we to cure? I do not
exactly know, but at least and first this: the disease of the will to
cure.”13 All these works of art or texts allow us to perceive the
collapse of the traditional order of space and time—or, again in
Harvey’s words, “space-time compression.”14 And they ask for
interpretational models that go beyond the historicist concept of
Modernism versus Postmodernism.
 My view of the 1950s and 1960s is of a period when a multitude
of artistic forces were vying for the rapidly expanding territories
and infrastructure of the art world. A significant distinction
between the time of the classical avant-garde and the 1960s may be
seen in the public’s involvement in each. The deep chasm that had
opened up in the last third of the nineteenth century between
avant-garde art production and reception progressively narrowed
during the course of the 1960s. New art no longer regularly
shocked the public; on the contrary, it met the popular expectation
that artists were constantly developing and refining their work. The
term art world—soon to be art crowd or art scene—established
itself and sidelined artist’s world.15 Art world encompassed the
growing interest group of artists, collectors, dealers, curators,
museum personnel, gallerists, critics, art historians, and diverse art
audiences. As in a stage play, the actors and the audience knew the
plot—that is to say, the quashing of one artistic style by the next—
even before the event. In 1957, for instance, when the Jewish
Museum in New York presented the exhibition Artists of New York:
Second Generation, it was clear to all that as soon as the new style
was identified, its apparent demise was sure to follow, although in
reality it would merely shift sideways to make way for the new.
Thus Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, New York School,
Second Generation, Hard Edge, Happening, Nouveau Réalisme,
Fluxus, Pop Art, Op Art, Body Art, Performance, Minimal Art,
Conceptual Art, and Earth Art were in effect concurrent, less a
sequence than a spectrum. The motor of artistic change in the
1960s, I contend, was first and foremost the struggle to gain favor
with the growing art audience. The various actors, who
increasingly included critics and museum curators, were constantly
competing for normative authority. Thus, I see the heated debate of
the 1950s and 1960s surrounding the nature of art as a sign of
various camps marking out their territories. It seems to me that the
wave of schools and isms had a lot in common with the claims that
were staked during the California gold rush. In fact, in my view the
question of the nature of art was not nearly as important, at that
time, as the question of its location: not “What is art?” but “Where
is art?” As Kaprow put it: “Yesterday’s distinctions between art,
anti- and non-art are pseudo-distinctions which simply waste our
time.”16 My interest, with a nod to Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, is not “What does it mean?” but “How does it work?”17
Sociologists have developed a convention whereby society can
be discussed in terms of a “theatrum mundi.” Depending on one’s
viewpoint, that theater may have either negative or positive
connotations.18 I am using the metaphor of a theater in a positive
sense, partly as a means to highlight the exuberance, self-irony, and
humor of the 1960s—a time with a life-style not only shaped by the
aggressive ideology of New Frontiers but equally open to
fictionalization, theatricality, and eclecticism. After the “silent
generation” in the 1950s, for whom the “key word had been
security,”19 the American youth of the 1960s grew up as a
generation that had not experienced firsthand the traumas of war
or economic depression and found out about them only in verbal
and media accounts and on an aesthetic level. With active state
support for universities and industry, in some ways the Cold War
was an indirect blessing at the time.20 And ever since the Kitchen
Debate between Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. vice
president Richard Nixon in 1959, the fear of atomic war had
become something of a myth, feeding populist entertainment such
as the James Bond movies (1962 onward). In 1966 the Polish
American historian Zbigniew Brzezinski, later the national security
advisor to President Jimmy Carter, declared that the Cold War was
not a “real” war any more: “The cold war thus continues, but it is
no longer a ‘real’ war in the sense that the issues involved are no
longer historically relevant.”21 Looking back at that same time,
Smithson described its fictionality: “Cinematic ‘appearance’ took
over completely sometime in the late 50s. ‘Nature’ falls into an
infinite series of movie ‘stills’—we get what Marshall McLuhan
calls ‘The Reel World.’”22
In the 1950s and 1960s among the top best sellers were
sociological studies of the mechanisms of this theatricality. In his
book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the sociologist
Erving Goffman provided his readers with instructions on the use of
effective dramaturgical methods in the context of the growing
service industry sector. Drawing on the writings of Georg Simmel
and Jean-Paul Sartre, Goffman explored the workings of role-plays,
and his use of the vocabulary of theatrical performance—drama,
public, front, props, impression management—resonated with a
very wide readership. He related this language to everyday life: “A
‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of a given
participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any
way any of the other participants.”23 Thus his approach was in tune
with the notion, shared by many of his readers, that there was no
clear distinction between real life and stage dramas: “The stage
presents things that are make-believe; presumably life presents
things that are real and sometimes not well rehearsed.”24
Another best seller at that time was David Riesman’s study The
Lonely Crowd. Riesman posits that during the 1930s and 1940s the
“other-directed” individual had largely replaced the “inner-
directed” individual. In other words, the fluctuating demands of
changing “peer groups” were sweeping away erstwhile internalized
social norms: “While the inner-directed person could be ‘at home
abroad’ by virtue of his relative insensitivity to others, the other-
directed person is, in a sense, at home everywhere and nowhere,
capable of a rapid if sometimes superficial intimacy with and
response to everyone.”25 For Riesman and Goffman—unlike William
White Jr., the author of The Organization Man—theatricality had no
negative connotations. Whereas White defended and wanted to
preserve individualism and authenticity, Riesman and Goffman
expounded the mechanisms of a new society so that their readers
might orient themselves more effectively and, yes, become more
skilled in their chosen roles. White bemoans the
“professionalization” of managers, the trend toward “practical
education,” and the primacy of “technique” as opposed to
“content.”26 But even he did not object to the growing uniformity of
American life. In his view the technoid structures of society were
neutral in their impact, and he turned his attention instead to a
form of inner resistance: “I speak of individualism within
organization life.”27 The picture White painted also very much
applied to the change at that time in the personae of artists, who—
as the last embodiments of the fast-disappearing “individual”—
were expected to engage, as they always had, in their own
particular form of inner resistance.
This form of theatricality can be interpreted as a feature of a
specifically American liberal tradition. Unlike in continental
Europe, where theatricality was regarded in a much more negative
light and seen as evidence of some kind of inadequacy—from
Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Wagnerian theatricality via Jürgen
Habermas’s analysis of public life to Guy Debord’s La Société du
Spectacle28—in the English-speaking world it had a distinctly
positive air, most notably as the necessary precondition for the
exercise of democratic principles such as participation and
conventionality. Thus Richard Sennett, for one, viewed the
supplanting of theatricality by individualization and narcissism as a
serious cultural loss.29 The notion of participation—the acceptance
and engagement of a wide range of people in a theatrical-seeming
reality—thus came to be one of the central themes of American art
in the 1960s. While some participants literally took part in
Kaprow’s Happenings, others were symbolically cast in the role of
viewer by large-scale installations of Minimal Art. Hence I am also
interested in the question of how far it is possible to establish a
connection between the artistic structures of Happening and Earth
Art and the dynamics of capitalist, unchecked growth—the
continual celebration of the present, nonstop consumption, and the
aestheticization of the environment. Precisely because certain
Happenings and Earthworks seemed, superficially, to comply with
the structures of capitalism—because of their ephemeral,
consumable structures, “whose principle is extension,” as Kaprow
put it (his italics)30—some observers were critical of them for
blending into the backdrop of society as it was.

THE CONTINENTAL EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

Lest there be any misunderstanding: one of the aims of this book is

to historically situate the dualistic model of Modernism versus
Postmodernism and subject it to critical scrutiny. My task is of
course made easier by the fact that the oeuvres of my two
protagonists, Kaprow and Smithson, in any case never fitted
comfortably into this scheme. And the fact that I am in the
Germanspeaking part of continental Europe, where there is still
much skepticism toward the notion of Postmodernism—although
usually for reasons different than my own—is also a benefit to my
argument. Therefore it is worth highlighting some particularities of
the history of ideas in continental Europe. In postwar Europe the
notion of Modernity was much more problematic than it ever was in
the American context. This is no doubt largely due to collective
memories of the Second World War. Whereas the victorious
American people could uninterruptedly take for granted the
economic and cultural blessings of Modernity, Europeans had
experienced on their home ground Modernity’s other, destructive
face. What felt in the United States like a triumphal tradition
brought disruption and disappointment in continental Europe,
especially divided, postwar Germany. In Werner Haftmann’s
standard work of art history Painting in the Twentieth Century,
volume I (first published in German in 1955), the term Modernism
occurs just once, and then only in connection with the Italian
Futurists.31
These differences also leave their mark on periodization. From
the European point of view it is only natural to locate the beginning
of the history of contemporary art in 1945, following the end of the
Second World War; from the American perspective, however, the
break seems rather to occur in the 1950s, at the point when
American artists first started to take on a leading role in the art
world. Jean Baudrillard’s definition of modernité in the
Encyclopaedia Universalis (1992) exemplifies European skepticism
regarding the concept of Modernity and Modernism. In his account,
the term first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century in the work
of Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. Baudrillard pinpoints
that time as the moment when modern society started to reflect on
itself. In his view modernité was the result of a historical crisis:

Tied to a historical and structural crisis, Modernity

[modernité] is only a symptom of this crisis. It does not
analyze this crisis, but it expresses it in an ambivalent way,
in an endless forward flight. It works as a power of ideas
and as a master ideology, sublimating the contradictions of
history in the realm of culture. It turns the crisis into a
value, into a contradictory moral. (Baudrillard’s italics;
author’s translation)32

Baudrillard regarded Modernity not as a revolution but—like Henri

Lefèbvre—as the “shadow and parody” of a revolution.33 In this
respect, according to Baudrillard, as a substitute and purely
superficial, modernité was no more than a fad, which in turn
presaged its end.34 Moreover, it was always a sign of some
inadequacy, some unfulfilled promise.
The situation of Modernism was even more problematic in the
German-speaking world than in France. During the 1950s and
1960s the discussion in Germany was largely colored by efforts to
demonstrate to the art public at home and abroad that, after the
“caesura” of 1933 to 1945, art in the Federal Republic of Germany
had reconnected with the international project of Modernism that
had started in the interwar years.35 These efforts notably included
the rebuilding of war-torn collections through the acquisition of
contemporary art, the establishment of documenta in Kassel in
1955, the founding of the Cologne art fair in 1967, and the
foundation of numerous new art museums starting in the 1970s. In
this light it is understandable that while its progressive champions
lauded the art of the 1950s and early 1960s as the legitimate heir
to the classical avant-garde, its conservative opponents regarded it
as a threat to the status quo. Whatever one’s view, “modern art”
was not to be taken lightly—as became abundantly clear from the
work of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard
Richter, and Anselm Kiefer, who repeatedly returned in their
subject matter to the tragic division of the German nation. The
determination of German-speaking critics to rehabilitate,
standardize, and control the hard-won terrain of modern art was
very different from the easy negotiations with Modernism of their
American counterparts. Accordingly, American Modernism and
German Moderne are distinctly different concepts. In the English-
speaking debate, Modernism is the reliable, interest-paying legacy
of a triumphal past, which any subsequent present is free to accept
or reject. In the German-speaking debate, Moderne is a
burdensome mortgage that it will still take some time to pay off.
The German art historian Hans Belting rightly makes the point
that in Germany the reintroduction of Moderne (after the hiatus of
the Nazi era) in the form of a “reimport” from the United States
long remained a difficult, highly emotive topic that colored the
debate among art historians well into the 1990s: “The fear of losing
Modernism, which, as we know, can indeed go missing, has
repeatedly loomed into view. It also shapes the course of the debate
surrounding Postmodernism, particularly in Europe, where there is
a belief that cultural identity is being lost due to Modernism.”36
This also in part explains the irritation that colors German-speaking
commentaries on the demise of Modernism in the wake of French
and American discussion of Postmodernism. As Belting has put it:
“The whole dispute surrounding Post-modernism is fueled by the
fear that the loss of the avant-garde also means losing the future
and being left with only a frivolous art that no longer constantly
bids farewell to history.”37
Whereas in the German-speaking world the idea of Modernism
coalesced into a benign or bedeviled (depending on one’s point of
view) but always unassailable conglomerate of political, moral, and
historical ideas, Modernism in the English-language discourse of
the 1970s and 1980s took on a very different meaning that was
quite distinct from the Modern of the 1950s and 1960s. The English
terms Modernism and High Modernism became synonymous with
Formalism and the European tradition. A projection surface, with
negative undertones, emerged that from the 1960s well on into the
1980s came to be personified in the figure of Clement Greenberg.
The term Postmodernism came into being against this backdrop,
under the influence of theorists such as Fredric Jameson and art
historians such as Craig Owens and Benjamin Buchloh. Not until
the 1990s was any real attention paid to the confluence of
Modernism and Postmodernism, which had hitherto been regarded
as mutually antagonistic. It was Amelia Jones, in a groundbreaking
study of the reception history of the work of Marcel Duchamp, who
showed that the leading theorists of Postmodernism were in fact
perpetuating the norms that they claimed to have done away
with.38 The Modernist critics cited legitimation figures such as
Picasso and Pollock, while their Postmodernist counterparts looked
to Duchamp. Moreover, Jones contends that the two supposedly
different camps shared the same canon of values—that is to say,
they agreed on the starting date and “inventor” of the historic
process, the periodization and the establishment of a normative
value system.39 I am basing my narrative on this observation, and I
explain some of the reasons for this trend.
 The cultural conflict between the United States and continental
Europe came to a head in 1972 when a number of American artists
turned down their invitations to participate in documenta 5.
Smithson set out his reasons in a short text titled “Cultural
Confinement,” in which he puts forward the view that “cultural
confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on
an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.” He
was making the case for a form of art that engaged on a dialectical
level with the contradictory nature of the physical world and its
political and social values: “Art’s development should be dialectical
and not metaphysical. I am speaking of a dialectic that seeks a
world outside of cultural confinement. It would be better to disclose
the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom.”40
To regard Smithson’s statement as no more than a symptom of a
more general animosity toward institutions of any kind is, of
course, to miss the point. His participation in the boycott coincided
with the high point and final stage of the power struggles involving
a number of interest groups keen to stake their claims in the
territories of the explosively expanding art world of the 1960s. I
read his text on one hand as a fundamental critique of the idea of
an absolute art and on the other hand as a program for real artistic
change. Smithson’s polemical description of Harald Szeemann’s
exhibitions as “metaphysical junkyards” and his demand for art
that is dialectical harbor a theoretical potential that is still far from
exhausted.41 Smithson was one of the first to register the rappel à
l’ordre of the 1970s and to sense that art was being driven back
from what Allan Kaprow, in his essay “The Legacy of Jackson
Pollock,” had depicted as the “openness of 42nd street” in the late
1950s to the “white cube” described by Brian O’Doherty in the mid-
1970s.42 And, like Kaprow, Smithson grasped the connection
between the realignment of powers in the art world and the
unleashing of market forces in the early 1970s.
By virtue of their participatory structures and the comparative
complexity of their reception, Happenings and Earthworks are well
suited as case studies in an exposition of the changing role of the
institutions and image of art at a time of unprecedented expansion
of the art world. The institutions associated with Happenings in the
early 1960s were primarily artist-run exhibition spaces and art
departments at American universities, often very new and with a
leaning toward experimentation. Art dealers and art museums had
little interest in Happenings because of the absence of objects as
such. Ultimately, this has meant that in the major retrospectives of
1960s art that various institutions have presented since the early
1990s, Happenings only ever occupy a fairly peripheral position.
And as for the Earthworks, although they initially came into being
under the auspices of the influential Dwan Gallery and are today in
the safekeeping of mighty institutions such as the Dia Art
Foundation, they have never gained a foothold in the art market,
due to their size and cost, and have only ever played a minor role in
the relevant overview exhibitions.
In the present study I have selected just a few strands from
myriad artistic directions that do not conform with the monopoly on
meaning and the historicity of the Modernism/Postmodernism
model. I only touch on the history of Body Art and Performance,
which are of course closely related to the case studies I have
selected. I made my selections not least on the basis of my
involvement in architectural discourse. This explains the affinity I
feel for the central themes of Happenings and Earth Art, that is to
say, daily life, topographies, public spaces, and the technical,
economic, and political infrastructures that form the largely
invisible framework of the art world. My interest is, in other words,
the actual decisions by artists, representatives of art institutions,
and historiographers that lead to the exclusion or inclusion of
particular artists, works of art, and models of interpretation. For I
am in full agreement with Serge Guilbaut and the criticism of the
hegemony of Abstract Expressionism that he sets out in his book
How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, which leads him to
declare that “it therefore becomes important not to despise or
neglect the false paths taken, the forgotten artists, the rejected
works that illuminate the picture from the other side and give it
relief.”43 The latent conflict between American and continental
European art that was a feature of the 1960s and 1970s and is still
apparent in art scholarship is reflected on an individual level in my
own situation as an art historian trained and working in the context
of German-speaking academic art history (with its longstanding
blindness to contemporary art) yet at the same time engaged in the
dynamic English-language discourse of recent art history. This
ambivalent situation forms the backdrop to my observations. I
cannot resolve these innate contradictions, yet I venture to hope
that they may bear fruit in the wider discussion of this time and its
art.
Allan Kaprow and the Limits to Painting
 “Oedipal—just for fun”
ALLAN KAPROW AND ART HISTORY

ENVIRONMENT’S

IN MARCH 1958 Allan Kaprow exhibited a work in New York at the

Hansa Gallery, an artists’ cooperative that he had cofounded. The
work was untitled at the time. Later he listed it in his chronology of
works as Untitled Environment.1 A handful of color slides in
Kaprow’s archive and some black-and-white photographs, a few of
which he published later on, give no more than a vague impression
of the exhibition in spring 1958. These pictures show long swaths
of translucent plastic with markings in red, blue, and black paint;
hazily visible beyond them are the blurred outlines of exhibition-
goers (see figure 4). Besides the strips of plastic, there were also
wires, lengths of cloth, carbon paper, and tinfoil suspended in the
gallery space. It would be impossible to interpret these images if
not for contemporaneous reports by critics. Park Tylor, who
reviewed the exhibition for Art News, the leading art journal at the
time, commented that “as one moved at leisure among the even
rows, one had phantasmal glimpses of other visitors doing the
same.” Moreover, as he put it, the visitor felt “abstracted from the
ordinary world to one where musique is as concret as abstract
art.”2 Tapes recorded by Kaprow were played through speakers,
transmitting the chirping, buzzing, and grating noises made by the
Japanese toys that were all the rage in those days. Newsweek also
reported favorably on the event. Its reviewer made a particular
point about the way that the work enveloped the visitor—it
reminded him of Cinerama. In some amusement, he also reported
that one “gallery goer” found the sounds of the toys “so penetrating
that he clapped his hands over his ears and ran from the room.”3
FIGURE 4. Allan Kaprow, Untitled Environment, March 1958, Environment, Hansa Gallery,
New York.

In November 1958, Kaprow showed another untitled work in the

same gallery, which he also later listed as Untitled Environment. To
judge by the description of the work by the art historian Jeff Kelley
in his monograph Childsplay, based on conversations with Kaprow,
this was a “somewhat intensified environment” with “a ‘forest’ of
raffia strips hanging from ceiling-level netting along with swarms
of tiny blinking Christmas lights and a wall of broken mirrors
framed by two rows of spotlights aimed at the spectator.”4 Geoffrey
Hendricks, a colleague of Kaprow’s on the faculty of Rutgers
University, saw this exhibition and remembered it being divided
into two parts.5 In this second exhibition, he structured the space
not only in terms of sight, sound, and touch but also with pleasant
and unpleasant smells. According to Kelley, “an oscillating electric
fan circulated chemical odors.”6 However, these mingled with one
another and left a “nasty smell” in the space, as the Hansa
Gallery’s director, Richard Bellamy, recounted in an interview.7 And
Fairfield Porter, who was very critical of the exhibition in Art News,
wrote ironically of a “repellent smell of the particular disinfectant
that osteopaths favor.”8
Kaprow must have come to the conclusion that exhibition-goers
needed guidance of some kind, so he organized twice-daily events
when they could listen to the noise. Because these were too close to
being a performance— “a concert, in effect”—he later tried a
“random distribution of mechanical noise and taped sound.”9 The
second exhibition was accompanied by a pamphlet titled Allan
Kaprow: An Exhibition. In it Kaprow set out his aims under the
heading “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art”:

In the present exhibition we do not come to look at things.

We simply enter, are surrounded, and become part of what
surrounds us, passively or actively according to our talent
for “engagement,” in much the same way that we have
moved out of the totality of the street or our home where we
also played a part.10

The text explains how visitors should view and interpret the work.
They are to literally enter into the picture and participate in the
composition of the Environment, which in turn constantly changes
in response to their input. This idea reflected Kaprow’s interest in
producing a space that—as an extended form of painting—not only
represented something but also had a presence of its own. As he
put it: “Space is no longer pictorial, but actual (and sometimes
both).”11 According to him, visitors to the exhibition were given
“much greater responsibility” than in the context of traditional
artistic media, and the “success” of the work depended as much on
them as it did on the artist.12 Indeed the Environment only
“happened” when someone was moving around within it. In 1992,
Kaprow wrote in retrospect that “the Environment was vestigially
scenographic, but it favored the making and doing process, not the
visual result.”13

“THE LEGACY OF JACKSON POLLOCK”

This form of art, as yet without any widely accepted nomenclature,
was in need of commentary, and Kaprow provided this in an essay,
at greater length than was possible in the exhibition pamphlet.
Timed to coincide with the opening of his second Environment at
the Hansa Gallery, in October 1958 Art News published “The
Legacy of Jackson Pollock.”14 In this essay, Kaprow outlined the
thinking that had led to his Environment and, in so doing, cast light
on his future production. He also established the credentials of his
work by staking his claim to the legacy of none other than Jackson
Pollock, who had died in a car crash in 1956. Kaprow diagnosed a
tragic component in Pollock’s life that had less to do with his
sudden death than with the precarious state of art at that time. He
suggested that Pollock’s role as a heroically self-sacrificing artist
had become as untenable as the situation of contemporary art in
general, which now appeared to be doomed to either eternal
repetition or regression.
Kaprow came up with two provocative notions. First, that
modern art—or as we would say today, Modernist or Late
Modernist art—had become a thing of the past, at the latest with
Pollock’s death. He presented the art of the 1940s and 1950s as a
historical phenomenon that had already come to an end—of course
he was making this point before the term postmodern had become
common currency.15 Second, he suggested that as an artist, Pollock
had been playing a role. Although Kaprow does not explicitly talk of
a role, nevertheless his references to Pollock’s “gesture,” to his
being “in the work,” to his interest in the “attitude” of the
Surrealists, to his work as an “act,” and to the “acrobatic” aspect of
interpretation all testify to the fact that Kaprow imagined the artist
as an actor of sorts, as someone who is performative in his
demeanor and actions. He took the notion of the author behind or
above the work and replaced it with the idea of the artist as an
actor in a scenario that neither the artist nor the viewer can fully
take in.
Pollock’s legacy, according to Kaprow, was not the paintings he
had produced, for all that “he created some magnificent paintings.”
In Kaprow’s view it was the fact that Pollock had destroyed easel
painting. And even if Pollock himself had not capitalized on this and
had possibly only “vaguely sensed” its potential, he had definitely
pointed the way forward.16 Through his gestures and his lack of a
“malerisch [painterly] sensibility” he had managed to escape the
tradition of Formalism based on “part-to-whole or part-to-part
relationships.”17 He created new conditions that allowed him to do
away with the artfulness of painting and to relate art more closely
to older practices such as “ritual, magic, and life.” As Kaprow saw
it, there were two possibilities: either follow in Pollock’s footsteps,
making “near-paintings” and inevitably coming up against a dead
end in the process, or give up easel painting altogether.18 The latter
was the path that Kaprow recommended:

Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must

become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and
objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes,
rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second Street.
Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other
senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight,
sound, movement, people, odors, touch. Objects of every
sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food,
electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog,
movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by
the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold
creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have
always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose
entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in
garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store
windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and
horrible accidents. An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter
from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano; three taps on the
front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly, a
blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat—all will become
materials for this new concrete art.
Young artists of today need no longer say, “I am a
painter” or “a poet” or “a dancer.” They are simply “artists.”
All of life will be open to them. They will discover out of
ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not
try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real
meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the
extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well. People
 will be delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or
amused, but these, I am certain, will be the alchemies of the
1960s.19

It is nothing short of astounding that Kaprow anticipated the

artistic issues of the immediate future with such accuracy. The
different role of the viewer, the advent of performativity, the
engagement with popular culture, and the transformation of
spatiality are all prefigured in this text. And so it was that in 1964,
for instance, when Frank Stella delivered his verdict on “relational
painting,” he was in effect implementing Kaprow’s critique of
relational composition methods.20 Moreover, Kaprow’s text is still
regarded as a “manifesto for the Pop generation,”21 even as a
“prophetic statement.”22 This article in Art News made such an
impact above all because Kaprow managed to communicate the
concerns of a younger generation of artists while outlining a vision
that was as inspiring as it was vague, with the result that numerous
artists read it as a reflection of their own thinking.
It is typical of Kaprow’s approach that rather than simply
dismissing Pollock as dead and gone, he proceeded to reassess an
eclectic selection of elements of Pollock’s art. Kaprow neither
indulged in a symbolic act of patricide nor allowed Pollock to
become his demon, unlike Claes Oldenburg, for instance, who later
noted ironically: “I feel like Pollock is lurking over my shoulder, or
rather crouching in my pants.”23 The relationship Kaprow implied
between himself and Pollock is similar to the one between Robert
Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning, illustrated by Rauschenberg
in 1953 in Erased de Kooning Drawing. With de Kooning’s consent,
Rauschenberg spent a month and a half meticulously erasing one of
de Kooning’s drawings. However, this was not so much an
iconoclastic act as a pastiche of artistic patricide.24 De Kooning had
deliberately selected a drawing executed in oil crayons and ink,
which could not be entirely erased. And for a long time
Rauschenberg kept the end product in his private collection like a
trophy—with its evidence of determined yet ultimately ineffectual
erasure.25 Rauschenberg and Kaprow thus took the Oedipal
process of artistic rebellion, based on the nineteenth-century model
of trouncing one’s predecessors, and replaced it with playful
imitation. To paraphrase Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, they
were only Oedipal “for fun.”26
Unlike the artists of the classical avant-garde in the 1910s and
1920s, Kaprow was not out to do away with painting. On the
contrary, he repeatedly made the point that his work was deeply
rooted in the rationale of painting and that “the innovations which
are under discussion have primarily grown out of the advanced
painting of the last decade.”27 In fact he was closer to his teacher
Hans Hofmann than he was to Pollock. In his writings and teaching
Hofmann always returned to the connection between movement
and space, between tension and rhythm, and without doubt his
ideas, as set out in the following passage, were a major source of
inspiration for Kaprow’s Environments:

Movement is the expression of life. All movements are of a

spatial nature. The continuation of movement through space
is rhythm. Thereby rhythm is the expression of life in space.
. . . The product of movement and countermovement is
tension. When tension—working strength—is expressed, it
endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated,
though opposing, forces.28

So Kaprow’s mission was not to wipe out painting as a medium but

rather to transform it. He wanted to free it from its self-
referentiality and historicity and thus develop an alternative to the
tradition of art for art’s sake. Or, as he said on a later occasion: “I
was concerned with the implication that action painting—Pollock’s
in particular—led not to more painting, but to more action.”29 One
of the counterstrategies he employed, like many of his
contemporaries, was narration. As he put it, his easel paintings
from the 1950s told “literary stories.” With hindsight he pointed out
that his paintings had always been figurative, never
nonrepresentational, and that his “seemingly ‘abstract’ pictures
were anything but abstract!”30 Another strategy was to use collage
and assemblage, as in Kiosk: Rearrangeable Panels with Lights
(1959). This consists of a series of variously clad panels that can be
opened up, at will, like a polyptych, or closed again—that is to say,
they can be arranged as a sculptural installation. Kaprow regarded
collage as a subset of painting that also bore within it the seed of a
future replacement for painting, or, as he put it, “one of the forms
of painting which has led us unknowingly toward rejecting painting
in any form, without, however, eliminating the use of paint.”31
Kaprow thus took what he needed both from art history and
from the art being produced in his own time. His works have a
strong affinity with Rauschenberg’s Combines. Like Rauschenberg,
he was striving to combine painting, assemblage, and stage design.
Shortly before Kaprow installed his Environments in the Hansa
Gallery, Rauschenberg—commissioned to create the set for a
performance by the dancer Merce Cunningham on 30 November
1957 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—came up with a design
using chicken wire, branches, and newspapers, all of which appear
in Kaprow’s pieces.32 From 1956 to 1958 Kaprow attended the
seminars led by John Cage (a close friend of Rauschenberg and
Jasper Johns) at the New School for Social Research, where, as
Kaprow pointed out, he learned a lot about tape recorders and
made the “transition from being a visual collagist to being a noise
collagist.”33 He suggested that Johns should participate in the
exhibition Artists of the New York School: Second Generation,
which he was co-organizing and which was to be presented at the
Jewish Museum of New York in 1957. So Johns exhibited his
painting Green Target there.34 Some critics took the view that
Kaprow was imitating Rauschenberg, and Porter closed his
assessment of the exhibition in autumn 1958 with the words
“Kaprow could be more inventive.”35
What looked to many at the time like plagiarism can now be
seen as the outcome of an entirely deliberate approach to art as a
commentary on the status quo, which is wholly in keeping with
Kaprow’s skepticism regarding the Modernists’ expectation of
constant innovation. For the differences outweigh the formal
similarities between Kaprow’s assemblages and Environments and
Rauschenberg’s Combines. Kaprow’s works are not about adding
and combining decipherable codes from the repertoire of art
history and popular culture. They are much more about the
contingent superimposition of sensory impressions, which—since
they have no fixed meaning—cannot be unraveled like some kind of
mystery. Typical of these is the collage Hysteria (1956), whose
whole picture plane is pasted or painted with the word Haha. The
paint surface consists of a mass of interlocking letters that cannot
be taken apart and reconstituted in their original form. Whereas
Rauschenberg took the view that all lines of communication are of
equal value, regardless of direction, Kaprow’s interest was in the
errors and faults that can arise during the process of
communication. And while Rauschenberg, in his role as a mediator
between different levels of representation, was constantly
colonizing new terrain and themes for art—thereby reinforcing its
hegemony in the cultural arena—Kaprow questioned the basic
precepts of art by seeking out confrontation with nonartistic
realms.
For Rauschenberg’s pluralist art there was “no poor subject,”
because in it meaning can be transferred or shifted at will.36 For
Kaprow, however, there were most definitely better and worse
subjects. Rauschenberg’s Combines respect the limits of painting
and sculpture and accept the authority of established
iconographies. In fact his combination of painting and sculpture
does not defy the limitations of different genres as such but rather
the hierarchization of artistic genres, with painting as the dominant
medium. Even as the Combines symbolically ignore the frame and
reach out into the space around them, they affirm the authority of
that same frame. By contrast, Kaprow’s Environments share the
space with the exhibition-goer. Whether this art, as we have
already seen, is deemed “successful” depends as much on the
audience’s engagement as on the artist.37 The complex spatiality of
these Environments—in which there is no preferred standpoint—
comes to light as soon as we examine the documentation pertaining
to them. Rauschenberg’s Combines, like his stage sets, are
photogenic and readily accommodate the static position of a single
viewer. In complete contrast, Kaprow’s Environments only arise
through a process of interaction with multiple participants. They
are all but impossible to photograph and cry out for commentary
and interpretation. The fact that of all Rauschenberg’s works,
Kaprow most admired the White Paintings he saw at the exhibition
in the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1953 is highly revealing with regard
to the role that he expected the viewer to play. He remembered
spending a long time looking at these paintings, studying the
reflections and shadows that appeared on the white surfaces. In his
view these were Rauschenberg’s “pivotal works,” because they
“left viewers with themselves and the void in front of them.”38

THE HANSA GALLERY

Taking a closer look at the institutional circumstances that formed

the backdrop to his artistic praxis can shed useful light on how
Kaprow came up with his Environments in 1958. Until that point he
had exhibited almost exclusively at the Hansa Gallery in New York.
Like all the other members exhibiting at the gallery, he paid out of
his own pocket for the hire of the premises and publicity for his
exhibitions. His hope was that this would pay off by attracting the
attention of collectors, critics, and museum directors so that sooner
or later he could make the move to an established uptown gallery
on or around Fifty-Seventh Street. The Hansa Gallery, founded in
1952 by a group of students from a Hans Hofmann class, had its
roots in a cooperative called 813 Broadway, launched in December
1951.39 The name Hansa was a reference both to the league of
North European seaports and to the students’ highly respected
teacher. This new venture was to become the most prominent of a
number of similar cooperatives, such as the Tanager Gallery
(founded in spring 1952, closed in summer 1962) and three others
—Area, Camino, and March—all on Tenth Street.40 George Segal,
for one, was convinced that the Hansa Gallery “represented the
embryo that hinted at most of the major directions in New York
contemporary art.”41
The founders, who signed a contract in November 1952 setting
out “the aims and means of the Hansa Gallery,” were Jacques
Beckwith, Barbara Forst, Miles Forst, Jane Wilson Gruen, John
Gruen, Wolf Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Jan Müller, Felix Pasilis, and
Richard Stankiewicz.42 John Gruen seems to have initially taken on
a role similar to that of a business manager. The contract stipulated
that the founding members should present at least one solo
exhibition per season. In autumn 1958, immediately before the
cooperative was dissolved, the regular members were Beckwith,
Richard Bellamy, Lilly Berdoy, Jean Follet, Miles Forst, Kaprow, Ivan
Karp, Fay Lansner, George Segal, Stankiewicz, and Myron Stout.43
However, this is not to say that all these artists sold much of their
work, let alone were able to live from their sales. Without exception
the artist-members of the Hansa Gallery cooperative, including
Bellamy, appointed the business manager in 1954, and Karp, who
acted as manager toward the gallery’s end, all earned their living
elsewhere.44
Kaprow was the only member who already had a university post
by the mid-1950s. While studying for his master of arts at Columbia
University under Meyer Schapiro, whom he described as a “rara
avis” among art historians, someone who was at home with the art
of both the past and the present, Kaprow had also studied painting
with Hans Hofmann. Although he had not published his master’s
thesis, “Piet Mondrian: A Study in Seeing” (1952), it nevertheless
qualified him to take up a position, in 1953, as an instructor of art
history and art for Rutgers University at Douglass College. From
1956 to 1961 he held the post of assistant professor and actively
encouraged other artists to take up teaching posts at Rutgers.45
Lichtenstein, who had taught at various universities since the mid-
1950s, became an assistant professor at Rutgers in the summer of
1960;46 Robert Watts and Geoffrey Hendricks were also faculty
members; Lucas Samaras and Robert Whitman studied under
Kaprow; and George Segal graduated from Rutgers with a master
of fine arts in 1960. However, Kaprow left Douglass College
following a dispute that arose when some of his colleagues deemed
a particular work by Samaras to be obscene. After a short spell at
the Pratt Institute, in 1961 he was appointed an associate professor
in the Department of Fine Arts at the State University of New York
at Stony Brook, where he subsequently held the position of
professor from 1966 to 1969. At this point his career as a university
teacher took him to the West Coast, where he was to remain.
Having spent 1969–1973 as associate dean at the California
Institute of the Arts in Valencia, in 1974 he was appointed a
professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of
California, San Diego, where he was also department chair from
1985 until his retirement in 1993, when he became a professor
emeritus.
From the outset, Kaprow combined a number of different roles
in the art business: with his main source of income coming from his
university teaching, he also exhibited in his own right, organized
group exhibitions, and published texts on art—mainly concerned
with his own work. In the art world he deliberately cultivated his
image as artist and art historian in one. In view of his ambitions as
a university teacher, he had to publish on a regular basis. With this
in mind, he complained to Meyer Schapiro that Douglass College
refused to recognize his painting as research: “I’m practically
forced to write articles (the grand stand-by)—which I don’t relish or
have time for.”47 At the same time, however, programmatic essays
presented the ideal opportunity to lend weight to his exhibitions. In
this he once again proved to be leading the way in what was to
become a more general trend. The academization of artists—that is
to say, the idea that they should graduate from a university with a
master of fine arts—only started to become the norm in the course
of the 1950s.48 This was matched in the 1960s by an equally rapid
rise in the number of artists teaching at universities.49
The members of the Hansa Gallery did not regard their
cooperative as a programmatic league to promote any particular
artistic approach; they viewed it quite pragmatically as a potential
springboard for their individual careers. Although they occasionally
invited speakers—including Clement Greenberg in the mid-1950s—
the members did not pursue any shared theoretical aims.50 They
did not even agree in their attitudes toward Abstract
Expressionism. However, they did attract considerable attention.
Exhibitions at the Hansa Gallery were regularly reviewed in Art
News, whose editor-in-chief, Thomas Hess, looked kindly on the
group. By the mid-1950s the members’ efforts were beginning to
bear fruit. With the marked rise in prices being paid for Abstract
Expressionism, there was a growing demand for new, less
expensive art. Paintings and sculptures by Hansa artists, such as
Müller and Segal, and especially large-format assemblages by
Stankiewicz were now shown in prestigious group exhibitions and
increasingly bought by art museums. Consequently the Hansa
Gallery was able to move from downtown New York to uptown, to
the southern end of Central Park, and to employ a professional
business manager who earned a commission on his sales.
However, the growing success of certain members of the group
also inevitably heralded the dissolution of the cooperative. In this
situation Kaprow knew that he needed a succès de scandale if he
was to make a breakthrough before the gallery closed. As he later
wrote: “[The artist] must put-up or shut-up, succeed in conveying
his vision in reasonably good time or consider giving up the
attempt.”51 The distinctly sensational invention of a new medium—
the Environment—was the best solution, although the piece itself
would, by definition, not generate any sales. Looking back, Bellamy
recalled that Kaprow had never intended to sell the work but rather
hoped it would encourage academic and art institutions to provide
grants or other funding that would allow him to continue with his
experimental work.52

ART AND THE DIVISION OF LABOR: 18 HAPPENINGS IN 6

PARTS
Kaprow now set about building on the reputation he had made for
himself with his Environments and “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.”
He spent three months preparing an event for the beginning of the
1959 art season—an event that was to go down in the history of art
as the first ever Happening. After the summer vacation, art lovers
in New York received a form letter from Reuben-Kaprow Associates
announcing that “eighteen happenings will take place.” The
recipients were invited to become part of these Happenings and to
experience them in the company of other spectators: “Do not look
for paintings, sculpture, the dance, or music. The artist disclaims
any intention to provide them. He does believe that he provides
some engaging situations.” The letter closes with the words “The
present event is created in a medium which Mr. Kaprow finds
refreshing to leave untitled.”53 A press release announced that the
Reuben Gallery would have a grand opening in the autumn, not
with easel paintings but with an “event.”54 Later on flyers were
sent out with the title “18 Happenings in 6 Parts.”55 Some people
also received individual invitations, consisting of a plastic bag that
contained, besides the flyer, scraps of paper, photographs, wood,
cinnamon sticks, and cutout figures.56 The recipients of the flyers
learned that the event would be held in three rooms, that there
would be actors and slide projections, that the “actions will mean
nothing clearly formulable,” and that the “whole work is to be
intimate, austere and of somewhat brief duration.” They were also
asked to indicate whether they would be attending, because of the
limited number of places available, and to make a financial
contribution.
The work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was presented six times—on
4 and 6–10 October 1959—at eight thirty in the evening, and lasted
exactly one hour.57 Audience members were given a program with
an “Instructions” informing them that the performance was divided
into six parts, each of which consisted of three Happenings; the
sound of bells would mark the end of one and the beginning of the
next. The lengths of the intervals between the parts were
underlined (two minutes between parts 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and
6; fifteen minutes between parts 2 and 3, and 4 and 5). Visitors
were also given three cards informing them which room they
should sit in and when. Each evening there were six participants,
three men and three women, who were predominantly artists.
Kaprow’s score lists the participants: “Allan Kaprow—who speaks
and plays a musical instrument,” “Lucas Samaras—who speaks,
plays a game and a musical instrument,” “Sam Francis, Red
Grooms, Dick Higgins, Lester Johnson, Alfred Leslie, Jay Milder,
George Segal, Robert Thomson—each of whom paints,” and “the
visitors, who sit in various chairs.”58 Robert Whitman, Shirley
Prendergast, and Rosalyn Montague also took part as actors.
Curiosity drove a large audience to the gallery newly opened by
Anita Reuben, which was downtown in a loft above an antiquarian
bookshop.59 The audience no doubt included many of the
protagonists from the burgeoning New York art world, who in any
case were always running into one another and who would feature
three years later in a group portrait in the form of the book The
Artist’s World, by Fred McDarrah.60
Unlike the Environments, the first Happening is well
documented, thanks to the detailed description, including a number
of photographs, published by Michael Kirby in 1965 in his book
Happenings. In preparation for the event, Kaprow had erected a
temporary stage set in the loft. Opaque plastic sheets fixed to
wooden frames divided the space into three “rooms” of different
sizes. According to Kirby, in room 1 there were around thirty
folding chairs facing the other rooms, which were only indistinctly
visible through the plastic sheeting. Red and white bulbs were
suspended from the ceiling and bathed the room in a pink light.
The walls, as in Kaprow’s earlier Environments, were covered with
assemblages of wax fruits, scraps of paper, and mirrors. In room 2
there were two groups of around a dozen chairs, facing each other.
A single lamp bathed the space in blue light, and colored Christmas
lights bedecked the walls. In room 3 there were fifteen chairs,
placed so that they faced the other rooms. As in room 1, there were
lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling, this time blue and white.
Fixed to the plastic wall between rooms 2 and 3 were variously
colored foil rings. Another wall was made from a screen collaged
with words and fragments of words.
The audience took their seats. A bell sounded to announce the
beginning of the event. Loud, dissonant, electronic noises from four
tape recorders sounded from loudspeakers. Actors appeared in
ordinary day wear, men in room 1 and women in room 2, and, like
robots, executed a number of gymnastic exercises, strictly
according to Kaprow’s choreography. In the darker room 3, there
were slide projections of children’s drawings and Kaprow’s
paintings. Part 1 of the event ended after five minutes. After a short
pause, part 2 began, with two actors in suits carrying placards on
small sticks and reading out sentences on the placards in loud
voices. The audience heard fragmented utterances on the subjects
of time and art. Samaras was the speaker discussing art and came
out with sentences such as: “I was about to speak yesterday on a
subject most dear to you all—art. I wanted to speak then about art,
but I was unable to begin.”61 In room 3 there were more slides, this
time of masterpieces of European art. This was followed by a
fifteen-minute interval, during which visitors moved to a different
room depending on the instructions on their cards. Couples and
friends who had come to the event together found themselves
separated. Some people were instructed to stay where they were,
since all three rooms did not have the same number of chairs.
Part 3 began with the entry of the actors once again and more
electronic noises. In room 1 two female actors performed a series
of physical exercises; one of them bounced a rubber ball. In room 2
two actors sat at a table, where they played with little wooden
blocks that they arranged according to instructions issued by
Kaprow in a flat voice that was now heard from the record player.
In room 3, accompanied by a slide projection of diverse objects, a
female actor recited fragments of poems. In part 4, four actors in
room 1 played on a variety of musical instruments, as set out in
Kaprow’s score. In room 2 a mechanical drumming doll was set in
motion. Meanwhile, in room 3 a man sat down at a table, struck a
number of matches, and extinguished them in a glass of water, one
after the other. Following this he positioned himself behind lengths
of plastic sheeting, which he sprayed with a liquid so that the
audience’s view of him became increasingly blurred. In the next
interval the audience members again switched places. In Part 5
indistinct sentences and words were heard from the speakers. A
female actor in room 1 pressed oranges, filled a number of glasses
set out in readiness, and drank the juice (see figure 5). The smell of
the oranges filled the room and mingled with the smell of enamel
paint in tins that were brought into the room. Another female actor
pushed a so-called sandwich man—a wheeled construction for
displaying advertising—from room to room. The sound of dance
music, played on a scratchy old record player, came from within the
sandwich man. In room 2 an actor presented a pantomime of sorts.
At the same time, in room 3 a male and a female actor read
sentences from placards that they carried in front of themselves. As
the sandwich man passed through room 2, two spectators stepped
forward from the audience (on one of the evenings Jasper Johns
and Robert Rauschenberg performed this task), one from room 2,
the other from room 3, and approached, from opposite sides, a
frame in the dividing wall, over which a canvas was stretched. Each
was carrying a brush and a tin of paint, and they started to paint
the canvas with repetitive gestures.62 Since the canvas was
unprimed, each performer and the audience could see what was
bleeding through from the other side.63
FIGURE 5. Rosalyn Montague squeezing oranges, rehearsal for Allan Kaprow’s 18
Happenings in 6 Parts, Reuben Gallery, New York, 4 and 6–10 October 1959.

The final part of the event took place without sound. In room 1,
two actors performed a symmetrical synchronized sequence of
movements. In room 2, two female actors stood stock still, facing
the audience. After a time the four actors came together in the
central room. They pulled rolls of colored paper down from the
ceiling and started to read out the one-syllable words written on
them. The voices merged, creating a Babylonian confusion that
Kirby reproduced as “eh?,” “mmmmmm . . . ,” “uh,” “but,” “well,”
“oooh. . . .” In room 3 the lights went out for the last time and a
single slide was projected, showing a detail of Kaprow’s face—his
mouth and chin (see figure 6). When the bell rang out twice, the
last of the eighteen Happenings was over.
FIGURE 6. Allan Kaprow’s beard, slide projected in Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,
Reuben Gallery, New York, 4 and 6–10 October 1959.

“Eh?,” “mmmmmm . . . ,” “uh,” “but,” “well,” “oooh . . . ,” you

might say, although not entirely seriously, is not all that different
from what has since been written about 18 Happenings in 6 Parts.
Although most historiographers of modern art agree that it was a
milestone, scarcely anyone—with the exception of Gavin Butt and
Jeff Kelley—does more than mention the title. For Jürgen Becker it
was the “first of its kind.”64 For Roselee Goldberg it was “one of the
earliest opportunities for a wider public to attend the live events
that several artists had performed more privately for friends.”65 For
Henry Sayre it marked the beginning of the history of Performance
in New York.66 Thomas Crow places two images of the event at the
beginning of his book The Rise of the Sixties and describes Kaprow
as one of the founders of a tradition of “hybrid events, dubbed
Happenings,” albeit, as he adds, within the apolitical, “nearer
horizons of the art world.”67 And for Kelley it was “the first
American Happening and a seminal moment in the history of the
avantgarde.”68 The main sources these authors used are Kirby’s
description of the Happenings, based on his memories as an
eyewitness, an early script of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts published in
the internal bulletin of Rutgers University, and the hand-written
scores and other documents now in the Kaprow archive at the
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.69
According to Kirby, one source of inspiration for the piece came
in the shape of dance performances at Rutgers University
presented by Paul Taylor that Kaprow and Whitman had seen. Part
of this program was given over to a dance divided into separate
sequences in which a girl’s voice announcing the time was followed
by Taylor performing a series of jerky movements.70 Nevertheless,
these accounts—some published and others accessible only in the
Kaprow archive, like photographs of the rehearsals—and
contemporaneous reviews supply only a very sketchy impression of
the whole.71 There was hardly any reaction in the press. That the
detailed article which appeared in the Village Voice was effusive
was not surprising, since it was penned by Kaprow and signed for
him by a friend.72 But the article by Fairfield Porter in The Nation
was devastating. Porter accused Kaprow of eclecticism and
specifically of plagiarizing the work of Cage, Rauschenberg, and
Cunningham. “The Eighteen Happenings devalue all art by a
meaningless and deliberate surgery. And the final totality is without
character. . . . Like so many science fiction movies about the future,
his subject matter is the undigested immediate past.”73
After Kirby published his account, it was to be another twenty
years before the next eyewitness report appeared, in the shape of a
detailed description of the Happening in Samuel Delany’s
autobiography The Motion of Light in Water, published in 1988.
Delany recounts that as an eighteen-year-old, he was at the
Happening purely by chance and felt rather strange there, as the
sole Afro-American in the audience. With hindsight, he felt that the
real impact of Kaprow’s work of art was the awareness it instilled
in him of the altered temporality of Postmodernism: “As a
representation and analysis of the situation of the subject in history,
I don’t think Kaprow’s work could have been improved on. And, in
that sense, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was about as
characteristic a work as one might choose in which to experience
the clash that begins our reading of the hugely arbitrary
postmodern.”74
In that same year, 1988, Kaprow presented a new version of 18
Happenings in 6 Parts in New York, although with an entirely
different score, without an audience, and with little response from
the art world.75 In 2006, shortly after Kaprow’s death, André
Lepecki presented a replica in Munich, which conveyed a sense of
the progression and the atmosphere of the work.76 And in the
autumn of 2006, Christoph Schlingensief presented a walk-in
installation titled Kaprow City at the Volksbühne in Berlin along
with a two-hour performance involving members of the audience,
which explicitly drew on 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. It is as though
18 Happenings in 6 Parts actively invites historic reenactments,
however incomplete.
Taking as his example the fragmentary and partially inaccurate
recollections published by Delany, Gavin Butt has demonstrated
how memories and history are also defined by what is left out. He
particularly makes the point that “history writing . . . might address
itself to its own inevitable inadequacies, to its lapses of memory,
exclusions, and obfuscations as an important part of its very
enterprise” (Butt’s italics).77 He quotes Benjamin Buchloh, who
takes the view that “happenings are known of and not known,” and
this “only through their dispersed traces: hearsay and gossip,
reminiscence, a few photographs, and documents.”78 Unlike those
of many other works of art, Butt says, the story of a Happening is
by definition open-ended:

So, whilst happenings might be taken as disappearing from

the historical record by dint of the passing of their unique
spatio-temporality, they continue to live on in the memories
and curiosities of contemporary writers and historians.
Remaining in this manner means that the arrival at any kind
of final, interpretative closure is forever deferred in favor of
the production and circulation of multiple and competing
narratives.79

This had already led certain contemporary critics to assume that

anyone could attribute their own meaning to the work. But
although Kaprow had stated in advance that the actions would
“mean nothing clearly formulable,” he determinedly resisted
accusations of “meaninglessness” by critics such as Jill Johnston:80

You are beginning to join with many in denouncing

“meaning” in art and favoring “no-meaning,” or purely
existent situations-for-themselves. I don’t wish here to say
more than that this view is as discriminatory as any other, in
advocating one kind of subject matter (about which you
assume there is no-meaning) over another (of which you
believe you know the meaning). . . . A chap asks a Zen
master what Buddhist enlightenment is. He is told that
before studying, a mountain is a mountain. While studying,
everything seems confused. Then, with enlightment, a
mountain is once more a mountain. I would suggest, Jill, that
for the word “mountain,” you substitute the word
“meaning.”81

In an interview Kaprow explained that as a rule he conceived his

works on four levels. First there was “suchness,” second the
“difference of daily life and imaginations,” third “structure,” and
fourth “meaning.”82 In other words, he left nothing to chance. The
rigidity of the structure of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts reflects this.
The notion of chance has much less to do with Kaprow’s work than
the notion of irony, as expounded by the literary scholar Linda
Hutcheon in her book Irony’s Edge. Hutcheon points out that “irony
‘happens’ (and that’s the verb I think best describes the process) in
all kinds of discourses (verbal, visual, aural), in common speech as
well as in highly crafted aesthetic form, in so-called high art as well
as in popular culture.” And, in her view, irony is unlike ambiguity,
allegory, or metaphor in the sense its meaning cannot readily be
transplanted: “Irony has an edge.” For, as she explains, irony
happens in “discursive communities.” That is to say, in any
particular context the intention, the attribution, and the framing
create the scene within which the irony occurs.83 One of
Hutcheon’s special lines of inquiry concerns the interaction
between relations of power and relations of communication. The
model that she develops here can be usefully applied to Kaprow’s
Happening. The audience at 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was clearly a
“discursive community.” And Kaprow’s statements concerning the
piece, explicitly intended as instructions, commentary, and
interpretation, provided the framing that such a community
depends on. The event was characterized by a mixture of inclusion
and exclusion, with the participants both involved and kept at a
distance. Moreover, it was self-evident that all the spectators did
not necessarily understand Kaprow’s Happening; while some got it,
others certainly didn’t.
As an art historian I would naturally like to count myself among
those who got it. Consequently I prefer to set out my interpretation
here and now rather than somehow sidestepping the issue, as
Kelley does with his suggestion that 18 Happenings in 6 Parts
marked the end of the first phase of Kaprow’s artistic career.84
Rather, I argue that it marks the beginning of Kaprow’s
performative works. Butt also avoids the question by declaring that
the Happening holds up a mirror to the patchiness of memory.
Kaprow himself provided no real answers. In conversation, he
remarked to me that the Happening was full of funny references to
the art of the day. However, even he could no longer identify any of
those references and admitted that at the time they had been lost
on the audience. He did say that the title was an allusion to Luigi
Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921),
which enjoyed particular popularity in the 1950s.85 In addition,
both works—Pirandello’s play and Kaprow’s event—require six
actors, three men and three women, for the main parts. The
involvement of the audience, the special announcement, and the
focus on theatrical devices in Kaprow’s case would all have been
unthinkable without Pirandello’s striking representation of a
theater within a theater. Other elements, such as the fragmented
dialogues, also recall Pirandello’s techniques. Which only leaves
the question, how does this advance our understanding of Kaprow’s
work?

MY 18 HAPPENINGS IN 6 PARTS

So how shall I tell the story of this work? I would like to start by
tracking down the author’s signature. It appears on the flyers and
in the program, which names Kaprow as both the originator of the
piece and a participant “who speaks and plays a musical
instrument.”86 During the event Kaprow took on various roles.87
For the first, he had prerecorded his voice, which was now heard
from the wings, instructing two actors on how to arrange a number
of small wooden blocks. For his second role, like the Pied Piper of
Hamelin he played the flute in a procession. In his third he was
implicitly present as the maker of one of the paintings in the slide
show. Last, the lower half of his face was pictured on a slide. As one
of the few men sporting a beard in the art world at the time,
Kaprow, “bearded but no beatnik,” would have been easy to
identify.88 So the author had the last word—although both silent
(according to Kirby, the mouth was “expressionless”) and unseeing,
in the sense that his eyes were not in view.89 Leo Steinberg had
discussed the dialectic of seeing and speaking, alluded to here, in a
recent text on Jasper Johns.90 And the audience members must
have known Johns’s painting Target with Four Faces (1955), the top
edge of whose frame consists of a closable set of four niches, each
containing the lower half of a face. It had been featured on the
cover of Art News and caused a considerable stir when it was
shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery (see figure 7).91
FIGURE 7. Cover of Art News, January 1958: Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces (1955).

This division of the author into originator, actor, commentator,

and imitator, someone who invents, arranges, performs, comments,
and is receptive to other people’s ideas, is radically at odds with
the monolithic coherence of the artistic author who puts up a
(mystifying) front, as in the case of artists such as Pollock and
Cage.92 Ever since Harold Rosenberg’s 1952 essay “The American
Action Painters,” inspired by Hans Namuth’s photographs and films
of Pollock, the canvas could also be treated as an arena where an
“act” might take place. The impact of Namuth’s images can hardly
be overestimated. In the 1950s, as a direct consequence, Art News
introduced a regular feature on an artist painting a picture. In
addition to the text, often interspersed with quotes from the artist,
there was always a series of shots of the artist’s studio, taking the
reader right through from the canvas being stretched to the
finished picture. The tone of these features suggested that the
reader could in a sense participate in the creative act they traced.
Kaprow, in my interpretation, gave artistic form to the division of
labor. In the 1950s, art—by way of being a notable exception—was
a field of activity within industrialized society that appeared to be
exempt from the modern division of labor. Artists such as Pollock
and Cage served in the United States as figures onto whom others
projected their notions (both desirable and undesirable) of a still
intact world of work. For some they embodied preindustrial
workers, who are not alienated from their work, who sets
themselves a particular task and have the product in their hands
from the first concept to the eventual sale. It was not only the
artist’s persona that seemed to fit this bill. It was also his or her
place of production—an empty loft. In the 1950s and 1960s small-
scale nineteenth-century manufacturing premises in New York’s
inner-city loft buildings, whose occupants had left after the Second
World War, were now starting to find favor as places of artistic
production and reproduction, as studio, apartment, and gallery in
one. (Unawares and unintentionally their new occupants were,
however, also setting in motion precisely the process of
gentrification that they themselves would fall victim to in the 1970s
and 1980s, when yuppies and boutiques would drive them out of
their inexpensive studios.) With its clear structural division of labor
and also by virtue of its maker’s refusal to accept the loft as a more
or less natural framework, Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts
presented an alternative to the Late Modernist concept of artistic
work.
In a sense the acts that Kaprow presented in the three arenas of
the Reuben Gallery made a mockery of the idea of art production as
the work of an artistic genius engaged in a heroic struggle with his
material; at times they even recalled moments in the movies of the
Marx Brothers, which Kaprow greatly admired. And although the
actors did in some ways struggle with their props, they did this like
people getting on with a job, almost as though they were
implementing Frederick Taylor’s findings from his analyses of
specific work sequences, detailed in his book The Principle of
Scientific Management (1911). The performers were not driven
from within but clearly “outer directed,” as David Riesman would
have put it.93 That is to say, they carried out activities like
operatives that have been invented and are controlled by some
other beings. Each one was responsible for only certain sections of
the piece. But—unlike a stage play or a circus act—the Happening
would have had little effect if any of them had somehow gone off
the rails. (This did in fact happen one evening, when Al Leslie was
supposed to draw vertical lines on a canvas but started writing
obscene words instead.)94 There was nothing at all heroic about
these performers’ activities. In response to mysterious instructions,
they executed purely mechanical actions, almost like puppets, parts
in a machine, or members of a German dance-gymnastics group
from the early twentieth century.95 They were constantly taking on
different roles. They expressed nothing—the closest they got was
pressing halved oranges.
However, Kaprow’s subdivision of the author into various roles
was at odds with the image of not only the heroic Action painters.
His representation of different roles was also in stark contrast to
the persona embodied by Cage. In the late 1950s many artists of
the younger generation identified with Cage, who was widely
regarded as the antithesis to the Action painters. While established
artists such as Pollock and de Kooning moved out of town to the
countryside, Cage was omnipresent in the downtown art scene. He
was constantly in evidence—teaching, writing, lecturing,
performing. He had every reason to be curious about 18
Happenings in 6 Parts; he had already witnessed various
performances realized by Kaprow, a student in his seminar. And
Cage had organized that legendary event—undocumented and
untitled—that took place in the summer of 1952 at Black Mountain
College, which historiographers refer to as “the first Happening,”
as a direct model for “the material and structure” of Kaprow’s
Happening, as a “proto-Happening,” the “first such event,” as the
source of all later Happenings, and as a “preparation for the
countless activities of the 1950s and 60s.”96 What is now generally
referred to as Untitled Event apparently involved a combination of
artistic genres that were presented, partly concurrently, in front of,
around, and behind the audience, which was seated in the center of
the room.97 M. C. Richards and Charles Olsen are said to have
recited poems, Cunningham improvised a dance performance,
David Tudor played the piano, and Rauschenberg played Edith Piaf
discs on an old record player.98 Slides and flickering 8 mm films
were projected onto the walls.
In some respects Kaprow no doubt took his lead from the
concepts of art and vocabulary he had absorbed from Cage. As a
student in Cage’s seminar, he would have heard accounts of
Untitled Event, and Cage’s notion of “experimental action,” the
“outcome of which is not foreseen,” informed his rhetoric as much
as the idea that any such performance was by definition “unique.”99
Kaprow’s path from painting to the stage would have been
inconceivable without Cage’s own progress from music to theater.
As Cage said: “Where do we go from here? Towards theater. That
art more than music resembles nature.”100 Yet the self-evident
affinities between Kaprow and Cage are not as interesting as the
differences between student and teacher.101 These are readily
apparent in the surprisingly harsh criticism of 18 Happenings in 6
Parts that Cage came out with in an interview with Kirby in 1965.
In Cage’s opinion, the problem was that Kaprow was only
interested in himself, quite the opposite of Cage’s view of himself:
“I came to be interested in anything but myself.”102 His irritation at
what he regarded as Kaprow’s artistic narcissism part could be
interpreted as a reaction to being confronted with a mirror image
of his own artistic praxis, which ultimately depended on his
authority as an artist and teacher and on the public’s acceptance of
these roles. While Cage played down this authority by dint of his
rhetorical insistence on objectivity and concealed it in his artistic
praxis behind the mysteries of chance and structures, Kaprow
flaunted it in his performance. Kaprow’s unabashed interest “in
himself” highlighted the authority of the artist as author—and
presented it as a topic for debate. Through his performative
omnipresence, he invited the audience to question the function of
the all-controlling artistic author (barely visible in Cage’s praxis).
Moreover, he did not present himself as a single, coherent
personality—like Pollock and Cage—but rather as a figure
fragmented through active engagement in different forms of
labor.103
It was not only the narcissistic presence of the author but also
the obvious intentionality and what he regarded as Kaprow’s high-
handed instructions to members of the audience, particularly the
seating order, that were alien to Cage’s concept of art: “It doesn’t
include policemen.”104 In a sense his criticism of Kaprow reflects
the difference between utopian vision and a pragmatic approach,
between art as a secluded field within a deregulated reality and art
as a testing ground for rules and boundaries. It is significant that
Cage specifically objected to the process of allocating seats. The
seating arrangement in 1952’s Untitled Event comprised four
triangular blocks, around which various activities took place, which
allowed the audience to “see itself,” as Cage himself said.105 There
was no hierarchy in this seating arrangement. As Cage explained to
a woman in the audience who wanted as good a seat as possible,
there were no “best” seats. Not so in 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,
whose seats could definitely be described as better or worse. No
individual spectator could see the whole event, but some certainly
saw more than others, and those who were particularly unlucky in
the (random) distribution of instruction cards did not even make it
into all three rooms. Thus, in Kaprow’s jurisdiction the act of
perception was neither natural nor neutral but rather contingent,
contradictory, and fragmented.
In the same way that Kaprow deconstructed the originator of the
piece, by dividing his labor into its component parts, he also
deconstructed his audience. For the spectators could only ever
guess at what was happening on the other side of the opaque
plastic walls separating the rooms.106 If they wanted to know what
had been going on, they had to ask other members of the audience
during the intervals, who in turn had to rely on their powers of
recall. It was thus only possible to have an impression of the whole
scenario by putting together a range of different perceptions,
recollections, and assumptions. There was no single spot from
which to survey the entire sequence of events. Even the author was
caught up in a mechanism that did not distinguish between
creation and reception, that both produced the work of art and was
produced by it.107 The fine dividing line between creation and
perception, between artist and spectator, even between work of art
and reproduction seemed to fade away in 18 Happenings in 6 Parts.
The intervals, during which the audience members were not
allowed to leave the rooms, as the program said, were of just as
precise a duration as the acts themselves. The intervals gave the
performers a chance to change, but they were also the moment—
emphasized by the lighting—when the audience could enjoy the
limelight, having been expressly requested in the program to
refrain from applauding until the end of the evening. Thus the
sounds of people scraping their chairs on the floor, clearing their
throats, chatting, making critical remarks, and jockeying for better
seats, framed by the interval bells, also became part of the
production. Amounting to a total of thirty-six minutes, the intervals
lasted longer than the twenty-four minutes of the acts.108
Cage made a point of the process of perception as such, but
Kaprow went a stage further.109 His focus was not on the act of
neutral perception but rather on the production of meaning
through artistic performance. Whereas Cage was interested in
opening up “the entire field of time,” Kaprow was concerned with
actual events.110 Unlike Cage, Kaprow could not—as in the case of
his earlier Environments—anticipate that the work would be a
success. The form of the work partly depended on the spectators.
Cage failed to understand that Kaprow’s score accounted for the
audience, perhaps because his own artistic calculation for his
composition 4’33”, for instance, did not include the times before,
between, and after the movements.
While chance was central to Cage’s work, Kaprow set greater
store by rules. After all, the deliberate cultivation of chance—from
Kaprow’s perspective—was no more than a symbolic transgression,
and hence confirmation, of the framework of the self-referentiality
of art. Chance as an expression of undirected “naturalness”—in
Cage’s work and of course in that of Duchamp—was, in Kaprow’s
estimation, the “most problematic” aspect of the Happenings.111 It
was only interesting to him as an instigator of outcomes: Who
would sit next to whom once the bell had rung? Who would block
whose line of vision? Who would disturb whom by giggling or
coughing? What little mishap in the performance would trigger
which misunderstandings in the minds of the recipients? How
would these misunderstandings be communicated to others? How
would the performance be rated during the evening? Whose
opinion would be influenced by whom? Which allusions would be
spotted, and which would be missed? Accordingly, I take the view
that 18 Happenings in 6 Parts is both a representation and a re-
creation of the mechanisms underpinning the evaluation of art and
the production of meaning that prevailed in the art world in New
York at the time. To paraphrase again the words of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, Kaprow’s work was not about what something
meant but about how it functioned, how it produced and negotiated
meaning.112
Yet this in itself still raises the question of how art from the past
generally makes itself felt in our own time and specifically why, at a
distance of half a century, this particular piece has lost nothing of
its relevance. This brings us to concepts such as the environment,
performance, and atmosphere, which are so firmly rooted in art
today. It would be going too far to suggest that Kaprow was the
first to use these terms—which are, after all, part of everyday
speech—as shorthand for specific artistic processes. However, in
the late 1950s and early 1960s he did use environment and
surroundings to mean “total art.” In “The Legacy of Jackson
Pollock” he set the word environments in italics, to emphasize it as
unusual in the context of art.113 It was only in 1965 that he first
wrote Environment with a capital E, giving it the status of an
artistic genre in its own right.114 But however he used the relevant
terms, the fact remains that half a century ago he mapped out a
whole series of issues that have come into prominence again,
starting in the 1990s. First there was the intermingling of artistic
genres—particularly painting, architecture, and theater. Second,
the use of ephemeral, time-dependent structures. Third, the
involvement of the spectator in the work’s spatial and temporal
makeup. Finally, by presenting a work of art and its commentary in
parallel, he laid the foundation for a notion that still operates today,
namely that the artistic author stands surety for the correct
interpretation of his work—whether he expounds on it in detail or
prefers to maintain a discreet silence.
Thus not only the enduring presence of Kaprow’s art in the
contemporary art scene but also its impact on the writing of art
history is of interest. The scant documentation of those early
Environments and Happenings specifically epitomizes the issues of
ephemeral art forms that we as art historians must constantly
address. Will we ever know what those exhibitions were really like?
Does the written word really help us to see those blurred images
more clearly? Is it at all possible to reconstruct the event from the
numerous, partly contradictory accounts that have come down to
us, to put the pieces of the puzzle back together again? What
counts here as the original work? Is there even any sense in trying
to find it? Are the two Environments from 1958 and 18 Happenings
in 6 Parts more important or more “authentic” than photographic
reproductions? Or are precisely those photographs the only
authentic thing within our grasp? And what is the significance of
the fact that Kaprow retrospectively baptized the exhibitions from
spring and fall 1958 and re-created them and other early works
more than three decades later, in the early 1990s? How should we
deal with the fact that he reinvented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in
1988 and performed it in the city of New York in an entirely new
form? As historians, should we discuss the works from the late
1950s and early 1960s or those from the late 1980s and early
1990s?
For a long time I took the view that it was neither possible nor
reasonable to try to reconstruct that original situation. After all, it
was changing even under the impact of my description. It was my
aim to relinquish the distance, the “objective” reserve that I had
previously favored, and to engage with the subject matter in the
here and now. I saw my own interpretation as a continuation of the
past acts of the performers and participants. I felt that my work as
a historiographer interlocked with the work of the author, Kaprow,
and with that of the actors and diverse commentators. The subject
of my investigation—18 Happenings in 6 Parts—had instigated that
very investigation, and for its part the investigation was leading to
more outcomes of its own. If 18 Happenings in 6 Parts had never
existed I perhaps would not have written my book, yet the piece is
dependent on other people telling the story of what happened. So I
saw it as my task to make the individual steps in my work
comprehensible to and adaptable by others. This was the “truth” of
the historiographic approach that I took as my guideline.
But then I found myself compelled to change my ideas. As a
witness of the meticulous reconstruction in 2006 of 18 Happenings
in 6 Parts led by André Lepecki, I found I had yet another
perspective on the work. The movements, the colors, the lighting,
and above all the sound effects in the exhibition space made it clear
to me that my picture of the Happenings had been too reliant on
images and text. Contemporaneous documents and pictures can
never convey the atmosphere, the timing, the interplay of different
levels—although this is not to say that the replica in Munich did not
fill me with something of the same unease that most replicas
induce in me. But at the same time I acquired a more nuanced view
of Kaprow’s achievement.
Geoffrey Hendricks, one of the few who were at both the 1959
and the 2006 event, pinpointed the difference between the two. In
his view, everyone at the 1959 event was well aware that it was a
significant moment in history, which itself captured the essence of
what was in the air at the time. At the re-creation of the event, he
had a renewed sense of its formal beauty. Over the years his
memory of that aspect of the work had rather faded.115 The event
in Munich showed the lucidity of the composition, how well its
sights and sounds interconnected, and the importance of the
contrast between the controlled elements and the chance aspects
of this work. No doubt there was very considerable difference in
the behavior of the spectators at the two events. Unlike on that
occasion in New York, the “entire” art world—which has expanded
beyond all recognition since the 1950s—was of course not present
in Munich, and there were no stars from the contemporary art
scene, just a handful of specialists and friends from the circles
around Kaprow. But the re-creation also confirmed that Kaprow
had pulled out all the stops and clearly intended to present a wide-
ranging piece that would take its place in art history. And it
reinforced what he had said to me in conversation ten years earlier,
that it had been his aim both “to step out of history” and to be “the
most modern artist in the world.”116
 The Happeners’ Bodies

What has been called the art public is no longer a

select, small group upon which artists can depend for
a stock response, favorable or otherwise. It is now a
large diffused mass, soon to be called the public-in-
general. . . . Not only does it echo a pluralistic
esthetics, but it also suggests that the range of
reasons people now have for being interested in
contemporary art is sufficient for art to be admitted
to the public domain. Not all artists can benefit from
all these reasons, but artists are in a position to turn
the welcome signs to their advantage; for, in any case,
people are taking advantage of artists.
—ALLAN KAPROW, “The Artist as a Man of the World”

18 Happenings in 6 Parts caused a major stir in the art

ALLAN KAPROW’S
world in 1959. At last someone had found the long-sought escape
from the gravitational pull of Action Painting. Immediately after the
event was presented, a wave of Happenings set in, continuing until
the mid-1960s. The press and increasing numbers of the wider
public responded with enthusiasm to “Happeners” such as Red
Grooms, Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Carolee Schneemann, Claes
Oldenburg, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Yoko Ono, and the musicians
Dick Higgins, Philip Corner, and La Monte Young. However, the
Happeners—Kaprow in 1966 reckoned there were “more than forty
men and women ‘doing’ some kind of Happening”—never
constituted an identifiable group as such.117 The term Happening
was widely accepted, although the Happeners understood it in
quite different ways and variously described their work as “play,”
“event,” “act,” “activity,” or “performance.”118 By the mid-1960s
there were as many definitions of Happening as there were
Happeners. Oldenburg, for one, distinguished between emotional
and rational camps. The emotional camp, as he saw it, was rooted
in an Expressionist tradition that went all the way back to German
Expressionist film and the Surrealist environments of Salvador Dalì
and Marcel Duchamp via Antonin Artaud’s theory of theater and
culminated in Happenings like Grooms’s The Burning Building and
Oldenburg’s own Autobodies. By contrast, again in Oldenburg’s
view, the rational camp took its lead from Cage’s anti-
Expressionism, which paved the way for Kaprow’s Happenings.119
Kaprow, for his part, felt that Oldenburg’s approach had more to do
with theater than with Happenings.120
The New York Happeners soon realized that they were not
alone. Inspired by Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock, the Gutai
Group in Osaka was already making a name for itself among the
wider public with an article in Life, a front-page report in the New
York Times on 8 December 1957, and an exhibition at the Martha
Jackson Gallery in 1958.121 Georges Matthieu’s paint actions, also
inspired by Pollock; Yves Klein’s performances with “living
paintbrushes”; Wolf Vostell’s texts and Happenings; Daniel
Spoerri’s Environments; Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tableaux-Tirs; and
early works by the Viennese Actionists, such as Blood Organ, were
all conceived in pursuit of artistic aims that were at least
comparable to those of the American Happeners. Exhibitions such
as The Art of Assemblage (1961) at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Bewogen-Beweging (Motion in Art) (1961) and Dylaby
(Dynamic Labyrinth) (1962), both at the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, and The Nouveaux Réalistes (1962) at the Sidney Janis
Gallery in New York were among the earliest attempts to introduce
certain individual positions, above all in the field of Environments,
into the museum world as part of an international phenomenon.
Despite their conceptual and historical differences the parallels
between these groups encouraged their members to invite one
another to present lectures and performances, to organize festivals,
to actively acknowledge each other’s work, and thus to establish a
distinct identity for this new movement. The Happeners and the
Fluxus artists—some felt an allegiance to both movements—
established a loose international network. As Paul Schimmel has
aptly pointed out, “The necessity of travel associated with
performance work allowed and encouraged an extraordinary
degree of interaction that brought the studio into the world
arena.”122 Initially this network formed what might be described as
a shadow art world, an alternative to the already established
network of galleries, collectors, and museums. This formed the
backdrop to the subsequent groundswell of sometimes only short-
lived associations, distribution organs, exhibition centers, and
journals. The improvised, semi-ironic, semiserious formation of
pseudo-bureaucratic structures by the members of these art
networks led to a specific aesthetic that saw the emergence of the
Multiple—inexpensive to produce and easily transportable—and a
delight in bureaucratic accoutrements such as stamps, forms,
boxes, files, and cases. The often cited simultaneity of the work
being produced by artists in the United States, Europe, and Japan—
supposedly working entirely independently of one another—turned
the art-historical topography of that time into somewhat daunting
territory that academic art historians did not dare venture into for
many years. Even with the canonization of Happenings and Fluxus
in the 1990s the situation remained blurred. In 1998 the exhibition
Out of Actions drew together a rich array of materials. However,
the organizers’ museological determination to create an
overarching art-historical context led them, in effect, to obscure the
deep-seated differences between the European and the American
art of that time.
From the late 1950s onward, Happenings in New York followed
hard on one another’s heels. They took place in converted factory
buildings, artists’ studios, and backyards or in newly opened
galleries such as the Reuben Gallery, mentioned earlier, and the
Judson Gallery.123 In August 1958, at the Sun Gallery in the artists’
colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Grooms presented a paint
action titled A Play Called Fire. His Happening The Burning
Building took place from 4 to 11 December 1959, just two months
after 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, in a studio on Delancey Street,
which Grooms had summarily renamed the Delancey Street
Museum.124 Whereas Kaprow’s Happenings were presented
according to a precise plan, following extended rehearsals, and in
comparatively elaborate surroundings, Grooms deployed the
simplest of means, such as painted cardboard, plain costumes and
makeup, two lightbulbs, a candle, and a radio receiver. According
to Grooms, The Burning Building stemmed from his love of private
backyard theatricals and the ambience of old circuses and
playhouses he remembered from his childhood in Tennessee.125
The actors were given a vague plot outline and could decide for
themselves, depending on how the audience reacted, how long the
performance would be—usually it lasted about ten minutes. Unlike
Kaprow, Grooms encouraged his actors to improvise, and Michael
Kirby recalls that on the first night, they were still preparing for
the performance when the first members of the audience
arrived.126
In February and March 1960 there were two events at the
Judson Gallery—Ray Gun Show and Ray Gun Spex—with
Environments and performances of Happenings by Dine,
Oldenburg, Higgins, Whitman, and Kaprow. Oldenburg showed his
Environment The Street, an “epic construction” in the form of a
street made from paper, wood, and wire, which served as the
backdrop for the Happening Snapshots from the City; he
subsequently presented this Environment at the Reuben Gallery.127
Dine showed The House, an Environment full of items from a
domestic interior, painted scraps of canvas, and paper. Kaprow
presented the Happening Coca-Cola, Shirley Cannonball?, in the
tradition of Bauhaus theater; hidden in a kind of cardboard
telephone box and an oversize boot, respectively, Dine and
Oldenburg featured as actors in this piece. Dine’s first Happening,
The Smiling Workman, made a mockery of the heroic image of an
artist engaged in Action Painting. Dressed entirely in red, with his
face painted red and his lips black, he appeared in front of a set
made of white canvases. Using orange and blue paint, he then
wrote the words I love what I’m doing on the canvas backdrop.
Next he drank a pot of red “paint” (actually tomato juice), tipped
another pot of paint over his head, and jumped through the canvas.
According to Dine, the whole thing lasted less than thirty seconds:
“It was like a drawing.”128
Many Happenings were mutually referential. No doubt diligent
research would identify iconographic mores that avid Happenings-
goers at the time would have understood. Grooms enthused over
the tactile and olfactory properties of certain materials: “Oh, the
joys of a woodpile, cardboard, canvas, and glue, and paint.”129 Like
Grooms, Dine abandoned this medium after 1960: “It was taking
too much from my painting, which I really wanted to do.”130
Oldenburg’s Happenings, like those of Dine and Grooms, were
closely connected with his work as a painter.131 His main emphasis
was on their colorful impact as tableaux; after each show, he
offered certain elements for sale as “residual objects,” that is to
say, autonomous works of art.132 Circus (Ironworks/Fotodeath),
which he presented at the Reuben Gallery in February 1961, had a
structural similarity to 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. It consisted of a
series of thirty-four events, each divided into a sequence of
overlapping scenes and separated from the next event by an
interval. After Oldenburg’s Store had been open for two months, he
presented Ray Gun Theater in the same premises as that piece,
between February and May 1962; this comprised a series of
Happenings including Store Day I and II, Injun (N.Y.C.) I and II,
Voyages I and II, Nekropolis I and II, and World’s Fair I and II.133
While Kaprow inspired the structure of Oldenburg’s Happenings,
he himself learned from Oldenburg’s methods—the dramatization
of Happening by means of a plotline, the use of personification and
eroticism. However, in both their work the last was in fact confined
to stylized female personae and the use of female characters as
projection figures for male fantasies. When it comes to the
representation of eroticism and sexuality, Oldenburg’s and
Kaprow’s Happenings pale in comparison with Environments such
as Yayoi Kusama’s Sex Obsession Food Obsession Macaroni Infinity
Nets & Kusama (1962) or even Schneemann’s staged performances
of Eye Body (1963) or her Happening Meat Joy (1964).
It is only posthumously, since the retrospective of 2006–2007,
that Kaprow has been included in the canon of mainstream art—if
we take this to consist of the artists who have played a prominent
part in museum exhibitions since the 1960s. There has never been
a place for him in the canon of any alternative history of art. With
the exception of Gavin Butt, the leading lights in performance
studies have paid scant attention to Kaprow. Although the story of
Performance Art could hardly have unfolded as it did without
Kaprow, he does not feature in the otherwise innovative and
differentiated history of this academic field. Yet it is only to be
expected that he does not fit in with the main issues of the
alternative art scene. As the “father” of the Happening and as one
of the most influential figures in American college life, this
heterosexual white artist in effect embodied a distinctly patriarchal
structure. He is very much part of the male genealogy of art
history, even if the resonance of his name tends to shroud the fact
that his work as such is not at all well known. He admitted that up
until the early 1970s he was blind to feminism.134
In the 1960s his use of the human body, his own and those of the
other participants in his pieces, was entirely conventional. At that
time, isolated female bodies in his Happenings—naked, seminaked,
or fully clothed—served first and foremost as allegorical
embodiments, in pieces such as A Spring Happening, Courtyard,
Orange, and A Service for the Dead. When there was a group of
female actors, they were generally dressed in street wear; the same
can be said of the male actors. Kaprow himself was involved in
most of his Happenings, always in the role of someone prepared to
get his hands dirty, with his sleeves rolled up, in jeans; at sweat-
inducing Happenings he would appear as a manual worker with a
bare torso. Inspired by—but not an institutional member of—
performance studies, I would like at this point to turn to the body
image of Kaprow’s art. My particular interest here is in the way
that the human bodies in his events related both to one another and
to the space around them, with specific reference to the power
relationships between the actors, between the artist and the actors,
and between the actors and the spectators, as well as—as in 18
Happenings in 6 Parts—Kaprow’s presentation of labor.
Having turned attention to the audience as a gathering of
spectators with specific knowledge, expectations, and
misapprehensions in 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, Kaprow continued
to develop this theme in the years to come. A Spring Happening
was typical of the demands he put on the spectator. Kaprow
presented this piece in March 1961 on the ground floor of the
Reuben Gallery, not long after Dine’s Car Crash and Whitman’s The
American Moon and before Oldenburg opened his Store not far
away. The visitors, who had preregistered, had to enter a specially
constructed narrow, dark corridor until they came to a standstill in
complete darkness, packed together in single file.135 Kaprow called
this structure a closet. It was around twenty feet long, seven feet
high, and two feet wide; it had a floor and a ceiling, walls, and a
curtain at each end.136 At eye level were small slits, covered with
transparent plastic film, through which the walls of the gallery
could be seen. As in an Environment, these walls were painted in
red, blue, and white and covered with fabric, newspaper, roofing
felt, and chicken wire. There were also sounds to accompany these
sights. On the reinforced roof of the closet, out of sight of the
visitors, were empty oil drums, an electric saw, and a floor polisher.
Noises came from the loudspeakers, a foghorn, and a bell. Actors lit
matches, flitted past the visitors as the lighting changed, enacted
fights, and blundered about with cardboard boxes over their heads.
An actor on the roof, rolling the oil drums around, started up the
electric saw. Next he set to work on the roof panels with the floor
polisher, directly above the visitors’ heads.
The climax of the event was the entrance into the gallery space
of a female performer wearing only beige tights; she came to a stop
in the spotlight, with green vegetables hanging from her mouth—an
iconographic allusion to the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s
Primavera. Two actors approached her and covered her with a
piece of fabric. In the last sequence of A Spring Happening, an
actor suddenly appeared at one end of the corridor, walking
straight toward the visitors while pushing a running gasoline lawn
mower. The visitors had to crowd closer and closer together since
their only exit was now blocked by a fan blowing cool air into the
corridor. Just before the lawn mower reached the first visitors the
walls of the corridor fell outward, releasing its occupants. The
lights went on and the visitors had their first sight of the room as a
whole (see figure 8).
FIGURE 8. Allan Kaprow, A Spring Happening, Reuben Gallery, New York, 22 March 1961.
Photo © Estate of Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Throughout A Spring Happening, the visitors were at the mercy

of their own voyeurism. They were hidden from the actors—except
the man with the lawn mower—yet they were exposed to their
fellow spectators. They could only look out of the closet through the
small viewing slits and were never in control of what they could
see, which was only revealed to them as fragments. After a while
someone outside the closet smeared soap on the plastic film, so
what was already a restricted field of vision was now blurred too.
At the same time noises and sounds were bombarding the visitors.
It was only after the final shock that they had a complete view of
the situation. For a split second they had a bodily sensation of the
new beginnings and birth that may be associated with spring, only
for the Happening to end in that same moment.
Jeff Kelley interpreted this Happening as an attempt “to
eliminate the audience.” Kaprow himself remembered Marcel
Duchamp (who attended the event with Max Ernst, Hans Richter,
and Richard Huelsenbeck) “leaping nimbly out of the way.”
According to Kelley, Kaprow was endeavoring to drive out the old
ghosts of art history and make an entirely new start. Kelley also
pointed out the ambiguity of the word spring—the season after
winter, people springing out of the way, springing a trap.137 What
particularly interests me here is the situation Kaprow created, with
people penned in a claustrophobic space and only freed at the last
minute. The quasi-masochistic combination of seeing and being
punished has echoes of stories by Edgar Allan Poe. At the same
time this situation reads like an illustration of the words of John
Dewey:

Space is room, Raum, and room is roominess, a chance to

be, live and move. The very word “breathing-space”
suggests the choking, the oppression that results when
things are constricted. Anger appears to be a reaction in
protest against fixed limitation of movement. Lack of room is
denial of life, and openness of space is affirmation of its
potentiality. Overcrowding, even when it does not impede
life, is irritating. What is true of space is true of time. We
need a “space of time” in which to accomplish anything
significant.138

Oldenburg was also out to “reward” his sensation-seeking

spectators’ curiosity with a strange sense of irritation. In Circus
(Ironworks/Fotodeath), in February 1961, he first made the
audience wait around in the darkness before the performance
began. And Whitman’s Happenings The American Moon and Mouth
also deliberately tried the spectators’ patience with long waiting
times, cramped conditions, and a poor view of the proceedings. It
was after attending Kaprow’s A Spring Happening that Susan
Sontag wrote the first extended art-critical essay on Happenings. In
“Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,” she specifically
homed in on what the spectators had to endure: “The audience may
be made to stand uncomfortably in a crowded room, or fight for
space to stand on boards laid in a few inches of water. There is no
attempt to cater to the audience’s desire to see everything.139
In Sontag’s estimation, this “abusive involvement of the
audience” was the actual point of these Happenings.140 She traced
them back to Surrealism, partly in terms of their use of “radical
juxtaposition (the ‘collage principle’)” and shock tactics at the
expense of the audience. Her main point of reference here was
Artaud’s prescriptions in The Theater and Its Double, which
perfectly matched three fundamental aspects of a Happening:
“First, its supra-personal or impersonal treatment of persons;
second, its emphasis on spectacle and sound, and disregard for the
word; and third, its professed aim to assault the audience.”141 She
concluded that Happenings were ultimately comedic and, as such,
typical of the Modernist view of life. This was the main message of
her essay:

At this point the Surrealist arts of terror link up with the

deepest meaning of comedy: the assertion of invulnerability.
. . . No matter how much they scream or prance about or
inveigh to heaven or lament their misfortune, the audience
knows they are really not feeling very much. The
protagonists of great comedy all have something of the
automaton or robot in them. . . . I, and other people in the
audience, often laugh during Happenings. . . . I think we
laugh because what goes on in the Happenings is, in the
deepest sense, funny.142

Ever since it was first published, Sontag’s essay has been a

benchmark for the historiographic interpretation of Happenings.
But its emphasis on the potential for aggression and destruction in
certain Happenings has encouraged a distinct bias in their
interpretation.143 To be precise, Sontag’s analysis was based less
on the New York Happenings than on Surrealist art of the 1930s; in
neither Kaprow’s nor Oldenburg’s Happenings was the main focus
on mechanized processes, as in ballet mécanique. Contrary to
Sontag’s claims regarding “invulnerability,” these artists’
Happenings were very much about specific instances of deep
vulnerability. It may be, however, that the Happeners subsequently
modified the role of the audience partly because of Sontag’s
observation that the spectators at a Happening became the
scapegoats that any comedy requires. Whatever the case, the
publication of Sontag’s essay more or less coincided with the
moment when Happenings, above all Kaprow’s, saw audience
members progress from beholders to participants—not merely in
the spirit of Barnett Newman’s and Mark Rothko’s evocation of the
sublime, in which the effects devised by the artist all but
overwhelm the viewer, but actively and voluntarily as players or,
metaphorically speaking, as consumers of the art on offer.
Accordingly, the public now generally had to pay to go to a
Happening, and there was often a limit on the number of
participants. This was not a direct outcome of the Happeners’
intentions or of the institutional circumstances—that is to say, the
fact that commercial galleries and established theaters had little
interest in Happenings. This dynamic relationship between the
work of art and its audience was, however, a form of interaction
that marked a new departure in the exhibiting of art, which was to
have art-historical consequences that are still of interest almost
half a century later.

A SERVICE FOR THE DEAD

A Service for the Dead was presented in two parts, in March and
August 1962. For the first time in Kaprow’s work, the choice of
venue was more important than the props. The Happening started
in the foyer of the Maidman Playhouse in New York’s West Forty-
Second Street.144 It was part of the Poets Festival organized by the
New York Poets Theatre, which also involved George Brecht,
Robert Whitman, Niki de Saint Phalle, Philip Corner, La Monte
Young, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, and
Steve Paxton. An announcer—a figure used not only by Kaprow but
also by Grooms and Oldenburg—invited the visitors to form a
single-file line and follow a procession of musicians in costume.145
Accompanied by a cacophony of different instruments, the
procession set off not into the auditorium but down a staircase,
through a storeroom full of props, and past dressing rooms, some
lit, some in darkness, some with radios switched on. A half-open
door led into the boiler room—a cavelike space with old boilers,
fuel tanks, and piles of metal left over from the days before the
theater existed in its present form.
 All the visitors’ senses were aroused: the surroundings were
black and brown, warm and damp. There was the smell of “rot and
fuel fumes,” water dripped from corroded pipes, and naked light
bulbs illuminated the scene. Kaprow noted the conditions: “soot all
over,” “everything festering and damp,” “clumps of rusted pipe,
valves, electrical conduits, exposed wire, bent and broken.”146 The
musicians led the procession to the farthest reaches of the boiler
room, where a naked actor (Lette Eisenhauer) loomed into view,
lying motionless on a horizontal ladder suspended from the ceiling
(see figure 9). The music stopped, and for a short time the
musicians made a deafening row with the oil drums and trash cans
suspended on ropes. Next they pointed their flashlights at tar-paper
mounds throughout the room, with actors inside. These actors now
started to tremble, to whistle, and to yelp. Sirens sounded, an actor
lit a propane torch, flashlights switched on and off. The ladder
began to sway, and the woman flung her arms apart, scattering
torn paper over the visitors, then let her arms hang by her sides.
Now the actors started to moan and hum, and the musicians
started up again. As the visitors slowly made their way to the stairs,
the woman was covered with a white sheet. Finally the visitors
were guided out into the street along a route different from the one
by which they had entered.
FIGURE 9. Lette Eisenhauer and members of the audience for Allan Kaprow’s A Service for
the Dead, New York Poets Theatre, Maidman Playhouse, New York, 22 March 1962. Photo
© Estate of Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

The trigger for this Happening had been the death of one of
Kaprow’s friends, a biographical motif, although the visitors were
not informed of this.147 They were simply passive spectators,
caught up in a spectacle. Kelley has rightly referred to ritualism in
connection with the structure of this event, that is to say Kaprow’s
“formal, artistic, and ultimately mock adaptation of the idea of
ritual. Ritualism allowed him to play at the seriousness of
ceremonies, processions, and other liturgical forms of
performance.”148 In structure, A Service for the Dead is thus
closely related to A Spring Happening: the members of the
audience gather and line up in single file, only to be bombarded
with sounds and light effects and confronted with a female nude,
until they are finally released from their confinement and the
tension is relieved. Unlike in A Spring Happening, the audience in
A Service for the Dead sees itself as a crowd that is constantly in
motion. Although they were physically under cover of darkness,
there was no real distance between individual visitors, and the
proximity of other bodies, the smell and feel of other people, and
the sound of their whispers and giggles appealed to some and
repelled others. Crowded together, some may have recalled
childhood fears and anxiety dreams; others may have thought of
acts of worship held below ground, of catacombs, or of scenarios in
film noir and Expressionist cinema. As before, in A Spring
Happening, Kaprow wore down the audience and made excessive
demands of them. No doubt it was impossible for people to work
out what the piece was about. However, unlike in A Spring
Happening, the “plot” was not played out at a distance from the
audience. Indeed, the title suggested that all the visitors would be
participating in a service. Ultimately no one could escape the fact
that he or she was mortal too and that, as a participant in this
ritual, one was connecting with something existential that went far
beyond the contingencies of the art world.
When it came to the second part of the Happening, A Service for
the Dead II, which was presented (as part of the Ergo Suits Festival
in late August 1962) at twilight one evening on the shores of the
Atlantic Ocean at Bridgehampton, New York, the visitors were
much more actively involved (see figure 10). Once again there was
a procession that ended with a figure on a bier of sorts, but now the
audience carried props—torches and placards, cardboard boxes,
empty oil drums and a car tire. A number of “carpenters” built a
wooden construction on the beach. The climax of the event was the
entrance of ghostly, hooded figures, who interrupted the coffin
makers at their work. The visitors then poured sand around these
figures as they stood upright in pits, until only their heads were
visible. Once again the main protagonist was a female actor; she
appeared on the embankment near the end of the performance, “all
shrouded in loosely wound plastic film,” and was then carried a few
paces out into the sea on the finished bier.149 The open Atlantic
shoreline contrasted dramatically with the theater’s claustrophobic,
crowded basement. The sense of having been cowed into
submission in the first part of the Happening was now dispelled as
the visitors played roles of their own in the second part. As in many
of his works of art, Kaprow employed the method of contrasts and
formal tension that goes back to Hans Hofmann’s teaching on
composition. Whereas the previous venue had included a human-
made boiler room where the passage of time had left its mark in
the shape of rusting infrastructure, now nature provided the
setting. The endless expanses of the Atlantic shore put human
activity into perspective. But even here the landscape was not
untouched, and it served as another metaphor for human activity,
for, as Kelley points out, this part of Long Island was “known for
the preponderance of psychiatrists who summered there, and this
had prompted Kaprow to use the overwrought imagery of crossing
the dunes from land to sea, symbolic of the divide between reason
and unconscious.”150
FIGURE 10. Allan Kaprow, A Service for the Dead II, part of the Ergo Suits Festival,
Bridgehampton, New York, 25 August 1962. Photo © Estate of Robert R.
McElroy/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

CALLING

Calling was the first of Kaprow’s Happenings that all but did
without an audience.151 It took place on 21 and 22 August 1965,
first in New York, then outside the city in a wood on George Segal’s
farm. After an introduction by Kaprow, the unrehearsed Happening
began. The participants included Kaprow, his wife Vaughan Rachel,
Michael Kirby, Peter Moore, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Robert
Brown, Christo, Jeanne-Claude, and others. Three performers
waited by the edge of the road until each was picked up and driven
away in a car. During the journey other actors wrapped each of
them in aluminum foil (see figure 11). Once the cars had come to a
stop, with the silver foil-wrapped figures sitting motionless in the
back seats, different drivers took over. The performers were
unpacked from their foil wrappings by other actors, loaded into
laundry bags, and unloaded at a public underground car park,
where the bundles, tied shut, were loaded into different cars before
being driven through the streets of Manhattan to Grand Central
Station. There the three victims were carried on their abductors’
shoulders into the main concourse and left to their own devices
after being deposited, like foundlings, at the information booth. The
performers inside the sacks called out to one another by name and
finally freed themselves. Next they each dialed a particular
telephone number, belonging to a person who had helped to drive
or wrap them during the Happening. After the phone had rung at
least fifty times, the other party answered the call. The victim
asked if it was that person (stating the right name). The other party
quietly hung up; that was the end of the first act of the Happening.

FIGURE 11. Jeanne-Claude wrapped in silver foil for Allan Kaprow’s Calling, New York, 21
August 1965. Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, New York, NY.

The next day the roles were reversed. Now the victims became
the hunters. The other performers were divided into five groups;
one member of each hung upside down from a tree in a sailcloth
sling. The hunters moved through the wood, calling out names. As
soon as they named a victim, his or her group would call out,
“Here!” When the hunters found the victim they tore off his or her
clothes and moved on. The naked participants hanging from the
trees called out to one another until they got tired, at which point
they freed themselves and left the wood, bringing the second part
of the Happening to a close (see figure 12).

FIGURE 12. Performers in a forest for Allan Kaprow’s Calling, South Brunswick, New
Jersey, 22 August 1965. Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, New York,
NY.

The leitmotif of Calling was the act of communication using the

human voice. Communication in the widest sense triggered each
sequence within the Happening—either a phone call, calling out
other people’s names, or “calling for” parcels. In each case it was
clear that the form of communication in question was not a neutral
interchange between two equal partners—that is to say, an
equitable and reversible exchange. Instead it was an irreversible,
unilateral, laborious demonstration of power. In the acts of
collecting bundles, of calling out, and of making a telephone call
there was an obvious distinction between active players and
passive targets. And if the abducted victims are seen as the
embodiments of media, then Kaprow’s Happening can be read as a
critique of the premise that meaning can easily be transferred.
Calling is a demonstration of the fact that the medium is not a
neutral vehicle but a highly sought-after raw material that different
parties will fight over.
Like A Spring Happening, Calling can be seen as an allegory of
the complexity of communication processes and the dubiousness of
the notion of the unhindered circulation and exchangeability of
goods, information, and meaning in the information society. At the
same time—at least in terms of the episodes that took place within
New York city—it was the Happening that made the most audacious
contact with the general public and thus also turned the spotlight
on the mechanisms of public life. The climax of the Happening was
the moment when the speechless “media” were abandoned at the
ultimate hub of communication—the information desk at Grand
Central Station, surely the busiest place in all of North America.
This was also the moment when innocent members of the public
came into contact with the Happeners, only to be left as speechless
as the cloth sacks. The abandoning of the human bundles clearly
marked the boundaries of an art world that had to struggle to
maintain contact with the outside world, with “life.” The concealed
“media” that passersby—both unsettled and amused—saw lying
around helplessly were bewildering, impossible to decode. It is
significant that when Kaprow was applying to the transport police
for permission to put on an event in the station, he described it as a
“rehearsal for a children’s theater,” partly so as not to run the risk
of provoking members of the public and partly to avoid the high
fees for any theatrical performance within the train station.152 It
was precisely the unusual encounter of the public with the bundled-
up performers that became the lasting image of the Happening in
the annals of art history. Peter Moore’s photograph of the three
“mummies” and astounded onlookers is one of the iconic images of
Happenings (see figure 13).
FIGURE 13. Bundled performers at Grand Central Station ticket counter for Allan Kaprow’s
Calling, New York, 21 August 1965. Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA,
New York, NY.

Unlike earlier Happenings, Calling had no audience as such. The

Happeners were performing for themselves and one another. The
representation of violence directed against the spectators in
previous Happenings now focused instead on the performers’
bodies. There is a self-evident affinity here with sadistic practices
such as bondage—and in the score there is a specific instruction
that the aluminum foil should be wrapped very tightly. How must
the performers have felt as the others were encasing them in foil?
How must they have felt when they were being driven blindfolded
through New York? What was it like to be tied up in a sack and
exposed to the stares of the thousands of commuters hurrying
across the concourse at Grand Central Station? The slashing and
tearing of the clothes of the performers helplessly dangling upside
down from trees is similarly reminiscent of sadomasochist games.
What can have been going through their heads as they waited to be
released from their distressing situation? What sense of
embarrassment would they have had to suppress to agree to be
exposed like that in front of their friends and colleagues? The
passive performers were entirely at the mercy of their active
counterparts, who behaved like ruthless, preprogrammed robots.
The victims in the sacks had to free themselves and communicate
with the others in the same situation. Like A Service for the Dead,
Calling exploits contrasts between confined and open spaces,
between the urban and the natural landscape. Yet it shows that
people in the asphalt jungle treat one another as roughly and
violently as they do in a woodland. It is only the means that are
different. And although the woodland is without technical
equipment—cars and telephones—in both cases the human voice
has the same role as anthropological constant.
If we take a semiotic approach to Calling, we naturally find
ourselves comparing it to an earlier Kaprow Happening called
Words. While communication in Words takes the form of written
words and the passive absorption of snippets of mechanically
recorded speech, in Calling language is not mediated as such; that
is to say, as Roland Barthes put it later, the body—which gets lost
during the process of writing down—is present once again. This
happens partly through utterances such as “Hello, hello, can you
hear me?”: “Unassuming as they are, these words and expressions
are yet in some way discreetly dramatic: they are appeals,
modulations—should I say, thinking of birds: songs?—through
which a body seeks another body. It is this song—gauche, flat,
ridiculous when written down—which is extinguished in our
writing.”153
Calling is, not least, also an homage to Kaprow’s colleague,
neighbor, and friend George Segal, who had hosted the Happenings
Pastorale in spring 1958 and Tree in May 1963 on his farm. The
motif of wrapping up human bodies recalls Segal’s work. He made
a name for himself with Environments including plaster effigies of
human beings placed alongside various found objects; in 1962 he
represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennial. In 1964
Kaprow published an article in Art News on his work, titled
“Segal’s Vital Mummies.” No doubt Calling was in part about the
act of wrapping up a friend’s body, which was central to Segal’s
work at the time, described here by Kaprow:

By wrapping bandages dipped in wet plaster around the

parts of their bodies, cutting off the hardened sections, then
later reassembling them into the whole body, he “touches”
them and possesses them physically and psychically with a
contact that would be possible in no other way. Both for him
and for us, he evokes their presence; they are almost real
because they have substance and a name. Yet at the same
time he embalms them. These stark, motionless figures,
nearly mummies, frozen in some ordinary hour of their day,
remain in an endless trance, blanched of color,
communicating with no one.154

During the 1960s there was an ever-growing appetite for

Happenings. By the mid-1960s Kaprow could strive for only a
quantitative increase. He even answered a request for a publicity
stunt Happening from the cigarette makers Liggett & Myers
Tobacco Company, of New York. (As it turned out, his proposal was
not realized.) At the same time, Happenings were shifting ever
further from the art world. For Kaprow, the Happening Gas, in the
summer of 1966, was a high point in his work, but in a certain
sense it also heralded the end of the Happening as a genre. It was a
coproduction by the television company WCBS-TV and the Dwan
Gallery, which later also championed Earthworks by Robert
Smithson and Michael Heizer. Gas was presented during the course
of three days, from August 6 to August 8, at various locations on
Long Island and involved countless “volunteers,” as the television
commentator called them. Among other things, several tons of
extinguishing foam were pumped into a pit, where performers,
especially children, cavorted in it. Huge balloons were inflated
inside buildings and on the beach. Nurses were rolled down the
street on beds, and people undertook joint ferry crossings. I read
Gas as an (ironic) allegory of Kaprow’s situation at the time. The
leitmotif was expansion—be it in the form of inflated balloons,
processions running off the rails, or orgiastic foam fights. Thus the
title, with its connotations of gasoline, vapor, and also, in the more
slangy sense, fun, can be seen in relation to the idea that Fredric
Jameson articulated much later, namely the expansion of the sphere
of culture at the cost of its autonomy.155
The final nail in the coffin of the Happening as an artistic
undertaking was not Kaprow’s Gas but the event Nine Evenings.
Nine Evenings could perhaps be described as the
monumentalization and popularization of John Cage’s mysterious
Untitled Event, which had taken place well away from the general
public, in the isolation of Black Mountain College. It consisted of a
series of performances by Cage, Lucinda Childs, Oeyvind
Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer,
Rauschenberg, Tudor, and Whitman presented on nine evenings in
October 1966 in the great hall of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory
in New York City.156 The reason for the event was the founding of
the organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in
September 1966. E.A.T., the brainchild of the engineer Billy Klüver
and Rauschenberg, was devised to promote mutually beneficial
contacts between artists and engineers. Cage presented Variations
VII, which used sounds from locations in the city—a police station,
a restaurant, an editors’ office—that were transmitted by telephone
to the Armory, where he then manipulated them in various ways.
Rauschenberg showed Open Score, a Happening that began with a
tennis ball and ended with the entrance in darkness of five hundred
actors, made visible in images produced by infrared cameras. As an
organization, E.A.T. combined the synesthetic utopias of the
interwar years with the euphoric enthusiasm for technology that
was rife in the United States during the Cold War. Kaprow was not
among the participants at this mega-event. Although he had made
several attempts to work with E.A.T., it always declined his
proposals, perhaps because of his unmistakable skepticism
regarding the organization’s unmitigated belief in progress and
technology. Moreover, his absence from Nine Evenings, which took
place at the same time as his midcareer retrospective in Pasadena,
was symptomatic of the distance that was opening up between him
and the mainstream art of the day.
 The Triumph of Pop Art

could expand no more, since the art public

THE FACT THAT THE ART SCENE

was steadily reaching saturation point, was one of the reasons why
Happenings disappeared in the mid-1960s. However, the fact that
the art world forgot them for so long can be put down to the way
that art historians fell silent on this subject. This steady silence was
closely connected with the advent of Pop Art as the mainstream art
form of the early 1960s. Let us therefore take this opportunity to
look back at how art historians and curators reinforced Pop Art’s
rise in their writing.
“Pop art was radical and came as a surprise,” Henry Geldzahler
wrote in 1969 in his influential exhibition catalogue New York
Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970. In this catalogue he devotes
precisely one comment to the subject of Happenings in the late
1950s, which he sees alongside “new painting and sculpture with
recognizable subject matter” as an “alternative to Abstract
Expressionism.”157 At the end of the 1960s he thus took the
opposite stance to the view he had first expressed in 1963 that Pop
Art was an “inevitable” phenomenon, one that “we can recognize
[as] a movement literally before it fully happens.”158 Geldzahler
was one of the leading figures in the historicization of Pop Art and
its introduction into American art institutions, even as it was still
under way.159 He “typifies the interconnections of roles in the
system very well,” was the comment of Lawrence Alloway (who was
similarly adept at creating these interconnections).160 As the
curator for contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, as a critic, and as an exhibition maker he was to the
1960s what Alfred H. Barr was to the 1940s and Walter Hopps and
Harald Szeemann were to the 1970s. It was Geldzahler—who
admitted in 1970 that he enjoyed watching movies more than
anything else (“It’s a visual experience that exists in time. Instead
of looking at a painting and looking away and knowing everything
about it, it is something to engage”), had been omnipresent in the
Happenings scene, and remarked that his participation in
Happenings “got me over my stage fright”161—who ensured that
Pollock’s legacy, which Kaprow had wanted to claim for
Happenings in 1958, passed to Pop Art. Accordingly Pop Art was
seen as the legitimate heir to high modern art. The Happenings
were left out in the cold. At best there might be a mention of their
influence or a passing reference to their importance as a
transitional stage on the margins of art history. Over the years
those art historians who have written on Happeners have been less
interested in the ironically critical stand they took against the logic
of Late Modernist painting than in the structural and formal
aspects of their work—its transience, for instance.
Happenings were temporarily written out of art history; they
were not included in the canon of art, so it would not have to be
changed. With certain exceptions, such as Yard, Kaprow’s works
disappeared from the collective art memory. Carolee Schneemann’s
works were rediscovered in the 1990s in the wake of the
postfeminist revision of art history. Oldenburg’s Happenings and
films, in which Geldzahler also participated, were regarded as
separate from his main body of work. The “early work” of artists
such as Red Grooms, George Segal, Lucas Samaras, and Jim Dine
was simply ignored. The leading art institutions in New York—
notably the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum
of Art—in effect neutralized the critical potential of Happenings by
categorizing them as a stylistic consequence of Dada and
Surrealism. During the 1960s, while art historians were removing
the “Neo-Dada” and “Neo-Surrealism” labels from Pop Art, art-
historical reminiscences of the artists of the classical avant-garde
sidelined the long overdue museological presentation of
Happenings. The Museum of Modern Art celebrated these artists’
work in retrospectives such as Futurism (1961) and Dada,
Surrealism, and Their Heritage (1968), accompanied by scholarly,
authoritative catalogues. Looking back, Geldzahler recollected that
art catalogues were among his most important reading matter as a
boy in the 1940s.162
At a symposium on 13 December 1962 at the Museum of Modern
Art, a round-table discussion chaired by Peter Selz, with Dore
Ashton, Geldzahler, Hilton Kramer, Stanley Kunitz, and Leo
Steinberg, laid the ground for Pop Art’s entry into the art-historical
canon. Geldzahler spoke of Pop Art as not only a development in
the tradition of high art but also a reflection of the “best and most
developed post-Abstract Expressionist painting,” as seen in the
work of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Ray
Parker, and Frank Stella.163 Although, as he pointed out later, he
always favored (and collected) Kelly and Noland and had the same
distanced relationship with both Pop Art and Minimal Art, each of
which he viewed as a “phenomenon that can’t be ignored,” he
nevertheless established the formalist interpretation of Pop Art.164
Only Kramer—albeit taking a slightly derogatory view—made a
close connection between Pop Art and Happenings: the aim of both
was “to restore to complex and recognizable experience its former
hegemony over pure aestheticism.”165
Lucy Lippard’s book Pop Art, published in 1966, reinforced and
popularized Geldzahler’s view. Lippard, who had worked in the
library of the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1960s and been
involved in the production of the catalogue The Art of Assemblage
in 1961, regarded Pop Art as wholly rooted in Abstract
Expressionism and its formalist tradition. Moreover, in her view its
art-historical significance derived from its role as the heir to
Abstract Expressionism and the extent to which it advanced the
tradition of American high art on its way toward Hard Edge. In her
introduction she wrote, “Pop Art has more in common with the
American ‘post-painterly abstraction’ of Ellsworth Kelly or Kenneth
Noland than with contemporary realism.”166 The contradictory
argumentation of Lippard’s legitimation of Pop Art reflects her
confusing historical analysis of that period as a whole. While
casting Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp in the role of “most
valid prototypes,” she resists the use of the term Neo-Dada as a
description for Pop Art.167 She also felt that undue attention had
been paid not only to Robert Motherwell’s book Dada Painters but
also to John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. In the chapter “New
York Pop” she mentions Happenings only because of the connection
between the Green Gallery and the Reuben Gallery.168 In Lippard’s
opinion the real pop artists were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein,
James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, and Claes Oldenburg, and she
believed Pop Art was “discovered” in spring 1961 when Richard
Bellamy, Ivan Karp, and Leo Castelli saw work by Rosenquist,
Lichtenstein, and Warhol: “Recognizing their importance, they also
understood that these artists provided the missing link between
Assemblage and hard-edge abstraction, and had independently
arrived at something new.”169 Furthermore, Pop Art had nothing to
do with “story-telling or social comment”: “These artists do not see
themselves as destroyers of art, but as the donors of a much-
needed transfusion to counteract the effects of a rarified Abstract
Expressionist atmosphere.”170 Lippard’s reference to “story-telling
or social comment” is as striking as her evident fear of the
destruction of art. The nonrecognition of the narrative and critical
aspects of Pop Art cut out all the factors that connected it with the
intentions of the Happeners. The exponents of Pop Art were
welcome, as we apprehend from Lippard’s analysis, explicitly as the
new blood needed in aging Late Modernist circles. This
interpretation of Pop Art colored its historiography until well into
the 1990s.171
Not until the 1990s was there a renewed interest in Happenings,
although this was primarily a consequence of the drive by museums
and art institutions to complete and confirm the established view of
the history of the mid-twentieth century rather than revise it in any
way.172 The exhibitions that Paul Schimmel organized at the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles played a central role
in these developments. Writing in the catalogue for the 1992
exhibition Hand Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955–
1962, he reiterated the continuous line of development from
Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. The theme of that exhibition
was the “extraordinarily active period of transition between two
great eras,” and its aim was to counter the supposedly widely held
notion that Pop Art constituted a break with Abstract
Expressionism, although Schimmel also took the view that the
“myth” of Abstract Expressionism was fully activated only by Pop
Art.173
Of course there is every reason to take a closer look at that
“transitional” period and to present, in context, paintings and
sculptures by lesser-known artists from that time. However, the
intention of diverse professionals in the field was specifically to fill
in certain gaps in recent art history to confirm that the established
canon reflected a logical continuity advancing from one great
phase of American art to the next. Depending on the contents of
different museum collections, the artists pressed into service
ranged from Johns and Rauschenberg to “early” Oldenburg,
Lichtenstein, Dine, Rosenquist, Segal, and Warhol, who all worked
quite independently of one another—a point that was frequently
emphasized, as if the stylistic coherence of their work were
“natural.” A key role was credited to reliefs from Oldenburg’s
Store; in 1983 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, had
bought the largest single ensemble of these reliefs en bloc from the
Italian collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. Since then they have
frequently appeared in publications and featured prominently in
highly influential exhibitions such as Out of Actions (1998).174
The model that presents Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as
polar opposites obscures the fact that Abstract Expressionism was
never the self-contained, hegemonic phenomenon that it may
appear to be in hindsight.175 It also obscures the fact that there
were a number of coexistent artistic positions in the 1950s that by
no means toed the usual line of Abstract Expressionism, including
those of the artists in the Jewish Museum’s 1957 exhibition Artists
of the New York School: Second Generation. Moreover, the
interpretation of Pop Art voiced at the 1962 symposium did not go
unchallenged. Aside from the conservative stance taken by some
participants, who rejected Pop Art out of hand—Geldzahler later
pointed out that he had to defend Pop against the curators at the
Museum of Modern Art—and aside from the entrenched antipathy
of the European critics, there was also the interpretation of Pop Art
as part of the critique of Late Modernist painting that was intrinsic
to Happenings.176 Lil Picard, for instance—an artist, participant in
various Happenings, and correspondent for the German newspaper
Die Welt—took the line in her “New Yorker Pop-Report” that the
Happenings marked the beginning of Pop Art.177 Lawrence Alloway,
who is credited with the invention of the name Pop Art, tentatively
lent his weight to this interpretation. Alloway, who had moved to
New York from London, described the Reuben Gallery artists as
exponents of Pop Art “used as a comprehensive term.” In his eyes,
their “shared quality” was “anti-ceremonious, anti-formal, untidy,
and highly physical (but not highly permanent),” and they also had
in common an “interest in stretching and violating the borders of
art.”178
Kaprow of course also put forward his views on Pop Art. In his
lecture at the Jewish Museum in March 1963 he was openly critical
of the symposium at the Museum of Modern Art. As in many of his
texts, an introductory homage is followed by a series of provocative
statements. Kaprow makes reference to the nostalgia of Pop Art,
with its motifs from the consumer society of the 1930s and 1940s—
the days when the Pop artists were children and adolescents—to
describe it, unlike Action Painting, as backward looking rather than
of the present moment. Instead of seeking to come closer to
commercial art and life itself, Pop Art (in Kaprow’s estimation) said
“more about art than the world.”179 Its real achievement was that it
questioned notions of “what art should actually be.” But, for
Kaprow, Pop Art was only at the beginning of its journey:

The pop artist still has to put his mind to what he is and to
the context in which he wants to present his work. Up until
now he has been content to be associated with elegant life,
aesthetes, wheelers and dealers in the art business, the
editors of modern magazines. His arena is the sophisticated
sanctuary of art galleries, museums, art institutes. . . . That
is far too timid, it smacks too much of the hothouse.180

As he so often did, Kaprow argued here against the principle of

l’art pour l’art. Alluding to Warhol and Wesselmann’s work as
window dressers, he reminded his audience that Pop paintings
functioned better in a commercial context than in a gallery.

Still too precious for its own good, Pop Art has to get out
into the fresh air. It should be out there in the street . . . The
buzz in the street has to change, and Times Square needs
precisely the kick in the pants that Pop Art can give it.
Imagine huge billboards between the towers of Washington
 Bridge! . . . Imagine writing in the sky, flyers in the literal
sense of the word . . . What miraculous, wonderful things
could happen in the aisles of American supermarkets! . . .
And if gallery directors have concerns about the practicality
of my suggestions, they needn’t lose sleep over them: they
can steer the careers of these new ad men from the comfort
of their own desks, they can turn their galleries into
agencies with themselves as art directors.181

The discussion at that time surrounding Pop Art was not merely
a game played by academics in art institutes. The advent of Pop Art
can be seen, as Kaprow did, as an indication of the transfer of
power in the art world from the producers—the artists—to the
mediators and art administrators. Let it be said, however, that my
aim here is not to take the moral high ground and apply some form
of conspiracy theory to the ensuing conflict. The cliché of the good
artists on one side and the bad institutions on the other is just as
inadequate as the categorical separation of producers, consumers,
and administrators—particularly since, during the 1960s, some
artists took on the mantle of curators while certain curators also
had aspirations to artistic activity. It is rather more interesting to
ask why it was that in the 1960s art institutions suddenly started to
meddle with the production process and how exactly they did this.
Were American art museums anxious that they might be losing
ground, that collectors could overtake them, that they might not
spot the latest ism, or that they might lose sight of art altogether?
In the 1980s and 1990s the European museums were keen not
to replicate these failings. The result was a veritable flowering of
museums for contemporary art that have been springing from the
ground since the 1980s. Toward the end of a decade marked by a
cascade of different styles and animated rivalries between artists,
collectors, critics, and historians—all striving for some kind of
normative authority—it was the art institutions that emerged
triumphant. Significantly, these institutions were no longer
dependent on the architectural confines of particular museums.
They could be personified equally well in the shape of leading
exhibition makers, such as Richard Bellamy and Walter Hopps in
the United States and Harald Szeemann, followed by Kasper König
and Peter Weibel, in Europe. Szeemann in particular epitomized
this role in the 1970s when he founded his “agency for intellectual
guest workers,” that is to say, presented himself as an art
institution and, in so doing, instigated the European comeback on
the main stage of the art world.

THE NONENTRY OF HAPPENINGS INTO THE ART MUSEUM

In 1960 William Seitz, at the time an associate curator at the

Museum of Modern Art, New York, was working on an extensive
exhibition, The Art of Assemblage, which was to open in the spring
of 1961 and include the very latest work in this field.182 It was part
of the museum’s endeavor to shake off its image as a conservative
institution with its sights still set on Classical Modernist European
painting and, in so doing, to extend the reach of its cultural
authority to include contemporary art. The museum had already
demonstrated its intentions in this respect by purchasing a group of
works at Leo Castelli’s early-1958 Jasper Johns exhibition and by
stepping in early and buying pieces by Oldenburg and Richard
Stankiewicz. The Art of Assemblage was also to provide an
overview of various smaller exhibitions on the same subject that
had taken place elsewhere—including An Exhibition of Collages
and Constructions (Alan Gallery, New York, January 1959), Out of
the Ordinary: The Audience as Subject (Contemporary Arts
Association, Houston, November-December 1959), and, at MoMA
itself, Sixteen Americans (December 1959) and of course Jean
Tinguely’s Homage to New York: A Self-Constructing and Self-
Destroying Work of Art (17 March 1960).
It goes without saying that the Happenings, which in part had
alerted the art world to the problematic hegemony of nonfigurative
painting, would have fitted perfectly into the context of The Art of
Assemblage. Kaprow in fact saw that this would be a unique
opportunity for the new medium to make its mark and did his best
to have it included in this important event. He provided Seitz with a
copy of the manuscript for his planned book on Happenings,
“Paintings, Environments and Happenings,” which Seitz referred to
in his catalogue essay and listed in the bibliography.183 Clearly it
was worth Kaprow’s while to make every effort to have his work
sanctioned by the museum that had the greatest influence on
contemporary art and to have his views disseminated in an
extensive catalogue. He even went so far as to conceive the
Environment Chapel for this show; the notable difference between
this work and his earlier Environments was that visitors to Chapel
would be able to change it as they wished. The plan was that
Kaprow and five other artists would paint long rolls of paper red
and white in a specified area in the museum; the public would then
be invited to continue where the artists had left off. Anyone who
wanted to could do what they liked with what had already been
painted—leave it as it was, destroy it, extend it.
Seitz rejected Kaprow’s proposal. It is evident from Kaprow’s
written reply to the letter of rejection that Seitz regarded this type
of intervention as “not appropriate” for the museum and
“problematic because of fire hazard.” However, Kaprow was keen
to salvage whatever he could. He agreed that his project cast doubt
on the traditional role of the museum, “BUT . . . I wonder if a
museum’s function cannot change.” He recalled the Museum of
Modern Art’s pioneering achievements in museum education and
asked whether it was not in any case already changing “from an
institution dedicated to displaying gravestones to a place where
things ‘happen.’” He was entirely open about his own interest in
the matter:

My personal motives . . . needn’t be hidden: For my work to

exist I need public places . . . larger rather than smaller—
and especially places where an interested public will
naturally gravitate. The more up-to-date museum can serve
this function. Furthermore, the obvious focus and prestige a
museum confers upon any work it exhibits may attract those
spirited but wealthy individuals who might feel drawn to this
new work, enough to support it in its more congenial
habitat: nature, vacant lots, armories, factories, etc. You
know that it cannot be bought and must, if it is going to
develop, be subsidized in some fashion. Such rich men never
seem to come to us where we presently “flourish”.184
At the end of the letter Kaprow once again pulls out all the art-
historical stops, appealing to Seitz’s sense of the shared lineage of
the Museum of Modern Art and Kaprow’s work, which he noted
was rooted in the art of Claude Monet (via Cubism, Piet Mondrian,
and Jackson Pollock), and pointing out that, in terms of art history,
it was only logical that the barriers between artists, art, the public,
the past, and the present should progressively be broken down.
Kaprow’s letter shows that at this early stage in the history of
Happenings he had no intention whatsoever to launch an attack on
the institution of the art museum. On the contrary, he was doing his
level best to join the mainstream.
We cannot know for certain whether the possible inclusion of
Happenings in The Art of Assemblage was actively debated during
its planning stages.185 But the fact remains that Seitz makes
detailed reference to Happenings—he uses the term in quotation
marks—in the catalogue. He points out their key role in recent art
history in general and in the theme of the exhibition in particular.
Seitz’s essay was the first institutional recognition of the
Happening as an artistic phenomenon. It juxtaposed a black-and-
white photograph of Dine’s Car Crash (1960) with an image of
Tinguely’s Homage to New York. In addition, Seitz included in the
exhibition George Brecht’s Repository (1961), two of
Rauschenberg’s “Combine-paintings,” from the Ileana Sonnabend
collection (Talisman [1958] and Canyon [1959]), a relief by
Samaras (Untitled [1960–1961]), and an assemblage by
Stankiewicz (Untitled [1961]). Seitz’s ambivalent position as a
museum curator with an eye on both the past and the future is
reflected in the somewhat convoluted passage toward the end of
his essay in which he describes Happenings as, among other
things, “amateur theatricals”: “The challenge presented to the
plastic arts by the new wave of assemblage should nevertheless not
be evaded, but surely pseudo innovation should never be embraced
because it seems to be le dernier cri.”186
However, the edge may have been taken off Kaprow’s
disappointment by the fact that in 1961 he showed Chapel three
times. It went to Amsterdam and Stockholm, as Stockroom, and to
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as Chapel. But for
Happenings as an art form the rejection from MoMA was the first—
and probably decisive—setback in being recognized by leading art
institutions. The die was already cast at MoMA in favor of Pop Art—
and against Happenings—even before the phenomenon of Pop Art
was in sight. For Kaprow at least, the rejection of Happenings by
the most influential institution set in train a critique of institutional
exhibition praxis. Whereas previously he had put his energy into
having his work accepted by art museums and galleries and had
hoped, at most, to see existing institutional structures reformed,
now—nolens volens—he found himself at a distance from the
establishment. At the same time, as though to compensate for the
lack of institutional approval, he intensified his efforts regarding
the interpretation and historicization of his art. This was the
sequence of events that formed the backdrop to his second major
article in Art News.

“HAPPENINGS IN THE NEW YORK SCENE”

The publication of Kaprow’s article “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock”

had brought home to him just how effective a text and buzzwords
could be in advancing the cause of an artistic program. He now
determinedly cultivated his reputation as the inventor of the
Happening and looking back in 1968 wrote to Harold Rosenberg
that the mere invention of a name or descriptive term for an art
trend—such as Rosenberg’s Action Painting and his own
Happenings—could lay the foundations for success:

For some time I’ve suspected that . . . persuasion begins

with a poetic act, the disclosure of one or two metaphors
which appear to capsule an artist’s or theorist’s sense of
things. Later, they may transform into other guises of media,
or into genuine discourse, but the point of departure may be
a matter of a lucky catch-word. . . . It doesn’t make much
difference if Cubism has or has not to do with cubes, if
Futurism has or hasn’t to do with the future. What matters is
that those words unleashed terrific energies. They marked
for the artists the beginning or the end of what they were
doing, and charged them up for a reaction that would lead
them to new territories.187
 The Happenings, which were witnessed by such a small, select
audience and could only ever be reproduced in the most
fragmentary form, had a particular need for an explanation. Since
art history was his trade, it was only natural that Kaprow would
also concern himself with the historiography and theory of
Happenings—all the more so since the critics were clearly not
putting any energy into promoting this new medium. By 1960 he
had already started to collect material for a book. It finally
appeared in 1966 as Assemblage, Environments and Happenings—
a richly illustrated, lavish volume produced by the prestigious New
York publisher Harry Abrams. In spring 1961 Kaprow published his
second article in Art News, “Happenings in the New York Scene.”
Described by Susan Sontag as “the best article to appear on
Happenings,” it picked up the same thread as “The Legacy of
Jackson Pollock.”188 Once again the main line of argument was a
critique of the image of the modern artist, the modern art world,
and modern art theory. No doubt one of Kaprow’s motives was to
establish, in a leading art publication, his credentials as the
inventor of Happenings. But this—perfectly understandable—
intention is less remarkable than the fact that, as he had done in
“The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Kaprow made an art-historical
leap forward.
He discussed the new phenomenon—and by definition his own
work—as though looking back at it from some point in the future.
Once again he turned the spotlight on the artist who is both part of
the system and excluded from it. He expressed the fear that
Happenings would fall victim to the gravitational force of
Modernism. In the midst of the euphoria of this new beginning he
warned that the weight of fame would soon break many artists. The
risk, as he put it in starkly tragic terms, was that they would
succumb to the logic of modern art and in effect feel that it was
now up to them to “die” in order “to keep the myth intact.”189 He
criticized not this process as such but rather the fact that everyone
preferred to turn a blind eye to it:

There is no overt pressure anywhere. The patrons of art are

the nicest people in the world. They neither wish to corrupt
nor actually do so. The whole situation is corrosive, for
 neither patrons nor artists comprehend their role. . . . Out of
this hidden discomfort there comes a stillborn art, tight or
merely repetitive at best and at worst, chic. . . . Strangely,
no one seems to know this except, perhaps, the
“unsuccessful” artists waiting for their day. . . . To us, who
are already answering the increasing telephone calls from
entrepreneurs, this is more than disturbing. We are, at this
writing, still free to do what we wish, and are watching
ourselves as we become caught up in an irreversible
process. Our Happenings, like all the other art produced in
the last decade and a half by those who, for a few brief
moments, were also free, are in no small part the expression
of this liberty. In our beginnings some of us, reading the
signs all too clearly, are facing the end.190

Kaprow took the view that the current success of Happenings

was directly linked to the flourishing American economy. They were
part of a trend whereby only results counted, not the underlying
purpose. As he put it:

Where else can we see the unbelievable but frequent

phenomenon of successful radicals becoming “fast friends”
with successful academicians, united only by a common
success and deliberately insensitive to the fundamental
issues their different values imply? I wonder where else but
here can be found that shutting of the eyes to the question
of purpose.191

For Kaprow, the driving force of artistic change was not the
teleology of autonomous art pursuing its own stylistic development
but rather the social reality of the times: “This everyday world
affects the way art is created as much as it conditions its response
—a response the critic articulates for the patron, who in turn acts
upon it.”192 With this analysis of Happenings as a function—and not
a critique—of the boom economy in the United States, that is to say,
as a means of satisfying the desire of the moneyed classes for a
“befitting culture,” Kaprow deconstructed the notions of art as an
autonomous zone and as an instrument of political resistance.193
In fact there was a growing demand for performances of what
Kaprow described as “melodrama.”194 He could well have added
the comment by Karl Marx that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all
great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak,
twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time
as farce.”195 Kaprow took the view that the enacting of melodramas
had always been intrinsic to American culture, be it in the figure of
the lone cowboy, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, or “the
organization man,” in the spirit of William H. White, pursuing an
unattainable goal and loving adventure for its own sake.196 In the
1940s and early 1950s the artists around Pollock had played their
part in the historicist logic of Late Modernist painting—the
“melodrama” that Kaprow described. But they had reached their
goal too soon—which Kaprow felt was nothing short of tragic for
Pollock and Rauschenberg.197 They had to die to keep the myth
alive. And now the Happeners were continuing that tradition of
melodrama: “Their activity embodies the myth of nonsuccess, for
Happenings cannot be sold and taken home; they can only be
supported.”198
Well aware that his article would accelerate the demise of the
Happening, Kaprow ended it with the hope that—precisely because
of their foreseeable failure—Happenings would one day take on a
utopian dimension, “like the sea monsters of the past or the flying
saucers of yesterday.” And this in turn would see the birth of a new
myth: “I shouldn’t really mind, for as the new myth grows on its
own, without reference to anything in particular, the artist may
achieve a beautiful privacy, famed for something purely imaginary
while free to explore something nobody will notice.”199 It is as
though Kaprow was anticipating his career, which was to lead him
away from the limelight of the art world in the 1970s until he
reached his own form of privacy, where he no longer needed an
audience. However, his article did not make him popular among the
other Happeners. His use of the cliché of the artist destroyed by
success and his complaint that some artists “are given their prizes
very quickly instead of being left to their adventure” exposed him
to the risk of his critique being read as sour grapes from an
established artist who saw the success of his followers diminishing
his own hard-won success.200 For most of the other Happeners,
whose artistic lives were far from a bed of roses in the early 1960s,
Kaprow’s analysis could only appear blatantly cynical.

CLAES OLDENBURG VERSUS ALLAN KAPROW

Kaprow’s relationship to Claes Oldenburg exemplified his

withdrawal from mainstream art production. Oldenburg, two years
younger than Kaprow, arrived in New York in 1956 and was soon
impressed by Kaprow’s sculptures, Environments, lectures, and
article on Pollock in particular.201 He co-founded, with Red Grooms
and Jim Dine, the City Gallery, an offshoot of the Hansa Gallery.
Together with Dine, Dick Tyler, and Phyllis Yampolsky he was part
of the team at the Judson Gallery, connected to the Judson
Memorial Church, where Robert Rauschenberg and Merce
Cunningham realized a number of dance events.202 Oldenburg’s
first exhibition took place at the Judson Gallery in 1959. In late
1960 Kaprow served as acting director of the gallery for a short
time and, like Oldenburg, kept a firm hand on its institutional reins.
Oldenburg was in the audience for 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,
and he later claimed to have been disappointed by it because of
“the boredom of repetition, which he attributed to the Zen
influence of John Cage.”203 Moreover, in retrospect he set himself
apart from Kaprow, not without a tinge of condescension: “My
position, you must understand, has always been on the outside. I
didn’t live in New Jersey, and I wasn’t part of the New Jersey
School, of which Kaprow was the leader. I didn’t study with
Cage.”204 In fact, there was a time when he worked closely with
Kaprow, and he even participated in Coca-Cola, Shirley
Cannonball? in February 1960. It is clear from correspondence
between the two men in the summer and autumn of 1960 that
Oldenburg was respectful toward and on friendly terms with
Kaprow, already an established artist. Like Roy Lichtenstein, he
was keen to have Kaprow’s approval. Initially he had been very
much in favor of Kaprow’s efforts to promote the cause of
Happenings with his article in Art News and the planned
monograph, modestly enquiring if Kaprow “would care to use any
of the [Ray Gun] statements in your book, appendix, footnotes or
the like.”205
In 1960 both artists were invited to participate in the summer
exhibition New Forms—New Media I at the prestigious Martha
Jackson Gallery. Kaprow wrote a text for the catalogue, and
Oldenburg designed the poster.206 In spring 1961 both artists
received invitations to show their work at the follow-up exhibition
Environment, Situations, Spaces.207 The fact that Kaprow and
Oldenburg exhibited at one of the most influential galleries of
Abstract Expressionism is symptomatic of the rapid changes taking
place in the early 1960s. These exhibitions seemed to be a test of
the public’s acceptance of the new generation’s art. Martha
Jackson presented them in collaboration with her son’s David
Anderson Gallery and left their realization to a member of her staff.
Although she extended the second exhibition after the summer
break, she later made no bones about the fact that she did so only
for the publicity it would bring the gallery.208
At Environment, Situations, Spaces, Oldenburg showed part of
his Store, which he was working on at the time (see figure 14).
Originally intended as a self-contained Environment, it consisted of
a three-part wall painting in a stairwell and some plaster objects
finished with enamel paints and mounted on the entrance wall.209
This served as a dry run for the Store that he later opened, in
December 1961, in a vacant shop at 107 East Second Street,
between Avenue A and First Avenue. In effect he simulated a
commercial outlet connected to an artist’s studio. It seemed that a
workshop was directly supplying a multitude of colored reliefs and
sculptures to be sold in The Store.
FIGURE 14. Spread showing Allan Kaprow in his Yard (left) and Claes Oldenburg in his
Store (right), in Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Abrams,
1966), pp. 140–141.

At the same exhibition Kaprow showed his Environment Yard,

which—as one of his few photogenic pieces—was to become an
icon. None of his other works of art has been illustrated and
restaged as often as Yard. He realized new versions for the
Pasadena exhibition in 1967, for Dortmund in 1986, for Milan in
1991, and for Los Angeles and Vienna (at the exhibition Out of
Actions) in 1998. In autumn 2009, Yard was posthumously
presented in a reinvention by William Pope.L at the same address
where it had originally been shown, now home to the gallery
Hauser & Wirth New York.
Kaprow’s chosen site was the small backyard of the Martha
Jackson Gallery, which served as a sculpture garden. He covered
the ground with multiple layers of car tires, then positioned empty
oil barrels between them. He enclosed the sculptures in the yard in
wooden constructions draped in black plastic sheeting, somewhat
reminiscent of plants and sculptures encased in their winter
protection in a landscaped garden but possibly also a deliberate
allusion to Hans Hofmann’s didactic practice of covering objects in
sheeting in order to focus on their shapes and outlines. Looking
down on the yard from the gallery windows, visitors found
themselves gazing on a picture with mixed gray, black, and blue
tones. If they wanted, they could also literally immerse themselves
in the picture (as people had done with the earlier Environments),
teetering on the rubber tires and repositioning them if they wished.
In the muggy summer heat, some wallowed in the heady odor of
rubber and oil, which repelled others.
The title of the piece and the perimeter wall of the backyard
called to mind garden iconography in general, the small medieval
paradise garden at the Cloisters in New York in particular,
children’s playgrounds, and the backyards that are the main arena
for so many Americans’ private domesticity. At the same time, the
title and the materials alluded to more functional garden spaces,
with the empty barrels and material products such as rubber and
plastic implying a cycle of production based on crude oil. There was
nothing natural about Yard. All the various elements had been
fabricated by means of industrial processes. The countless gray
tones may well also have called to mind the omnipresent auto
junkyards and tire dumps that dominated the industrial landscape
on the margins of Manhattan and marked the transition from town
to country for commuters like Kaprow.210 Yard thus raised two of
the main topics that particularly concerned the American people at
the time—the problem of urban sprawl and the nature of an
affluent society.
In allegorical terms, Yard can be read as a depot, an archive
where “remains” are preserved and can be rearranged time after
time. As they made physical contact with the rubber yielding and
flexing beneath their feet, visitors could rearrange elements at will,
endlessly changing the topography. From a distance they could
view the structure as a whole but do nothing to it. From within it
they could have an impact on it but never an overview. Even the
author of this piece was not above his work. In the photographs
that Kaprow published of Yard, we see him as an attendant-cum-
commentator, a pipe in the corner of his mouth, sinking into a sea
of tires.
It was typical of Kaprow’s ambiguous attitude to art galleries
and commerce that he chose the backyard for his Environment.
While it is true that the rooms inside the gallery were not spacious
enough for his needs and his work would have interfered with other
exhibits, the spatial and symbolic distance to the “actual” gallery
was in keeping with his interest in shifting contexts. With this
choice of location, Yard was both in and outside the gallery.
Like Oldenburg’s Store, Kaprow’s Yard could in a sense be
described as a fixed Happening. In both cases it was as though
movement had solidified into sculpture. Both profited from the aura
of the Happening as something unique. The Store stood out from its
rather picturesque surroundings in the Lower East Side, and Yard
contrasted equally strikingly with the nearby, elegant uptown
galleries.211 Both artists placed themselves center stage as
performers in the published photographs of their Environments.
The antithetical roles they played reflect the different trajectories
of their artistic careers. Kaprow’s image as the guardian of his own
story anticipated his later role as a key figure in university
departments and among the ranks of those promoting American
artists. Oldenburg’s image as an entrepreneur, surrounded by
consumer goods, was just the first sign of his later activity as his
own manager.
The source of the rift between Kaprow and Oldenburg was
Kaprow’s article “Happenings in the New York Scene.” In the late
summer of 1961 the two artists had a long conversation, in all
likelihood during the setup of the exhibition Environment,
Situations, Spaces. Kaprow later recalled admiring Oldenburg’s
objects and considering buying some of them.212 In a subsequent
letter Oldenburg wrote that he was glad to learn from Kaprow and
referred to himself as being “in the part of the questioner.”
However, as he explained, he regarded the Art News article “not as
an account of fact, but as a fiction.” Moreover, “Perhaps this
[method] does lead to an American art truer than any before. You
are either a prophet or an unconscious ironist. You are probably a
little mad (which is a good thing) and possibly a person of great
importance.”213 Two weeks later he wrote a reply to a letter from
Kaprow that seems to have attempted to reconcile their differing
positions; in his response Oldenburg resisted the idea that he had
signed up to the same theories as Kaprow. He took Kaprow’s
reference to the corrupted hero as a blanket judgment. In
Oldenburg’s view, Kaprow had with this article “blown us all up.” In
addition, Oldenburg suggested that it was only through his
practical input that Kaprow’s purely conceptual project had been
realized as art:

I see now quite clearly that one of my motives in doing what

I did under the banner of “happenings” was, in my perverse
and didactic way, to show that art could be made out of your
highly unlikely approach. In doing this I think I must have
done you a favor, but I don’t think you got it.214

Oldenburg also said that Kaprow’s purely intellectual ideas were

in fact not on a par with the thinking behind other Happenings,
such as Red Grooms’s Burning Building.215 Moreover, he made it
clear that he did not share Kaprow’s view of the reality of American
life, the belief—according to Oldenburg—that America was exactly
the way it was portrayed. By contrast, Oldenburg felt that America
was becoming ever more entangled in its fictions, which made
Kaprow’s “dreaming” untenable.216 For him, Kaprow’s approach
was both wayward and “bizarre.”217 However, he did not regard
their divergent views as a symptom of artistic rivalry:

In art there is no competition really, because there is no way

to compare the complex cosmoses of individual artists. They
simply realize themselves, and there exist. . . . I want people
to see the world as I see it, that is to really see my work. . . .
You must have realized that all the remarks surrounding Ray
Gun were hyperbolical, to emphasize the egotistical nature
of creation. Creation as a kind of derangement in vision. But
this was ironic. All my art rings variations on the relation of
artistic reality to philosophical reality.218

Kaprow replied in late July and specifically criticized

Oldenburg’s mystification of the authority of the artistic persona,
who created a world resembling reality: “Authorities usually try to
avoid sounding like authorities. And not all your theories are as
poetic as the one I singled out, by which guise they might have
seemed less authoritative.”219 The rub for Kaprow was the
underlying rivalry between him and Oldenburg. In his analysis,
rivalry between artists in the 1960s had replaced the distance that
separated avant-garde artists and the public in the past. In 1964 he
would write, “The artist can no longer succeed in failing. Deprived
of his classic enemy, society, he cannot comfort himself in his lack
of recognition. . . . For now his only opponent, if he has any, is the
competition.”220 In his July letter to Oldenburg he unmistakably
staked his claim as the inventor of Happenings: “You came to
something in which I had been involved for some time, and by your
participation in its activities you indicated your willingness to share
some (at least some) of its principles and values.” He wondered
how it could be that Oldenburg had coped with Kaprow’s “highly
unlikely approach” for two whole years.221
In late August Oldenburg responded with a pamphlet subdivided
into twenty-three points, openly admitting that his intention had
been to launch an attack on Kaprow: “Your irony bores me. You’re
talking to me, not a jury box. . . . You have discredited our motives
by involving us in a theory of art which produces nothing but
boredom.” He refused to allow himself to be described, ironically,
as a “trained aesthetician” and wondered if Kaprow was trying to
act as his teacher by publishing “a bullshit article in Art News.” He
also contradicted Kaprow’s suggestion that he had fitted in with the
latter’s methods: “I came to a vague notion of theater, chiefly
suggested to me by Dick Tyler and Red [Grooms], of which yours
constituted, to me, a negative example.” And he swiftly dismissed
Kaprow’s differentiated reflection on the conditions of artistic
production:

If an artist isn’t sure what art is, he shouldn’t be practicing

it. . . . Your example did not seem to me to be art, but an
“approach” (not a distinction). What I tried to do was to
transform the approach into art, and thus into example. . . . I
hope I have set up a superior artistic example.222

Yet again Oldenburg insisted that there was a difference between

Kaprow’s theory and his own, which he shared with Grooms, Dine,
and Robert Whitman. Finally, he read Kaprow’s reference to
“melodrama” as a covert bid for leadership:

What you are doing (i.e. creating a fictional character out of

yourself) does not refer to your art, but to your attempts or
at least silent acquiescence in the claim to leadership, and
to your attempts to justify happenings as the heroic “moral
act” of the modern artist. Happenings are a fresh wind, for
us, if not for you. Why can’t you admit this? Why must you
bury us, sing our requiem, and tie us back to the mythology
of the 40’s?223

In late December 1961, after Oldenburg’s Store had opened and

was clearly on the road to success, Kaprow received another letter
from Oldenburg, in response to a dummy of the book he was
preparing. Oldenburg criticized the layout, the choice of
photographs, the large format, and—in view of the fact that Kaprow
was the editor, as opposed to an independent critic—the level of
self-congratulation. Oldenburg was adamant that he did not want to
be associated with Kaprow in this book and asked him to exclude
all references to Oldenburg: “I do not want this book to be a
spokesman for anything I have done. . . . What you do is your
business and you have no right to speak for me.”224
Unlike Kaprow, Oldenburg cultivated the traditional notion of
the artist as tragic outsider. In his view it was impossible for an
artist to escape bourgeois values, but “the enemy is bourgeois
culture nevertheless.” He dreamed of a situation far away from
“civilization built on human weakness”: “I would like to find some
way to take a totally outside position.”225 By contrast, Kaprow
talked of artists as being “in business” and hence integrated into
society.226 His image of the artist fulfilling a variety of roles in a
society where labor was divided among different players was
entirely at odds with Oldenburg’s notion of the artist as the heroic
guarantor of social coherence: “He analyzes and breaks up only to
rearrange and ultimately to resynthesize.”227
Following his striking contextualization of the Modernist
heritage in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” and of the Happening
in “Happenings in the New York Scene,” Kaprow’s third article,
“The Artist as Man of the World,” dealt the next blow to the
mystification of the artist as an outsider on the margins of society.
By now he had gained a tenured position at the State University of
New York, Stony Brook. In addition, he was involved in shaping a
national education policy for the John F. Kennedy administration. In
connection with his work for the Artists in Schools program, which
aimed at educating schoolteachers in matters of art, he was
fortunate enough to receive various grants and was constantly
traveling around the country.228 This latest article thus reflected
his professional work, which had shifted from production to
organization, and is of interest today above all because it
formulates a novel image of the artist that was increasingly to
become the subject of artistic enquiry in the 1980s and 1990s.
Kaprow’s premise was that “the art world, at least, has never
been in better flower.” And this flowering had to be met with a
more professional approach and greater academic rigor, because
now, “for the first time, blissful ignorance hasn’t a chance.”229
Success could come only with a new form of professionalism that
would open up the possibility of both strategic planning and art as
a “full-time career.”230 In his view artists were firmly rooted in the
middle classes, into which most were born and for which they
produced their work: they could no longer adopt the guise of social
outcasts. Situating artists well within the bourgeoisie was Kaprow’s
way of criticizing the residual yearnings of artists and their public
for the aristocracy: “Middle-class money, both public and private,
should be spent on middle-class art, not on fantasies of good taste
and noble sentiment.”231 Seven years later Robert Smithson made
a similar statement: “By making portable abstractions, the middle
class artist plays right into the hand of the mercantilist.”232
Because they were no longer up against bourgeois society,
artists instead had to contend with other artists, their rivals and
competitors. This was the thinking behind Kaprow’s comment
concerning the modern artist’s preoccupation with internal artistic
disputes and withdrawal from social conflict: “The modern artist is
usually apolitical.”233 But unlike many of his fellow artists, Kaprow
felt that this was not the time to abstain from cultural politics: “Art
politics is not only possible, but necessary. It is the new means of
persuasion.”234 Artists were no longer at one remove from society;
on the contrary, they were involved in it: “Society nowadays—at
least a rapidly growing part of it—pursues artists instead of exiling
them.” They could no longer rely on the idea that their time was yet
to come, telling themselves that society will “discover me later.”235
This particular sentiment was wholly at odds with Marcel
Duchamp’s notion that the artist must endure a period of
nonrecognition: “He [the artist] will have to wait for the verdict of
the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and
that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History.”236
By taking this stance Kaprow was chipping away at the very
foundations of the common assumption that the artist—taking
advantage of the supposed autonomy of culture to step back from
ordinary life—operated as a critical social corrective. Moreover, his
notion of middle-class art undermined the idea, largely formed in
the nineteenth century, of the artist as a tolerated outsider on the
fringes of a static social order. The concept of art as an absolute
was at the core of all art institutions, from the museum to the art
journal. With this sideswipe Kaprow touched a raw nerve in the
world of art institutions by implicitly criticizing their self-image as
leaders in the field. In view of this, it is hardly surprising that in the
editorial of the issue of Art News in which this article appeared,
Thomas Hess made a point of distancing himself from Kaprow’s
opinions. Although he respected Kaprow’s powerful language—“the
baroque quality of his prose compels admiration, despite its
content”—he nevertheless felt that there was a lag of twenty years
between artistic activity and its acceptance by society at large.
Even if an artist met the needs of his collectors, he was, in Hess’s
view, “part of and a rebel against his environment, simultaneously.”
Moreover, Hess saw the “professionalism” that Kaprow described
as the “finest flower of modern society’s corruption.” Besides
making the point that responsibility for one’s own work could
always be delegated elsewhere in a society defined by the division
of labor, Hess specifically charged artists with the task of
identifying the correlation between excess and poverty:

The Pro artist, when he opts to become a Man of the World,

subscribes to worldly racism, he joins the religion of Holy
 Private Property, he sells out his rights as a man for the
comfort of tenure in a university, membership in a country
club, cocktails with the boss. The artist as a company-man is
reduced to an entertainer. Fortunately, Kaprow speaks
almost only for himself.237

Kaprow’s concept of the artist as a man of the world became

common currency in the 1980s. For the wider public in the 1960s,
however, his vision was unsettling, despite the fact that in some
senses it drew on David Riesman’s book The Lonely Crowd, notably
his exposition of rivalry within peer groups.238 Kaprow himself
notably played out a range of roles in different contexts. In the art
world he was the “other-directed” artist; in the company of
academics, museum professionals, and jury or committee members
he played the “inner-directed” artist; at exhibition openings he
became the “bearded professor,” and so on. Oldenburg, by
contrast, preferred the inner-direction of what Riesman described
as the “old” middle class, for instance the “tradesman, the small
entrepreneur,” and maintained certain prewar traditions that he
felt Kaprow was betraying.
Oldenburg also took issue with the fact that, as he saw it,
Kaprow was endangering the cohesion of their peer group by
tacitly ignoring their agreed pricing structures. Although
Oldenburg liked to create the impression that he was inner-
directed, his actions were certainly other-directed. His Store was
an expression—not a critique—of art playing a part in a modern
consumer society. Like Warhol’s Factory later on, Oldenburg’s
Store owed some of its considerable success to the fact that it
perpetuated a nostalgic picture of straightforward production
processes. Conception, production, and distribution all took place
under the same roof. The fact that this idyll was only sustained
thanks to support from an internationally active gallery was quietly
swept under the carpet. By contrast, Kaprow structured his
Happenings along the lines of a modern service industry. He
produced them to order—which naturally affected their finish,
depending on how much time and money were available.
The prices charged for Oldenburg’s art were in keeping with the
gallerists’ confidential agreements, with sums between forty and
five hundred dollars accurately reflecting the market value, around
1960, of works by an up-and-coming thirty-year-old. By deciding
not to sell anything, Kaprow not only undercut other people’s
prices in the most extreme manner possible but also shone a bright
light on sales structures. And by installing Yard behind the Martha
Jackson Gallery, he drew attention to the difference between a
showroom and a place where sculptures are stored. His
contextualization of the gallery space (unlike Oldenburg’s
colonization of the Lower East Side by setting up a public sales
outlet) did not subject the setting to his strategy but rather
adjusted his strategy to the setting.

NATURALISM AND MODERNISM

Differences between artists are of course nothing unusual in the art
world. However, there is a reason to pay attention to the clash
between Kaprow and Oldenburg: their respective positions reflect
an art-historical watershed. Bearing in mind Oldenburg’s artistic
success from the 1960s onward, there is little point in comparing
the reception histories of his and Kaprow’s work. While
Oldenburg’s sculptures are found in numerous cities in Europe and
North America, Kaprow’s work is mainly known to art specialists.
Yet from a present-day perspective, Kaprow’s theories—his view of
the role of the artist, his analysis of the context of art, and his
critique of Modernism—are much more stimulating than
Oldenburg’s stance, which was founded on the notion of individual
creative power, the autonomous work of art, and the mystery of art.
Kaprow regarded Oldenburg’s thinking (not his art) as regressive
and criticized it accordingly; Oldenburg, for his part, described
Kaprow’s position as cynical.
Of course it is not my intention here to try to turn back the
wheel of art history or speculate on what might have been if, for
instance, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo had not bought Oldenburg’s
sculptures but had instead invited him—and Kaprow—to Europe to
realize a few dozen Happenings. Nor—lest there be any
misunderstanding—am I trying to suggest that Kaprow was
somehow marginalized. That simply would not tally with his
successful teaching career in higher education and his ongoing
presence in the artcritical debate, and it would only lead down the
avenue of hagiographic regret for another “neglected artistic
genius.” But the case of Kaprow versus Oldenburg does exemplify a
complexity in the art history of the 1960s that has been largely
forgotten today.
To reopen that case, we must return once again to “Happenings
in the New York Scene.” In this essay Kaprow ironically
exaggerated the workings of Modernist art production, which
openly celebrated the making of art and its instantaneous
consumption. In so doing he partially drew on John Kenneth
Galbraith’s demystification of production in The Affluent Society
(1958). However, in terms of economics, the art debate was lagging
behind the sociological debate. Kaprow’s view on the speed of
reception was a provocation to most of his peers; for economists,
however, it would have simply confirmed what they took for
granted. For the artist, the impermanence of Happenings made
them different from other art forms: “A Happening is thus fresh,
while it lasts, for better or worse.” And Kaprow had an explanation
for this impermanence:

This is, in essence, a continuation of the tradition of Realism.

The significance of the Happening is not to be found simply
in the fresh creative wind now blowing. Happenings are not
just another new style. Instead, like American art of the late
1940s, they are a moral act, a human stand of great urgency,
whose professional status as art is less a criterion than their
certainty as an ultimate existential commitment.239

Kaprow did not pursue this line of argument any further. No

doubt he was keen to associate Happenings with Realism in order
to set them apart from the Nouveaux Réalistes in Europe, whom
William C. Seitz had fêted in The Art of Assemblage (1961). No
doubt he wanted to declare his interest in the American art scene
of the 1930s and 1940s, which had, after all, produced the painter
Jackson Pollock. However, his reference to a philosophy of Realism,
of whatever kind, does raise certain questions. The fact is, his
suggestion that Happenings—that “concrete art,” as he called it—
were rooted in Realism in effect undermined his earlier analysis,
which presented them as the progeny of the spirit of painting.240
Was it his intention to imply that the Nouveaux Réalistes were not
the rightful heirs to Realism? Was there another tradition, not
connected to the logic of Modernism, an alternative to “the triumph
of American painting” (per Irving Sandler’s 1970 book title), that
had in fact led to the Happenings? Kaprow did not provide any
answers to these questions. His assertion that Happenings were “a
moral act” was distinctly pathos laden. Yet it is worth tracing his
footsteps to gain a better understanding of the scope of his critique
of Modernist values.
Our starting point is the essay “The Gold Standard and the Logic
of Naturalism” (1987), by the cultural historian Walter Benn
Michaels.241 Michaels explores the connection between American
trompe l’oeil painting in the 1880s and 1890s and Late Modernist
art from the 1940s to the 1960s, by which he means Abstract
Expressionism and Minimal Art. In his view both trompe l’oeil
painting and Modernism are beholden to what he calls “the logic of
naturalism.” This logic, as he explains it, goes back to the attitudes
of the devotees of the gold standard, the so-called goldbugs, during
the late-nineteenth-century controversy over the continuation of
gold backing. The goldbugs supported the view that only as much
abstract money should be in circulation as there was natural gold
to back it. Unlike the monetarists, who won the day, allowing the
federal government to regulate the amount of money in circulation,
the goldbugs regarded money as a finite raw material.
The goldbugs on Wall Street, in whose interests it was to control
the limited gold resources, liked to collect paintings—by artists
such as John Haberle—of deceptively real-looking paper currency,
stamps, photographs, shares certificates, and the like. One of the
most famous paintings of this genre is Haberle’s Imitation (1887),
with its depiction of two much-used banknotes, a few tattered
stamps, and a yellowed photograph. Even the frame is painted,
with evidence of wear and tear, and the artist’s signature on the
frame is part of a trompe l’oeil. The theme of the painting is the
transience of any kind of representation. The wealthy New York art
dealer and leading art collector Thomas B. Clarke purchased it
directly from the exhibition when it first went on show in 1887.242
According to Michaels, the aim of painting such bafflingly real-
looking motifs was to reinforce the beholder’s valuation of the real
thing as opposed to a copy or a fake.243 By tapping into Clement
Greenberg’s concept of “flatness” (and his “blank canvas”),244
Michaels makes the connection with Modernist art:

Flatness, not money, carries the weight of trompe l’oeil’s

economic commitments. And nowhere is this more evident,
even if somewhat paradoxically so, than in the hostility to
trompe l’oeil and to illusion in general that would become
(was indeed already becoming) a central preoccupation of
modernist painting. . . . Greenberg’s blank canvas, despite
(or, rather, because of) its repudiation of all illusion,
participates directly in the trompe l’oeil production of three-
dimensionality. . . . Replacing the illusion of three-
dimensionality with the physical fact of three-dimensionality,
the blank canvas identifies value with material, picture with
support. The painting that can represent nothing and still
remain a painting is “money itself,” and the modernist (or,
perhaps, literalist) aesthetic of freedom from representation
is a goldbug aesthetic.245

Although Fredric Jameson refers in detail to Michaels’s essay in

his book Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991), art historians have paid scant attention to Michaels. Yet his
writing provides a welcome and unexpected tool for those keen to
challenge the idea of a radical break between Modernism and
Postmodernism. His premise (which he came to earlier than his
colleagues in art history) is that there is a continuous, unbroken
line connecting Abstract Expressionism and Minimal Art.
Furthermore, he situates the ideology of Modernism—concepts
such as self-referentiality, essence, quality, originality, and the ban
on images—firmly in the context of economic history. In his
exposition of a “goldbug aesthetic,” Michaels identifies a particular
embodiment of the goldbug in the figure of the “miser,” who, as he
puts it, has a fetish for money and such a passion for gold that he
withdraws his own gold from circulation, which is always
threatening and promising to naturalize it again. Michaels locates
the figure of the miser in literature from the turn of the century,
characters such as the junk dealer Zerkow in the novel McTeague
by Frank Norris. However, Zerkow hoards junk, as opposed to
dealing in it. His passion for it is the same that anyone else might
have for gold, a passion for something that has been withdrawn
from circulation. The behavior of the junk dealer highlights the
paradox of “natural” gold, which functions as money only when it
has an exchange value and undermines its very existence when it
seeks to escape this role:

If gold, to be money itself, need never be money at all and

so, as I have argued, can never be money at all, then what
Zerkow likes is a way of seeing gold that, identifying it as
junk instead of money, allows it for the first time actually to
become money. Here the figure of the miser is turned inside
out; instead of marking the continuity between nature and
the economy, between a natural money and no money, he
marks the sudden emergence both of money out of junk and
of a puzzling question: If there is no value in nature, how
can there be value at all? It is just this question that the
commitment to precious metals is designated to answer or,
better, to forestall—forestall it by insisting that there is
value in nature and answer it by suggesting that should the
value in nature run out, then there would indeed be no value
left anywhere.246

There are of course self-evident parallels between the figure of

Zerkow and the “junk dealers” in the postwar art world, such as the
Nouveaux Réalistes or Robert Rauschenberg, represented in the
1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage. As if to underline this, an
illustration of Haberle’s trompe l’oeil painting The Changes of Time
(1888) occupies a prominent position in the introduction to The Art
of Assemblage’s catalogue.247 The fact that the New York Museum
of Modern Art—that citadel of abstract modern art—opened its
doors to the “junk dealers” and allowed Jean Tinguely to present
his Homage to New York: A Self-Constructing and Self-Destroying
Work of Art makes perfect sense if we accept that these were, in
effect, two sides of the same Modernist coin. The title of Tinguely’s
work already points unmistakably to the notion of the autonomous
work of art, which refers only to itself and its own operations. This
in turn explains why the program of the Museum of Modern Art
could accommodate a piece by Tinguely—and not Kaprow. At the
same time, we have to ask why Pop Art so soon ousted the
Nouveaux Réalistes—who, if we take Kaprow’s logic to the next
stage, ought in fact to be known as Nouveaux Naturalistes. Why
should it be that, despite Tinguely’s undisputed status, Oldenburg
so soon overtook and vastly outdid him?
Oldenburg, like Kaprow, was not represented in The Art of
Assemblage. In 1960 and early 1961 he had still not reconciled his
involvement in Happenings with his work as a painter. It was only
in mid-1961 that he managed to synthesize these two sides of his
activities. Almost immediately his art became an important
component in numerous international exhibitions. Moreover, during
the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s he successfully monumentalized and
popularized this synthesis in his sculptures—with the declared aim
of reaching “as many people as possible.”248 Regularly working
from 1976 onward with his wife Coosje von Bruggen, Oldenburg
produced sculptures, in the trompe l’oeil tradition, in the form of
gigantic enlargements of everyday objects. The pleasure derived
from their contemplation is partly due to the reassurance that, in
surroundings that seem increasingly abstract, ordinary things stay
as they are. And at least in the early days of his artistic career,
Oldenburg could well have been compared to Michaels’s notion of a
miser, since his breakthrough came not from his involvement in
Happenings but rather when he created the typical environment of
a junk dealer—his Store. Although the objects on display did not
represent junk, they recalled a secondhand shop. They consisted of
a great variety of goods that looked randomly brought together,
such as clothing, food, and other consumer objects. This was much
more like a general store from the good old days—looking back (if
Kaprow was right to identify an element of nostalgia in Pop Art) to
Oldenburg’s childhood—full of all kinds of individual, unpackaged
goods. These examples of “junk culture” were now ennobled to
such an extent that they became the three-dimensional heirs to the
mantle of the New York School. The haptic surface of peinture was
rendered as enamel paint on a rough plaster ground.
 Oldenburg compared his Store to a museum: “Museum in
b[ourgeois] concept equals store in mine.”249 He expressly
identified with what he had created: “The store means for me: my
consciousness.”250 And in a letter to Kaprow, he wrote, “The store .
. . it’s personal.”251 Oldenburg symbolically withdrew consumer
goods from circulation by accumulating them. Having talked in the
1960s of his desire to turn art into life, he now aimed at making life
into art.252 There is a close analogy here to Zerkow, who wanted to
make gold from junk. At the same time, Oldenburg admitted that
his interest in painting was olfactory and obsessive: “I am turned
on by the thick plaster and green paint of a kitchen in my
neighborhood. The accumulation and mystery. The heaped up
table.”253 The accumulation of plaster and paint also had an
irresistible appeal for the visitors who came to The Store. (And it
was not long before Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures literally bowed to
the covetous gaze of the public.) But unlike in Happenings, where it
was not unknown for viscous paint to pour from buckets, in The
Store products from Happenings were on sale.
Panza di Biumo, who from 1953 onward regularly made the
journey to New York from Milan or Varese, where he lived, later
looked back at visiting The Store:

To reach the Store, we had to go through the Jewish section

in downtown New York, which was full of shops selling used
dresses. . . . And the Oldenburg Store was in a small street,
after the Jewish section. It was completely different because
it was glowing [with] beautiful colors. The poor objects . . .
[were] changed into something brilliant, because of the
strong, pure, beautiful colors used by Oldenburg.254

Oldenburg’s objects so fascinated Panza, another true “miser,” that,

having pondered for a whole year, he came forward with an offer
for the entire contents of The Store—so that he, for his part, could
withdraw all these items from circulation on the art market.255
However, Richard Bellamy, who was representing Oldenburg and
wanted to see the work disseminated as widely as possible,
thwarted Panza’s desire to own every last item on sale there.256
Bellamy, who had a financial interest in The Store through his
Green Gallery, was in a position to turn down “goldbug” Panza only
because he had the backing of a much mightier goldbug, the
collector Robert Scull.257
By 1963, however, Oldenburg had grown so uneasy at having a
dealer representing his work that he decided to become an
entrepreneur and do without the services of a gallery.258 He
reactivated in real life a game he had invented in 1960, when he
created a dedicated currency for his Ray Gun Show that the
audience could use to purchase objects.259 During an interval in the
show he set up a mock barter event, as he recounted in his notes:
“The audience gathered in the gymnasium [of the church,] where
girls wheeled around carts of junk objects for purchase with Ray
Gun money given to them on their arrival.”260
It is not surprising that Oldenburg made full use of anything
produced during his Happenings: “Residual objects are created in
the course of making the performance and during the repeated
performances. . . . To pick up after a performance, to be very
careful about what is to be discarded and what still survives by
itself. Show study & respect for small things.”261 His obsession with
preserving things is reflected in statements such as “I am for an art
covered with bandages.”262 In his book Store Days he published
minutely detailed business accounts covering everything from
heating costs to the sale of each item.263 Andy Warhol was another
artist who never threw anything away. Unlike Oldenburg, however,
he had an ironic awareness of his obsession, which he voiced in his
“philosophy of using leftovers,” a parody of the skinflint that is less
about being mean than supposedly being lazy: “I always thought
there was a lot of humor in leftovers.”264
This relatively lengthy account serves above all to show that the
differences between Kaprow and Oldenburg amounted to a
fundamental disparity that could be described as the difference
between naturalism and realism. I am deliberately avoiding the
adjective Postmodernist here, since it would call to mind their
common ground. Both consciously moved away from Modernism
and can thus be classed as Postmodernist. However, little is to be
gained from that, for there was a distinct divergence in the nature
of their historicity. Let us return once more to Michaels. He
suggests that a feature of the logic of naturalism (not to be
confused with the art style known as Naturalism) is the notion that
money is a natural resource—“like coal or cows.”265 Oldenburg
frequently reiterated the importance he attached to working with
organic materials.266 He dreamed of a “square which becomes
blobby,” recalled that “the insides looked as interesting as the
outsides and I hated to seal them up,” and commented that “the
bone of a thing, its essentialness is what matters to me the
most.”267 His deep-rooted leaning toward naturalism is reflected in
his desire “to be for a moment nature itself” and in a statement in a
letter to Kaprow: “The creation of art is . . . a natural act. . . . An art
of non-artistic reality or philosophical reality is impossible to flirt
with. It is an irrelevance. . . . Art is as truly organic and mysterious
as the self.”268
By contrast, Kaprow insisted that only difference and exchange
were real. He demonstrated his skepticism of the Modernist logic
of hoarding to spectacular effect in Bon Marché, even if it elicited
no response from the critics or the participants. This Happening
took place in 1963 in the Parisian department store of that name—
that is to say, an institution which must be abhorrent to any
goldbug for its celebration of the most frivolous love of
extravagance. Kaprow was immediately taken with the shop’s
ambience:

Its [the Happening’s] theme was suggested both by the

daytime activities of the store and by the morgue-like,
shrouded appearance it took on after closing hour. I sensed
in the ritual exchange of packages for money, and in the
nighttime aisles of cloth-covered merchandise and
mannequins, an inevitable circularity of imagery.269

Each visitor received a small package at the beginning of the

Happening and was then drawn into diverse activities, all of which
centered on the processes of exchange and consumption and
ranged from pushing a shopping trolley to watching television and
eating. The Happening came to a close with participants being
directed, via the public address system, to open up their packages
—only to find that they were filled with stones, which the
participants were to deposit in a basin of water before making their
way home (see figure 15).
FIGURE 15. Allan Kaprow, Bon Marché, Happening sponsored by Théatre des Nations, Bon
Marché department store, Paris, July 1963.

As the evening progressed, with its game of exchange,

consumption, and dissipation, participants in Bon Marché may well
have harbored the (Modernist) wish that the weight in their hand
would turn out to be of some value, maybe even a lump of gold. The
disappointment that awaited them at the end of the evening was of
the same order as the shock that could befall a goldbug were he to
discover that, as Michaels puts it, “money doesn’t exist at all.”270
The “inevitable circularity of imagery” was real and, in Kaprow’s
terminology, “life.” Consequently a temporarily nonfunctioning
commercial premises—the department store after closing time—
was a nightmare in his view. For the Modernist this nightmare
became a glorious dream of everything turning into gold. Kaprow
let his participants live the dream for a short time, until he woke
them up with the bitter truth about the contents of their packages.
The participants were left holding on to nothing more than maybe a
sense of disappointment. In much the same way that Oldenburg
described his Store as his “consciousness,” Kaprow identified with
the department store, at least when he referred to himself having a
“supermarket-mind.”271
Another particularly striking response to the theme of
commercial exchange is Rauschenberg’s Combine Black Market
(1961). This piece, created for the exhibition Bewogen-Beweging at
the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, invited visitors to exchange any
one of four objects in a suitcase for an object of their own and to
register this exchange by stamping Rauschenberg’s name on the
new object and tracing or drawing the object into a booklet,
accompanied by their own name. Even if Rauschenberg’s approach
was much more ironic than Oldenburg’s, there was still something
of the junk dealer mentality in his hope that visitors would leave an
item “that had some personal value for them” and that he would
make a minimal profit from each transaction, in the form of a
“receipt.” The idea was that visitors would be “torn between the
object and the art work,” in other words, between losing an object
that had value for them and gaining an object that was a work of
art by Rauschenberg.272 In that respect, if not the idea then at least
the act of representation (using a stamp, for instance) could be a
pleasure to the miser. This may provide an answer to the question
of why Oldenburg represented objects in the first place. In 1961 he
wrote, “Why do I not just present the real thing instead of imitating
it? Because my desire to imitate extends to the event or activity of
making the thing I imitate.”273 The pleasure he gained from
satisfying his mimetic urge was the same that he experienced as an
artist in the guise of a sign painter or a pastry cook. The image of
an artist that he created became a trompe l’oeil that may have
deceived his neighbor but would not fool the connoisseur.274 Thus
he underpinned the authenticity of the creative artist as “an
indomitable hero who exists on a plane above any living context,”
as Kaprow put it.275
“Why does the miser save?” Michaels asks, and comes to the
conclusion that “he saves to escape the money economy; he saves
to reenact for himself the origin of economy.”276 The paranoia of
the miser is founded in his paradoxical fear and hope that money
might cease to exist:

The love of precious metal is just the fear that men will
regress into beasts, which is, in turn, the fear that money
will disappear, which, transposed and inverted, is the love of
trompe l’oeil painting. It would be possible, in my view, to
extend these transformations—in the case of painting . . .
forward into minimalism.277

This might be extrapolated to include the Modernists in art—be

they artists, collectors, or historians. Gripped by the same
inextricably intertwined fear and hope that art may cease to be,
they seek to re-create the beginnings of art. This then informs both
the Modernist notion of originality and the Modernist’s fixation on
the definition of art. Thus the rekindled debate in the 1960s
regarding the nature of art and the previously mentioned revival of
the classical avant-garde can be read as the art world’s
reenactment of the origin of art. What Theodor Adorno described
as a widespread critique of isms—namely, opponents ridiculing new
movements in art, such as Expressionism and Surrealism, as
momentary and short-lived—was rooted in the Modernist fear of
Modernism per se, the anxiety over Modernism developing schools
and a tradition in its own right.278
This issue, which played such an important part in the art
discourse of the 1950s and 1960s (by the 1970s scarcely anyone
was asking “What is art?”), filled Oldenburg with a sense of
agonizing uncertainty that led to his uneasy love-hate relationship
with art. Sometimes he actively sought to distance himself from it:
“[Art] is the notion I’ve got to get rid of.” Or: “Assuming that I want
to create some thing, what would that thing be? Just a thing, an
object. Art would not enter into it.”279 The idea that the
significance of art resides in the self-referentiality of its media, that
is to say, in the demystification of the fact that it is made from
wholly tangible paint and picture ground or that it is the outcome
of particular conditions of production, is ultimately wholly in
keeping with the rationale of naturalism. As it turned out, this idea
survived beyond the 1960s and continued to fuel the debate until
well into the 1980s. Witness Benjamin Buchloh’s appreciation of
Michael Asher, whose art is evaluated mainly in terms of its
revealing of the (presumably) hidden conditions of art:

Asher’s work committed itself to the development of a

practice of situational aesthetics that insisted on a critical
refusal to provide an existing apparatus with legitimizing
aesthetic information, while at the same time revealing, if
not changing, the existing conditions of the apparatus. More
than any other artist of his generation that I am aware of did
he maintain that stance once it had been defined after the
shortcomings and compromises of Minimal art had become
apparent in the late Sixties and Conceptual art had revealed
its idealist fallacies.280

The viewer’s enjoyment arises from the artist’s—infinitely

repeatable—unmasking of a deception. The gain that is to be had
from this lies in the confirmation of a hidden truth that viewers feel
they already know. Kaprow regarded this predetermined sequence
of concealing and revealing an a priori truth as “tragic”; Smithson
later described this attitude as “mechanistic.”281 I therefore
suggest that the pleasure commentators felt in the 1980s and
1990s when they studied the desublimation strategies of artists
such as Asher, Daniel Buren, and Hans Haacke may be compared
with the pleasure Greenberg experienced as he surveyed the
“flatness” of Kenneth Noland’s paintings and by the goldbugs when
they saw through the sleight of hand of Haberle’s trompe l’oeil
paintings. Against this backdrop, Panza’s activities as a collector
make perfect sense. Having started with just a few examples of
Abstract Expressionism, during the 1960s and 1970s he built up
the most important private collection worldwide of Pop Art,
Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art. In the mid-1970s he expressed an
interest in Asher’s “lounge area,” created for the exhibition
Ambiente/Arte curated by Germano Celant in the Padiglione
Centrale at the 1976 Venice Biennale.282 Panza was invited to
purchase this work, an ensemble of furnished relaxation zones that
highlighted both the interconnection of sculpture and furniture and
the exhaustion that visitors to the Biennale experienced.283 He had
already been interested in Asher’s work and, had he acquired this
piece, would have been one of the few collectors with an Asher to
his name, bought before Asher began making unsalable art. Panza
finally declined the offer, after lengthy hesitation, citing a lack of
funds.284
Michaels proposes writing as an alternative to the logic of
naturalism: “The attraction of writing is that it escapes this logic.
Neither a formal entity in itself nor an illusionistic image of
something else, it marks the potential discrepancy between
material and identity.”285 This discrepancy makes representation
possible in the first place. However, in Michaels’s view the idea of
writing is unbearable to goldbugs and Modernists, for it also
always contains the possibility that one’s persona might disappear.
Indeed, as a means to endless fiction, writing is one of the potential
enemies of Modernist logic, as are photography, as a means to
endless repetition, and even, to a certain extent, three-dimensional
objects that, insofar as they are not made from pure gold, distract
attention from the self-referentiality of the ur-material and, by dint
of other qualities, vastly exaggerate their given value. Writing,
which can set up new value systems at will, stands in opposition to
the symbol that relies on the convergence of reality and an artist’s
mark.
There is a considerable difference in Kaprow’s and Oldenburg’s
use of writing. For instance, in Kaprow’s Environment Words,
visitors could add new words and messages to those already
written on the canvases and thus undermine the supposed
transparency of the medium in signifying a content. By contrast,
the messages in Oldenburg’s texts are always easily decipherable,
be it in the design for Police Station, an image of a police station
made from the individual letters of the word police, or be it that, in
a polemical move, he lines up the letters of Kaprow’s name into a
kind of concrete poem that can be read as letters but also seen as
parts of a mountain chain. Although these pieces arrest the epic
flow of language and cause the reader’s eye to stumble over
individual letters, starting involuntarily to play with their order and
to mentally rearrange them like building blocks, their meaning
remains perfectly clear. In just the same way that he pushed letters
within words into one another, so too did Oldenburg stack up torn
cardboard props in early Environments, such as The Street. He
reaffirmed the self-contained cycle of consumption by creating
temporary blockages in the flow of goods in his Store: gleaming,
thick enamel paint covers objects (made of plaster over a wire
armature) with a viscous surface that is both beguiling and
repellent, that promises freshness yet represents stagnation. Thus
he created an ambiguity that, as he insisted, was far from easy to
achieve: “I want these pieces to have an unbridled intense satanic
vulgarity that is unsurpassable, and yet be art. To work in total art
is hard as hell.”286 Ultimately he was creating reversible
transgressions of a particular framework (the notion of
communication, the genre of painting, the cycles of consumption)
that by definition affirmed that same framework. All of this had
nothing to do with Kaprow’s skepticism regarding the neutral
transmission of messages—which he formulated in, for instance, his
essay “Impurity.”287
Oldenburg shows his deep-seated, naturalist mistrust of
representation in the first scene of his film Snapshots from the City
(1960), when the business pages of a newspaper go up in flames.288
In his Happening Fotodeath (1961), he embodied his hatred for the
supposedly falsifying nature of photography in the sleazy
photographer, Carl, who tried to take a photograph of a family of
three against a landscape backdrop only to find them apparently
dropping dead every time he attempted the shot.289 Photography is
portrayed as a deadly intrusion, whose subject is brutally wrenched
from a natural continuum of space and time. However, as soon as
the possibility arose of documenting his art to make it more widely
known, Oldenburg—unlike Kaprow—engaged a professional
photographer to record his Happenings, usually in color, and even
re-created some so that they could be filmed. Kaprow later alluded
to the fact that Oldenburg felt it was important that his works be
documented when he commented, “He had a Minox.”290 However,
Oldenburg never described these photographs as art. By contrast,
Kaprow seems almost systematically to have ensured that any
images of his Environments and Happenings had a specific iconic
quality.
Kaprow embodied everything that would completely infuriate
the goldbug, alias naturalist, alias Modernist. His Happenings were
there to be consumed, nothing more, nothing less; they could never
be placed in an art repository, but they had no connection with the
natural world. They could be described as pure extravagance, the
ultimate frustration for collectors and museum directors, for whose
fixation on art Kaprow had nothing but scorn: “The real weakness
of much vanguard art since 1951 is its complacent assumption that
art exists and can be recognized and practiced.”291 He was never
preoccupied by questions of art, nonart, or the nature of art; his
interest was always in art’s locus. This inevitably brought him into
contact with the realms of architecture.
 Performing Architecture

The first great consideration is that life goes on in an

environment; not merely in it but because of it,
through interaction with it. No creature lives merely
under its skin.
—JOHN DEWEY, Art as Experience

opinion, initiated the destabilization of the

HAPPENINGS, IN ALLAN KAPROW’S
traditional exhibition situation. The context, the atmosphere, and
the habitat of Happenings—in disused industrial premises, in
basements, in empty shops and warehouses, or out in the street—
put an end to the traditional limitation of art by means of “white
walls, tasteful aluminum frames, lovely lighting, fawn gray rugs,
cocktails, polite conversation.” Happenings melded together the
“surroundings, the artist, the work, and everyone who comes to it
into an elusive, changeable configuration.”292 Kaprow’s
Environments and stage sets also had nothing to do with the
gallery spaces of the 1940s, which, with their colored fabric
finishes and carpets, were in the Parisian mode. But neither did his
work subscribe to the loft aesthetic that followed the European-
style gallery.
Calvin Tomkins identified the opening of the Betty Parsons
Gallery in autumn 1946 as the beginning of a new era:

Most of the New York galleries then copied the European

look, with dark, fabric-covered walls, thick carpets, and
small paintings in elaborate frames—art presented as
expensive decoration. Betty Parsons was the first to look like
an artist’s loft studio: white walls, bare wood floors, no
 decoration—emphatically not a middle-class interior.293

Parsons’s innovative presentation of paintings in the same context

in which they had been made, as though in a tidied-up studio,
reflected a different attitude in the recipients—that is to say, a
specific interest in the very latest work. At the time numerous
artists had been able to set up their studios in low-rent commercial
premises when light industry and clothing manufacturing were
squeezed out of Lower Manhattan after the Second World War.294
These studios still bore traces of their industrial past, which
American artists welcomed as proof of the difference between
themselves and their European counterparts and as a useful
backdrop for the image of the working-class hero that they were
keen to cultivate. In 1949 Art News started to publish a new
column of artists’ portraits, each of which included a series of
photographs documenting the making of a painting in the artist’s
studio.295
After Betty Parsons, Leo Castelli was the next to exploit the
ambience of an industrial premises in an art presentation.296 Even
before he opened his gallery, he caused a considerable stir with an
Abstract Expressionist group exhibition in an abandoned factory
that was due for demolition. His Ninth Street Show in spring 1951
was to become the stuff of legend.297 The backdrop of the
converted factory space was very much in keeping with the
production aesthetics of the Abstract Expressionists. In the late
1960s, when he opened his Castelli Warehouse as an offshoot of his
gallery, Castelli introduced another new element into the typology
of exhibition architecture. The conversion of disused industrial
premises and repositories into exhibition spaces proved to be a
viable option and established itself as a new paradigm by the late
1970s. Minimal Art in particular—as a manifestation of
postindustrial art—could be presented to good effect in deserted
factory buildings with naked brick walls, riveted steel beams, and
shed roofs, spaces that machinery and workers had once filled.298
These nineteenth-century industrial settings appeared more
authentic and American to the art-viewing public than did
presentation styles imported from Europe. The democratic
traditions of American labor and manufacturing now countered
European precedents, with their aristocratic connotations—known
to many from the night shots of the sculpture exhibition against the
backdrop of the burned-out orangerie of Kassel Castle at
documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955 and photos of the Picasso exhibition
at the ruined Castello Sforzesco in Milan in 1953. Broadly
speaking, art seems to benefit from being set off against the ruined
remains of an earlier epoch that has given way to and is now
commemorated by that same art—one need only call to mind the
nineteenth-century museums built as imitation castles or churches.
By the late 1950s the ambience of the “‘loft generation’ of the
’40s and ’50s,” as Kaprow ironically called it, had become so
ubiquitous in New York that Kaprow distanced himself from it and
provocatively defied the supposed authenticity of the artist’s studio
with the artificiality of a stage set.299 The loft was now a stage:
studio and exhibition space had become one, and the separation of
production and reception was a thing of the past.
More than painters and sculptors, the Happeners could profit
from an institutional change that occurred around 1960. As well as
benefiting from support from the Judson Gallery, the Reuben
Gallery, and other smaller galleries such as the Smolin Gallery and
the Green Gallery, they now found their work championed in
university and college art departments, some very new. Happenings
fitted well into the interdisciplinary programs of the art, poetry, and
theater festivals that greatly enlivened campus life at colleges and
universities. The student audience was young and interested in art.
At these events, which generally took place outdoors when the
weather was warm and were often attended by whole families, the
dividing lines between art, play, and festival were naturally fluid.
At times the Happeners would form an advance party, like film
crews searching for locations, to find the most suitable sites and to
work out themes. Four years before Robert Smithson coined the
term site selection and long before the concept of site specificity
had become common currency, Oldenburg and Kaprow were
surveying possible venues with an eye to their spatial, atmospheric,
social, economic, and historical characteristics. Oldenburg even
commented that after a while it became difficult to find new
venues: “It becomes harder and harder to do a happening. You use
up everything that you have. That’s why you have to find new
places. One reason that I have done fewer things in New York
recently is that I used up New York, particularly the Lower East
Side.”300 Kaprow once recalled that they generally came up with
themes and a title after their first visit to a proposed location. As a
rule, they relied on local curators to see to the necessary
preparations, including organizing materials, fees, safety
procedures, permissions, insurance, and rehearsals. The extent and
length of a Happening depended on the funding, some of which
would be reserved as remuneration for the Happeners. The scores
of most Happenings were so straightforward that they could be
explained in a few minutes and could sometimes be performed
without rehearsal.301 In the mid-1960s Kaprow started to publicize
his Happenings on posters that served as announcement, score,
and documentation in one.
The new situation, with Happenings commissioned for particular
events, brought fundamental changes. The context of a university
campus or an ephemeral, open-air festival was very different from
the fixed, urban spaces of the New York galleries. Importance now
attached to Happenings’ duration, audience, and costs. While
American universities had an increasing appetite for Happenings in
the early 1960s, commercial galleries had no use for these
unsalable events, and art museums had no desire to integrate them
into exhibitions or collections. Thus the relocation of Happenings to
places that were not on the usual exhibition circuit should not
automatically be read as “a protest against the museum conception
of art” (per Susan Sontag)302—although Kaprow himself cultivated
this cliché303—but as a logical adaptation to changed
circumstances.
Kaprow’s first Happening commissioned by a university was The
Night. It was presented as part of Open House 61, a festival held in
May 1961 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Kaprow made
all the necessary arrangements by post. Students built the required
set and rehearsed the performance. Kaprow flew in from New York
shortly before the opening.304 This Happening was an extended
version of A Spring Happening. It took place at night in an old
aircraft hangar, on whose walls lengths of fabric and paper were
hung. Around a hundred spectators were ushered in. A single
naked bulb cast a dim light over the scene. Large cardboard boxes,
lit from inside by actors with flashlights, moved among the visitors
like wandering lanterns. Then other actors started to create
collisions among items hanging by ropes from the ceiling—car tires,
empty oil drums, garbage. Next the actors in the cardboard boxes
stepped out of their containers, naked and painted from head to
toe. As in A Spring Happening, a shadow play projected on the
fabric-covered walls took the spectators by surprise, and the sound
of a hidden power saw suddenly shocked them. Lengths of
transparent plastic sheeting descended from the roof and came to
rest on the spectators, covering them. The actors then spattered
paint and white foam over the plastic-covered spectators. After a
storm of flashlights, an actor on a rope swung through the air like
Tarzan, crying out at the top of his voice, “The night!” Finally, a
wall of ornamental shrubs started to move toward the visitors,
crowding them together.
The spectacular settings of Happenings such as The Night,
whose setting recalled the set of a movie or a play, were
characteristic of the fact that the atmospheric context of the
events, the site where each took place, was gaining wider
attention. The Happeners turned the galleries’ lack of interest to
their advantage and profited from the new possibilities that
unfamiliar surroundings presented. They derived the bare bones of
their performances from the nature of the venues they chose, in
keeping with John Dewey’s view of the way that life takes place not
only within but also because of our surroundings.305

SITE SPECIFICITY

Kaprow’s art in the 1960s serves as a welcome vehicle for

exploring the precepts of the debate regarding site specificity that
flared up in the 1980s, when attention shifted from the spatial and
formal characteristics of a place to its functional and historical
characteristics.306 He used architecture as both the subject matter
and the medium of his Happenings, not so much to reflect political
issues as to expose art to the unpredictability of the public domain.
In other words, it was not his aim to make political art but rather to
give art free reign on the public stage. It comes as no surprise that
he opens his book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings with
a series of deliberations on architecture. Whereas, in his view,
visual artists had once been dependent on architecture, in the
1950s a change set in. Art, as Kaprow puts it, changed faster than
architecture and thus fitted “uncomfortably within the glaring
geometry of the gallery box.” As a result, many artists moved to
open spaces: “They cannot wait for the new architecture.”307
Kaprow’s first Environments and his 18 Happenings in 6 Parts
had already operated on an architectural level. In the years that
followed, at events held at venues other than galleries and
museums, he took advantage of the special atmospheres of
different architectural backdrops. In these cases he never regarded
the architecture solely as a spatial factor but always also saw it as a
reflection of functional and historical change. This applied as much
to the grimy setting for Yard (1961) as to the internal courtyard of a
rundown luxury hotel used for Courtyard (1962).308 Other
Happenings, including A Service for the Dead, Mushroom, Orange,
Eat, Bon Marché, and Calling, all owed aspects of their subject
matter and atmosphere to their given architecture.
Besides this literal use of architecture as a stage set, Kaprow
also deployed it as the focus of collective actions. What could be
called the performance of architecture is, in my view, a key element
of his art. Although neither he nor the relevant historiography have
discussed this, the performance of architecture occurred in many of
Kaprow’s Happenings, those with an audience and those without.
In many of his Happenings the action revolved around the
collective construction and subsequent destruction of ephemeral
architectures.
Kaprow’s Happening Household took place on 3 May 1964 on a
rubbish tip somewhere outside Ithaca, New York, as part of the
Festival of Contemporary Art presented by Cornell University.
Following Kaprow’s introduction of the piece in a lecture hall at the
university, the participants drove to the site in their cars. There
were no spectators. The score outlined a ritualized battle of the
sexes, with a group of men and women in the background as a
chorus of sorts. The morning was spent constructing the set. The
men built a tower from items they found at the dump—poles,
planks, ropes, car tires, and more. The women built a nest and put
up washing lines around it, from which they hung old shirts. In the
afternoon more cars arrived, towing a smoking, burned-out car. The
chorus, taking cover in the trees, formed a circle around the scene.
The women stayed in their nest, shrieking. The men toppled the
wreck into a ditch and covered it with jam. They dipped slices of
bread into the jam and ate them (see figure 16). The women went
to the car and licked the jam. Meanwhile the men went to the nest
and stole the clothes hanging on the line. Then they destroyed the
nest, returned to the car, drove the women away, and started to
consume the jam themselves. The women ran away screaming
angrily and demolished the men’s tower.

FIGURE 16. Students putting bread on a car for Allan Kaprow’s Household, dump outside
Ithaca, New York, 3 May 1964, Festival of Contemporary Art, Cornell University.

As the chorus approached the center, making more and more

noise, the women enticed the men ever closer until they were able
to tear back the stolen shirts, which they promptly flung into a
blazing fire. Next they took off their blouses and waved them
around in triumph, singing rock and roll hits. The men threw smoke
bombs into the garbage; the chorus had now reached the car wreck
and started to lick the jam. This prompted the men to return to the
car, which they destroyed with sledgehammers, egged on by the
women. Once the men set the wreck on fire, the women left the
scene in the cars they had arrived in, blaring their horns. The men
and the chorus gathered around the smoking wreck, lit up
cigarettes, and waited until the car was completely burned out.
Then they silently made their way home.
Household was the high point of Kaprow’s early architectural
performances, whose participants enacted the construction of
dwellings, thereby creating, shifting, and destroying territorial
boundaries. On one hand the title points to the household as the
framework for daily occurrences such as eating, sleeping, dressing,
cooking, washing, and mending and as a place where individuals
live collectively under the same roof. On the other hand, as a
metaphor it also stands for a stronghold and the defense of one’s
dwelling. The household is understood here as the stage for
existential dramas of constructing and tearing down norms of all
kinds. The various topics Household touched on range from the
problematics of sexual liberation to the growing interest in the
1960s in rural living to the sociology of an affluent society.
The participants were mainly students from Cornell University.
As residents at the university campus they had left the familiar
structure of their parental homes but were not yet involved in
setting up their own households. Living in dormitories, sheltered
from the outside world, they were used to having to keep house as
members of a group and were acquainted with the resulting
inevitable territorial struggles and subtle hierarchical processes;
thus the Happening provided an opportunity for them to play out
the joys and sorrows of communal living and eating and above all of
the contact they might be having with the opposite sex. As such
Household embodies much of the adolescent characteristics of
Happenings, which Kaprow described as typical of a society that
was still finding its way toward “cultural maturity.”309 The playful
enactment of conflicts in Happenings such as Fight, Tree, Calling,
and Household is in fact in keeping with a notion of art that,
metaphorically speaking, plays out on the pathway from childhood
to adulthood.310 In the early 1960s more than ever before, art (and
the economy) was expected to demonstrate continuous growth,
which implies something akin to eternal youth.
Cornell University was known in the 1960s as a venue for the
interaction of architecture, landscape architecture, and art. In 1969
the Andrew Dickson White Museum presented the exhibition Earth
Art and, in so doing, set the seal on the institutionalization of this
new artistic movement. Household constituted a particular
challenge to the students of architecture: for once they were not
working on a small scale, with models or sketches and plans,
refining their ideas in the context of a virtually endless sheet of
white paper and an eternity of creative freedom. On the contrary,
now—in accordance with specific rules—they were collectively
erecting and destroying ephemeral structures in a real space and in
real time, limited to just one day.311 Kaprow, as the author of and a
coparticipant in the Happening, had presented them not with plans
but merely with a “typology”; he had only suggested they might
construct a tower and a nest. There were no norms for the beauty
or historicity of the design—in fact, in this context the idea of a
design as such was obviously nonsensical. The finished form was
the outcome of a process that had nothing to do with planning and
relied entirely on collective, pragmatic decision making. The
resulting architecture was unique, not in terms of Modernist
originality but as an event of such complexity that it could never be
repeated in this form and could barely be described.
This is not to say that Kaprow was aiming for some form of
bricolage, as Claude Lévi-Strauss defined it at much the same time,
nor that the concurrent exhibition Architecture without Architects
inspired him.312 He was not interested in exploring processes of
creativity. And the notion of bricolage presumes that there is such a
thing as a normal case, that is to say, nonbricolage. In Household,
which demonstrates Kaprow’s pragmatic approach to art, the
normal case turns out to be the handling of found materials,
makeshift construction, and gratifying destruction—it involves
seeking out the path of least resistance and constantly making
compromises within the given situation. In that respect, Kaprow’s
praxis has a clear affinity with that of Robert Smithson, who
expressed scorn for the fetishization of concepts. While Kaprow did
use a score to communicate the course of the action, it was not a
concept; it was merely a manual and had no artistic value in its own
right.
The location for the event, away from the university campus, of
course referenced the American suburbs, the type of residential
area where most of the students had been raised.313 The garbage
dump, related to the old-tire depository in Yard, can be read as an
inverse image of the suburb, that territorial reflection of the
unchecked economic growth and baby boom following the Second
World War.314 Yet Kaprow’s focus was in no sense on the
interconnections between forms of urban living and real estate
speculation, state funding and aesthetic standardization, economics
and taste, as in Dan Graham’s ironic illustrated essay “Homes for
America” of 1966.315 Nor was he pessimistically demonstrating the
destruction of nature as a consequence of urbanization, as Peter
Blake did in his influential 1964 book God’s Own Junkyard.316 On
the contrary, in my view at least, as someone who lived in the
suburbs, Kaprow wanted to convey a sense of the periphery as a
zone where people were still free to do as they liked; at the same
time he was allowing participants to experience, in a playful
manner, the speed with which households are set up and
dismantled and the drama of trade and commerce, of territorial
acquisition and expansion, in quick motion, so to speak.
According to Kaprow, the fragility of Household was one of the
main features that distinguished Happenings from other art forms:
“Physical fragility . . . is the central expression of this art’s
difference from the past.” Moreover, the very transience of the art
of the twentieth century made it what it was: “Since the first
decade of this century, picture and construction have more and
more exhibited a short life span, betraying within a few years, even
months, signs of decay.” The Happening highlighted the rapid cycle
of change that shaped both art and reality in the twentieth century,
by, as it were, accelerating and literally involving the participant in
a pattern of “creationdecay-creation almost as one watches.”317 For
Kaprow this representation of constant change was “more
fundamental than our ‘throwaway’ culture.”318

FLUIDS
In October 1967 a number of strange constructions appeared in
Los Angeles. Groups of people, adults and children, were seen
hauling blocks of ice from trucks and building rectangular
structures with them. Salt made the blocks stick together. The
finished open-topped structures were a little taller than the average
man (see figure 17). Over the course of a few days they melted
away entirely. The solid cubes dwindled to amorphous lumps and
finally dissolved into nothingness. The water trickled away, leaving
no trace on the dry ground. A poster inviting people to participate
in the Happening and a few photographs of the event were all that
survived. The poster included the instructions for the Happening:
“During three days, about twenty rectangular enclosures or ice
blocks (measuring about 30 feet long, 10 wide and 8 high) are built
throughout the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are left to
melt.”319

FIGURE 17. Allan Kaprow in front of a structure for Fluids, Pasadena and Los Angeles, 10–
12 October 1967, conceived for the exhibition Allan Kaprow, Pasadena Art Museum, 15
September-22 October 1967.
 This Happening, Fluids, turned out to be the high point not only
of Kaprow’s architectural performances but also of his impact on
the American art world. The context for this event was his long-
planned midcareer retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. A
new installation of Yard was presented in the company of paintings,
assemblages, and collages dating back to 1953. The walls of the
museum were draped with lengths of fabric to alleviate the
“neutral” exhibition situation. A comprehensive catalogue was
published to accompany the show.320 The core of the exhibition was
Fluids, presented at various urban locations in Los Angeles County.
The plan was to erect ice structures at thirty sites. It seems that in
the end there were about fifteen structures actually built. The
locations included open areas next to a McDonald’s restaurant in
Pasadena and a Body Shop in Los Angeles, a private residence in
Beverly Hills, a house in Pasadena, a construction company, sites
under two bridges in Pasadena, parking lots, and empty building
plots. The Union Ice Company delivered 405,000 pounds of ice,
paid for—according to a newspaper report—by an anonymous East
Coast sponsor.321
As one might expect of a Happening for a retrospective, Fluids
was paradoxical: a dynamic, ephemeral work of art that also served
as a monumental commemoration of Kaprow’s work. The remit was
perfectly fulfilled by a “memorial” that must have been fun to build
and of its own accord took leave of this world within just a few
days. From a distance the edifices constructed from roughly hewn
blocks had the air of archaic temples, inaccessible to unbelievers,
sanctuaries for the preservation and presentation of all that was
most sacred. As such they highlighted the role of architecture in
drawing liturgical and political boundaries. They also called to
mind igloos and warehouses.
The sites for the ice structures were important to Kaprow, who
described them as examples of the “twilight zone of indifferent
architecture,” where warehouses and distribution centers could be
seen shooting out of the ground on the basis of “planned
obsolescence,” often financed with mortgages issued on condition
that these premises would exist for a maximum of ten years.322 In
view of this, I agree with Robert Haywood’s description of Fluids as
the high point of both Kaprow’s critique of capitalism and his
artistic autonomy as a political activist, because this Happening
“maintained its autonomy from active New Left political resistance
by transforming collective, participatory labor into a dystopian
allegory of capitalist production, consumption, and
obsolescence.”323
With the ice structures so obviously prey to the passage of time
and their construction and disintegration playing out under the
eyes of their makers and spectators, Fluids could be read as an
allegory of the way that money circulates in a capitalist economy.
The fact that, as in most of Kaprow’s Happenings, the male
participants worked stripped to the waist was yet another
indication that they represented the working class and were in part
an allusion to the iconography of the Works Progress
Administration art of the 1930s. The diverse locations of the ice
works—next to a fast-food restaurant with notoriously underpaid
staff, close to a business specializing in body care products for the
middle classes, but also in a public park, a recreation ground in an
exclusive residential area—underlined Kaprow’s message that
every kind of territorial ownership depended on (alienated) work.
At the same time, participation in the Happening was purely
voluntary, a game. In the glowing heat of the California late
summer, handling the blocks of ice was no doubt hard work but
must also at times have been pleasing. Fluids thus also alluded to
bodies, to sensations of heat and cold, to the joy of making
something, and to the relish we may feel at the sight of something
disintegrating.
Fluids took place at the height of the debate regarding the place
of sculpture in society. Between 1965 and 1969 the country was
positively deluged with sculpture and open-air exhibitions, marking
the triumph of Minimal Art and displacing the earlier wave of
Happenings, which came to a reluctant close with Nine Evenings
and Kaprow’s large-scale events Gas and Self-Service. For Kaprow
and other artists, such as Smithson, the return to the medium of
monolithic sculpture was nothing short of reactionary. Stasis now
replaced the dynamism of the art of the early 1960s. Idealistic
utopias replaced pragmatic experimentation. A desire for
monuments replaced pleasure in the moment. In Fluids Kaprow
spoke to this, using architecture as a metaphor for how the general
acceptance of categorical norms places constraints on artistic
possibilities. Fluids was not architecture as such; it was about
architecture. Smithson took a similar approach with his notions of
“ruins in reverse” and “dearchitecturization,” as did Gordon Matta-
Clark when he coined the term Anarchitecture.324 Smithson even
asked Kaprow to send him any photographs he might have of
Fluids, which he intended to use in an essay at one point.325
Fluids can be read allegorically as a critique of notions of
abstraction and reduction, essence and presence that exponents of
Late Modernism and Minimal Art actively endorsed. For the fluids
that formed during construction and ruination were never entirely
present. When Kaprow reduced a painstakingly constructed
structure to its essence—to nothing—he also brought the debate to
an ironic close. Looking back, he described the whole undertaking
as “a way to make minimalism more minimal.”326
However, this event was to win him few friends. Jane
Livingston’s review of Kaprow’s retrospective in Artforum, the main
organ for Minimal Art, neither pictured nor mentioned Fluids.
Adopting an unusually aggressive tone, she lambasted the
exhibition and described Kaprow as “less an artist than . . . a
phenomenon.” As if that were not enough, she added that “the
Kaprow phenomenon belongs essentially to the history of art. He
has made his objectives not only clear but virtually transparent: he
has at every opportunity talked about himself and his intentions, to
the point where . . . the mystery has gone out.” Although she
admitted that Kaprow had been one of the main pioneers of
Happenings, she also cast doubt on their art-historical relevance:
“In the context of all the arts, the Happening has so far proved to
be a precarious and, ironically, a predictable venture.” And
although, in her view, Kaprow’s critique of the traditional role of
museums and galleries was still relevant, she also accused him of
concealing museum walls in order to simulate life—and dismissed
his Environments Yard and Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for
Hans Hofmann as “old hat.”327
Kaprow responded, as “Dad Kaprow,” with a sarcastic letter
pointing out in no uncertain terms that he was not interested in
“art versus life” but rather in “what art may become in life-
contexts.”328 He did not respond to the accusation of making his
objectives “virtually transparent.” At issue here was, once again, a
fundamental matter that concerned not least the demarcation of
roles fulfilled by the artist, the critic, and the art historian. If an
artist reflects and theorizes on his production to such an extent
that the mystery goes out, the critic is rendered obsolete. However,
it seems that at the time this exchange of views sparked no wider
interest.
It was not long before Kaprow once again put pen to paper, this
time with a critique of Robert Morris’s essay “Anti-form.”329
Making it clear that he was disinclined to trust Morris’s argument,
he reminded his readers that Morris’s, Jackson Pollock’s, and Claes
Oldenburg’s works always functioned in relation to a rectilinear
frame, be it in a studio, in a gallery space, or on the page of an art
journal: “Ruled lines and measurable corners in such spaces tell us
how far, how big, how soft, how atmospheric, indeed, how
‘amorphous’ an art work is within these lines and corners.
Rectilinearity, by definition, is relational.” Kaprow further reminded
his readers of the tradition of Environments and Happenings, which
Morris—Kaprow sardonically suggested—might well not have
witnessed firsthand. For Kaprow, these events were above all site
specific: “The important fact was that almost everything was built
into the space it was shown in, not transported from studio to
showcase.”330 He explained in some detail how the geometric
structures that exist around most of us also condition artists:

Most humans, it seems, still put up fences around their acts

and thoughts—even when these are piles of shit—for they
have no other way of delimiting them. . . . When some of us
have worked in natural settings, say in a meadow, woods, or
mountain range, our cultural training has been so deeply
ingrained that we have simply carried a mental rectangle
with us to drop around whatever we were doing. This made
us feel at home. . . . It may be proposed that the social
context and surrounding of art are more potent, more
meaningful, more demanding of an artist’s attention than
the art itself! Put differently, it’s not what artists touch that
counts most. It’s what they don’t touch.331
 Kaprow, in consequence, put much emphasis on the articulation
of limits and boundaries—on their fabrication and destruction, their
shifting and altering. The motif of a wall, or delimitation, that
features in Fluids reappeared in various guises in his work in the
coming years. In Transfer: A Happening for Christo (1968) it took
the form of barrels stacked on top of one another; in Overtime (For
Walter De Maria) (1968) it appeared as a displaced fence; and it
was a wall of cement blocks, bread, and marmalade in Sweet Wall
(1970). The Galerie René Block commissioned Sweet Wall, which
took place in West Berlin on ground laid waste by the Second World
War, not far from the Berlin Wall. The score could hardly have been
simpler:

Berlin, empty lot, near the Wall

Building a wall (cement blocks, ca. 30 m × 1.5 m)
Cementing blocks with bread and jam
Toppling wall
Removing material, empty lot332

Kaprow and others stuck the cement blocks together with bread
and jam. As soon as the wall had been built, the participants
pushed it down (see figure 18). Dick Higgins took photographs of
the event, and a cameraman filmed it.
FIGURE 18. Allan Kaprow, Sweet Wall, Berlin, 11 November 1970, commissioned by Galerie
René Block.

Kaprow later wrote a short commentary on this work, which is in

effect also a commentary on his notion of political art. In this text
he distinguishes between two kinds of such art. On one hand there
is art that is filled with obvious political connotations, which the
artist hopes will immediately instigate direct, sudden social change.
On the other hand there is art that operates on a metaphorical level
and is intended for the already enlightened. This art is also
intended to induce political change, but there is no certainty as to
how or when—in other words, it is more of a long-term endeavor.
Sweet Wall falls into the second group because, as Kaprow said, it
“contains ironical politics. It is parody. It is for a small group of
colleagues who can appreciate the humor and sadness of political
life. It is for those who cannot rest politically indifferent, but who
know that for every political solution there are at least ten new
problems.” As he pointed out, unlike the actual Berlin Wall, Sweet
Wall was torn down after being erected and was done within a
matter of hours. It was out on open ground and hemmed in no one.
It blatantly mimicked the real Wall. As an idea implemented by a
number of individuals, Sweet Wall could be played out with
impunity. Its symbolic meaning could be established and
immediately extinguished again. The participants could speculate
for themselves and others on the practical value of that kind of
freedom. “That was its sadness and its irony.”333
The Limits to Sculpture: Robert Smithson and
Earth Art

I think the major issue now in art is what are the

boundaries.
—ROBERT SMITHSON, “Smithson’s Non-site Sights,” interview with
Anthony Robbin
 who expressed interest in Kaprow’s
IT SEEMS THAT ONE OF THE FEW ARTISTS

Fluids was Robert Smithson. As mentioned earlier, Kaprow later

recalled that in 1967 Smithson asked him for photographs of Fluids
as illustrations for an essay he was planning to write, although he
did not use them in the end.1 The two were in sporadic contact at
the time, and the 1967 Arts Yearbook included their conversation
“What Is a Museum?,” in which each took a critical view of the
museum as an institution. Kaprow tried to convince Smithson that
museums were a threat to artists’ autonomy and tended to
overshadow their work because of the ever-greater need for events.
Smithson for his part defended museums as places where in fact
nothing happened, cut off from normal space and time. Unlike
Kaprow, who, according to Smithson, was interested in what was
happening, he was interested in what was not happening, in “the
area between events which could be called the gap.” Whereas
Kaprow felt that the power of the museum as an institution had to
be opposed and reproached Smithson for his “lack of extremity,”
Smithson seems almost to have pitied the museums for being
caught up in increasingly fragmented categories and having to be
constantly active.2 However, the two agreed that the museum is a
place where a value is put on art and that their art should not be
part of this value-based economy. And although Kaprow came to
the conclusion that Smithson’s attitude was basically ironic, it was
in fact closer to his own than he was prepared to admit at the
time.3
There are no records of further conversations between Kaprow
and Smithson, although Nancy Holt, Smithson’s wife, photographed
them with Claes Oldenburg in a snowy suburb on their tour of the
monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, in early January 1968 (see
figure 19). My research over the years has found no evidence of
any additional encounters nor any indications that they followed
each other’s careers with any particular interest. Smithson made
the point in an interview in 1972 that the Hansa Gallery had
exerted a particular fascination on him as a young artist and that
Dick Bellamy was the first to invite him to an opening, probably to
an exhibition of Kaprow’s work.4 Kaprow, for his part, recalled in
conversation with me that although the two were certainly
interested in each other’s work, they were not especially close.5
FIGURE 19. Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Smithson in Passaic, New Jersey,
1968. Photo © Nancy Holt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Accordingly, there are neither biographical nor stylistic reasons

to make a connection between these two artists. However, I have
chosen to do exactly that because it seems to me that both Kaprow
and Smithson—in parallel and almost simultaneously—were
searching for alternatives to the dominant artistic rationale of their
time and trying to find a way to cut loose from the historicity of
American art.6 Moreover, from the perspective of the early years of
the twenty-first century, it is particularly interesting to see their
individual engagement with limits and boundaries, their
commitment to collaborative artistic practices, and their efforts to
shake art out of its self-satisfied isolation. Both enjoyed
considerable success around 1970. The work of both men received
much less attention in the 1970s and 1980s—Smithson died in 1973
—only to be rediscovered around the turn of the millennium. As
though their decline contained the seeds of the art to be produced
after 2000, they have become all but indispensible to today’s art
discourse. As a result of their interdisciplinary activities—their
desire to combine artistic praxis and writing, their affinity for
architecture, urban planning, film, video, and performance—their
influence on art today is at least equal to that of Gordon Matta-
Clark and Dan Graham.
 The Excursions: Critiquing Minimalism

Robert Smithson launched his second

IN 1964 THE TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD

attempt to break into the prosperous New York art world. During
his first, somewhat ill-fated attempt to make his name in the early
1960s (without having completed an art degree)7—Thomas Crow
pointedly described him as a “provincial misfit who gravitates to
New York”8—he had a number of exhibitions in small galleries: solo
exhibitions at the Artists Gallery, New York, in fall 1959, the George
Lester Gallery in Rome in 1961, and the Richard Castellane Gallery,
New York, in 1962, plus a group exhibition at the Allan Gallery,
New York, in 1961, whose other exhibitors included Claes
Oldenburg. However, at a time when Pop Art was in the ascendant,
his collages and drawings dealing with religious themes seem to
have been little in demand.9
In 1961, at exactly the same time as Kaprow, he tried in vain to
have his work included in the William Seitz-curated exhibition The
Art of Assemblage. 10 In 1964, in response to his efforts to join the
exhibition The Responsive Eye, Seitz, again the curator, wrote him
a letter of refusal, which stated that he did not have the
“individuality that other artists on our list have expressed.”11 In
fact his work did not appear in any exhibitions in 1963 or 1964. Nor
does his early collector and gallerist George Lester seem to have
been keen for his work to be shown in current or future
exhibitions.12 Some art historians present Smithson’s life between
1962 and 1964 as a mysterious in-between phase. Robert Hobbs
takes the view that Smithson “partially withdr[ew] from the art
world” then, although he does mention that Smithson continued to
draw and read a great deal, got married (in 1963), and moved into
an apartment in Greenwich Village, where he remained until his
death.13 Eugenie Tsai puts the lull down to drugs and homosexual
escapades.14 Caroline Jones, in a similar vein, has scrutinized his
early work for signs of homoerotic tendencies that he might have
repressed later.15
These various explanations for Smithson’s supposed silence in
fact reflect the need that art historians feel to identify periods of
melancholy in artists’ lives, during which their creative potential
progressively builds up. This can be seen as an echo of the tradition
of “the legend of the artist.”16 The search for phases when the
artist’s creativity is suppressed also attests to art historians’
expectation that an artist’s life and work should in effect be an
organic whole. Like many artists, Smithson fanned the flames of
these clichés. In retrospect he declared that his work became
“conscious” only in 1964, and he disowned his early work, which he
described as constrained by the “cultural overlay of Europe.”17 But
Smithson’s suppressed early work and individual aspects of his
personality intrigue me less than why it was that so many artists
from that time—John Baldessari, Donald Judd, Edward Kienholz,
Sol Le-Witt, George Segal, Andy Warhol—drew a veil over their
early work or even, like Baldessari, demonstratively destroyed it.
Why did it seem so important in the 1960s for an artist’s oeuvre
to be stylistically homogenous and qualitatively consistent? One of
the main reasons must have been the changed role of the art
market. In the 1960s, for gallerists such as Leo Castelli and
Virginia Dwan to specifically champion a new generation of artists,
the different styles of the various contenders had to be instantly
identifiable. Moreover, creative continuity promised stable
valuations. Smithson’s decision to distance himself from his early
work, along with his decidedly anti-European rhetoric, was entirely
in keeping with what would have been expected of him at that time
in the United States. In my view, it was also pragmatically
connected with the fact that he had not enjoyed any success with
his early work.
In 1963 Smithson started to adopt the language of forms that
came to be known as Minimal Art by the mid-1960s. His move from
painting and collage to nonrepresentational objects was certainly
not free of tactical considerations. Indeed, his stylistic change of
direction was to pay off. The demand for work by young sculptors
was growing apace in the turbulent New York art market. In 1965
the curator Brian O’Doherty included Smithson’s work in the
exhibition Art ’65 in the American Express Pavilion at the New York
World’s Fair. Smithson showed Quick Millions, a colored relief
made from Plexiglas and acrylics with a synthetic-looking,
glittering surface. The title can be read as a witty play on the name
of the pavilion. American Express, founded in 1850 as a delivery
service, profited to such an extent from the worldwide acceptance
of its Travelers Cheques and credit card, introduced in 1958, that it
had come to epitomize breathtaking commercial growth and was in
many people’s minds synonymous with unfettered consumption.
Even if the American Express Pavilion was a less prestigious
exhibition space than some others—such as the Philip Johnson
Pavilion of the State of New York, its facades adorned with works
by Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert
Rauschenberg, the heroes of Pop Art—nevertheless it would have
shown Smithson’s work to large numbers of visitors. In addition,
O’Doherty published a catalogue, with a color illustration of Quick
Millions and an artist’s statement by Smithson.18
The exhibition in the American Express Pavilion opened the
doors for Smithson to the major group exhibitions of the coming
years. The first, in spring 1966, was Primary Structures, curated by
Kynaston McShine at the Jewish Museum in New York and billed as
“the most sensational exhibition of Minimal art.”19 Following this,
Smithson participated in exhibitions at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston, the Finch College Museum in New
York, and the Whitney Museum; most important for his career, he
signed a contract with Dwan, which led to his first solo exhibition,
from 29 November 1966 to 5 January 1967.
At first sight, the objects Smithson made in and after 1964 fit
perfectly into the mores of Minimal Art. The treatment of surfaces,
the choice of industrially manufactured materials that cut out
evidence of the artist’s hand, and the preferences for basic
geometric forms and for placing individual units directly on the
floor were all in keeping with the working methods of artists such
as Judd, LeWitt, and Robert Morris. However, Smithson rarely
resorted to symmetry or repetition and after 1964, ignoring
convention, scarcely ever described his works as Untitled. Instead
they had names such as Enantiomorphism Chambers (1965), Four-
Sided Vortex (1965), and Alogon (1966). Unlike Frank Stella—who
used either proper names (Carl Andre, 1963), place-names (Plant
City, 1963), or idioms (Mas o Menos, 1964) for his “shaped
canvases” and whose symbolic flouting of the Modernist ban on
representation in fact affirmed it—Smithson chose titles that seem
like those of stories or films. Whenever the opportunity arose, he
would include an explanatory text to guide the viewer’s response to
his work—a practice that we have already observed in Allan
Kaprow.
Although Smithson suggested in a number of early texts that
there was an affinity between his work and Minimal Art, he later
withdrew from that position. Still, most contemporary critics and
later chroniclers of that early period agreed that his “real” work
was an offshoot of Minimal Art. Lawrence Alloway was the first to
present a more differentiated reading. In his essay “Robert
Smithson’s Development” he pointed out that some critics who
supported Minimal Art had certain difficulties with Smithson’s
work.20 Alloway argued that it was already clear from the titles of
works such as Alogon that Smithson was more interested in
incommensurable, collaborative systems than in the canon of
repetition. He rightly suggested that Smithson’s use of
photography and texts marked his departure from sculpture. And
he reminded his readers that when Lucy Lippard claimed that
Smithson’s work—and Earth Art in general—was rooted in the
canon of Minimal Art, she substantiated her argument with
reference to his essays but failed to take his sculptures into
account.21
It is productive to compare the methods—“artistic strategies” in
today’s terminology—that Kaprow and Smithson developed.
Whereas Kaprow, with his pseudopatricide of Jackson Pollock in
1958, aimed to shake up the stagnating art world in New York and,
above all, to reanimate his career, the situation was very different
for Smithson. He had to struggle to catch the already moving train
of Minimalism. Where Kaprow had focused on the limits of
painting, Smithson set his sights on the limits of sculpture. And
while Kaprow laid claim to Pollock’s legacy, Smithson had to enter
into a tactical alliance with the proponents of Minimalism, which
catapulted him to the center of the art world; nevertheless, he was
able to extricate himself in time to set out on his own individual
path.
No one was better suited to be the other party in this alliance
than Donald Judd. Ten years older than Smithson, he had already
made a name for himself with his pithy, apodictically judgmental
texts. In 1964 he represented the United States at the eighth
Biennial in São Paulo, and by 1965 he was in negotiations with the
mightiest gallery of contemporary art in New York, the Leo Castelli
Gallery, which represented him from 1966 onward. In 1965
Smithson and Judd both showed work in the exhibition Plastics at
the Daniels Gallery, whose director was Dan Graham. Following
this, Judd asked Smithson to write the catalogue essay on Judd’s
contribution to the exhibition Seven Sculptors at the Philadelphia
Institute of Contemporary Art. Smithson’s estate has around a
dozen different handwritten versions of this text, his first
publication, showing the considerable effort that he put into it. The
opening of one attempt reveals his ambivalent attitude toward the
older, more successful artist: “Donald Judd’s inaccessible technique
questions the ‘work’ in a work of art.”22 Inaccessible was crossed
out and replaced with disarming, which was in turn crossed out
and replaced with radical. The published version reads, “Donald
Judd has set up a ‘company,’ that extends the technique of abstract
art into unheard-of places.”23 Smithson describes Judd tracking
down out-of-the-way manufacturers on the outskirts of New York in
his search for particular materials and production processes. (To
judge by an envelope with scribbled names that survives in
Smithson’s estate, it appears that Judd dictated the relevant details
to him during a telephone call.) Smithson recounts that it was
Judd’s aim in his first exhibition, in 1963, to represent matter as
such, not movement in space. He concludes that Judd has changed
the reality of modernity, just as the Mannerists transformed art
during the Renaissance. According to Smithson, Judd regarded
space as crystalline, not a fluid continuum: “Space in Judd’s art
seems to belong to an order of increasing hardness, not unlike
geological formations.”24
Smithson’s approach in this text is distinctly different from
Judd’s (in support of his own position) in his essay “Specific
Objects.”25 Judd’s essay teems with the names of artists whom he
evaluates and ascribes to one camp or the other. In Smithson’s text
there are no artistic genealogies, just detailed descriptions of
countless materials, surfaces, manufacturers, and production
processes that interested Judd. It seems that Smithson wanted to
stretch as far as possible Judd’s notion that art becomes all the
more specific the more it avails itself of materials from an
industrial context. By making a point of Judd’s meticulous selection
of materials and interest in craft skills, Smithson suggested—
without spelling it out—that there was an affinity between Judd’s
approach and that of the Arts and Crafts movement. And whereas
Judd makes rather convoluted reference to Clement Greenberg’s
discussion of painting and thus remains beholden to the precepts of
that art, Smithson elegantly sidesteps the issue of sculpture’s
relation to painting and turns instead to the question of space.
Judd’s texts from that period sound like manifestos, but
Smithson’s essay concentrates on the conditions of production of
Minimal Art, playfully concealed behind copious metaphors and
allegories. Where Judd talks of real space and literal space,
Smithson postulates a fictive space. Judd states, for instance, that
“three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of
illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and
colors—which is riddance of one of the salient and most
objectionable relics of European art.”26 Not so Smithson, talking of
Judd: “He has put space down in the form of deposits. Such
deposits come from his mind rather than nature.”27 Whereas Judd
thus used his sculptures to articulate, concentrate, and present an
already existent space and to make the ensuing gestalt
phenomenologically comprehensible to the viewer, Smithson had no
interest in either spatial illusion or Judd’s “real” space. His interest
was in functional spatial entities—historical, economic, or narrative
expanses that could be conflated in sculpture. In the aforesaid
conversation with Kaprow, he commented, “I never saw an exciting
space. I don’t know what a space is.”28
Smithson was similarly uninterested in Judd’s idea that a work
of art should be fully apparent in a single glance, that it should
have a certain “wholeness.” Judd took the view that

in the three-dimensional work the whole thing is made

according to complex purposes, and these are not scattered
 but asserted by one form. It isn’t necessary for a work to
have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by
one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a
whole, is what’s interesting.29

Smithson, for his part, was resoundingly critical of the notion of

gestalt: “I consider the facile unitary or gestalt ideas part of the
expressive fallacy, a relief after the horrors of duality. The apparent
reconciliation seems to offer some kind of relief, some kind of
hope.”30

“THE CRYSTAL LAND”

The significant effort that Smithson put into his first published text
was to pay off. An editor from Harper’s Bazaar contacted him with
a request for a contribution to the artists’ column Scene and Not
Herd.31 May 1966 saw the publication of “The Crystal Land,” the
first of a rich array of texts that were to make a name for Smithson
in the American art world.32 This short article begins with the
writer describing how Judd’s pink Plexiglas cube instantly struck
him as a huge crystal from a distant planet. In all likelihood he was
referring to the sculpture Untitled (1965), constructed from
stainless steel and fluorescent Plexiglas, which appeared in the
exhibition Plastics (see figure 20).33 The two artists later meet and
discover that they share an interest in geology. They decide to take
a trip, with their wives, to the quarries of New Jersey. They go
exploring in the deserted Upper Montclair Quarry, which was
abandoned in the 1910s. In his account Smithson cites Brian H.
Mason’s geological guide Trap Rock Minerals of New Jersey, which
lists a long sequence of minerals found in this area, like an almost
endless supply of Readymades:
FIGURE 20. Donald Judd, Untitled, 1965, steel and Plexiglas.

Actinolite, albite, allanite, analcime, apatite, anhydrite,

apophyllite, aurichalcite, axinite, azurite, babingtonite,
bornite, barite, calcite, chabazite, chalcocite, chalcopyrite,
chlorite, chrysocolia, copper, covellite, cuprite, datolite,
dolomite, epidote, galena, glauberite, goethite, gmelinite,
greenockite, gypsum, hematite, heulandite, hornblende,
laumontite, malachite, mesolite, natrolite, opal, orpiment,
orthoclase, pectolite, prehnite, pumpellyite, pyrite,
pyrolusite, quartz, scolecite, siderite, silver, sphalerite,
sphene, stevensite, stilbite, stilpnomelane, talc, thaumasite,
thomsonite, tourmaline, ulexite.34

The two men find a big lump of lava, shot through with quartz
crystals; they set to work on it with a hammer and a chisel while
the women “[wander] aimlessly around the quarry picking up
sticks, leaves and odd stones.” From the highest point of the quarry
they can see beyond the suburbs of New Jersey to the Manhattan
skyline. Smithson describes the flat terrain with middleclass
residential districts with names like “Royal Garden Estates, Rolling
Knolls Farm, Valley View Acres, Split-level Manor, Babbling Brook
Ranch-Estates, Colonial Vista Homes.” He describes the boxlike
layout of the little houses and the impossible colors they are
painted: “petal pink, frosted mint, buttercup, fudge, rose beige,
antique green, Cape Cod brown, lilac.” The highways cutting
through the towns articulate human-made, geological “networks of
concrete.” In Smithson’s eyes, “the entire landscape has a mineral
presence.” From the chrome finishes at the diner to the windows of
the shopping malls, there is an impression of crystalline surfaces.
The two couples return to their car and continue on their way. Gas
stations pass by, and a chewing gum jingle plays on the radio:
“Countdown survey . . . chew your little troubles away . . . high ho
hey hey . . .” The landscape disappears behind them in the rear
mirror. The passengers in the back seat flip through the Sunday
papers: “The pages made slight noises as they turned; each sheet
folded over their laps forming temporary geographies of paper. A
valley of print or a ridge of photographs would come and go in an
instant.”
Finally they reach the moonscape of the next quarry. This site is
also long abandoned. The crumbling perimeters of the quarry have
a menacing air, and the sentence structure of Smithson’s essay
echoes the cascades of falling rocks and stones: “The walls of the
quarry did look dangerous. Cracked, broken, shattered; the wall
threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation, corrosion,
decomposition, disintegration, rock creep, debris slides, mud flow,
avalanche were everywhere in evidence.” Transmission towers,
dismantled sections of trucks, and bits of mining machinery litter
the area. The vegetation has been all but destroyed. “Railroad
tracks passed by the quarry, the ties formed a redundant sequence
of modules, while the steel tracks projected the modules into an
imperfect vanishing point.” On their return journey to Manhattan
the friends cross through the New Jersey wetlands, which Smithson
decides would be the perfect setting for a film about life on Mars.
Driveins, motels, radio towers, and gas stations are the main
landmarks, plus one garbage dump after the next. As they
approach Newark, heavy-industry smokestacks dirty the air. The
essay closes as the car passes through the Lincoln Tunnel: “The
countless cream colored square tiles on the wall of the tunnel sped
by, until a sign announcing New York broke the tiles’ order.”
 “The Crystal Land” is an eclectic mix of the montage techniques
used by the poet and physician William Carlos Williams (much
admired by Smithson, who claimed the former had treated him as a
child) and the narrative style of science fiction authors such as
Brian W. Aldiss and J. G. Ballard. The title was taken from Ballard’s
novel The Crystal World, set in an African jungle that suddenly
undergoes a mysterious transformation which causes the
vegetation to start crystallizing. This relentless process of gradual
crystallization ultimately affects objects, houses, and people. It
becomes clear to the people in the jungle that they have no means
of resistance, and that soon the whole planet is likely to be affected
and to die. Oddly, however, no one seems troubled by this situation,
because, as it turns out, the process of crystallization induces an
ever-growing lethargy in people, along with an irresistible
fascination with the beauty of the transformation of their world.
Ballard repeatedly alludes to the colors of the crystallizing
landscape. Some passages could be descriptions of works of art:

The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip
and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches
sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away
across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were
being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor
process.35

I read Smithson’s “The Crystal Land” as an allegory, an ironic

commentary on Minimalism. It is a parody of the art world of the
mid-1960s, whose occupants were constantly reminiscing, quoting,
and making historical connections. In this essay, Smithson placed
the art of his day in a historical context in a manner that clearly set
him apart from his fellow artists. This critical move is comparable
to Kaprow’s claim (which Oldenburg could not tolerate) that the
Happeners were already outliving themselves. Smithson’s
excursions were like time travel through art history, a dig run by
future amateur archaeologists exploring the picturesque ruins of a
Minimal open-air museum. Allusions of that kind deliberately weigh
down “The Crystal Land.” The disused quarry, which had
functioned “from about 1890 to 1918,” can be read as an evocation
of the avant-gardes.36 It was against this backdrop that Smithson
and Judd toiled away for a good hour while their womenfolk
browsed for odd objects. This description is an ironic reference to
the techniques of the Nouveaux Réalistes, who used to collect their
objets trouvés from waste dumps and flea markets before turning
them into works of art. The women are also such unmistakable
illustrations of the cliché of passive womanhood that they in effect
make a mockery of the male-dominated art world.37
Beneath the car radio, as we learn from the narrator, there is “a
row of five plastic buttons in the shape of cantilevered cubes”—an
obvious allusion to sculptures by Donald Judd. The gray factory at
the Great Notch Quarry specifically reminds the day-trippers of
sculptures by Robert Morris, no doubt those made from gray-
painted chipboard panels that he had shown in December 1964 at
the Green Gallery in New York. And Smithson’s description of old
railroad tracks calls to mind Carl Andre’s sculptures made from
identical modules (and the autobiographical myth of his past as a
railroad brakeman and conductor). In the quarry the explorers
come across a certain “Mr. Wizard,” who gives them “all kinds of
rock-hound-type information in an authoritative manner.”38 He can
be read as a caricature of an art critic. The imagined film about life
on Mars recurs in Smithson’s later text “The Monument: Outline
for a Film.”39 The drive-ins, motels, and gas stations recall works
such as Edward Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). As at
the site of Kaprow’s Household, there are smoldering garbage
dumps in the background, and the tunnel that the four drive
through on their return to New York City calls to mind grid
structures and wall drawings by Sol LeWitt.
The mechanical citing of geological guides and real estate
brochures was an ironic pastiche of the Minimalists’ seriality and
also implicitly drew a parallel between the aestheticization of
surfaces admired by Judd and the cosmetic improvements made to
dismal suburban dwellings by real estate speculators. In addition,
Smithson not only took the concept of a monolithic sculpture to an
absurd extreme by setting his story in abandoned quarries but also
embellished his discussion of the therapeutic potential of art with
lines from a chewing-gum jingle. Finally, he replaced the popular
American myth of the artist as a lonely, working-class hero with the
figure of a philistine white-collar worker—semiexpert,
semidilettante—who makes weekend excursions to the countryside
with his wife and their married friends.
The choice of the old-fashioned genre of travelogue and its
contemporary counterpart, science fiction, was a rhetorical ploy
that allowed the newcomer Smithson to step forward as artist-
cicerone and to integrate established colleagues into his narrative.
There is an echo here of Kaprow’s “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.”
And yet there is a fundamental difference between the tactics of
Smithson and of Kaprow. In the first place, Smithson’s text is not
discursive but primarily fictive. (Note however, that Kaprow tried in
vain to persuade Oldenburg that his essay “Happenings in the New
York Scene” was a work of fiction.) In the second place, Smithson’s
narrative was not a polemical reaction to the dominant discussion
and thus did not run the risk of inadvertently affirming current
positions. And in the third place, it was not a programmatic artist’s
statement. By writing his text in the guise of an established genre,
Smithson ensured that it was largely impervious to potential
criticism—although this also put it at risk of being either
misinterpreted or uninterpreted.
“The Crystal Land” is itself a little like a crystal, with flashes of
the past and the future, illusion and reality, theory and narrative,
critique and wit reflecting from its facets.40 Its impact on the art
world was without doubt greater than that of the sculpture Untitled
(1964–1965), with which Smithson also responded to Judd’s pink
Plexiglas cube.41 Smithson’s piece was a crystal-shaped sculpture
with a blue frame and pink facets.42 A black-and-white image of it
was the only illustration for his essay in Harper’s Bazaar. Other
photographs of this work show that it had the properties of a prism,
reflecting the setting, the artist, and the viewer in various
perspectives (see figure 21). Certain facets are placed in such a
way that it is impossible for the viewer to see any reflections in
them. Smithson’s notes record this effect: “A double vanishing point
exists as a solid reversal of traditional illusionistic perspective.
Infinity without space.”43 He created similar effects in Four-Sided
Vortex (1965) and Three-Sided Vortex (1965–1966), whose facets
are formed in such a way that the viewer’s gaze becomes caught up
in a waterfall of glittering prisms. In 1966 The Cryosphere was
shown in the exhibition Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum.
The catalogue contains a schematic description of the piece by
Smithson, who points out that “66?% of the entire work is
invisible.”44 This specification is deliberately burdening the viewer
with too much information. The same can be said of the sculpture
The Eliminator, which also has an explanation: “The Eliminator
overloads the eye whenever the red neon flashes on, and in so
doing diminishes the viewer’s memory dependencies or traces.”45

FIGURE 21. Robert Smithson sitting in front of his Untitled, 1964–1965, steel and Plexiglas,
81 × 35 × 10 in. (206 × 89 × 25 cm), Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Melvyn Estrin.

These crystalline sculptures invoke a spatiality that has nothing

to do with the anthropomorphic and continuous spatiality of
Minimal Art. Smithson repeatedly drew attention to this difference,
writing that “The Eliminator is a clock that doesn’t keep time, but
loses it” and that his intentions in Quick Millions were “out of sight
and out of mind.”46 Broadly speaking, he regarded all things
crystalline as the antithesis to naturalism and historicism.47 In his
mind crystalline forms were the locus for contingent meaning and
served well as projection surfaces for temporal or spatial schemes,
be they science fiction scenarios or the culture of the 1930s, which
seemed so baffling in his day and age. Like Kaprow and critics such
as Harold Rosenberg, Smithson associated the 1930s with social
utopias and the integration of the artist into society under the
auspices of the New Deal. However, he also regarded them as a
period of phantasmas, a time of mirror worlds—the “illusory depths
of The Mirror of Mirrors”—that people created for themselves in
buildings like Radio City Music Hall, the Riverside Museum, and
apartment blocks on the west side of Central Park. Yet these
mirrors, in his view, had nothing to do with the architectural
concepts of transparency and functionalism which rooted in the
Bauhaus: “Form does not follow function in the Ultramoderne
cosmos of fixity and facets.” For Smithson the still-extant facades,
interior designs, and corner windows of that era operated like
crystal balls, encapsulating an earlier time—not least that of his
earliest childhood. Artists in the 1930s had very different aims from
those of the 1960s: “Today’s artist trys [sic] to make his art refer to
nothing, while the art of the ’thirties seemed to refer to
everything.”48
The Smithsons’ invitation to the Judds to go on an excursion
outside the metropolis evokes a classic motif in the lives of fictional
artists: escape to the country—be it green, intact nature as
portrayed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or the gray outlying
neighborhoods of the industrial nineteenth century in countless
tales of bohemian adventures. It was outside the city—somewhere
on the local rail network—that the protagonists in Émile Zola’s
L’OEuvre (1886), Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème
(1849), and even, one can imagine, Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner
sur l’herbe (1863) resolved important issues concerning art and
love. Traditionally these excursions coincided with high points and
crises—a new love affair, an outbreak of disease, the end of an
artistic friendship. Thus Smithson’s “The Crystal Land” may be
read as an allegory of his impending break with the exponents of
Minimal Art. It could also be that he was mocking the Abstract
Expressionists’ tradition of collectively decamping to the country in
the summer, to spend months on end in artists’ colonies such as
Provincetown and Black Mountain College (emulating the French
avant-garde of the nineteenth century). While that was perfectly
possible for artists in the 1940s and 1950s, the busy schedules and
competitive stress that were the artist’s lot in the 1960s prevented
him and his friends from indulging in similar jaunts. Little is known
of Judd’s reaction to the trip to the quarries in New Jersey. Dan
Graham wrote to Holt and Smithson, “Julie [Judd] said about the
geology piece that it is definitely to be published,” although she
apparently bemoaned the fact that it was “unreadable and not
interesting like Günter Grass.” According to Graham, Judd was now
more interested in oceanography: “He’s sick of geology.”49 Later
Graham commented in an interview when the subject turned to
Smithson’s first essay, “Judd didn’t like the essay, he hated it.”50
It is clear from the appointments diary in Smithson’s estate that
he and Judd had plans for at least one more excursion.51 In
“Entropy and the New Monuments,” which appeared in Artforum in
June 1966, Smithson rather ambiguously compares Judd’s writing
style to the “terse, factual descriptions one finds in his collection of
geology books.”52 In a collage of quotes, titled “The X Factor in
Art,” that he compiled for that July’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar,
Smithson cites his own comment on Judd from the catalogue Seven
Sculptors: “The ‘unconscious’ has no place in Don Judd’s art.”53
The next strike came in November 1966, in Arts Magazine. Now
even outsiders must have been able to see that there was a
fundamental divide opening up between the artistic positions of
Smithson and of Judd. Smithson’s allegorical interpretation of
Judd’s Untitled (1965) was in fact a broadside against the neo-
avant-garde rhetoric of his colleagues, the technoeuphoria of
certain artists, and the ideology of art for art’s sake: “At the turn of
the century a group of colorful French artists banded together in
order to get the jump on the bourgeois notion of progress. This
bohemian brand of progress gradually developed into what is
sometimes called the avant-garde.”54
The idea that artists, far from leading society, were in fact
hobbling along behind progress was of course inherently critical of
the notion of artistic autonomy and the rhetoric—still widely
accepted in the 1960s—of the avant-garde as a groundbreaking
force and a social corrective where necessary.55 Smithson’s
formulation was bound to appear as a snub to his fellow artists, and
not long afterward there was a temporary rift between him and
Graham.56 This text was published just six months after “The
Crystal Land,” but by that time Smithson had made his artistic
breakthrough. He had been appointed the artistic advisor to what
was then the largest construction project in the world, the
proposed international airport at Dallas-Fort Worth. Now he was
dealing with larger dimensions and budgets than he or any of his
fellow artists had ever dreamed of.
Thanks to the good offices of Sol LeWitt, he had also signed a
contract with the gallerist Virginia Dwan, who had just moved from
Los Angeles to New York, where she was soon to become Leo
Castelli’s strongest rival.57 She engaged Smithson, Morris, and Ad
Reinhardt to conceive the exhibition 10, which later turned out to
have laid the foundations for the European reception of Minimal
Art.58 The other artists rejected the text Smithson wrote for the
catalogue, which they published with numerous black-and-white
illustrations but no commentary as a result. Smithson also wrote
the press release for one of the Dwan Gallery’s next exhibitions,
this time under the ironic pseudonym Eaton Corrasable.59
In early 1967, in response to Jeanne Siegel describing Smithson
as “the spokesman” for Minimal artists in an Arts Magazine review
of his first solo exhibition, Judd finally lost patience, despite
previously having resisted the label of Minimalism.60 He wrote a
letter to the editor of the magazine in which he declared that
Smithson did not speak for him.61 John Weber, appointed the
director of the Dwan Gallery in 1962, recalls that numerous artists
then started wearing badges bearing the phrase “Smithson isn’t my
spokesman.”62 There are distinct echoes here of the moment a few
years earlier when Oldenburg, as we have seen, felt obliged to
make it clear that Kaprow did not speak for him.
Judd never forgave Smithson. Ten years after Smithson’s death
he was still annoyed by what he described as the latter’s
“anthropomorphic sentimentalism as gross as Landseer’s dogs.”63
Smithson, for his part, did not tire of taking potshots at Judd and
Minimal Art in general. In 1969, for instance, in an unpublished
review of the exhibition Can Man Survive, he remarked that a
disintegrating black box on which the exhibition title was painted
was reminiscent of a “discarded example of ‘minimal art.’”64 In
1971, in the essay “Art through the Camera’s Eye” (also
unpublished), he wrote, “Hopefully ‘objects’ themselves will
disappear, ‘specific’ or otherwise.”65 And in an interview with
Dennis Wheeler he compared the idea of specific objects with
attempts to prove that “angels exist.”66
Judd’s irritation was due not solely to the fact that within the
space of one year Smithson had gone from an unknown newcomer
to one of his toughest competitors, whom others named in the same
breath as Judd, but also because those keen to topple Minimal Art
from its dominant position were now fighting on all fronts. Galleries
were competing with one another in the face of an ever-dwindling
demand for Minimal Art in New York, and some were setting their
sights on Europe, where a new market serving private and public
collectors was starting to develop—reflected by the inauguration of
new art fairs in Cologne (1967) and Basel (1970).67 By 1967 the
debate surrounding the next generation after Minimal Art was
already raging (with the Dwan Gallery as one of the main players)
and shaping programmatic exhibitions such as Scale Models and
Drawings, Language I and II, and, of course, Earthworks. In
addition, a new generation of museum curators was emerging; its
members were keen to avoid the institutional failings of the early
1960s (such as the Museum of Modern Art’s delayed reception of
Pop Art) and wanted above all to identify the latest trends as early
as possible. The relocation in fall 1966 of the Whitney Museum of
American Art to a new home in uptown New York designed by
Marcel Breuer—“the major event of the New York season”—
exemplified this new, self-confident commitment to contemporary
art.68
 “THE MONUMENTS OF PASSAIC”

It is significant with regard to Smithson’s position as an artist that

he undertook his second written excursion alone. Once again in the
form of a travelogue, the resulting essay, “The Monuments of
Passaic: Has Passaic Replaced Rome as the Eternal City?,” was
published in Artforum in December 1967. The narrator buys a copy
of Brian W. Aldiss’s paperback Earthworks as his travel guide. After
getting on a bus, he glances at the art section of the New York
Times, where his gaze alights on a reproduction of Samuel F. B.
Morse’s Allegorical Landscape of New York University (1835). This
picture then provides the structural framework for an allegorical
medley of notes, quotations, and Instamatic snapshots Smithson
takes on his foray into the industrial landscape of Passaic, which, as
the title suggests, “replaced Rome as the Eternal City.” The
artificiality of the landscape painting described in the newspaper
mingles with the reality of the outside world: “Outside the bus
window a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge flew by—a symphony in
orange and blue,” Smithson writes, in an allusion to the titles of
paintings by James McNeill Whistler.69
The narrator alights from the bus and gazes at the first
“monument,” the bridge over the Passaic River:

Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge

and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it
with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a
photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that
projected a detached series of “stills” through my Instamatic
into my eye. 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 showed nothing but a continuous
blank.70

The bridge, built in 1896, rotates on its axis to allow a barge to

pass down the river. In the narrator’s eyes this rotation epitomizes
“the limited movements of an outmoded world,” and he suggests
that the bridge could be named “the Monument of Dislocated
Locations.”71 Other shots, of concrete supports for the new
highway, recall cubes by Judd or LeWitt. However, the editors of
Artforum did not include these photos in the essay they
published.72 Construction machinery, standing idle at the weekend,
reminds the narrator of “prehistoric creatures trapped in the mud,
or, better, extinct machines—mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their
skin.”73
A high point in the excursion is the sight of “The Fountain
Monument,” with its rusty pipes spewing pond water into the river:

The great pipe was in some enigmatic way connected with

the infernal fountain. It was as though the pipe was secretly
sodomizing some hidden technological orifice, and causing a
monstrous sexual organ (the fountain) to have an orgasm. A
psychoanalyst might say that the landscape displayed
“homosexual tendencies,” but I will not draw such a crass
anthropomorphic conclusion. I will merely say, “It was
there.”74

Artforum reproduced a bird’s-eye view and a side view of “The

Fountain Monument” (see figure 22). The short description is
riddled with allusions to the art discourse of the day. The title of the
monument is an ironic homage to an icon of twentieth-century art,
Marcel Duchamp’s legendary Readymade Fountain (1917). Then
there is the mock-psychoanalytical explanation. Last there is a dig
at the discourse of the sublime and presentness— expounded by
artists and writers ranging from Barnett Newman to Judd to
Michael Fried—with the throwaway line “It was there,” an extreme
version of the Modernist “fetish of pure presence.”75
FIGURE 22. Robert Smithson, black-and-white photographs of “The Fountain Monument”
for “The Monuments of Passaic,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967).

The narrator continues to turn his “suburban Odyssey” into

something of a comedy. He feels as though he is wandering around
in a film that he cannot understand, until he spots “a green sign
that explained everything”:

YOUR HIGHWAY TAXES 21 AT WORK

Federal Highway U.S. Dept. of Commerce
Trust Funds Bureau of Public Roads
2,867,000 State Highway Funds
2,867,000
New Jersey State Highway Dept.76

This “explanation” is a parody of Marxist art theorists’ relentless

efforts to reduce the world to no more than economic factors and
class struggles. And like someone who has suddenly had his eyes
opened, Smithson writes, “That zero panorama seemed to contain
ruins in reverse—all the new constructions that would eventually
be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the
buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into
ruin before they are built.”77 The idea of a ruin in reverse recalls
Vladimir Nabokov’s statement that “the future is but the obsolete
in reverse,” which Smithson had already cited in “Entropy and the
New Monuments.”78 However, this is more than merely a
commentary on the concept of planned obsolescence.
Smithson’s description implicitly criticizes the sophisticated
finishes of flawless sculptures devised at a drawing board and
executed by specialists. Given that Brian O’Doherty regarded
Minimal Art as striving for a “high survival quotient” by not being
avant-garde, from Smithson’s point of view, this undertaking was
doomed to fail because in the end the art would not resist aging.79
What O’Doherty had said about Minimal Art’s focus on the
conditions of its presentation and preservation—“it suggests that
we deal with this art not in terms of facts (what they are) but in
terms of states (the conditions that maintain them)”—is reflected in
what Smithson found on the green sign.80 And O’Doherty’s idea
that Minimal Art “sits blandly within the gates, announcing that it
is not ahead of its time (therefore, arousing no shock), and that the
future is simply now,” inspired Smithson’s polemical comparison
with the suburbs, which he felt existed without “a rational past and
without the ‘big events’ of history.”81 This is the context of his
reference to a “monumental parking lot” built over old railroad
tracks that had once run right through Passaic: “There was nothing
interesting or even strange about that flat monument, yet it echoed
a kind of cliché idea of infinity; perhaps the ‘secrets of the universe’
are just as pedestrian—not to say dreary.”82
For the narrator, suburbia embodies the nightmare of eternal
presentness dreamed by the Modernists and the Minimalists. When
Smithson talked of suburbia, it was not with the sociocritical
intentions of his contemporaries or of present-day viewers of the
photography of Graham, Edward Ruscha, and Allan Sekula but
rather as a critic of the New York art world, with its group rituals,
subtle mechanisms of exploitation, and voluntary seclusion. In his
eyes suburbia was inextricably connected with the metropolis of
New York; indeed, “Passaic seems full of ‘holes’ compared to New
York City, which seems tightly packed and solid.” The narrator
takes more snapshots and concludes that “if the future is ‘out of
date’ and ‘old fashioned’, then I had been in the future.”83
The last monument, “a sand box or a model desert,” recalls the
shapes of sculptures by Judd and Morris. It may also be an allusion
to a sci-fi story, The Cage of Sand, published by J. G. Ballard in
1962. Smithson uses the sandbox to illustrate his concept of
entropy: he asks the reader to picture a child in a sandbox filled
with white sand on one side and black on the other, running around
in circles until the contents of have become uniformly gray, yet
unable to restore the sand to its original state by running back
round the other way.84 Ultimately the sandbox also in a sense
prefigured the Nonsites and even the Earthworks that Smithson
was to show just a few months later.

“INCIDENTS OF MIRROR-TRAVEL IN THE YUCATAN”

“Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” was published in

September 1969, also in Artforum.85 The trip to Mexico with Holt
and Dwan that it describes once again took Smithson to a place
where the past and the future intersected and that could serve as a
reflection of the New York art world. As on his earlier trips, he had
a written starting point—not a sci-fi novel on this occasion, but a
classic of travel literature, John L. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in
Yucatan.86 Whereas on previous excursions he had collected objects
or taken snapshots to bring back to the gallery, now he brought a
dozen square mirrors with him. This enabled him to set up
experiments on site, so that he could photograph and analyze the
results. He placed the mirrors in a variety of places—in the jungle,
in a field subjected to controlled burning, on a shoreline, and so on
—took photographs, and immediately removed the mirrors again.
Mirrors were well suited to Smithson’s needs. On one hand he
had long used them to break up sculptural surfaces. On the other
hand they had proved a useful means to convey an impression of
places that were not accessible to viewers. (In his project Cayuga
Saltmine, created for the exhibition Earth Art in 1969, Smithson
used mirrors to make an imaginary link to a salt mine some miles
from the exhibition space at the Andrew Dickson White Museum.)
Smithson’s mirrors also made a passing allusion to the small ones
that a traveling companion of John Stephens, the ophthalmologist
Dr. Cabot, used in operations in Mexico.87 Last, they also recalled
the concave stone mirrors used in Olmec culture, which the
archaeologist Robert Heizer, the father of Michael Heizer, had
researched in the 1950s and had described in an article for
National Geographic, which Smithson cites.88
However, besides referring to archaeological texts and maps of
Yucatan, Smithson also makes room in his essay for demons and
Mayan gods, who are naturally fully informed of the latest gossip in
the New York art world and mutter dubious snippets to the
narrator: “‘The Jaguar in the mirror that smokes in the World of the
Elements knows the work of Carl Andre,’ said Tezcatlipoca und
Itzpaplotl at the same time in the same voice. ‘He knows the Future
travels backwards,’ they continued. Then they both vanished in the
pavement of Highway 261.”89 Some oracles talk sheer nonsense;
others are drowned out by the sound of an engine: “Out of the
smoke of a Salem came the voice of Ometecuhtli—the Dual Being,
but one could not hear what he had to say because the airplane
engine roared too loudly.”90 As in the classics of this literary genre,
unexpected episodes, misunderstandings, and mishaps are just as
important as the real insights the traveler gains.
As before in “The Crystal Land,” Smithson turned art-critical
discourse into a narrative. He subverted the usual jargon and its
normative aspirations by means of that whimsical mixture of fiction
and documentation, chronicle and reflection, that can make
travelogues such compelling reading. He toys with the ambivalent
nature of his text and leaves his readers to decide whether he is
braving the front line of the theory of painting or simply suffering
from the heat, for instance in The Fifth Mirror Displacement in
Palenque, which—as in Ballard’s novel The Crystal World
—“paralyzed” all the light in the jungle. Taking as his starting point
the assumption, based on art theoreticians’ notion of “pure” color,
that there must also be “impure” or “guilty” colors, he speculates
on a “pathology of color”: “The word ‘color’ means at its origin to
‘cover’ or ‘hide.’ Matter eats up light and ‘covers’ it with a
confusion of color.”91 In the darkness of the jungle, light is “killed,”
and this breeds color. The rampant jungle thus becomes a
metaphor for self-referential art: “The jungle grows only by means
of its own negation—art does the same.”92 At no time does
Smithson transfigure his version of the jungle. He was no more
proposing a return to nature than he would have wanted to take up
residence in a suburb again. And he made it clear to his readers
that they would not find their longings answered in that jungle
either:

If you visit the sites (a doubtful probability) you find nothing

but memorytraces, for the mirror displacements were
dismantled right after they were photographed. The mirrors
are somewhere in New York. The reflected light has been
erased. Remembrances are but numbers on a map, vacant
memories constellating the intangible terrains in deleted
vicinities. . . . Yucatan is elsewhere.93

HOTEL PALENQUE
The most amusing outcome of the trip to Mexico was Smithson’s
slide lecture Hotel Palenque. It took place in 1972, when he was a
visiting professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of
Utah, Salt Lake City, although his time at the university was limited
to this single event.94 Contrary to his audience’s likely
expectations, the lecture was about neither the world-famous
Mayan ruins in the Mexican state of Chiapas nor the then-much-
discussed wall paintings by Mexican artists but rather a run-down
hotel in a tourist village near the legendary rain forest site.
Smithson explained the contents of his slides without a script but
had made copious notes in preparation for this lecture.95 According
to Nancy Holt, who reconstructed Hotel Palenque as a work of art
after Smithson’s death (the text is not included in the Collected
Writings), he had intended all along to develop this lecture further
and to record it on tape.96
The lecture takes the audience through the different times and
conditions of the labyrinthine hotel. The shots in and around the
building never show it as a whole. The fragmented view of the
building reflected its condition: although the hotel was open for
business—Smithson and his companions stayed there—it was half
under construction and half falling into disrepair. From the slides it
is impossible to tell how the hotel is meant to look one day, what
the design plans are, or even if there are any plans. Since the
construction work appears to be progressing at a snail’s pace, some
of the as-yet-unfinished parts are already showing signs of decay. In
addition, it seems that an older hotel is successively giving way to
the new building, so that from time to time the already-aging new
structures reveal the ruinous remains of a previous building on this
site that may have been similarly unfinished. The few completely
finished areas—for instance, a decorative turtle pond in the lobby—
look all the more out of place in these chaotic surroundings.
Smithson provides his commentary in a neutral tone of voice,
with the intonation of a respected expert. He slips into the role of
the connoisseur who easily spots formal affinities, for instance
between a floor pattern and stripe paintings by Frank Stella, or
between an unfinished room and “Jasper Johnsian simplicity”97 (see
figure 23). Smithson compares a pile of rubble to a floor sculpture
by Robert Morris, a stack of cement blocks reminds him of Donald
Judd’s Stacks, and he bafflingly concludes with a green door, which
he says refers to the barn door in Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés:
1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946–1966).98 Compared
to the contradictory, speculative archaeological explanations of the
possible functions of the ruins of Palenque, Smithson’s suggestions
about the hidden intentions of the anonymous builder constructing
this hotel seem entirely reasonable. And in the context of what the
Viennese art historian Alois Riegl would have called, in his classical
differentiation of types of monument, an “unintentional
monument”— in this case to the cliché of Latin American sloppiness
—Smithson’s interpretations are pure comedy, for instance when he
sees the untiled swimming pool as an echo of pre-Columbian ritual
sacrifices.99 On the recording, bursts of laughter from the audience
increasingly interrupt his commentary.
FIGURE 23. Slides from Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque, 1969, thirty-one chromogenic-
developed slides and audio CD, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

By presenting a hybrid of academic lecture and homely slide

evening, Smithson distanced himself from the established rituals of
the artist’s lecture, which was no doubt what the students were
expecting from a visiting professor. Morris—in his performance
21.3, poking fun at Erwin Panofsky—and Lucas Samaras, in Allan
Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, took a similarly comedic
approach.100 In fact, Smithson’s critique was aimed at the way that
Conceptual Art was increasingly dominating the art discourse.
Almost descending into slapstick at certain points, his lecture was
wholly at odds with the intended rigor and gravitas of texts by
figures such as Joseph Kosuth. Thus Smithson was able to react,
with irony, to the current discourse without having to bow to its
conventions. At the same time as creating a caricature of it, he was
able to provide—between the lines—glimpses of a theory of his
own.
An interesting point, in terms of architectural theory, is
Smithson’s term dearchitecturization, which was a spin on the term
dedifferentiation, coined by the psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig.101
Smithson illustrated his idea with a slide showing a series of
crumbling floors, whose metal support structures protrude from a
wall into empty space. Dearchitecturization was distinct from the
notion of deconstruction in that it did not analytically dissect a
whole into individual components, thereby revealing the original
construction, but rather cast doubt on the coherence of the whole.
Architectural historians have only partially taken Smithson’s ideas
into account, and then predominantly in the context of matters of
form.102 As it happens, it was the reception of the work of Gordon
Matta-Clark that revived interest in Smithson’s engagement with
this topic.
Hotel Palenque was to be the last of the series of travelogues
that first set Smithson on his way as an artist in 1966. He regarded
them as works of art in their own right, on a par with his
sculptures, films, photographs, and installations. They drew on real
excursions, with other artists, that he led between 1966 and 1969.
Besides Holt, Virginia Dwan was usually also a companion on these
trips. As the daughter of one of the founders of the Minnesota
Mining and Manufacturing Company, Dwan felt an affinity with
Smithson’s interest in the history of the earth. She was financially
independent and funded not only most of the excursions but also
the most important of Smithson’s and Michael Heizer’s later
Earthworks. Guests named in Smithson’s planner who went on
these excursions include Judd, Andre, Morris, Heizer, Dan Graham,
Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Peter Hutchinson, Claes Oldenburg, and
Kaprow. Initially these trips took the participants into the areas
surrounding Manhattan and to New Jersey, but from 1968 Smithson
went much farther: to the Nevada desert and California with
Heizer, to the mining district of Oberhausen, Germany, with Bernd
Becher, to Sanibel Island, Florida with Rauschenberg, and to
Mexico with Holt and Dwan. But he also regularly explored
Manhattan—the Museum of Natural History with Dwan, the
Hayden Planetarium (attached to the Museum of Natural History)
with Mel Bochner, or Central Park alone.103
These excursions were not so much group strolls as a form of
performative critique. In the same way that art criticism seeks
spatial and temporal distance from the work in question yet also
engages with it on a dialectical level, the participants in the
excursions distanced themselves from their usual habitat, their
small art world, so that they could all the better explore its spatial,
historical, and economic parameters. They were well aware that
those same disused quarries and asphalt works had provided the
materials for the city-center skyscrapers and streets. And in these
peripheral areas, old craft skills still survived, without which the
postindustrial art of the 1960s could never have been produced.
For Smithson, trips to the suburbs also had an autobiographical
undertone, because he had grown up in New Jersey, first in
Paterson and then in Rutherford. Although he never expressly said
so, these excursions can be seen as an homage to the poet William
Carlos Williams, who spent his whole life in that area and whose
epic poem Paterson is his magnum opus.104 Most of Smithson’s
friends and colleagues were also raised in the provinces and
regularly returned there, on visits to their families and parental
homes. In that sense a trip away from the big city was also a trip
into individuals’ private pasts, which they were generally reluctant
to address in their art.
 There are no precedents in art history for these excursions, in
which only art professionals participated, unless one were to count
travel literature as art. They were never intended as Happenings,
in the sense in which Kaprow used the term. Yet they could hardly
have occurred had there not already been Happenings. Smithson
tapped into the choreography of Happenings when he gave early
morning instructions to a group of artists, telling them to spend a
specific amount of time on a specific route. But whereas in
Happenings such as Calling and Household the event as such
constituted the work of art, these excursions were never conceived
of as art. Instead they constituted the subject matter, the raw
materials that would form the basis of essays, films, lectures, and
sculptures, in the same way that Smithson turned certain sites into
Nonsites for exhibition purposes. The excursions combined literary,
geographical, sociological, and architectural traits. The
excursionists—unlike the participants in Happenings or dance
performances by, for instance, Trisha Brown—may well have felt
less like actors in a preplanned sequence than like explorers, such
as members of a nineteenth-century expedition, who have no idea
what awaits them, or characters in a New Wave sci-fi novel by J. G.
Ballard.105
 The Triumph of Minimal Art

that Smithson temporarily sought to connect with

THE ARTISTIC CURRENT

in 1964, before striking out on his own again, had no name yet. The
term Minimal Art was not coined until 1965—in a different context
—by Richard Wollheim and became common currency in the second
half of the 1960s despite, or maybe because of, its undeniable
vagueness.106 What Lucy Lippard’s book Pop Art (1966) did for Pop
Art, Gregory Battcock’s Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (1968)
and Rosalind Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) did for
Minimal Art.107 As in the case of Pop Art, it seems to me worth
asking how it was that a particular movement—in this case,
Minimal Art—emerged victorious in its own day and has held its
own in the annals of art history ever since. On one hand, I propose
to pursue the hypothesis that the triumph of Minimalism, in the
form of stylistic trends such as Minimal Art, Post-Minimal Art, and
Conceptual Art, is ultimately the sequel to the story of “the triumph
of American painting.”108 In other words, I suggest that
Minimalism rescued the values of Late Modernism in the 1960s and
henceforth perpetuated them in the realms of the visual arts, art
criticism, and art scholarship. On the other hand, I propose to
highlight the differences between the U.S. and European appraisals
of Minimalism.
Most art historians writing in the 1980s and 1990s have
interpreted Minimal Art as a break with the precepts of Late
Modernism—specifically those of Abstract Expressionist painting—
and thus as the beginning of a new chapter in the history of art. In
Hal Foster’s eyes, Minimalism constitutes “a contemporary crux, a
paradigm shift toward postmodernist practices that continue to be
elaborated today.”109 James Meyer defines it not as “a movement
with a coherent platform, but as a field of contiguity and
conflict.”110 And Gregor Stemmrich typifies the reception of
Minimalism in the German-speaking art world when he states that
Minimal Art “rejected the conservative program of
‘Modernism.’”111 By the same token, Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin
Buchloh, who were at pains to present Minimal Art as a stage in a
logical artistic development, also equated Minimalism with a new
beginning. Krauss saw it as “a new syntax for sculpture,” with the
rupture consisting only of the desire “to relocate the origins of a
sculpture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modeling its
structure on the privacy of the psychological space but on the
public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural
space.”112 Ultimately she, Buchloh, Foster, Meyer, and Stemmrich
are all in agreement that Minimalism embarked on a critical
revision of Late Modernism and, as such, connected with the values
of the earlier avant-gardes. In their view, the Minimalists’ critique
was directed against the formalism and self-referentiality of Late
Modernist art—but not against the tradition of Modernism as a
historical continuum. Buchloh clarified this point in the late 1970s:

Formalism in aesthetic practice and the correlating

equivalent, an entrepreneur’s morality, have not been the
original position of the Minimal generation. The Minimalists
had not only oriented their formal and material strategies
according to Constructivist axioms, but also attempted to
reactivate the latter’s sociopolitical implications. This meant
. . . the abolition of the artwork’s commodity status and the
attempt to replace its exchange and exhibition value with a
new concept of functional use value.113

Contrary to Buchloh, I believe that from the outset Minimal

artists were aiming for commercial success and seeking to advance
the established forms of object art. Although, in view of the
pressure exerted on the values of the neo-avant-garde in the 1980s
by the Neo-Expressionists, it is understandable that he has chosen
to style Minimal Art as a means to resist objecthood and the art
market, nevertheless this stylization fails to take into account the
mechanisms Minimal Art employed to gain ground in the 1960s. It
also overlooks the fact that for decades Minimal Art has enjoyed a
special status in the collections and exhibitions policies of artistic
institutions, despite the fact that it never reached the same heights
as Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art in the art market. The
striking longevity of Minimal Art owes much to its reception in
Europe. This has perpetuated the myth of not only the rupture
between Minimal Art and Modernism but also the “American-ness”
of Minimal Art. Witness Stemmrich in 1995, suggesting that
Minimal Art was the first “eminently American” artistic trend.114 In
so doing he was in tune with the dominant view in continental
Europe that Minimal Art reflected an American ideology. The
definition that Jutta Held proposed in 1972 typified this attitude:

A belief in science and rational technology as the basis of

dignified human existence and a belief in the superiority of
American civilization, thanks to its technological
advantages, underpins the American ideology, insofar as it is
persuaded of its own progress. And this is reflected in the
theories of Minimal Art and determines the form its
products take.115

However, the European insistence on the American-ness of

Minimal Art completely obscures the fact that since the late 1960s
Minimalism has enjoyed its greatest successes in Europe. The first
touring exhibition in Europe of work in this style, titled Minimal
Art, was seen in a series of cities in 1968 and 1969. In the 1970s,
when the American art market was having difficulties, Minimal Art
and Conceptual Art were sustained by interest from private
collectors in Europe, such as the northern Italian Giuseppe Panza
di Biumo, the Belgian physician Herman Daled, and the Cologne
gallerist Paul Maenz, as well as the Crex Collection in
Schaffhausen. Yet the European fixation on Minimalism was
certainly not evidence of some wider admiration of American
qualities. In the German-speaking world at least, the enthusiasm
for Minimal Art and Conceptual Art has gone hand in hand with a
persistent, largely anti-American skepticism regarding the
narrowing gap between high art on one hand and popular culture
and commerce on the other. But unlike Pop Art and a certain
element in American art in the 1980s and 1990s—represented by
artists such as Jeff Koons—Minimal Art has proved resistant to the
European suspicion of commerce. One reason may be that it has
been regarded as a form of ideology, as “neo-avant-garde.” The
enduring European taste for Minimal Art suggests that it was
ultimately seen as a European victory, as the legitimate heir to
European Modernism—that is to say, Bauhaus and the avant-garde
art of the interwar years.116
As it turned out, sculptures were the first Minimal artifacts
primarily produced for presentation in exhibition spaces. In
contrast to Pop Art’s beginning, in the early days of Minimal Art
museums more than private collectors initiated and sustained the
demand. Minimal Art, to put it in a nutshell, was the trend that best
matched the expansion of the flourishing art world and the
increasingly authoritarian structures of the art bureaucracy that
was taking root. The interest that critics and exhibition curators
showed in this art was also a form of self-interest, for Minimalism
was concerned not least with the spatial, structural, and functional
parameters of art mediation. Almost all of the main players of
Minimalism—Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris,
and Sol LeWitt—had the same educational background as the
curators and critics: degrees in art history and often philosophy
too.
Gregory Battcock highlights the new familiarity between artists
and art mediators in his introduction to Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology: “The new artist has moved into a much closer working
relationship with the art critic. . . . The appraisals of critics go
beyond mere judgment and evaluation; they provide a sympathetic
contribution.”117 For Battcock, Minimal Art was the legitimate heir
to Abstract Expressionism.118 They were connected by virtue of
their historicity, and they were both posited on traditional aesthetic
values.119 Battcock presented a clear picture of the dynamics and
efficiency of the new art: “In a sense, what is most important is
what an artist does, rather than what he is, what the object does—
in terms of response—rather than what it is.”120 Moreover, this new
art had a different relationship to the space around it:
 With a confidence that has rarely been seen since de
Kooning and Kline, Minimal artists acknowledge both the
viewer and the space of the gallery. They grasp aggressively
at all available space. . . . The audience is persuaded to walk
about a newly defined and delineated space, and the path is
determined by the art. In doing so, the artists allow no room
for confusion or misrepresentation. A row of panels on a wall
owe the possibility of their existence in the selected form to
the presence of the wall, just as the pattern of our own
existence is determined largely by environmental factors.
The Minimal artist no longer questions—he challenges and
observes.121

Battcock and Brian O’Doherty have proved to be among the

most perceptive observers of Minimal Art, with O’Doherty
epitomizing the art critic making “a sympathetic contribution” and
very much aware of the flirtation between Minimalism and the art
institutions: “I suggest that we deal with this art not in terms of
facts (what they are) but in terms of states (the conditions that
maintain them).” According to O’Doherty, Minimal Art behaves as
though it were “inert or non-emotional.”122 This allowed it to avoid
the rapid depreciation of styles in an art world that was
increasingly emulating the rapid turnover of fads in consumer
objects and had, since 1962, tended to expect new models on an
annual basis, as in the motor industry—“to mimic the obsolescence
of last year’s Detroit models.”123 The exponents of Minimal Art
attached great importance to what Bruce Glaser called a “very
finished look,” O’Doherty’s “smooth surface.”124 These perfect
finishes are highly photogenic and instantly recognizable.125 In
addition, these artists hoped to secure the future of Minimal Art by
abandoning the avant-garde’s distance from its audience, declaring
that their art was “not ahead of its time and that the future is
simply now.” O’Doherty was convinced that Minimal Art showed
that the gulf between artists and the public—which the avant-garde
had nurtured—was at last closing. Typically, Minimal Art replaced
authors with “technicians” and produced artists who were both
drafters of a “useless environment” and aristocrats. In O’Doherty’s
words, “this amalgamated philosopher-artist-draughtsman-
aristocrat seems to lead us to an Academy once again, a sort of
Platonic academy—minus Plato.”126
Unlike Pop Art and Happenings, with their clear references to
consumer culture, Minimal Art had a look that obscured its
connections to consumer society for some critics. The instant
perceptibility and unproblematic reproducibility of Minimalist
artifacts sublimated, on an aesthetic level, the consumerist habits
of the viewer. Minimalism’s apologists interpreted this apparent
availability (Minimalist sculptures were strictly to be seen, not
touched) as fundamentally democratic. Whereas Abstract
Expressionism (against the backdrop of the Cold War) was
associated with democracy and the so-called free market economy,
and Pop Art (at least in Europe) was regarded as “capitalist
realism,” O’Doherty’s suggested designation for Minimalism was
“Democratic Nominalism.”127

THE SCULPTURE BOOM AND THE CASE OF MICHAEL

FRIED

How does the history of Minimal Art relate to economic history? In

other words, how can we shake off the prevalent fixation on a
historical perspective and re-view this art in its economic context?
Even with hindsight, it is hard to grasp the wealth of important
events that took place in the art world in 1966–1967. As Virginian
Dwan said in an interview, “1967 was a good year!”128 The United
States had never before enjoyed such prosperity: in the words of
John Kenneth Galbraith, “The twenty years from 1948 through
1967 may well be celebrated by historians as the most benign era
in the history of the industrial economy, as also of economics.”129
What now looks like the heyday of Minimal Art registered at the
time as the heyday of large-format sculptures. The museums and
galleries in the United States vied with one another in a wave of
sculpture exhibitions that began in spring 1966.130 The annual New
American Sculpture and Prints exhibitions at the Whitney Museum
of American Art also turned the spotlight on sculpture. By spring
1967 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was already
presenting an overview exhibition, titled American Sculpture of the
Sixties, with work by eighty predominantly younger American
artists, some of whom—such as Robert Grosvenor and Kenneth
Snelson—showed monumental sculptures in the open air.131 That
fall the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented Sculpture
from Twenty Nations. Marina City was the venue in summer 1967
for New Horizons in Sculpture, and Toronto hosted Sculpture ’67.
Also in the summer, the Art Institute of Chicago put on the
overview exhibition Sculpture: A Generation of Innovation.
At the same time, Pablo Picasso’s monumental Head was being
installed at the Civic Center Plaza in Chicago. This was part of a
veritable boom of exhibitions that were not presented inside the
confines of a museum. As early as 1966 Tony Smith had his first
exhibition in the open air, in Bryant Park opposite the New York
Public Library. This was also the last of the Events, open-air art
exhibitions organized by Thomas Hoving, the parks commissioner
of New York City. In October 1967 his successor, August Heckscher,
put on the exhibition Sculpture in Environment, with support from
the National Endowment for the Arts and private sponsors. Much of
the new sculpture addressed the question of sculptural scale,
exemplified by the 1967 exhibition Scale as Content at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.132
Art journals and magazines also reflected this shift toward
sculpture. Artforum, founded in 1962, relocated from Los Angeles
to New York and set itself up as the voice of “new sculpture.”
Detailed articles discussed the work of leading sculptors, who were
also given the chance to publish personal statements. Robert
Morris’s essay “Notes on Sculpture,” which was published in four
installments, set the ball rolling in February 1966.133 Smithson’s
“Entropy and the New Monuments” followed.134 In summer 1967
Artforum produced a special issue on sculpture, and in December
of that year it published Mel Bochner’s “The Serial Attitude,”
followed by Dan Graham’s review in January 1968 of Claes
Oldenburg’s designs for monuments and, that fall, “The Shape of
the Art Environment,” Kaprow’s response to Morris’s essay.135 The
most controversial essay during the course of this debate was “Art
and Object-hood” by Michael Fried, an Artforum staff member.136
Fried’s intention was to defend the Late Modernist painting of
artists such as Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jules Olitski
against the threat of Minimalist sculpture. The danger, as Fried
saw it, was the likely dissipation of art due to the introduction of a
new form of “theatricality” that had the capacity to end art’s
material autonomy. He directed the main thrust of his attack
against Morris:

The literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing

other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is
now the negation of art. . . . Morris makes this explicit.
Whereas in previous art “what is to be had from the work is
located strictly within it,” the experience of literalist art is of
an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition,
includes the beholder.137

Fried’s verdict was that Minimalist theory and praxis identified

with the same rationale that it supposedly radically opposed,
namely the rationale of naturalism: “I am suggesting then, that a
kind of latent or hidden naturalism, indeed anthropomorphism, lies
at the core of literalist theory and practice.”138
Fried’s essay was to be the catalyst for a controversy that is still
unresolved. Few art texts have been cited as often as “Art and
Objecthood.” This analysis still compels art professionals to take
sides. In 1967, following the publication of “Art and Objecthood,”
the majority of artists and critics declared their opposition to
Fried’s views and defended Minimal Art against his accusations.
This gave rise to the art-historical consensus that the point at issue
was a conflict between painting and sculpture—or, from the
perspective of the discourse in the 1980s and 1990s, the separation
of Modernism and Postmodernism—and that the positions of Fried,
the Modernists, and Minimal Art were fundamentally opposed.
Typically, Thomas Crow described 1967 as the year of the “epic
disagreement.”139
However, the widely held view that there was a radical break
between Modernism and Minimalism—we might describe it, with a
sideways glance to John Kenneth Galbraith, as the “conventional
wisdom” in the discipline of art history—does not stand up to closer
scrutiny, above all if we look at Smithson’s reaction to Fried’s
essay.140 In October 1967 he wrote a letter to the editor of
Artforum. Of the countless contemporary responses to “Art and
Objecthood”—with the exception of a polemic from Kaprow—
Smithson’s is the only one to launch a theory-based attack without
coming down on the side of the Minimalists.141 Instead he declares
the ongoing “war” to be civil war by another name and ironically
casts Fried in the role of Don Quixote, tilting against windmills.
Some years previously Kaprow had associated Jackson Pollock with
an inherently Modernist tragedy.142 In Smithson’s view, Fried and
the Minimalists were unknowingly on the same side as the
Modernists. Smithson claims that Fried set “presentness” against
“appearance” in the hope that he would not fall from “grace,” then
interprets the quasi-religious longing for grace on the part of the
“Marxist saint” and “keeper of the gospel of Clement Greenberg”
as an unconscious wish to suppress his awareness of what he was
doing—battling his own precepts:

What Fried fears most is the consciousness of what he is

doing—namely being himself theatrical. He dreads
“distance” because that would force him to become aware of
the role he is playing. . . . Every war is a battle with
reflections. What Michael Fried attacks is what he is. He is a
naturalist who attacks natural time.143

Smithson thus implicitly put Late Modernism on a par with the

very Minimalism that was under attack from Fried. Both
movements played out on the stage of eternity—that is to say, in the
assumption that time was endless and space unlimited. The belief
in the grace of presentness was as much about a section of this
eternity as was the bedeviled theatricality of Modernism. In the
face of an eternity that formed the foundations for both Late
Modernism and Minimalism, the “temporal histories, empires,
revolutions, and counter-revolutions” lost their reality; they were
rendered ephemeral and unreal. Smithson regarded Fried’s
critique of theatricality as a parody of the debate between
Renaissance Classicism and Mannerist Anti-Classicism. For him,
Fried was “the first truly manneristic critic of ‘modernity’” and set
the scene for “mannerist modernism.”144
 By the mid-1990s the picture of Minimalism had started to
change. In 1995 Gary Shapiro referred to Judd and Fried in the
same breath, thus paving the way for an alternative to the
conventional wisdom about a rupture between Minimalism and
Modernism.145 The essay by Walter Benn Michaels mentioned
earlier, “The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism,” pursues
a similar direction. As we have seen, Michaels makes a connection
between naturalism and Modernism by way of trompe l’oeil and
Clement Greenberg’s empty canvas: the “modernist (or, perhaps,
literalist) aesthetic of freedom from representation is a goldbug
aesthetic.” In a footnote, he mentions the connection between his
argument and the debate surrounding Minimal Art and makes the
point that he does not take issue with Greenberg’s “attack on
minimalism’s commitment to ‘the third dimension’ . . . only with his
failure to recognize the congruence between the values of
minimalism and the values as embodied in the unpainted
canvas.”146
Greenberg’s supposed inability to recognize the parallels
between Minimalism and Late Modernism is, however, less
problematic in my view than that of his later opponents in the
Postmodernist-theory camp.147 With very little effort, it is possible
to find passages where he identifies connections between Minimal
Art and Late Modernism. And although he lamented the affinity of
Minimal Art with applied arts and “Good Design” in particular, felt
it lacking in “aesthetic surprise,” and diagnosed
overintellectualization, Minimal Art most certainly met some of the
criteria by which he judged art—notably “clarity” and “presence.”
It almost seems as though he was disappointed that Minimalism
was not more radically different from traditional art.148
Consequently, I suggest that when Smithson attacked Greenberg or
Marcel Duchamp, he was actually setting his sights on his own
contemporaries.
Greenberg’s notion of abstraction (and even more so those of
Judd and Morris) was, in Smithson’s view, the outcome of his
identification of space with the human body, the
“anthropomorphizing of space.”149 Moreover, Smithson regarded
abstraction not as a matter of formal reduction but as an aesthetic
attitude. In his eyes, an Egyptian idol was more abstract than a
painting by Noland, because the idol “excludes emotional needs,”
and Michelangelo’s art was more abstract than contemporary
abstract painting because he approached nature not as a naturalist
but as an inventor whose figures had more in common with
geometric structures than with human beings.150 Whereas
Greenberg, in his famous essay of 1952 on Michelangelo, had
derided him as “spoiled,” Smithson mockingly inquired—possibly
taking a subtle sideswipe at Judd—“Could it be that great art has a
‘knowledge’ of corruption, while ‘natural’ art is innocent of its own
corruption because it is mindless and idealess?”151 Smithson thus
clearly regarded abstraction not as the opposite of naturalism but
as part of one and the same economy.152 He was even willing to
take this a stage further and make the connection between
abstraction and the laws of capitalism: “Abstraction is what
essentially rules capitalism. Abstraction is what separates
production from work.”153
Naturalism, realism, and art for art’s sake were closely
interconnected in Smithson’s mind—at times he even used these
terms synonymously. For him, both Modernism and Minimalism
were in keeping with the rationale of art for art’s sake. He had his
doubts about naturalism because it failed to recognize the fictive
character of nature: “‘Nature’ is simply another 18th-and 19th-
century fiction.”154 He also regarded the idea of essence as absurd
—“You can’t say, ‘I’m in a world of pure essence.’”—and made no
secret of his fundamentally skeptical view of the crucial Modernist
belief in it: “Since I can’t believe in objects and I can’t believe in
totems, what do I believe in? Fiction.”155
Alongside Judd, Robert Morris and Carl Andre were also in the
firing line of Smithson’s critique. Morris’s essays “Notes on
Sculpture” and “Anti-form” were intended to legitimize the
Minimalist artists as a continuation of the classical avant-garde.
The extent of his thinking’s naturalism became clear when he made
a distinction between sculpture and painting on the basis that
sculpture involves real factors such as light, space, and time:
“unlike paintings, which are always lit in an optimum way,
sculpture undergoes change by the incidence of light,” and “the
experience of the work necessarily exists in time.”156 Meanwhile,
Morris’s insistence on the presence of the human body in his
performances echoed Greenberg’s anthropomorphism.157 In 1968
Morris drew attention even more markedly to the roles of gravity
and chance in sculpture: “Considerations of gravity become as
important as those of space. . . . Random piling, loose stacking,
hanging, give passing form to the material. Chance is accepted and
indeterminacy is implied.”158 His genuinely Modernist enthusiasm
for the mechanisms of trompe l’oeil is apparent in his reference to
the flags of Jasper Johns, who, in his view, “established the new
rules of the game.”159 It is almost as though Oldenburg were
speaking when Morris declares that “it is the presumption that the
constructed ‘thing’ is more real than the illusory and changing
aspects afforded by varying perspective views and
illuminations.”160 The backdrops to illusion and disillusion are the
particulars of a work’s reception—“a more emphatic focusing on
the very conditions under which certain kinds of objects are
seen”—and “the cultural infrastructure.”161
Smithson was well aware that his excursions and Earthworks
might be interpreted as the work of someone who loved nature.
Thus he drew attention to his critical attitude toward the idea of
nature:

Contrary to affirmations of nature, art is inclined to

semblances and masks, it flourishes on discrepancy. It
sustains itself not on differentiation, but dedifferentiation,
not on creation but decreation, not on nature but
denaturalization, etc. . . . The ponderous illusions of solidity,
the non-existence of things, is what the artist takes for
“materials.”162

In his laconic way, Dennis Oppenheim added weight to this

skeptical view of nature. During an interview in 1995 he remarked
—in the context of his Earth Art projects—that his disinterest in
engaging with nature was a fundamental difference between him
and artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton.163
Smithson’s disdain for naturalism is thus inextricably bound up
with his critique of modernity, of humanism, of art for art’s sake, of
the idealistic notion of expression, and is always directed against
the dominant value system of autonomous art: “Art should be empty
and inert. Self-expression must be voided. Art should eliminate
value, and not add to it. ‘Value’ is just another word for
‘Humanism.’”164 He regarded the category of “value,” which
attempts to compensate for individual suffering, so to speak, as
outmoded, the outcome of a form of criticism that was unable to
separate its limitations and its projection of problems from its
contemplation of art. He had no time for the notion of links
between art and life, content and form, which had so long been the
focus of art history.
The debate concerning the connection between art and life
combined a striving for autonomy with the guilty suppression of
that same impulse. Consequently, Smithson was of the opinion that
all form/content discussions in fact revolved around a similar sense
of guilt or an ideal of “artistic innocence.” He openly declared that
“artists should be conscious of the roles they are playing. . . . The
artist should be an actor who refuses to act.”165 However
paradoxical it may seem, Smithson’s aim was higher than merely
parodying Harold Rosenberg’s concept of the “act.”166 It was that
artists should find a way to free themselves from the prevailing
signifying economy and reevaluate their praxis: “The artist should
declare his art apart from the self-involving traps of innocence and
guilt and resist all forms of humanism. And this declaration should
be repeated ad infinitum.”167 Thus it was not enough merely to
produce a manifesto. Any such declaration had to be repeated
endlessly, like a litany, like the many quotes in Smithson’s texts,
like the to and fro of the images in his mirror sculptures.
Singularity in any form would see the artist being drawn back into
the gravitational pull of humanism.

ROBERT SMITHSON AND MARCEL DUCHAMP

He was a spiritualist of Woolworth.
—ROBERT SMITHSON,
“A Refutation of Historical Humanism”

Robert Smithson’s interest in Conceptual Art was as limited as his

interest in Minimal Art. As he put it, “I’m really not interested in
philosophy: I’m interested completely in art.”168 Although, like
many others, he was interested in artistic autonomy, he did not
believe in the absolute status of culture and certainly not in the
dream that art could overcome gaps—social, political, or economic.
He put his own view very plainly: “The Dadaists were . . . thinking
that everything was corrupted by commercialism, industry, and
bourgeois attitudes. I think it is time that we realized that there is
no point in trying to transcend those realms. Industry,
commercialism, and the bourgeoisie are very much with us.”169
Nevertheless, he was and still is regarded as a Conceptual artist of
sorts—Blake Stimson ironically describes him as a “part-time
conceptualist.”170
Smithson’s main complaint was that the Conceptualists did not
go far enough. In an interview published in 1973 in Lucy Lippard’s
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
1972, he set out his own stall:

I think that conceptual art which depends completely on

written data is only half the story; it only deals with the
mind and it has to deal with the material too. . . . My work is
impure; it is clogged with matter. I’m for a weighty,
ponderous art. There is no escape from matter. There is no
escape from the physical nor is there any escape from the
mind. The two are in a constant collision course. You might
say that my work is like an artistic disaster. It is a quiet
catastrophe of mind and matter.171

Ultimately the subdivision of art history into styles and the

allocation of artistic phenomena to historical concepts were of no
interest to Smithson. He preferred to devote his energy to concrete
works and figures. The real target of his artistic efforts was an
artist who reigned supreme around 1970, namely Marcel Duchamp,
whose work made Conceptual Art seem “rather lightweight” to
Smithson.172
In Postmodernism and the En-gendering of Marcel Duchamp,
Amelia Jones has traced the instrumentalization of Duchamp as the
father figure of the Postmodern discourse.173 Her postfeminist
analysis of the patriarchic structures of Postmodernism, which
replaced Clement Greenberg with Duchamp, cannot be ignored in
any engagement with Postmodernism as such. With hindsight it is
clear that Duchamp had taken on the mantle of artistic father
figure by the early 1960s. In 1960, for instance, Thomas Hess—not
without irony—referred to him as “St. Marcel.”174 Of all the artists
Smithson took issue with, Duchamp came in for the harshest
treatment. Not long after Smithson’s death, Artforum published an
interview between him and Moira Roth in which he mentioned that
Duchamp had played a leading role in the American art discourse
ever since the 1913 Armory Show. He took the view that what
Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso did for “hard-core modernism” in
the prewar years was not unlike what Duchamp did for it in the
postwar years. It is interesting to see him very naturally using the
term Post-modernism, which became common currency only in the
late 1970s: “Duchamp is really more in line with post-modernism
insofar as he is very knowledgeable about the modernist traditions
but disdains them.”175
As it happens, the art world remained persistently deaf to
Smithson’s critique of Duchamp for a long time, and few people
seem to be aware of his ironic pathologization of the cult
surrounding Duchamp as “Duchampitis.”176 However, he aimed his
barbs less at the victims of Duchampitis, namely Robert Morris and
Jasper Johns, than at Duchamp himself. In his eyes Duchamp was
neither interested in the dematerialization of the object nor critical
of the consumerist nature of art; his art was about the mystification
of the alienated object. Smithson defines Duchamp’s aim as the
desire “to transcend production itself in the Readymades when he
takes an object out of the manufacturing process and then isolates
it.”177 This shifts his work into the realm of aristocratic attitudes,
which disparage the work process as such. In contrast to his own
dialectical stance, Smithson saw Duchamp as representing an
elitist notion of art, which manifested itself in his love of chess,
snobbish attitude toward a specifically American tradition of
craftsmanship and American naiveté, and “French wit,” which
Smithson felt was very different from “an English sense of humor.”
Duchamp, in Smithson’s analysis, was so popular in the art
world because he added value to objects—quite the opposite of
Smithson’s idea that art should eliminate, not multiply, monetary
value.178 Duchamp was harking back to a premodern dream, the
quasi-alchemical transformation of dirt into gold—and the
Readymade was at the heart of this. However, this was precisely
the reverse of the approach of artists such as Sol LeWitt, who
wanted to turn gold into dirt when, as Smithson recounts, he
proposed putting “a piece of Cellini’s jewelry into a block of
cement.”179 Smithson regarded Duchamp’s art as fulfilling religious
functions of some kind to help assuage the Modernists’
characteristic “guilt even about being an artist.”180 Ultimately he
saw Duchamp as someone whose aim was to fill consumer items
with spiritual meaning, “a spiritualist of Woolworth” and “a kind of
priest of a certain sort. He was turning a urinal into a baptismal
font. My view is more democratic and that is why the pose of priest-
aristocrat that Duchamp takes on strikes me as reactionary.”181
Uniquely—and interestingly—he compared Duchamp and
Greenberg: “Greenberg is opting for high art or modernism from a
more orthodox point of view, but Duchamp seems to want to be
playful with that modernism.” This image of Duchamp playing with
Modernism is very much at odds with the usual picture of him as a
radical critic of the Modernist canon. Smithson rejected outright
Duchamp’s “mechanistic,” even “Cartesian,” view of the world: “I
don’t happen to have any mechanistic view of the world so I really
can’t accept Duchamp in terms of my own development.” And he
made a connection between Duchamp and Andy Warhol, whom he
regarded as similarly mechanistic, when he remarked, “Warhol
saying that he wants to be a machine is this linear and Cartesian
attitude developed on a simple level. And I just don’t find it very
productive.”182

DAN GRAHAM AND THE LEGACY OF ROBERT SMITHSON

Dan Graham was Smithson’s closest colleague. The two were

alternately on the best of terms and in hot dispute. It seems to have
been a love-hate relationship, and there was even a distinct
physical similarity between them.183 Smithson’s junior by four
years, Graham ran the (short-lived) John Daniels Gallery, wrote art
reviews, and took photographs. At one point he proposed putting
on a solo exhibition of Smithson’s work—it would have been
Smithson’s first—but had to cancel because of the gallery’s
closure.184 He was one of Smithson’s most faithful traveling
companions, and the two took numerous pictures of each other.
Graham presented at least one slide show in Smithson’s studio,
with shots of their excursions, as Smithson noted in his diary on 28
October 1966. In December 1966, Graham showed the same slides
in the exhibition Projected Art at the Finch Museum of Art, New
York. He then used them as the basis for his essay “Homes for
America,” which was strikingly similar in tone to Smithson’s “The
Crystal Land” (see figure 24). However, whereas Smithson had
confined himself to text, Graham added photographs and tables. It
seems likely that this is what inspired Smithson to include
snapshots in his next essay.
FIGURE 24. Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” in Arts Magazine, December 1966-January
1967.

“Homes for America” quickly reached a wide public when

Gregory Battcock included it in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology.
Battcock’s short description of “Homes for America” makes it clear
that Graham’s view of Minimal Art was closely related to that of
Smithson, noting that its shots depict “Minimal-type surfaces and
structures as they are found by the artists in nature—particularly in
the suburban landscape” and thus demonstrate that “Minimal
forms are not totally divorced from nature, and that they are
subjective and social.”185 Battcock also mentions that Graham
“founded the now-defunct John Daniels Gallery” in 1965 and that
Marcel Duchamp, at least according to Graham, described him as a
“photo journalist.” Graham’s authorization by Duchamp, his failed
bid to become an art dealer (referenced in every discussion of his
work), and his ability to relate artistic phenomena to reality earned
the then-twenty-six-year-old a place on the margins of the art-
historical canon of contemporary art—a place that he successfully
retained in the United States until the retrospective Dan Graham:
Beyond, which opened in 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles, canonized his work.
Given that Graham and Smithson were kindred spirits, it is
evident that art scholarship played them off against each other in
the 1980s and early 1990s. More than that, I suggest that Graham
was in effect cast in the role of a “European” Smithson, in light of
the fact that his reception happened mainly in Europe before his
retrospective in Los Angeles. He was also—with no regard to his
own intentions—designated crown witness for the theory of
Postmodernism, since Smithson had staunchly resisted being
instrumentalized to that end.186 The most important connoisseurs
of Graham’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s were the leading
European experts on Postmodern art, namely Benjamin Buchloh,
Jean-François Chevrier, Thierry de Duve, and Jean-Hubert Martin.
They collectively described Graham as an artist who was critical of
the dominant trends—Minimal, then Conceptual Art—and whose
path was consequently littered with misunderstandings. He is
credited, as an exception among his fellow artists, with having
absorbed the critical potential of both European and American art
in the 1960s and having carried it forward into the “degenerating”
present.187 In 1977 Buchloh was already talking about the
“misunderstanding and misnomer that his [Graham’s] work had
stirred since his earliest publication in 1965,” which had prevented
its appropriate evaluation.188 For Martin, writing in 1983, it was
“high time to demonstrate, as far as possible, the
phenomenological qualities of the work of Dan Graham.”189 In a
seminal essay for the first large-scale retrospective on the history
of Conceptual Art, in 1989, Buchloh declared that the potential of
“Homes for America” was “unbeknownst to most and unrecognized
for the longest time.”190 The much-repeated fact that Arts
Magazine selected only a few of Graham’s photographs of suburban
dwellings to appear with this essay seems to imply some form of
censorship that has consistently sought to hold his critical potential
in check.191
Against the backdrop of the early 1980s, a time when the legacy
of Conceptual Art was being defended against the advances of Neo-
Expressionism, it is easy to understand why Graham was held up as
a representative of universal radicalism. However, it is more
interesting to ask why the promotion of Graham’s work in Europe
did not lead to a reevaluation of Smithson’s work, and whether the
reading of Graham’s work was not unnecessarily reductive.
Chevrier, for instance, suggests in his essay “Dual Reading” that
Graham’s strategy was “perhaps more radical” than that of
Smithson, because Graham was not producing plastic objects but
instead concentrating on verbal structures and photographic
images.192 Apart from the fact that this is not true—Smithson also
used the essay as an artistic medium—it is striking that Chevrier
equates Graham’s artistic radicalism with political radicalism.
In Chevrier’s view, Graham was trying to reevaluate what he
calls the sociocritical principles of Pop Art while presenting a
critique of formalist Minimalism. This reading relies on an
interpretation of Pop Art as both critical and affirmative. According
to Chevrier, Graham’s artistic praxis conflated Modernist traditions
(having taken a detour through “academic” Minimalism) and
popular culture. On one hand, this sociocritical reading takes no
account of the fact that in “Homes for America” Graham was
adding his voice to the debate, started in the 1950s, on the subject
of suburbia.193 On the other hand, Chevrier’s argument relies on
the questionable premise that Pop Art was intrinsically antagonistic
to the formalism of traditional high art and, by virtue of its affinity
with ordinary life, politically radical—or, as Thomas Crow put it, an
“abstract critical allegory.”194 With hindsight Graham in fact
distanced himself from this interpretation and dismissed “Homes
for America” as a “fake think piece” full of “flat-footed humor.”195
Graham, according to Chevrier, aimed at “constructively
dramatizing ambiguity as the coexistence of contradictory points of
view and the montage of dissimilar historical moments.”196
However, in his analysis of Graham’s art, Chevrier primarily makes
a case for ambivalence as a value in its own right. This attitude
very much reflects the theoretical dilemma facing a large
proportion of the radical art criticism and art scholarship in Europe
and America in the 1980s. It seems that treating ambivalence as a
value was one of the few viable ways for critics to combine a claim
to the legacy of the classical avant-garde with the desire to secure
a place in the deregulated, ahistorical workings of an art world
caught up in the vortices of Reaganomics and Thatcherism.197
Chevrier opens “Dual Reading” with the following passage,
which reads very much like a paraphrase of a trompe l’oeil
painting:

“Dan, you’ve been called a poet and a critic and a

photographer. Are you an artist now?” asked Lucy Lippard
during a roundtable radio broadcast in 1970. Dan Graham
replied: “I don’t define myself, but whatever I do, I think, is
defined by the medium.” . . . This declaration should be
enough to immediately settle any vain debate about the
photographic nature of a part of Dan Graham’s work. If the
artist is defined by his activities, which are themselves
defined by the tools employed, it becomes pointless to ask
whether Dan Graham is “really” a photographer or not.198

It is almost as though Chevrier emits an audible sigh of relief at the

thought that Graham turns out to be what he, as the author,
expected of him—that is to say, an authentic artist who fooled those
around him (excluding the art connoisseur Chevrier) for only a
short while. Thus the awkward question of the nature of art (as
readily suppressed as asked) was now superfluous.
Chevrier continues, with even greater relief:

When he published Homes for America, Dan Graham did not

even need to indicate “This is not a work of art.” . . . Homes
for America is a magazine article. The commentary is not a
secondary reflection on a separate (and past) artwork. It is
no longer a reflection on art’s autonomy. The commentary is
coextensive with the work (which never negates or denies
itself). The work and the commentary are copresent in a
 single space of perception, which is that of information. The
latter is no longer information on; it is in-formation of. The
commentary itself is artistic form.199

With the help of the term in-formation Chevrier connects “the

commentary” with “the work” by virtue of their being “co-
extensive.” The term information becomes a plaything in the
writer’s hands, a plaything whose parameters are already known
and whose two components—work and commentary—can
seemingly, thanks to the hyphen, be pulled apart and reconnected
at will, without ever truly being in danger of getting lost (or losing
each other).
Having supposedly triumphed over Minimalism, Graham’s art
paradoxically also serves as a means to sustain Minimalism’s
theoretical precepts. However, for the definition of Postmodernism
that Buchloh and Chevrier favored, Smithson had to be left on the
sidelines, since his presence would cast too strong a light on the
close interconnection of Modernist and Postmodernist models of
interpretation. The value the Postmodernists attached to structure
and political content simply replaced the value the Modernists
attached to formalism. Nevertheless, this does not alter the fact
that the attribution of these values to works of art as a means of
defining their art-historical importance relies on previously defined
norms. In short, the vocabulary changed while the system of
ascribing meaning remained the same. There is no justification, in
this context, for Smithson’s art-historical importance having been
reduced to topics such as museum praxis, the history of the Earth,
mythology, and so on. He seems not to count at all in political
contexts. By the same token, there is no justification in presuming
that Graham had no interest in form.
One of the notable perpetrators of Smithson’s depoliticization
was the magazine October, founded in 1976.200 Benjamin Buchloh
was an important contributor, and in the late 1970s the magazine
published three groundbreaking essays on Smithson’s work by
Craig Owens: “Photography en abyme,” “Earthwords,” and “The
Allegorical Impulse.”201 By reactivating the concept of allegory,
Owens created his own apparatus for shifting meaning in a
controlled manner (comparable to but much more complex than
Chevrier’s use of in-formation). The major achievement of these
essays is that they introduced a readily manageable concept that
both was informative and laid the foundations of the discussion for
years to come. Owens expressly drew on Smithson’s texts. He even,
in “Earthwords,” quotes a passage from Smithson’s “From Ivan the
Terrible to Roger Corman, or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism
as Reflected in the Cinema” that refers to Kaprow: “The very word
‘allegory’ is enough to strike terror into the hearts of the expressive
artist; there is perhaps no device as exhausted as allegory. But
strangely enough Allan Kaprow has shown interest in that worn-out
device.”202 Owen’s essays were to be of seminal importance in the
reception of Smithson’s work. Yet at the same time he also seemed
to draw a veil over certain aspects of the latter’s output. His
reconstruction of Smithson’s countless iconographic allusions—to
natural history, for instance—and his formalist descriptions of the
structure of the allegories in Smithson’s art obscure Smithson’s
critique of the hegemony of Minimalism, his forays into political
art, and his humor and irony.203 It could be said that Owens thus
also reinstated formalism in the guise of structural analysis.
Owens’s conclusion to his study of Smithson’s texts is often
cited: “The failure of contemporary theory, which too often
operates in a vacuum, to see its own realization in Smithson’s
practice is, and remains, a scandal.”204 The real scandal for Owens
was that theory could fail in the first place. This presupposes that
the relevant theory is omniscient, omnipotent, that it can uncover
all meaning, given enough time. Although this is not to say that
theory takes precedence over art, it does assume that there are
fixed layers of meaning that can be revealed in the realms of both
art and theory.
 Site and Nonsite

ROBERT SMITHSON AS THE ARTISTIC ADVISOR TO THE

DALLAS-FORT WORTH AIRPORT

to reduce his artistic achievement

IT WOULD BE DOING SMITHSON A DISSERVICE

solely to his analysis of the dominant rationale of Late Modernist

art. Apart from which, his approach was by no means merely
destructive or polemical, and when he highlighted the limitations of
a historicist legitimation of art, it was not in order to replace it with
his own genealogies. A phrase coined by John Kenneth Galbraith in
another context could well describe this work: it was not so much
constructive criticism as a force that crystallized destruction.205 In
fact, Smithson was paving the way for his own program and his
own, entirely pragmatic inventions—his Nonsites, Earthworks, and
largely unrealized Land Reclamation projects.
We can do no more than speculate as to how Smithson’s career
—and the history of Earth Art—would have turned out had he not
taken part in a symposium on urban planning held at Yale
University in 1966.206 His contribution on the topic “Shaping the
Environment: The Artist and the City” caught the attention of the
architect Walter Prokosch, a partner in the firm of Tippetts-Abbett-
McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS), Engineers and Architects. TAMS had
made a name for itself in the 1950s and 1960s with major
construction projects for docklands and military facilities.
Prokosch, a leading specialist in airport design and a former long-
term employee at Boeing, had overall responsibility for the
planning of one of the largest construction projects in the world at
that time—an international airport between the cities of Dallas and
Fort Worth in the state of Texas.207 He asked if Smithson would act
as the artistic advisor for this project and, by 20 July 1966, had
already sent him a draft contract for his activities as an “artist-
consultant.”208
 The remuneration for Smithson’s work was set at four hundred
dollars, a not inconsiderable sum (and not only to artists) at the
time; he was to receive additional expenses for site visits. The
contract initially ran until the end of 1966, backdated to 1 July, with
the proviso that TAMS would extend it if the airport board extended
the firm’s contract. In the end TAMS employed Smithson for a full
year as an artist-consultant. His contract ran until the end of June
1967, when TAMS had to relinquish responsibility for the airport’s
design to another firm and was henceforth engaged to oversee
coordination and infrastructure.209 On completion in 1973, the
airport—with a linear layout three times the size of the John F.
Kennedy Airport in New York and covering an area as large as
Manhattan—opened with great pomp and ceremony, including the
first landing of a Concorde on American soil, but without further
mention of its artistic design.210
Smithson seems not to have made any visits to the proposed
construction site, although there are regular notes in his planner of
meetings with the architects.211 Finding himself suddenly
confronted with architectural plans and terminology, grid
structures, aerial photographs, and the reality of planning a
megastructure, the young artist found his horizon literally widened.
Smithson repeatedly referred to the importance of this contract to
him and the fact that he had been “confronted with material I
would not have been confronted with otherwise.”212 In 1969, at the
symposium held at Cornell University in conjunction with the
exhibition Earth Art, he made a particular point of the effect that
his work on the airport project had had on his views on the
integration of art and architecture.213 In an interview with Paul
Cummings he came to the conclusion that he had his first inklings
of Earthworks during his time as an artist-consultant (although he
predated his encounter with the firm of architects by one year in
this conversation).214
Although his plans were not realized, Smithson was content with
his work on the project and sure that it had been worthwhile for
him, because this was when he started “to think about large land
areas and the dialogue between the terminal and the fringes of the
terminal—once again, between the center and the edge of
things.”215 Many art historians have also seen this first major
contract as a turning point in the development of Smithson’s work.
Eugenie Tsai suggests that this experience decisively shaped his
ideas concerning the relationships between architecture, art, and
scale. As evidence she cites Smithson’s A Surd View for an
Afternoon (1970), a sketch of his career in the form of a map.216 In
the center is an “Air Terminal,” which Gary Shapiro also interprets
as the “take-off point” for Smithson’s work.217 Ann Reynolds
similarly regards the airport contract as one of the most important
triggers for Smithson’s “shift in reference points,” rightly making
the connection with his interest in French structuralism and
particularly Chris Marker’s film La Jetée (1964), which takes place
partly on an airport concourse.218
Smithson created several sculptures that relate to his
experience of airport design. Terminal (1966) and Aerial Map—
Proposal for Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport (1967) refer
directly to the airport terminal. Discontinuous Aggregates (1966)
addresses the question of increasing speed, which had a particular
fascination for Smithson. However, of greater consequence than
these sculptures were his Aerial Art projects. This was terra
incognita. Art that was to be seen by airborne passengers would
have to work in a fundamentally different way than forms such as
painting and sculpture. Over the course of a year he developed a
range of proposals in the form of plans and sketches: Clear Zone,
for instance, proposed a progression of square asphalt slabs to
transform the look of the concrete runway and evoke the idea of
increasing speed. Earth Windows was to consist of rectangular pits,
each containing a layer of broken glass lit from below. At night
these would have been strangely glittering zones of light; by day
they would have seemingly provided glimpses of the crystalline
interior of the Earth. In Wandering Earth Mounds and Gravel Paths,
paths would have wound around water tanks and runways, creating
what looks in the drawing like a vast spider’s web for catching
airplanes (see figure 25). All of these proposals respected and
highlighted the existing infrastructure and would have appeared
very different to beholders at ground level and in the air.
Passengers waiting in departure lounges were to be able to see the
art around the airfield in continuous television transmissions.
FIGURE 25. Robert Smithson, drawing for Wandering Earth Mounds and Gravel Paths,
1967.

While working for TAMS, Smithson invited Carl Andre, Robert

Morris, and Sol LeWitt to develop related projects of their own.
LeWitt already had some experience of megastructures from his
time at the outset of his career in the architectural practice of I. M.
Pei. Smithson presented their proposals in “Towards the
Development of an Air Terminal Site” in Artforum in June 1967 and
again in the essay “Aerial Art” in Studio International in 1969 (he
also made a couple of sketches for an unrealized exhibition of
Aerial Art).219 In the first of these essays, Smithson uses the term
earth works for the first time: “The ‘boring,’ like other ‘earth
works,’ is becoming more and more important to artists.
Pavements, holes, trenches, mounds, heaps, paths, ditches, roads,
terraces, etc., all have an esthetic potential.”220
Morris proposed Earth Mound, a circular structure with a radius
of 984 feet (300 meters). Andre planned either a crater, made by
dropping a ton of explosives from a height of 1.8 miles (3
kilometers), or an area planted with bluebonnets, the state flower
of Texas. Andre’s first idea has an obvious connection with the
American bombing of North Vietnam, which was then at its height.
It also reflects the connection between airfields and the weapons
industry in general. It is reasonable to assume that Andre knew of
Reyner Banham’s essay “The Obsolescent Airport,” which
hypothesizes that air travel was a by-product of the armaments
industry and that passenger planes were nothing more than
military bombers that had not made the grade.221 LeWitt, for his
part, came up with an invisible intervention: a small chest with
secret contents would be concealed inside a larger cube of
concrete at a secret location. On 1 July 1968, in the garden of a
private collector in the Netherlands, he realized a smaller version
of this proposal, now titled Buried Cube Containing an Object of
Importance but Little Value.
Smithson’s title “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal
Site” immediately recalls the essay “Towards a Clarified Aesthetic,”
written by the architectural critic Raymond Spurrier in 1962.
Taking Heathrow Airport in London as his focus, Spurrier considers
ways of making sense of the evergrowing disorganization at any
major airport. He compares this kind of airport to an exhibition that
millions of people see each day.222 In his view, architects should
keep well away from the airport’s functional elements. These either
speak for themselves or could, with minor interventions, be
incorporated into an artistic concept. In support of this line of
reasoning, he points to the aesthetic potential of a radar dish and of
“permanent earthbanks, originally built also as noise deflectors.”223
His essay is illustrated with a series of photographs, titled “A
Detailed Topography of the Landscape of Hysteria: London-
Heathrow,” of parking lots, works of art, advertising, traffic signs,
and plantings. These snapshots—mostly square like Smithson’s
later Instamatic photos—have ironic-sounding captions. It is
perfectly possible that Spurrier’s essay influenced Smithson’s style
of illustration in “The Monuments of Passaic” and Graham’s in
“Homes for America”—even if neither shared Spurrier’s
technoeuphoria. For Spurrier, the most pressing need was to devise
an entirely new form of landscape:

Because it is hopeless to try to absorb such a disruptive

complex into an existing landscape, particularly a flat one,
there is a clear case for creating a fresh, self-contained
environment—a special twentieth-century jet age landscape
which could be as exhilarating as the idea of jet travel itself
and a scenic element in its own right. With this to be looking
at, there would be no earthly reason why the man on the
ground could not share vicariously in the achievements of
the age.224

Smithson’s in-depth encounter with the world of the

megastructure allowed him to develop a feel for the quantitative,
financial, and above all temporal dimensions of that order of
project. In “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” he
enthuses over sites that TAMS had already realized—for instance,
dockland complexes in Chicago, Anchorage, and Aruba. He equates
these projects, which arose from the movements of ships and
freight, with works of art and in a sense prefigures the notion of
“ruins in reverse”—which features in his later essay “The
Monuments of Passaic”—when he draws attention to the
construction process, which consists of a sequence of phases, “thus
constituting a whole ‘series’ of works of art from the ground up.
Land surveying and preliminary building, if isolated into discrete
stages, may be viewed as an array of art works that vanish as they
develop.”225 He also anticipates the discussion that was to emerge
in the 1980s concerning the changing relationship of art and
architecture: “Art today is no longer an architectural afterthought,
or an object to attach to a building after it is finished, but rather a
total engagement with the building process from the ground up and
from the sky down.”226

A NONSITE (AN INDOOR EARTHWORK)

When Smithson started to devise his Land Reclamation projects in

the early 1970s, he drew on the experience he had gained with
TAMS. However, the most direct outcome of his work as an artistic
advisor was his invention of Nonsites, most of which he created
during the course of 1968.227 His first Nonsite went on display at
the exhibition Earthworks, conceived by Smithson and Virginia
Dwan, at the Dwan Gallery in October 1968. It also featured in his
solo exhibition Nonsites, in February 1969 at the same venue. The
special quality of the Nonsites was that they allowed Smithson to
combine findings from his excursions (previously recorded only in
his essays) with the formal vocabulary of his quasi-Minimalist
sculptures and to present these in a gallery space.
Smithson came up with the idea of Nonsites following the
collapse of his proposed Aerial Art projects and the subsequent
failed attempt to acquire land in New Jersey for realizing the
Earthworks—asphalt sculptures, water ditches, and gravel patches
—he had designed for the airport project. In early 1967 Dwan had
unsuccessfully approached the relevant authorities concerning the
possible purchase of some land for this purpose.228 On an excursion
to Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey in January 1968, Smithson
—in the company of Dwan, Nancy Holt, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre,
Robert Morris, and Mary Peacock—had visited an old six-sided
airfield with six sand tracks running out from the center.229 For
Smithson this location had a specific aura: “This place was in a
state of equilibrium, it had a kind of tranquility and it was
discontinuous from the surrounding area because of its stunted
pine trees.”230 The six-sided airfield also called to mind the
crystalline structures that so fascinated him. It seems that his first
idea was to realize a large-format asphalt sculpture in situ.
However, state authorities owned the airfield, and since it had to be
available to emergency services to combat forest fires, it could not
be used for an artistic intervention. Smithson photographed the
runways, their vanishing points out of sight due to the slight
undulations in the terrain.231 Finally, he decided to “transfer” the
site into a gallery space by means of a hexagonal map, a descriptive
text, and a floor sculpture. Looking back, Dwan described this
solution as very much a last resort.232
The work was titled A Nonsite (An Indoor Earthwork) (later
retitled A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey). Placed on a
hexagonal white base, of the kind used for architectural models,
the piece is in effect divided into six segments, each with five blue-
painted aluminum troughs, increasing in height and width as they
fan outward and filled with sand from the airfield at Pine Barrens
(see figure 26). At the center is a six-sided container also filled with
sand. The work includes the hexagonal photo of a map and a
description of the site. Robert Hobbs described this documentation
as “expanded title”; later Nonsites also included photographs,
additional maps, and literary sources integrated into the
descriptive text.233 Caroline Jones makes the point that these
various items of documentation were not merely “parts” of the
work of art but in fact indispensible components in the dialectic of
site and Nonsite.234 Without them the sculptural elements of the
Nonsites would be mere fragments. Smithson’s text for the 1968
Nonsite reads:

FIGURE 26. Robert Smithson, A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey (initially titled A
Nonsite [An Indoor Earthwork]), 1968, mixed-media construction with photograph and
map; construction 65 × 65 × 12 in. (166 × 166 × 30 cm), Virginia Dwan Collection.
 A NONSITE (An Indoor Earthwork)
31 sub-divisions based on a hexagonal “airfield” in the
Woodmansie Quadrangle—New Jersey (Topographic) map.
Each sub-division of the Nonsite contains sand from the site
shown on the map. Tours between the Nonsite and the site
are possible. The red dot on the map is the place where the
sand was collected.235

Dwan described the Earthworks exhibition as an “anthology”

designed to inform the art world about the progress of Smithson’s
work, since no suitable terrain had been found in New Jersey.236
Accordingly, the making of the first Nonsites looks very much like a
pragmatic compromise. If Smithson wanted to build on what he had
already achieved in the art world, he had to react to the increasing
demand for (group) exhibitions in art museums and produce
tangible, exhibitable objects. He had to abandon the gradually
sinking ship of Minimalism. And above all he had to find an
alternative to the essays that he had previously used to mediate his
excursions. Dwan’s view that the realization of Earthworks in some
distant location would be the ideal solution, with the gallery
presentation a “last choice,” suggests that in a sense the Nonsites
were a preliminary phase of the Earthworks. But this line of
reasoning is fundamentally teleological and fails to take into
account the fact that the Earthworks are rooted in the dialectics of
site and Nonsite and are not complete without their filmed
companion pieces. Gary Shapiro rightly makes the point that the
Nonsites are not “simply an intermediate step in Smithson’s
development, linking his quasi-minimalist gallery pieces to the later
earthworks; such a narrative would suppose that he found his true
goal in the actual landscape.”237
Smithson set great store by realization. He did not regard ideas
and plans, concepts and projects as works of art in their own right,
worthy of exhibition. This marks a significant difference between
his approach and that of Conceptual artists, who, going back to
Duchamp, preferred ideas to tangible works of art. Unlike LeWitt,
Lawrence Weiner, and Edward Kienholz, whom, like the late Yves
Klein, the Dwan Gallery regularly exhibited, Smithson was not
interested in concepts as such. In his mind, site and Nonsite were
inextricably—“dialectically,” as he put it—connected, with no
hierarchical distinction:

I was sort of interested in the dialogue between the indoor

and the outdoor and on my own, after getting involved in it
this way, I developed a method or a dialectic that involved
what I call site and nonsite. The site, in a sense, is the
physical, raw reality—the earth or the ground that we are
really not aware of when we are in an interior room or
studio or something like that—and so I decided that I would
set limits in terms of this dialogue (it’s a back and forth
rhythm that goes between indoors and outdoors), and as a
result I went and instead of putting something on the
landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer the
land indoors, to the nonsite, which is an abstract
container.238

Smithson was adamant that site and Nonsite were equally

valuable, with no hierarchy of “actual” place and its representation.
On the contrary, together they formed “a dual unity . . . a bipolar
rhythm between mind and matter. You can’t say it’s all earth and
you can’t say it’s all concept. It’s both. Everything is two things
that converge.”239 His view of the dialectic of the site and its
Nonsite equivalent can be compared to the didactic dioramas in
museums of natural history, or with cartography, or even
photography. His choice of sites was far from arbitrary. His
preference was for sites that were either in a state of decay or not
yet finished, which seemed to point to either the past or the future.
This explains his fascination with industrial ruins, construction
sites, and natural wonders such as the slowly evaporating, highly
saline Mono Lake and the Great Salt Lake. Henry Sayre rightly
points out that it is worth considering Smithson’s work in terms of
performance, in particular when he engages with “events deeply
implicated in the temporal dimension, things which fade away,
dissolve from view.”240
The old airfield at Pine Barrens also had the feel of a ruin, as “a
place where a piece should be but isn’t.”241 It dated to an age
before the invention of the jet engine, when airports were still
“airfields,” as Reyner Banham puts it.242 By the mid-1930s, as
Banham tells us, these “airfields” (Smithson also used quotation
marks in his expanded title for A Nonsite) were becoming a thing of
the past. The new, heavier, faster airplanes could land in any wind
conditions but needed a solid runway. So “narrow concrete strips”
replaced the fields. It may well be that the nameless, barely used
state-owned airfield at Pine Barrens struck Smithson as the polar
opposite of the as-yet-unopened private commercial airport—
superlative in so many ways—in faraway Texas. One day this most
modern of airports would also become defunct. In his role as an
artistconsultant Smithson had seen firsthand the short-term nature
of projections for megastructures such as this. The Nonsite can
thus also be read as an allegorical representation of the rapid aging
of whatever happens to be the latest technology. As Banham puts it,
any examples of the latest technology cannot be expected to last
long, for “like all monuments in a technological culture” they are
“by definition dead, superseded before they were designed.”
Smithson chose the remote site at Pine Barrens after what he
called “low level scanning”—echoing Anton Ehrenzweig’s
hypotheses on childlike, artistic creativity243—which allowed him to
sense, almost unawares, the potential of a site.244 Site selection
thus in effect became a new mode of artistic activity. Smithson’s
formulation is reminiscent of statements Allan Kaprow and Claes
Oldenburg made some years earlier regarding their searches for
suitable locations for Happenings; at the same time it also connects
with what came to be known as mapping in the 1990s:

“Site Selection Study” in terms of art is just beginning. The

investigation of a specific site is a matter of extracting
concepts out of existing sense-data through direct
perceptions. Perception is prior to conception, when it
comes to site selection or definition. One does not impose,
but rather exposes the site—be it interior or exterior.
Interiors may be treated as exteriors or vice versa. The
unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists.245
 Pine Barrens was far from an intact natural wonder. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had been exploited for a
variety of industries—glass, charcoal, and cast iron. In a sense it
was the reverse of the gleaming metropolis of New York. The area
was marred by gaping holes where raw materials had been
extracted before being refined and removed to the city. In the more
distant past, during the Miocene epoch, Pine Barrens had been an
isolated island when the (Atlantic) ocean still covered the
surrounding area.

LIMITS
As it happens, Smithson signed and dated his “expanded titles.”
However, because their form—the photograph, the text, the detail
from a map—was clearly specified by Smithson and related to both
the sculptural Nonsite and the site identified by Smithson, their
function is different from that of, for instance, the printed
announcements for Kaprow’s Happenings or Klein’s certificates for
his Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle.246 Kaprow’s scores,
Klein’s certificates, and even Kienholz’s Concept Tableaux are
means of representation that use traditional modes of
communication. Smithson’s expanded titles are about
representation. When Smithson formulated his Nonsites, he
created an alternative to the conventional notion of
(communicative) representation as a transparent, reciprocal,
smooth exchange of meaning in the sense of the then-current
media theory as expounded by Marshall McLuhan.247 Smithson did
not see language as a means of achieving transparency or
clarification. On the contrary, he regarded it as something that
settles on objects like a coat of paint, forming an opaque crust. His
drawing A Heap of Language (1966) represents this in the form of
layer upon layer of terms and phrases referring to language as such
(see figure 27). And in his essay “A Museum of Language in the
Vicinity of Art” he talks of using language to block channels of
communication: “Here language ‘covers’ rather than ‘discovers’ its
sites and situations. Here language ‘closes’ rather than ‘discloses’
doors to utilitarian interpretations and explanations.”248 Therefore
it is not enough to read a Nonsite by Smithson, as Lawrence
Alloway did, as a “signifier of the absent site.”249 A Nonsite
operates not as a pointer to another, distant site but rather as an
equivalent to or “placeholder” for it. It is possible to focus on a
Nonsite, but not on a site. Alloway quoted Smithson: “There’s no
way of focusing on a particular place.”250 For Smithson the Nonsite
was the “abstract equivalent of the site,” not its representation:251

FIGURE 27. Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language, 1966, pencil on paper, 6 × 22 in. (16 ×
56 cm).

No sites exist at all; they are completely lost in time, so that

the earth maps point to nonexistent sites, whereas the
nonsites point to existing sites but tend to negate them. . . .
The sites show the effects of time, sort of a sinking into
timelessness. When I get to a site that strikes the kind of
timeless chord, I use it. . . . A site at zero degree, where the
material strikes the mind, where absences become apparent,
appeals to me, where the disintegrating of space and time
seems very apparent. Sort of an end of selfhood . . . the ego
vanishes for a while.252

This dialectic of site and Nonsite resonates with elements of

contemporaneous literary theory and semiotics. Smithson’s
leanings toward literature and philosophy might be the reason why
the first comprehensive monograph on him was written by a
philosopher, namely Gary Shapiro, and not a specialist in art
history.253 The artist himself constantly made mention of his
interest in literature and science. The list of titles in his personal
library, as far as it had survived when the list was compiled, has
been published in full, and his estate in the Archives of American
Art holds its contents.254 There are evident affinities between the
style and form of Smithson’s texts and those of Jorge Luis Borges,
William Carlos Williams, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Pynchon.
In what follows here, I should like to draw a comparison
between Smithson’s writing and a work by Jacques Derrida from
the same time, and examine Smithson’s use of expanded titles in
light of the écriture of Derrida, who started giving lectures in the
United States in 1966 and who first introduced this term in his
1971 lecture “Signature, Evénement, Contexte” in his critique of
the traditional concept of communication:255

The semantic horizon which habitually governs the notion of

communication is exceeded or punctured by the intervention
of writing [écriture], that is of a dissemination which cannot
be reduced to a polysemia. Writing is read, and “in the last
analysis” does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to
the decoding of a meaning or truth.256

Derrida’s écriture is thus read in the same way that one of

Smithson’s sites is read, without its meaning or truth being
hermeneutically deciphered. Smithson expressed the contingency
of any such reading and above all the impossibility of fully
conveying the results to the viewer in deliberately vague terms. On
the label of A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey he wrote that
“tours between the Nonsite and the site are possible.”257 And from
the expanded title of Nonsite (Palisades, Edgewater, New Jersey)
(1968) we learn that “between the site and the Nonsite one may
lapse into places of little organization and no direction.”258 This is
clearly comparable to Derrida’s belief that the concepts of
communication, representation, and expression are inextricably
intertwined, with the result that any critique of the traditional
notion of communication also involves critiques of representation
and expression.259
In the same way that écriture, according to Derrida, destroys
the traditional notion of communication, the accumulation of
pointers in Smithson’s Nonsites generates an irreducible
complexity. For Smithson there was an unbridgeable abyss between
site and Nonsite.260 This explains his predilection for interrupted
communication systems. In the expanded title for Nonsite
(Palisades, Edgewater, New Jersey) he describes an old cable car
system that once connected a fairground and a ferry landing stage
but was closed in 1938 (the year he was born). The cable car
system, the ultimate apparatus for linear communication, was now,
thirty years later, no more than a ruin: “What was once a straight
track has become a path of rocky crags—the site has lost its
system.”261
Smithson’s description of the cable car is very much in the spirit
of Derrida’s critique of communication as a smooth transfer of
meaning. For Derrida, this notion is untenable for two reasons:
first, the concept of proper meaning is itself problematic, and
second, the transportation metaphor that forms the basis of the
notion of communication lets us think we understand what
communication is while obscuring its true workings.262 Similarly
skeptical, Smithson, for his part, repeatedly made the point that he
was not interested in processes of representation as such. As for
his dialectically related Nonsites and sites, there was “no
representational aspect between those two things.”263 On the
contrary, any mediation took place concretely and directly by dint
of the containers, maps, photographs, and descriptions that are
omnipresent in his work.
It is only at first sight that his treatment of boundaries might
appear to be at odds with the complaint he and Allan Kaprow made
that “acts and thoughts” are fenced in.264 When Smithson
questioned the use of off-the-peg concepts and categories by art
critics, his target was the voluntarily blinkered who insisted on
fitting their subject matter into a rigid, simplistic schema. When he
talked of the limits of art, however, it was an indication of his
interest in there being certain rules and, by definition, of his
skepticism regarding a deregulated, “natural” state.265 He returned
again and again to the problem of boundaries and limits, as in the
following exchange with Anthony Robbin:
 SMITHSON: Yes, I think the major issue now in art is what are
the boundaries. For too long artists have taken the
canvas and stretchers as given, the limits.
The motivation for doing that is not to expand the
ROBBIN:

system. You are not doing it for the sake of the system?
I’m doing it to expose the fact that it is a system,
SMITHSON:

therefore taking away the vaulted mystery that is

supposed to reside in it. The artifice is plainly an artifice.
I want to de-mythify things.
ROBBIN: People will be frustrated in their desire for certainty,
but maybe they will get something more after that
frustration passes.
Well, it’s a problem all the way round, and I don’t
SMITHSON:

suspect we will work our way out of it.266

For Smithson the idea of there being no limits was simply an

illusion, and he was interested above all in articulating the limits
that he, for one, recognized: “All legitimate art deals with limits.
Fraudulent art feels that it has no limits. The trick is to locate those
elusive limits. You are always running against those limits, but
somehow they never show themselves.”267 His misgivings
regarding the idea of expansion as a value as such and his
resistance to the ideology of limitlessness come across clearly in his
repeated efforts to sustain the limits laid down by convention. The
idea of going beyond these limits, of entering an “expanded field,”
as Rosalind Krauss described it in her influential essay “Sculpture
in the Expanded Field,” indirectly affirms the existing limits,
without rendering them visible. Smithson states in no uncertain
terms that there is no way past the existing framework:

I don’t think you can escape the primacy of the rectangle. . .

. There’s no exit, no road to utopia, no great beyond in terms
of exhibition space. I see it as an inevitability; of going
toward the fringes, towards the broken, the entropic. But
even that has limits. Every single perception is essentially
 determinate. It isn’t a question of form or anti-form. It’s a
limitation. I’m not at all interested in the problems of form
and anti-form, but in limits and how these limits destroy
themselves and disappear. It’s not a matter of what I’d like
to do, but how things result. There are strict limits, but they
never stop until you do.268

The system, or order, that was absent at the site was

constructed by Smithson at the Nonsite, that is to say, in the
exhibition situation, where the artificiality and capriciousness of
any system became all too apparent to the viewer. His containers
fulfilled the same function as sets in Alfred Hitchcock’s films or the
backdrops in Jacopo da Pontormo’s Mannerist paintings.269 The
metal bins used in the nonsites made clear that the materials, such
as rocks and salt crystals, at the site were inexhaustible and could
always be only partially contained. As Shapiro aptly remarked,
Smithson wanted neither to suppress nor to celebrate this
unfathomability in his art but rather to “draw upon it and disclose
it.”270 He collected in these containers the fragments “that are
experienced in the physical abyss of raw matter.”271 He came
across a particularly spectacular abyss in October 1968 while
exploring the area around Cornell University in the run-up to the
exhibition Earth Art, organized by Thomas W. Leavitt and
Willoughby Sharp. The site, half a mile underground and accessible
only at one’s own risk, was a salt mine that the Cayuga Rock Salt
Company owned, which he placed eight mirrors inside and then
photographed. In the exhibition space in the museum, he created a
floor sculpture with mirrors placed on a mound of rock salt. For
him the route between the museum and the mine was wholly
indeterminate—“an abyss between the abstraction and the site; a
kind of oblivion.” Only the mirror trail that he constructed,
photographed, and immediately removed stabilized the “chaos
between the two points.”272
 Earthworks

ENTROPY

coordinates, mirrors, and rectangles delineated

SMITHSON’S CONTAINERS,

an intangible quality that he referred to as entropy. With its origins

in thermodynamics, entropy signifies the natural, irrevocable
process of change from order to disorder; in Smithson’s use it also
represented the opposite of “the usual notion of a mechanistic
world view.”273 He used it synonymously with concepts such as
dedifferentiation (as defined by Anton Ehrenzweig), chaos, and
disorder.274 In a sense entropy could be said to have replaced the
word nature in Smithson’s vocabulary, for in his mind nature was
no more than a fiction of sorts.
What Smithson had set out in “The Crystal Land,” a parable for
a wide audience in the May 1966 Harper’s Bazaar, he expounded
on in June 1966 for the more specialized readership of Artforum. In
“Entropy and the New Monuments” he speculates on the meaning
of entropy and wonders whether the large-scale sculptures by
Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Frank Stella,
Paul Thek, and Larry Bell might be monuments to it. In his view
they had nothing to do with the widespread euphoric belief in
progress but rather reflected the consciousness that the edifice of
technological progress would ultimately collapse.275 As he puts it,
artists “celebrate what physicists call ‘entropy’ or ‘energy
drain.’”276 Entropy as a quantitative accumulation, an excessive
load, was his grim vision of the future, as seen in the dark fantasies
of New Wave science fiction, the “slurbs,” and the “lugubrious
complexity” of discount centers and exemplified in the blackout of
9 November 1965, the most serious in history, that affected the
northeastern United States.277 However, Smithson did not confine
his use of the term entropy to technological phenomena but also
applied it to cultural phenomena such as information, which—in his
paraphrase of A. J. Ayer—communicated not only truth but also
falsehoods.278
In contrast to the defenders of growth, with their faith in
technology and utopian scenarios, plans, and diagrams, Smithson
dreamed of decay: “Unlike Buckminster Fuller, I’m interested in
collaborating with entropy. . . . After all, wreckage is often more
interesting than structure. At least, not as depressing as Dymaxion
domes. Utopian saviors we can do without.” 279 However, his
interest in entropy as reality, the backdrop against which the farce
of progress plays out, had nothing to do with nihilism or fatalism. In
fact entropy was also of interest to him because it demonstrated
just how far removed self-referential art was from reality. His
notion of entropy is entirely comparable with what Allan Kaprow
generally referred to as “life”—that is to say, a reality that art had
to face up to and collide with. Smithson thus implies a connection
between art and the historic processes that were making
themselves felt in the 1960s. In his last interview he described the
energy crisis as an entropic process.280 His attitude was a corollary
of the recession that hit in the early 1970s, whose economic origins
had long preoccupied cultural historians. Smithson mentioned that
he had been reading Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s The Entropy
Law and the Economic Process. Georgescu-Roegen took the view
that “the Entropy Law itself emerges as the most economic in
nature of all natural laws.”281 Moreover, he regarded the law of
irrevocability as widely relevant because it provided an explanation
for the fact that everything runs short in the end. At the same time,
as a rule people did not want to believe in it, because it “concerns
one of man’s weaknesses, namely, our reluctance to recognize our
limitations in relation to space, to time, and to matter and energy. .
. . Alternatively, man is prone to believe that there must exist some
form of energy with a self-perpetuating power.”282
In America’s Impasse, Alan Wolfe describes just such a reality-
denying situation in the United States after the dollar had replaced
sterling as the leading international reserve currency in the
1930s.283 He outlines the dilemma of “nationalistic
internationalism” that emerged toward the end of the Second
World War. According to Wolfe, the decision of whether the United
States should open or close its doors to the world economy was so
important that it was never made. The idea of an international New
Deal, which the Bretton Woods agreement superseded in 1944, was
in constant conflict in the following decades with the interests of
major conservative American capitalists, who, like Walter Benn
Michaels’s goldbugs, wanted to hold back growth in the world
economy to benefit their domestic economy: “Bretton Woods . . .
was not the culmination of a New Deal in international economics,
but a return to power of those discredited by the Great Depression,
although this time in an international guise.”284
Wolfe shows that the problem for nationalistic internationalism
was that there was not sufficient liquidity in the world economy.
Under the sway of conservative nationalism, the United States
delegation “rejected at Bretton Woods [John Maynard] Keynes’s
proposal to increase the amount of money available to the
world.”285 But since the United States had decided to establish a
fixed conversion rate between gold and dollars, the rapidly
increasing need for capital in the world economy became a need for
dollars. Besides its role as a national currency, the dollar also
became the leading international reserve currency. The paradoxical
consequence of this system—which Wolfe suggests was never
intended in this form—was that the world economy could grow only
if the United States were willing to shoulder considerable deficits:
“For what may have been the first time in the history of world
trade, the growth and stability of the international economy
required that the major participant be in deficit.”286
As a consequence of the Bretton Woods agreement, private
capital—in the form of gold and dollars—started to flow out of the
country. America’s prosperity was now mysteriously tied to the gold
under lock and key at Fort Knox. Between 1950 and 1956 the
annual United States budget deficit was fairly constant, at around
1.6 billion dollars; in 1958 and 1959 it shot up to 3.8 billion. In the
1960s, not least in view of the cost of the Vietnam War, which
forced the United States to borrow money, European nations—
above all Germany and Switzerland—and Japan took the
opportunity to buy up massive amounts of gold. Whereas the
United States had held 49.8 percent of the world’s gold reserves in
1950, by 1970 this had dwindled to a mere 15.7 percent, as
opposed to the 37.7 percent that was now in Japan and Europe. In
other words, during the 1960s the United States lost its monopoly
on gold.287
In 1967 the outflow of gold reached a high point. The
newspapers described the situation as a “raid on Fort Knox,” and
President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a speech at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, Maryland, had to admit that the gold
reserves of the United States were ebbing away. This gold drain
almost imperceptibly heralded the severe economic crisis that was
to hit the United States in the 1970s and that led to Richard Nixon
abandoning the fixed exchange rate and the gold standard in the
summer of 1971. The American economy, and with it American
society, felt the impact on what for thirty years had looked like
inviolable supremacy. As Galbraith put it:

So now, in the decade of the ’60s, the great gold hoard of

the United States, with history going back to 1914, began to
melt away. . . . Better Switzerland, even better Germany. In
the late ’60s the outward flow of gold from the United States
became a flood. . . . The end came in August 1971. . . . Not
many noticed what would once have been an heroic act. . . .
Men did not speak of the final abandonment of the gold
standard. Instead it was said that the gold window had
closed. . . . In consequence, the dollar was now a weak
currency. . . . Negotiations now got under way to arrange
the devaluation and restabilization of the dollar. These were
held in the late autumn of 1971 in the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington. Eventually new exchange rates
were agreed on.288

I therefore view the demand for monumental sculptures and the

ascendancy of terms such as hugeness, presentness, and
wholeness, which reached a high point in 1967, not only as signs of
the triumph of American art but also as symbolic attempts to dam
the outward flow of gold. Wolfe has shown that in the postwar
years in the United States, economic growth and the ever-rising
standard of living compensated for the lack of a welfare program—
and bridged the menacing gap between rich and poor. This also
provided the backdrop to the tendency toward formal expansion in
American art during that period, which artists like Robert
Grosvenor, Walter De Maria, and Michael Heizer went along with
and others such as Peter Hutchinson, Kaprow, and Dennis
Oppenheim commented on more or less sardonically. Indeed, it
seems there is a parallel to be drawn here between the fiscal
paradox of nationalistic internationalism and the dominance of
American art, which needed the legitimation that came from
international recognition but resisted that very thing on principle.
It may even be that the European enthusiasm for Minimalism in the
1970s and 1980s was a sign of that continent’s triumphant
(re)establishment of cultural supremacy and economic potential.
The fact that in 1956 Smithson spent his time in the army at Fort
Knox, painting posters and creating watercolors for the mess hall,
as it were making an artistic contribution to the—ultimately
ineffective—protection of the American gold monopoly, casts an
intriguing sidelight on the wider issue.289 However, during that
period the omnipotence of the United States came to a halt, for
economic reasons. It reached its “limits to growth”—to recall the
book The Limits to Growth (see introduction). The rationale of
Minimalism can be interpreted as an aesthetic transference of the
desire to cling to the utopia of the gold standard as a reaction to
inflation.
From 1969 on, following on his Nonsites, Smithson produced a
sequence of works that show him engaging with entropy. Unlike the
Nonsites, these had no dialectic between a present physical object
and a distant place and were almost all presented as photographs.
Asphalt Rundown was the first piece in which Smithson worked
with flows. It was commissioned by the Galleria l’Attico in Rome
and realized in October 1969. A series of preparatory drawings and
photographs and documentary film footage of the action still
survive. A truckload of asphalt was tipped out over the waste heap
at a gravel quarry. As the asphalt flowed downward, the eroded
surface of the waste tip guided it; at the same time, it became an
imprint of the erosion and brought that process to a halt, since it
was Smithson’s intention that this work should last for some time
(see figure 28).290
FIGURE 28. Robert Smithson, Asphalt Rundown, Rome, October 1969.

In January 1970 he realized Glue Pour—originally planned for

December 1969—for the exhibition 955000 at the Vancouver Art
Gallery, curated by Lucy Lippard. This show—which had the
population of Vancouver as its title—was one of a pair, the other
being 557087, presented at the Seattle Art Museum. For
Smithson’s piece, a barrel of red glue was poured down the slope of
a garbage dump. After a short time the water-based glue seeped
into the ground (see figure 29).
FIGURE 29. Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, Vancouver, 1970.

There is clearly a connection here with the work being produced

by the painters of the New York School, specifically Jackson
Pollock’s Drippings. Smithson and many other writers made this
point. However, besides connecting with the recent past, these
works also related to the immediate present, namely some of the
floor sculptures that were being made at almost exactly the same
time. Lynda Benglis, for one, was pouring colored latex into molds
and directly on her studio floor, as in her floor sculpture Bounce
(1969). Richard Serra flung hot lead on the ground for Casting
(1969), Carl Andre had already scattered plastic blocks on the floor
for Spill (1966), and in 1969 he curled a strip of metal on the floor
for Tin Ribbon. In these floor pieces the focus was on either the
production process or the form as the outcome of the specific
characteristics of the material used. Once again, it is more
productive to concentrate on the differences than on common
ground. Uniquely among his contemporaries, Smithson specifically
wanted not to constrain or control the formation of the work but to
let it run its course: “I am not interested in art works that suggest
‘process’ within the metaphysical limits of the neutral room. . . .
Confined process is no process at all. It would be better to disclose
the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom.”291
When Smithson turned his attention to solid materials, he
created even more powerful effects than with liquid media such as
asphalt, concrete, and glue. On his visit to Vancouver in December
1969, he devised Vancouver Project: Island of Broken Glass (later
Island of Broken Concrete).292 His idea was to shower a small,
uninhabited island—actually a large rock protruding from the water
—with broken glass, and Douglas Christmas, who owned the Ace
Galleries in Vancouver and Venice, California, supported the
project. The plan was to unload a hundred tons of broken industrial
glass from California onto the island on 2 February 1970. Smithson
wanted to shatter the glass, so that it would shimmer like emeralds.
Within a few months erosion would have worn down the sharp
edges, and within a few hundred years all the glass would have
turned to sand. Two railroad freight cars set off from California
with the glass. However, when they arrived at the Canadian border
following mounting public protests, the Canadian environmental
authorities refused the delivery entry. The mobilization of these
protests was one of the first actions by a local group of
environmentalists who, not long afterward, in 1971, founded the
organization Greenpeace.293
The debate surrounding Smithson’s project revolved around the
possibility that the shattered glass might drive away the island’s
presumed bird population. It was impossible to prove this one way
or the other by arguing, but public opposition to the “American
beer bottles” was constantly gaining momentum. In response
Smithson adjusted his proposal and suggested that the fragmented
remains of a concrete building replace the glass and that the new
title be Island of Broken Concrete or Island of Dismantled Building.
When this version was also deemed unacceptable, he considered
having a cargo vessel circumnavigate the island with the broken
concrete, an idea that led to his Barge of Sulfur (Panama Canal)
(1970) and Juggernaut (1971).

PARTIALLY BURIED WOODSHED

At the same time as the 955000 exhibition in Vancouver, the
Creative Arts Festival took place on the campus of Kent State
University in Ohio; both Robert Smithson and Allan Kaprow were
invited to participate. Having found a small shed, an outbuilding
from a farm that the university owned and stored wood, soil, and
gravel in, Smithson arranged for a bulldozer to tip earth over it,
twenty loads in all, until the roof beams splintered and gave way.
The work was realized on 22 January 1970, after which he
immediately donated it to the university with the stipulation that
“everything in the shed is part of the art and should not be
removed. The entire work of art is subject to weathering which
should be considered part of the work. The value of this work is
$10,000.00. The work should be considered permanent.”294
Partially Buried Woodshed was thus explicitly planned as a
permanent, valuable work that was to be left at the mercy of the
elements but nevertheless maintained by the university’s Art
Department. In that sense it was different from other, ephemeral
interventions that Smithson had created outdoors following his
permanent Nonsites. Like all his large-scale Earthworks from 1970
onward, this was intended to last. Part of the fame of the Woodshed
is due to its proximity to the site of the most tragic moment in the
student protests of that era. In May 1970, just a few months after
the work was created, members of the Ohio National Guard shot
and killed four students during a demonstration against the
American invasion of Cambodia. On 28 March 1975 an arsonist
caused serious damage to the shed. In the 1980s, despite protests
from the art community, the shed was demolished.

SPIRAL JETTY

Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) has become the leading icon
of Earth Art (see figure 30). No other example has been reproduced
so often as it—usually in the form of one of the colored shots,
looking toward the shore, that Gianfranco Gorgoni took from a low-
flying helicopter. The weathered volcanic cones on the shore and
the nearby remains of past industrial exploitation of the lake are
generally outside the field of vision in these shots, or at their far
edge. This excision of the context meant that Spiral Jetty is
generally taken to be a scenic sculpture in an intact landscape. The
film The Spiral Jetty that Smithson produced has also become part
of that missing context—it is much less well known than the work
and is often mistakenly regarded as a documentary account of the
work’s making.295 It is mainly since the Dia Art Foundation took
over the work from the artist’s estate in 1999 that the general view
of Spiral Jetty has changed.

FIGURE 30. Robert Smithson on Spiral Jetty, 1970. Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Made from pieces of black basalt, white salt crystals, and mud,
the jetty— around sixteen and a half feet (five meters) wide and a
third of a mile (five hundred meters) long—curls inward, just above
the surface of the water, in the shallows of the red-tinged Great
Salt Lake. In barely a week in early April 1970, almost seven
thousand tons of material were excavated from the shoreline and
deposited into the lake. The Dwan Gallery paid the nine thousand
dollars of production costs.296 The Ace Gallery spent another nine
thousand dollars on the making of the thirty-five-minute, 16 mm
color film The Spiral Jetty, which was originally produced in an
edition of twenty, each to be sold along with a drawing by Smithson
for three hundred dollars.297 The film, shot during and after the
construction phase according to Smithson’s instructions, partly
from a helicopter, was first screened—simultaneously—at the Ace
Gallery in Vancouver and the Dwan Gallery in New York in
November 1970. Smithson said, “I consider the film a work of art in
itself—since it is about light, color, scale, etc.”298
In his essay “The Spiral Jetty,” Smithson described the long
process of site selection that preceded the construction work.299
When he set out he was specifically looking for a red lake and
eventually learned that there was red, bacterial discoloration on
the north shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. His initial intention
was to create an island. However, having reconnoitered the site,
Smithson decided to construct a jetty instead. He had worked with
spirals before, in Aerial Map—Proposal for Dallas-Fort Worth
Regional Airport (1967) and Gyrostasis (1968), for instance, but not
a jetty.
The jetty as a form arose from the traces of the industrial past of
that area, so to speak. As it happened, the tracks of the first U.S.
transcontinental railroad passed close by Smithson’s chosen site,
and the roadbed resembled a jetty. The Golden Spike National
Historic Site at Promontory Summit, Utah, commemorates the
moment when the two sections of the railroad finally met, on 10
May 1869. During the Second World War the tracks running north
of the Great Salt Lake were removed in order to adjust the route.
And at Rozel Point, just a few hundred yards from Spiral Jetty, are
the remains of a pier that once led straight out into the lake.
Reinforced with wooden stockades, this pier—declared a scenic
point in the 1990s by the local office of industrial archaeology—had
been built in the 1920s in connection with a failed attempt to
extract oil. The area is littered with rusty tanks, old barrels, and car
wrecks. Smithson was much less attracted to supposedly intact
landscapes than to places that had suffered industrial exploitation:
“The best sites for ‘earth art’ are sites that have been disrupted by
industry, reckless urbanization, or nature’s own devastation. . . .
Imposing cliffs and unimproved mesas could just as well be left
alone.”300 His provocative references to “imposing cliffs” and
“unimproved mesas” were aimed at spectacular works of art such
as Christo’s Wrapped Coast (1969) and Michael Heizer’s Double
Negative (1970).
Unlike the interventions by Christo and Heizer, Smithson’s jetty
was a direct response to the detritus of past attempts to exploit the
area. His work could be read as a commentary in the form of a
huge question mark in response to the exclamation mark—the pier
—left over from an earlier, heroic phase of industrialization. In fact,
it seems that the first version of Smithson’s jetty was not a spiral
but a straight line with a curved end, like the letter J. A number of
drawings document this much smaller version, which also included
a small artificial island.301 Having constructed a jetty according to
this plan, Smithson decided to remove the island and reuse its
materials to turn the end of the J into a spiral.
Bob Phillips, the project manager for the work’s construction,
remembered Smithson’s dissatisfaction with and immediate
decision to change the original, saying, “‘It’s not right. . . . We’ve
got to take this island out and we’ve got to make another loop out
of it.’”302 He also remembered that Smithson originally planned to
construct the jetty as two outer walls, made of lumps of lava,
holding gravel filler, not unlike the gravel- or sand-filled containers
in his Nonsites. However, Phillips persuaded him that this was not
technically viable and that they should instead construct a stone
core covered with pieces of basalt.303 Thus Spiral Jetty is both a
Nonsite—material from another site, the volcanic shoreline, placed
on a fragile base of salt deposits—and a site, which is
communicated by the film and the essays. This layering puts
viewers in a paradoxical situation, making it impossible for them to
step back from the work. Smithson cast himself in the role of
viewer in the film The Spiral Jetty, running along the freshly laid
jetty while followed by the camera in a helicopter, like Cary Grant
pursued by a plane in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
Smithson was keen to control and to document the construction
process. He acted like a client who put his trust in the hands of the
workers. He would not touch any machinery but would ram some
wooden posts to stake out the shape of Spiral Jetty. However,
Phillips recalls that his energy and charismatic presence inspired
the workers.304 At some point he even organized the construction
workers—prompting the project manager to remark that the crew
was “like an orchestra, with Robert Smithson as the conductor.”305
Smithson’s approach was very different from that of Heizer, who
laid the detonators for Double Negative and had himself
photographed at the controls of huge bulldozers. Smithson’s
studiedly dilettante interest in the construction process as such
was not going to see him mimicking the role of heroic laborer. His
chosen role was to be alert to any difficulties. He was particularly
fascinated by the risk posed by the thin salt bed. Boats avoided this
part of the lake because of the corrosive effect of the water’s high
salinity, and there was a constant danger that the construction
vehicles might break through the salt bed and sink into the mud. It
was possible to create a stable structure only by proceeding with
great caution: the machines edged forward little by little on the
foundations they were constructing.
The noise of the vehicles that Smithson described and the film
The Spiral Jetty recorded seems like another echo of J. G. Ballard’s
science fiction world. In The Wind from Nowhere an ever-
strengthening whirlwind encircles the earth, “a meteorological
phenomenon of unprecedented magnitude, a global cyclone
accelerating at a uniform rate.”306 In the face of this mysterious
wind’s threatened destruction of humankind, a construction
magnate named Hardoon erects a huge concrete pyramid.
Smithson’s account of the construction of Spiral Jetty recalls
Ballard’s description of the building of the pyramid:

Like gigantic robots assembling for some futuristic land

battle, the vast graders and tournadozers, walking draglines
and supertractors edged slowly toward each other. . . . With
a roar of racing clutches and exhausts, the huge vehicles
snapped into motion. Tracks skating in the soft earth,
wheels spinning, they plunged and jostled, the long lines
breaking into a mass of slamming metal.307

Smithson described Spiral Jetty as somehow holding together of

its own accord. Echoing William Carlos Williams’s maxim “Say it,
no ideas but in things,” he wrote, “No ideas, no concepts, no
systems, no structures, no abstractions could hold themselves
together in the actuality of that evidence. My dialectics of site and
nonsite whirled together in an indeterminate state, where solid and
liquid lost themselves in each other.”308 Spiral Jetty is thus far from
an abstraction or a reduction. It is, quite literally, an artificial
“project” that is legitimized by nothing other than its immediate
future and past. In Smithson’s hands the continuum of real space
separates out into the aggregate states of a temporal sequence.
The basalt pieces, which had formed from previously liquid magma,
now rest on layers of crystallized salt that had once been dissolved
in the water. The medium of real time, which Modernism treated as
a continuum, came to a spatial halt in Smithson’s art, formed into
rampant salt efflorescences, crystals, and petrified stone
formations.309 Smithson captured light, refracted by a red filter, in
film emulsion. But this captured sunlight risked destroying the
image by overexposure and blinding the camera. The burden of
meaning in the work’s materials brought Smithson’s construct to
the point of collapse, like the film, which “would end in
sunstroke.”310
In the same way that visual communication proves insufficient
for Spiral Jetty, so too does verbal communication. The
transposition of meaning from words to matter in early Smithson
works such as A Heap of Language (1966) and the Nonsites could
not work here. And whereas it is possible to draw on texts
concerned with the theory of language (such as those by Jacques
Derrida) to convey a sense of the Nonsites, this approach would not
do justice to Spiral Jetty. Its complex spatiality is better addressed
in light of the thinking of Henri Lefebvre, as set out in The
Production of Space (1974). Lefebvre, unlike most of his colleagues
in linguistics, does not assert the primacy of language:
“[Languages] are clumsy in the way they give utterance to social
time, to spatial practice.”311 His particular interest is in what he
calls “the hegemony of space,” explained in terms of “unitary
theory,” which is not, however, intended as the basis of a system:
“We are concerned, in other words, with a theory beyond system-
building.”312 His analysis of “monumental space” can be usefully
applied to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed:
 Analysis of social space—in this case, monumental space—
brings out many differences: what appears simple at first
now emerges as full of complexities. These are situated
neither in the geometrically objectified space of squares,
rectangles, circles, curves and spirals, nor in the mental
space of logical inherence and coherence, of predicates
bound to substantives, and so on. For they also—indeed
most importantly—involve levels, layers and sedimentation
of perception, representation, and spatial practice which
presuppose one another, which proffer themselves to one
another, and which are superimposed upon one another.
Perception of an entrance to a monument, or even to a
building or a simple cabin, constitutes a chain of actions that
is no less complex than a linguistic act, utterance,
proposition or series of sentences. Yet, whatever analogies
or correlations may legitimately be made between course
and discourse, so to speak, these complexities cannot be
said to be mutually defining or isomorphic: they are truly
different.313

As both the author of an essay and the narrator of a film about

Spiral Jetty, Smithson added new layers of meaning to the work.
These range from aspects of industrial and natural history to
allusions to Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and the legend of a
mysterious vortex said to connect the Great Salt Lake with the
Pacific Ocean via an underground channel. Like the salt crystals on
the pieces of basalt, “meanings” discovered by viewers and by the
artist cling to the surface of Spiral Jetty. They make it neither
“truer” nor “falser,” just more complex. And this process is
irreversible—that is to say, in the case of Spiral Jetty, “exposing”
levels of meaning will not bring anything “actual” to light, for there
are no secrets under the countless crusts of this work, just an abyss
of “groundless” silt. It is as though Spiral Jetty consists entirely of
fictions.
The fact that this Earthwork was submerged from 1972 to 1993,
with the result that no one could see it, has only added to the
mystique of a work of art that already posed a challenge to anyone
hoping to discover its “real” meaning. Smithson was well aware
that the water level in the lake is strangely inconsistent, possibly
depending on the amount of snowmelt each year. When Spiral Jetty
was constructed, the water level was at an all-time low. Smithson
reported that in June and July 1971 the jetty was entirely
submerged but that in August he was able to watch it reemerging
again. Once, during a storm after he visited, the salt crystals
completely dissolved, turning the jetty back into “naked rock”: “Its
mass was intact because it’s almost 80% solid rock, so that it held
its shape.”314 From his notes it is clear that he was concerned with
seeing his work of art endure. Consequently, in late 1971, when the
Dwan Gallery returned it to him in exchange for other works, he
looked into converting the twenty-year lease into a lease in
perpetuity. At the time he was paying one hundred dollars per year
for ten acres. He wrote to the relevant state authorities, asking
them to ask them to consider rewriting the lease:

The reason is that it is a work of art made by me at my own

expense. A perpetual lease would grant me greater security
if I should ever have to invest more capital to repair or
restore the jetty in the future, or transfer the lease to an art
institution, should they want to own the Spiral Jetty and
have it as part of their collection to preserve the work for
future generations.315

Smithson specifically refers to the fascination that this place had

for him. During the drive there, the “uncanny immensity unlike the
other landscapes we had seen” moved him. When he first set eyes
on the place, “it reverberated out to the horizon only to suggest an
immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape
appear to quake.”316 Smithson knew very well that he was coming
dangerously close to notions of presence and the sublime and that
very identification of an artist with an object that he had always so
determinedly resisted, and he was aware of the potential
entanglements that were threatening to tug him back into the
endless loop of metaphysics that he was trying to escape. Once
again he turned to irony to express a certain level of ambivalence.
There is no mistaking the analogy, the irreconcilability of “course
and discourse” (per Lefebvre) when Smithson’s voice is heard in
the film The Spiral Jetty neutrally listing what is to be seen from
the center of this work of art, namely “mud, salt crystals, rocks,
water.”

POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

The German art historian Martin Warnke has shown in his book
Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (1994) how in the
visual arts the landscape can be a vehicle for and index of political
forces. In his discussion of an illumination by the Limbourg
brothers in the Duke of Berry’s Très Riches Heures (c. 1415), for
instance, he writes that such “incunabula of early landscape
painting” were bound up in “the ruler’s hold over his territory; they
are political tableaux that register rights and duties, dispositions
and functions.”317 Furthermore, he describes “land monuments”
with a political function—boundaries, bridges, and roads—and links
them to monuments in open landscapes, such as the infamous
“Bismarck towers” popular in nineteenth-century Germany, whose
makers “sought out landscapes devoid of people and shunned the
chattering classes in the towns.”318 Even from the perspective of
the twentieth century, Warnke sees the role of the landscape as
representation: “The universal consequences of war in our own
century are best represented in a landscape dimension.”319 This
reading virtually compels us to interpret the Earthworks of the late
1960s as something other than merely the continuation of a
specifically American tradition of sculpture. As soon as the
landscape is seen in terms of annexation, factors such as land
speculation, the Vietnam War, environmentalism, and the moon
landing in July 1969 all come into play. Michael Heizer once
commented in this context that “the most formidable objects that
man has touched are the earth and the moon.320
If we look at Earthworks in light of landscape politics, the
distinctions between various such works emerge much more clearly
than any similarities that might seem to suggest stylistic affinities.
Many textbooks, for instance, refer to Spiral Jetty and Walter De
Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) in the same breath, although the
conditions for their viewers could hardly be more different. De
Maria’s work, which the Dia Art Foundation owns, can only be
visited following the submission, in writing, of an advanced
reservation, the payment of a very considerable fee, and an
obligatory overnight stay. The exclusive and elitist conditions of this
work’s reception—no more than six people can visit at any one time
—are particularly appealing to the European art lover hoping to
experience, in the American desert, a moment of the aesthetic
sublime that is supposedly not possible (any more) in continental
Europe. By contrast, Spiral Jetty, owned by Nancy Holt until 1999
and subsequently also in the hands of the Dia Foundation, at a
freely accessible public site that is leased from the state, has drawn
ever-greater numbers of visitors since its reemergence in 1993,
ranging from local school classes to art historians and architects.
Smithson designed his Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), on land
belonging to a private gravel works in Emmen, the Netherlands, to
be a public park as soon as its commercial exploitation ended, and
it is still regularly maintained.
And yet Smithson’s works can also appear somewhat
inaccessible. This, combined with their sometimes fragmentary,
sometimes even ruinous state—like those of works by Robert
Morris, Holt, De Maria, and Heizer—has contributed to their
becoming projection surfaces for an array of different ideas. Some
commentators still stubbornly cling to the notion that the
exponents of Earth Art turned to nature in protest against the
hegemony of art institutions and that their work implies a critique
of the commodity character of art.321 The attempts by many to
identify American art in the 1960s with the counterculture, the
New Left, or the widespread protests against the Vietnam War are
no more than wishful thinking and completely overlook the
considerable efforts of these artists to be accepted into the
mainstream.322 Dennis Oppenheim, looking back at that time,
vehemently rejected this view as a misreading and stated
unequivocally that the artists of the day “had practically nothing to
do with the . . . political phenomena itself. . . . Art did not mix well
with counter-culture. To do good art—high art—powerful art, with
social conscience—is very difficult. . . . Very few people do it well.
You can count them on one hand.”323 His own Radicality (1974) was
a dual parody of Earth Art and certain artists’ aspirations to
political effectiveness. Set on a sand dune on Long Island, it
consisted of a series of red, green, and yellow strontium nitrate
flares forming the word Radicality, which momentarily burst into
life only to fizzle out again (see figure 31).324

FIGURE 31. Dennis Oppenheim, Radicality, Long Island, New York, 1974, red, yellow, and
green strontium nitrate flares, 15 × 100 ft. (4.5 × 30 m).

The interpretations that Oppenheim so resoundingly rejected in

effect reduced the complexity of various artistic standpoints to
mere romanticizing. Furthermore, they failed to take into account
the financial basis of these interventions, which never would have
been possible without the support of galleries and collectors.325
Instead of reading Earthworks as a collective critique of the status
quo in the art world—and hence merely the latest stage in the
avant-garde’s traditional antipathy toward institutions as such—I
regard them, on the contrary, as monumental confirmations of the
triumph of an expanding art world, which had the institutional
means to conquer new terrain for its collections, even in the distant
American West.326 When Virginia Dwan closed her gallery in 1971,
the halcyon days of Earth Art were over.

ROBERT SMITHSON AND MICHAEL HEIZER

It is illuminating to compare Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer,

who were friends around 1970. Virginia Dwan discovered both, and
they were two of the mainstays of her gallery. She also
commissioned their most important works, Spiral Jetty and Double
Negative, respectively, which were both presented to the public in
1970.
In 1967 the twenty-three-year-old Heizer, having moved to New
York from the West Coast, had already shown work at the Park
Place Gallery, which Dwan partly supported. In late 1968 he started
to show work at the Dwan Gallery: first a large-format slide of one
of the trenches of his Nine Nevada Depressions—in the exhibition
Earthworks, devised by Smithson—and then in the group exhibition
Language II. In January 1970 Dwan presented a solo exhibition of
his work, titled Nevada-New York. This included images of Double
Negative, which prompted her to organize trips with collectors and
art critics to the site of the piece.
In spring 1968 Smithson and Heizer had gone on the first of
several excursions together. Besides making trips to New Jersey, for
instance to the Franklin Mineral Dump in June 1968, they traveled
to Las Vegas in July 1968 and collected rocks in the Nevada desert.
Then they went on to Death Valley and Mono Lake, one of the
largest American salt water lakes, where they shot a Super 8 film,
published in 2004 by Nancy Holt with the title Nancy Holt and
Robert Smithson—Mono Lake (see figure 32). Smithson used his
haul from these excursions for the Nonsites Mono Lake Nonsite,
Double Nonsite, California and Nevada, Gypsum Nonsite, Benton,
and California (all 1968). Heizer, alternately assisted by Smithson
and Walter De Maria, worked on various large-scale sculptures
commissioned by the collector Robert Scull; these included Nine
Nevada Depressions, which was made between June and
September 1968. There are also parallels in the way the two artists
presented themselves to the world. Both liked to cast themselves as
pragmatic pioneers, fearlessly breaking new ground. And both
frequently referred to their origins. Heizer never misses an
opportunity to mention that he is the son of an archaeologist—his
father, Robert Heizer, was an expert in the field of pre-Columbian
archaeology—and Smithson would proudly point to the fact that his
great-grandfather and grandfather created decorative plaster-work
for major museums and the New York City subway.327

FIGURE 32. Robert Smithson in a still from Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson—Mono Lake,
1968 (published in 2004). Photo © Nancy Holt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
 Unlike Smithson’s Nonsites, Heizer’s works have a clear
distinction between original and representation. His original,
sculptural works were ephemeral interventions in a seemingly
intact desert setting, which photographs then documented. Also
unlike for Smithson, the main criteria for Heizer in selecting a site
were its form and appearance, not its history. In his view, scale was
something that distinguished European from American art:

My idea was to make American art, as opposed to living in

New York and making paintings derived from the European
traditions. . . . As long as you’re going to make a sculpture,
why not make one that competes with a 747, or the Empire
State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge? . . . Why should
there be more commitment in this society to architectural
engineering than to art, particularly sculpture?328

Nevertheless, Heizer’s rhetoric was deeply rooted in the

thinking of Modernism and far removed from the ideas that
preoccupied Smithson. Earth, or rather dirt, fascinated him: “My
personal associations with dirt are very real. I really like it, I really
like to lie in the dirt.”329 Pieces such as Kick Gesture (1968), an
indentation in the sand made by the heel of a boot, show his focus
on the process of artistic production, which had been keenly
debated ever since the advent of Action Painting. As he said of this
piece, “The idea is that if you start to follow some of your basic
impulses the possibilities are endless. In this case my leg became
the tool.”330 His fascination with the ancient civilizations of Central
and South America reflects the Modernist topos of appropriated
ethnographic art. Displaced/Replaced (1969), financed by Scull and
involving the placement of massive boulders in depressions cut into
the ground, can be read as a (perhaps too literal) realization of
Smithson’s concept of the dialectic of site and Nonsite. In Heizer’s
mind, these boulders were substitutes for sculptures: “The idea of
the rocks was that they were surrogate objects, replacement
objects, replacement for the art object.” In creating this piece he
was also harking back to a time in prehistory when rocks and dirt
were all people had to work with: “In our times there’s a real
question about modernity and how far it stretches. My real feeling
is that we have returned to a primitive stage.”331
When Julia Brown asked Heizer, “When you say working with
the measurement of architecture do you mean a different scale
than what was common in sculpture?,” he replied, “Not scale, size.
Size is real, scale is imagined size. Scale could be said to be an
aesthetic measurement whereas size is an actual measurement.”332
Smithson also made a clear distinction between scale and size; in
his essay “The Spiral Jetty” he writes that “size determines an
object, but scale determines art,” and he particularly makes the
point that “scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the
actualities of perception.” However, unlike Heizer, Smithson
constantly intertwined the two categories in his mind, allowing him
to simultaneously contemplate “the crystal’s molecular lattice” and
“the entire mass” of Spiral Jetty. For Smithson, importantly, “scale
operates by uncertainty. To be in the scale of the Spiral Jetty is to
be out of it.”333 In other words, Heizer was interested in the effects
of size, whereas Smithson used the interplay of size, scale, and
measurements as his artistic material.
It is at this point that the comparison of Heizer and Smithson in
Rosalind Krauss’s Passages in Modern Sculpture becomes
problematic. In her efforts to come up with a “new syntax” for
sculpture, or, to put it another way, to establish the “passage” as
the common denominator in twentieth-century sculpture, she had
to greatly simplify matters. As though it were possible to travel
seamlessly from physical to mental space, she interprets Spiral
Jetty as the expansion of the viewer’s spatial experience of Double
Negative by dint of the addition of historical recollection—the myth
of the vortex between the Great Salt Lake and the Pacific Ocean:

In using the form of the spiral to imitate the settler’s mythic

whirlpool, Smithson incorporates the existence of the myth
into the space of the work. In doing so, he expands on the
nature of that external space located at our bodies’ centers
which had been part of the Double Negative’s image.
Smithson creates an image of our psychological response to
time and of the way we are determined to control it by the
creation of historical fantasies. But the Spiral Jetty attempts
 to supplant historical formulas with the experience of a
moment-to-moment passage through space and time.
Contemporary sculpture is indeed obsessed with this idea of
passage. We find it in [Bruce] Nauman’s Corridor, in
[Robert] Morris’ Labyrinth, in [Richard] Serra’s Shift, in
Smithson’s Jetty. And with these images of passage, the
transformation of sculpture—from a static, idealized medium
to a temporal and material one—that had begun with Rodin
is fully achieved.334

Krauss thus posits a space-time-mind continuum that allows her to

describe an art-historical arc that extends from Gotthold Lessing’s
Laocoon via Rodin to its “fulfillment” in Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.
Like Lessing, you might say, she clearly felt the need “to ask about
the very nature of sculpture and to wonder how we can define the
unique experience of that art.”335 Smithson, by contrast, was not
interested in discussing the nature of sculpture or individual
experiences of it. Although he did admittedly have a weakness for
“historical phantasies”—in the sense of the driving forces behind
the oil exploitation campaign in the Spiral Jetty region, the dream
of a transcontinental railroad, and the pioneering spirit of the
xenophobic ranchers he met in the area—he evokes them precisely
because of their singularity, the impossibility of replicating them or
connecting them with a spatial experience.
For Krauss the passages in sculptures by artists ranging from
Serra to Smithson are “nothing new,” simply a return to the
anthropological constant of memory.336 However, when Smithson,
in his film The Spiral Jetty, impassively lists the materials seen by a
viewer looking out from the center of the spiral toward all points of
the compass—namely “mud, salt crystals, rocks, water”—this is not
some form of ritualization. On one hand, he simply wanted to
demonstrate that as long as one did not fictionalize nature, it
existed without meaning; on the other hand, he wanted to illustrate
the abstractness of selection criteria such as points of the compass
by proving the impossibility of using them to represent something.
Whereas Heizer was happy for Dwan to purchase the land that
he had selected as the site for Double Negative and spent months
shifting thousands of tons of material by means of explosives and
heavy vehicles, Smithson leased the site for Spiral Jetty from the
state of Utah and—in order that his work should not be politically
or financially tied down—immediately opened it to the public.337
Unlike Heizer, who was keen that his works be integrated into the
cyclical processes of nature, including erosion (at least at first),
Smithson intended that Spiral Jetty should be constantly
maintained and any signs of erosion made good again.338 Heizer
used large-scale slides with partial views of the work as a whole to
represent and market Double Negative, while Smithson created a
thirty-minute film as a (more complex) companion piece to his
sculpture. In contrast with Heizer (and De Maria), Smithson also
used films and essays to portray the commissioning and production
processes of various works. However, whereas Heizer sought to
control the conditions of the reception of Double Negative by
recommending that visitors spend at least one day on site, to
experience the changing light, Smithson offered no binding
advice.339 He left it up to individual visitors to explore Spiral Jetty
however they liked, but he did take pleasure in imagining how and
where his films might ideally be seen. He drew a sketch with a
projection room in a cave near the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
And he even imagined his film being projected on the Staten Island
Ferry as it went out to the middle of the harbor and returned along
a spiral line.
Among the exponents of Earth Art, Smithson was the only one to
take the view that the deserts of Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico—
home to the incunabula of Earth Art—were neither endless nor
untouched but had long been known and exploited. The dried-out
salt lakes, for instance, only a few hundred miles from Spiral Jetty,
had been the training ground for the bomber crews who dropped
the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not far from the
plateau where De Maria’s Lightning Field still stands is Los
Alamos, the place where the atom bomb was developed during the
Second World War, and the site of the Very Large Array, which, with
twenty-seven antennas, is the largest radio observatory in the
world. Heizer’s Double Negative, at the edge of a steeply inclined
mesa looking out over a broad river valley in the Nevada desert,
brings to mind the nearby “positive” of the most spectacular dam in
the United States, Hoover Dam, with its abundant capacity
providing electricity for Las Vegas.

THE MILITARY SUBLIME: EARTH ART AND THE WAR IN

VIETNAM
Inspired by Serge Guilbaut’s book How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art, much detailed research has gone into the connections
between the language of forms used by the Abstract Expressionists
and American cultural politics during the Cold War, and concepts
such as Paul Virilio’s espace militaire provide a means to consider
the aesthetics of defense structures built during the Second World
War.340 But so far there has been no attempt to consider American
art in the 1960s in light of the Vietnam War. The general view is
simply that artists, like many intellectuals, can be counted as part
of the antiwar movement.
Leaving aside moral issues for a moment, and concentrating
solely on visual characteristics, we can see clear similarities
between the forms in the art of Michael Heizer, for instance, and
images of the Vietnam War in the American mass media. Indeed, at
a distance of more than forty years, it is hard to overlook the
parallels between pictures from Vietnam and photographs of the
excavations for Compression Line, Black Dye and Powder, Nine
Nevada Depressions (all 1968), Primitive Dye Painting I (1969), and
Five Conic Displacements (1969), with their obvious resemblance
to bomb craters. Life magazine published a shot of the artist in a
helicopter passing over his Earthworks, which has an unmistakable
similarity to images from the front line in Vietnam (see figure 33).
And Heizer’s Complex One/Complex Two (City), in Garden Valley,
Nevada, which he has been working on since 1972, immediately
calls to mind war defenses, aircraft bunkers, and missile silos.
FIGURE 33. Image from Life magazine of Michael Heizer in a helicopter over his Nine
Nevada Depressions, 1969. Photo by Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

I am not trying to suggest that Heizer’s large-scale sculptures

were an expression of the war America was waging in Vietnam. Nor
am I trying to reconstruct his attitude to the war. My intention is
merely to demonstrate possible connections between the two
things. I find it much less interesting to speculate about the causal
origins of Earth Art than to seek out the reasons why people at the
time regarded it as appropriate to that age. Was there a link
between the practice of connecting a distant site with a gallery
space in an urban center and the public’s reception, via pictures
and news footage, of the faraway war in Southeast Asia? Could it
be that the images of themselves that artists such as Richard Serra
and Heizer disseminated—Serra in a protective mask throwing
lead, Heizer stripped to the waist and up to his knees in earth
digging out ditches, in the cockpit of a helicopter, operating the
controls of vehicles with caterpillar tracks—were intended to
compensate for the fact that they were not in Vietnam but were, so
to speak, doing service in the American hinterland? Is there some
form of kinship between the grainy, harsh, small black-and-white
shots by Gianfranco Gorgoni and the reportage pictures that people
saw every day in Life magazine?
During the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson
administrations, the American people were actively involved in the
war that had been smoldering in Vietnam since the 1950s. In 1968,
near the end of President Johnson’s time in office, more than five
hundred thousand American soldiers were stationed in Vietnam.
The high point of Earth Art, when it enjoyed its greatest level of
attention from the art world and various large-scale projects were
realized at desert locations, coincided with the period of the
greatest American military presence and the most intense bombing
campaigns in Vietnam. The war that was being waged thousands of
miles from the American homeland was mediated in a flood of press
and television images that were regarded as authentic because
they were not being censored by the military. News reports
presented readers and viewers with two main perspectives: in one,
events were seen through the eyes of the troops engaged in the
ground war, and in the other, events were seen through the eyes of
the crews in the helicopters, fighter jets, and strategic long-range
bombers.
The iconography of the ground war concentrated on American
military personnel in almost impassable terrain, in rice fields, on
muddy paths, in the jungle. Life, for instance, confronted its
readers with colored close-ups of individual GIs—fighting,
wounded, or slain in battle, surrounded by impenetrable
vegetation. Although bulldozers cleared large tracts of vegetation
in the so-called free fire zones in South Vietnam—“whole areas of
the countryside were flattened, as if we were trying to build a
house with a bulldozer and wrecking crane”—the Americans were
never able to claim victory in the ground war.341 The ground troops
were constantly in danger from land mines and acts of sabotage.
The terrain and dark nights—in short, “nature,” still the soldiers’
ally in the Second World War342—now turned against them: “The
enemy was everywhere, yet nowhere, throwing bombs from a
speeding motor scooter into a Saigon cafe, or hiding in the midst of
a Vietnamese village preparing to boobytrap a trail,” as William
Chafe put it.343 “It was always going on,” said one journalist, “rock
around the clock, we had the days and he had the nights. You could
be in the most protected space in Viet Nam and still know that your
safety was provisional, that early death, blindness, loss of legs,
arms or balls, major and lasting disfigurement . . . could come
in.”344
The impact of the disastrous images of the ground war in that,
as President Johnson once cynically called it, “little piss-ant
country,” was somewhat mitigated by the knowledge that the
Americans controlled the air space and the long-distance
communications networks.345 Radio communications kept every
unit in constant contact with the crews of the air ambulances,
which could attend an emergency within minutes. The air support
for the ground troops was comparatively invulnerable, as the
enemy had neither an air force nor antiaircraft capability. Bombing
raids were the most popular form of air attack, since they were
cheaper and incurred fewer American losses. The press also had
communication networks, which it was free to use to report on the
war as it wanted, so most Americans felt that they were being given
a truthful account of events. Thus communication per se was
regarded in a positive light at the time.
The discrepancy between the traumatic ground war and the
triumphant air campaign left a deep wound in the collective
consciousness of the American people, which political and military
rhetoric during the Gulf War in 1991, the Balkan War in 1999, and
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reopened.346 Heizer made direct
reference to the discordance between the United States’ potential
technological omnipotence and its impotence when faced with a
ground war in Vietnam:

We live in a schizophrenic period. We’re living in a world

that’s technological and primordial simultaneously. I guess
the idea is to make art that reflects this premise. My original
impetus for getting out of the city and working with these
basic materials had to do with the idea of the insecurity of
society, the frailty of its systems, the dependence upon
interdependence. (italics by author)347

Among the few artistic actions that engaged directly with the
subject of the war in Vietnam and specifically with the ensuing
communications idolatry were Carolee Schneemann’s Performance
Snows (1967) and Martha Rosler’s series of photocollages Bringing
the War Home (1967–1972). However, the art world’s disinterest in
Vietnam is typified by the essay “How I Spent My Summer
Vacation, or Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco
and Utah” by Philip Leider, the editor in chief of Artforum.348 The
vacation starts in Berkeley, known to have the highest level of draft
resistance. Then, with Serra and Joan Jonas, Leider presses on
through Nevada. At a parking lot they momentarily come face to
face with the reality of war:

As we walked across the parking lot of a truck stop toward

the diner, Serra said: “Jesus Christ, look at that—bombs!” A
huge truck, parked in the lot, was stacked full with open-
slatted crates containing, sure enough, bombs. We walked
over to it and continued our political discussion: “B-O-M-B-
S,” spelled Serra, reading the stencils on the crates. He
looked at me. “They’re bombs. . . .” “Maybe they only travel
at night,” I said. We ate in the diner. When we came out, the
bombs had left, off to Cambodia.349

Not long afterward they arrive at Double Negative and fool

around in it like children: “We were all yipping and yowling as if
Matisse had just called us over to look at something he was
thinking of calling Joy of Life. The sun was down; we wound up
slipping and sliding inside the piece in the dark.”350 After visiting
an antiwar exhibition, the holidaymakers read in the newspapers of
the death of Barnett Newman. Leider reminds the others of
Newman’s conviction that his painting marked the end of state
capitalism, as opposed to Smithson’s prosaic line “Everything is
purchasable.”351 Leider later meets up with Smithson, who regards
the demonization of environmental sinners as an echo of the
church’s persecution of heretics—and, as such, the other side of
some people’s boundless belief in progress: “All those sins. And
here’s 2000 coming so near. Sin everywhere. The dead river, with
its black oil slime: The crucified river instead of the crucified man.
When do you think they’ll start burning polluters at the stake?”352
It is significant that when Leider encountered Smithson, he
talked not about politics but about the seemingly apolitical matter
of ecology. As we have seen, most art historians have chosen to
ignore Smithson’s political views or have neutralized them by
lauding him for his pioneering work introducing ecological issues
into art.353 Unlike artists such as Robert Morris, Hans Haacke, and
Daniel Buren, whose work seems more amenable to political
interpretation, Smithson appears not to offer most commentators
similarly recognizable points of identification.354 In conversation,
Dan Graham suggested somewhat wryly that Smithson not only was
uninterested in political action but even openly declared his
empathy with the Republicans and was a Richard Nixon
supporter.355 Although in artistic circles, which generally favor the
Democrats (insofar as they favor any political parties), this would
have been an act of provocation similar to Graham’s demonstrative
interest—as a Jewish artist—in Albert Speer, Smithson’s politics are
simply a blank on the map of art history. His refusal to connect art
and political topics and his skepticism toward the idea of historical
development does not fit into art history frameworks. He pointed
out the problematics of making causal connections between art-
historical data and the so-called history of events: “A series of fixed
incidents in the dumps of time: ‘1936 Civil War in Spain.’ ‘1961 Bay
of Pigs fiasco.’ ‘1964 China explodes atomic bomb.’ . . . Everything
in this Chronology is transparent and intangible, and moves from
semblance to semblance, in order to disclose the final nullity.”356
Lucy Lippard’s text “Breaking Circles: The Politics of Prehistory”
characterizes the difficulty art critics had with Smithson’s political
stance. In it she recalls the distance he maintained from the
activities of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) around 1970.357 She
also describes his contribution to a symposium on art and politics,
published by Artforum in 1970, as “diluvial prose” and an
“apocalyptic science-fictional vision.”358 Outwardly he had little
faith in the notion of artists engaging in political action: “Direct
political action becomes a matter of trying to pick poison out of
boiling stew.”359 And he described the student protests in the wake
of 1968 as basically no more than new versions of ritualistic
sacrifices, gestures that were made with the consent of the
authorities: “The riots are being structured into rites.” Even the
landing on the moon could offer no alternative; indeed, according
to Smithson, it was “one of the most demoralizing events in history,
in that the media revealed the planet Earth to be a limited closed
system.”360
As in his early writings, Smithson’s choice of words here recalls
the prose style of writers such as J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss. Yet
his rhetoric is also filled with irony. The deliberately excessive
nature of some of his formulations recalls aspects of science fiction
writing, not as an indication that he shared an apocalyptic vision of
the world but as a way of puncturing something of the pathos of the
political and ecological activism of that time. In his view, the
motivation of certain environmental activists was no more than the
other side of a naïve belief in progress, which led to the hope that it
might be possible to solve problems by the same means that had
created them. The Limits to Growth perfectly exemplified this
dilemma:

Man possesses, for a small moment in his history, the most

powerful combination of knowledge, tools, and resources the
world has ever known. He has all that is physically
necessary to create a totally new form of human society—
one that would be built to last for generations. The two
 missing ingredients are a realistic, long-term goal that can
guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the human will
to achieve that goal. Without such a goal and a commitment
to it, short-term concerns will generate the exponential
growth that drives the world system toward the limits of the
earth and ultimate collapse. With that goal and that
commitment, mankind would be ready to begin a controlled,
orderly transition from growth to global equilibrium.361

Smithson’s derogatory dismissal of those first environmentalists

was certainly in part due to the fact that, as we have seen,
Canadian authorities had blocked his project Island of Broken Glass
in early 1970 following protests from local activists. In his view, art
was merely a useful scapegoat for those who imagined that they
alone had the solution to society’s ills, although it would be wrong
to assume that had had no interest in ecology. His skepticism is
clearly different from the unreflectedly reverential attitude toward
nature of artists such as Walter De Maria, Heizer, and James
Turrell. In Smithson’s view, the art world specifically was
susceptible to this ideology. He also thought the idolatry of nature
was closely related to the mechanistic belief in progress. When he
was invited to participate in the exhibition Art and Technology
organized by György Kepes for the tenth Biennale of São Paulo, he
declined. Smithson could not accept the underlying premise of the
exhibition, as he saw it: “To celebrate the power of technology
through art strikes me as a sad parody of NASA. I do not share the
confidence of the astronauts. . . . Art aping science turns into a
cultural malaise. . . . The optimism of technical progress results in
political despair.”362

“CULTURAL CONFINEMENT”
Despite his ironic tone, Smithson’s attitude was by no means
nihilistic; on the contrary—in the spirit of John Kenneth Galbraith—
it was important for the crystallization of destruction.363 Toward
the later part of his career, Smithson’s critique became less
internal—that is to say, directed at the art world—and shifted
explicitly to the politics of the day. However, a closer look at his
writings reveals that his engagement with artistic matters always
took account of their economic and political context. Concepts such
as cult, authority, and aristocracy have consistently negative
connotations in his writing, while demystification, democracy, and
dialectic have equally positive connotations. One reason why art
scholarship in effect shunted his political thinking to the side may
be that he repeatedly attacked its terrain. He scoffed at art-
historical interpretations and criticized the historical models on
which they relied. He did not credit the “never-never land called
the ‘art world’” with the same level of commitment as its
protagonists and mediators liked to lay claim to.364 To him, it was a
safe haven for aristocratic posturing, not the locus of an avant-
garde with some kind of moral superiority.
As a rule Smithson addressed the matters he took issue with in
statements and conversations, but his participation in the artists’
boycott of documenta 5 (held, like all documentas, in Kassel,
Germany) was direct action. While a number of artists—such as Sol
LeWitt, Hans Haacke, and Daniel Buren—protested in writing at
what they saw as the high-handedness of the curator, Harald
Szeemann, but nevertheless participated in the exhibition,
Smithson, along with Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and
Fred Sandback, withdrew entirely. Smithson’s stance went far
beyond the lines of the spats that used to flare up in the 1970s
between American and European artists and between artists and
mediators. In particular, his essay “Cultural Confinement,”
published in the documenta 5 catalogue, is a diatribe against the
attempts of cultural institutions to control art. It vehemently
opposes the notion of a “warden-curator”—an undisguised lunge at
the exhibition maker Szeemann and at the same time a bid to
promote Smithson’s idea of Land Reclamation.
Smithson criticized the program, the place, and the privileged
artistic positions—Conceptual Art and Process Art—of documenta
5. His text is also a radical critique of the art museum as an
institution, which he variously compares to a “cultural prison,” an
“asylum,” and a “jail.” The works of art are locked in and “looked
upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to
pronounce them curable or incurable.” The task of the “warden-
curators” is to separate art from the rest of society. “Once the work
of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and
politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society.”365
Art is thus reduced to

visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations

are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement.
Occult notions of “concepts” are in retreat from the physical
world. Heaps of private information reduce art to
hermeticism and fatuous metaphysics. Language should find
itself in the physical world, and not end up locked in an idea
in somebody’s head.366

The latter is an allusion to Szeemann’s exhibition When Attitudes

Become Form: Live in Your Head (1969) and his concept of
“individual mythologies,” a term he coined on the occasion of
documenta 5, in 1972.367 Smithson was critical of what he saw as a
curator imposing restrictions on an art exhibition rather than
leaving the artists to set their own boundaries. He disparaged
“occult notions of ‘concepts,’” which cut art off from the physical
world, and pleaded instead, as mentioned earlier, for a dialectical
relationship to reality: “Art’s development should be dialectical and
not metaphysical. I’m speaking of a dialectics that seeks a world
outside of cultural confinement. . . . It would be better to disclose
the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom.”368
The program of documenta 5, along with its chosen venue—in
the once ruined, now reconstructed residences and grounds of
absolutist rulers—seemed to him symptomatic of the European
penchant for aristocratic ideologies. Although Szeemann decided
not to use Kassel’s famous park and other public spaces, as he had
originally planned, Smithson still took exception to the usual
documenta practice of presenting sculptural works in the open air:
“When a finished work of 20th-century sculpture is placed in an
18th-century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of
the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no
longer with us.” And all the while, as he pointed out, society did not
know what to do with the new “infernal regions—slag heaps, strip
mines, and polluted rivers.”369
 BROKEN CIRCLE/SPIRAL HILL AND THE LAND
RECLAMATION PROJECTS

“Cultural Confinement” can also be read as Smithson’s explication,

directed at the European art public, of his only Earthwork realized
in Europe, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill.370 Whereas Smithson created
Spiral Jetty at a defunct industrial site, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill
was his first—and only real—Land Reclamation project, an
industrial site converted into an art site.
Originally, as Smithson remembered it, the organizers of the
sculpture exhibition Sonsbeek 71 invited him to create a work of
art in Sonsbeek Park, in the Dutch city of Arnhem.371 The other
participants in the exhibition included Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt,
Robert Morris, and Carl Andre. Eager to make a permanent site-
specific earthwork, Smithson decided not to exhibit inside the park.
With the help of the organizers, he found a sand quarry on the
outskirts of the town of Emmen, in the Netherlands, where there
was already outline planning for the construction of a leisure park.
This site, on an ancient terminal moraine, was rich in materials that
were attractive to Smithson for both conceptual and aesthetic
reasons. Turquoise water covers its lowest point, and it has
different colors of sand, red earth, and erratic rocks in all sizes.
Smithson took advantage not only of the “broken landscapes” but
also of the painterly appearance of the materials he found there.372
Spiral Hill was formed on the gently rising shoreline and covered
with a layer of dark red earth. White sand marks its spiral path (see
figure 34). The companion piece, Broken Circle, was built out into
the water. Half of the circle is a sandbank, and a rounded channel
of water forms the other half, making it impossible to walk the
circle’s full length (see figure 35).
FIGURE 34. Robert Smithson, Spiral Hill, 1971, Emmen, the Netherlands, diameter c. 75.5
ft. (23 m).
FIGURE 35. Robert Smithson, Broken Circle, 1971, Emmen, the Netherlands, diameter c.
141 ft. (43 m).

Smithson was uneasy about the huge erratic rock at the center
of the circle: “Like the eye of a hurricane it seemed to suggest all
kinds of misfortunes . . . a kind of glacial ‘heart of darkness.’”373
However, as reputedly one of the largest erratic rocks in Holland, it
was too heavy to remove, so he was obliged to leave it where it
was. It seemed to echo the many megalithic sites in the area—while
Spiral Hill was reminiscent of burial mounds, and Broken Circle
naturally called to mind a completely circular ice age pond nearby.
As for Spiral Jetty, Smithson hoped to make a film for Broken
Circle/Spiral Hill, but it was never finished, due to a lack of
funding. His intention had been to interweave shots of the
disastrous flooding that struck the Netherlands in 1953 and shots
of the construction of the work of art, in what he described as a
“microcosm for this natural catastrophe.”374 Aerial shots from a
helicopter and an airplane were to capture the forms on the
ground.
Smithson also intended that Broken Circle/Spiral Hill should be
a permanent Earthwork. In a letter to Enno Develing at the
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, he wrote that Sonsbeek 71 was “not
over.” He also explained that he wanted to return to the
Netherlands to finish filming and hoped that the organizers would
“keep it [the work] from being destroyed.”375 Smithson was no
doubt delighted when the municipality of Emmen resolved to retain
his work as a park. In a letter to the authorities he outlined the
measures needed to maintain it: the channel should be deepened,
the eroded areas on the sandbank would need to be repaired, and
the weeds that by now covered Spiral Hill would have to be seen
to.376 He was openly skeptical of the idea of reinstating “nature” in
its original condition. In his eyes, the idea of any such condition
was a fiction, and it should be the task of art to respond to
industrialized sites with forms that would articulate humankind’s
destructive impact on the landscape.
Even before the United States set up the Environmental
Protection Agency in 1972, and while various states were debating
changes to their ecological legislation, Smithson was working out
artistic interventions in areas that had been mined and making
contact with the relevant authorities and companies. However, the
Land Reclamation projects that he devised in 1972 and 1973 were
never realized.377 One reason for this was that in June 1971
Virginia Dwan closed her gallery, which left him without the
support he had enjoyed from the art market until then. In his estate
are a number of letters offering his services to industrialists and
politicians who might be interested in his Land Reclamation
projects. It also includes an untitled statement that he apparently
prepared to attract potential clients, in which he points out that
there are numerous mining areas, disused quarries, and polluted
lakes that could be rehabilitated through the implementation of
Earth Art projects: “The world needs coal and highways, but we do
not need the results of strip-mining or highway trusts. Economics,
when abstracted from the world, is blind to natural processes. Art
can become a resource that mediates between them.”378
In April 1972 Smithson was invited to an international
conference at the Ohio State University held in connection with the
state’s proposed recultivation legislation that was to be put to the
vote that month. The new law mandated that the companies
engaged in strip mining must fill in the huge tracts they had dug
out of the landscape, in order to prevent toxic coal waste from
coming into contact with the air. However, it also proposed that
they could avoid the considerable cost of refilling the land if they
could come up with a suitable alternative use for these sites.
Smithson saw this as a unique chance for Earth Art to come into its
own:

Art on this scale should be supported directly by industry,

not only private art sponsorship. Art would then become a
necessary resource, and not an isolated luxury. . . . Artists
should not be cheated out of doing their work, or forced to
exist in the isolation of “art worlds.” There should be artist-
consultants in every major industry in America.379

Among the other speakers at the conference was Senator Harry

Armstrong. Smithson saw the senator a month later to set out his
ideas in greater detail, and he cited this meeting when he
presented a concrete proposal to the president of one of the largest
operators in the coal industry, the Hanna Coal Company. For a fee
of twenty thousand dollars, Smithson said, he was willing to
undertake the artistic planning of the impending recultivation of
the exhausted strip mine in Egypt Valley, with the help of “Hanna
Coal as direct sponsor,” as he put it. He referred to his experience
with the press and suggested that an “Earth Sculpture” would
attract more media attention than an ordinary recultivation project:
 A restored woodland is just not visually interesting to the
press. An Earth Sculpture, on the other hand, would provide
a focus that would have positive visual value, and call
attention to the surrounding reclamation process. A park
without visual focus is simply dull, and has no effect on
public opinion.380

Smithson’s proposal, Lake Edge Crescents—Egypt Valley, Ohio

(Hanna Coal Reclamation Project) (1972), was similar to Broken
Circle but would have been five times as large. A semicircular bank
was to be constructed in an artificial lake (see figure 36). The
materials—chalkstone and vegetation—were in keeping with those
Hanna Coal had used for previous recultivation projects. Far from
creating an overall artistic concept for the entire recultivation
project, Smithson wanted to take on only a small section. In his
analysis of Smithson’s proposed intervention, Robert Hobbs wrote
that it “would have emphasized the delicate balance achieved by
man in his attempts to repair his devastation of the land.”381

FIGURE 36. Robert Smithson, drawing for Lake Edge Crescents, 1972, pencil on paper, 19
× 24 in. (48.3 × 60.9 cm).

This idea did not meet with the interest Smithson had hoped for.
It seems that his proposal was out of step with the Hanna Coal
Company’s intention to recultivate the land so that it could be used
for either farming or tourism. In a letter of 20 November 1972 a
spokesperson for the company reminded Smithson that the coal
industry was going through hard times: “Every bit of capital must
be conserved. If you have other people who would be interested in
financing the project perhaps we could work out some agreement
for the use of the land.”382 Smithson was not disheartened. With
the help of a friend, Timothy Collins, an investment banker and a
member of the Friends Council of the Whitney Museum of
American Art, he put together an Earth Art brochure that he sent,
with an accompanying letter from Collins, to around fifty company
presidents in the manufacturing and mining sector.383 He offered
his services—for a monthly fee of eight hundred dollars—to
companies such as Peabody Coal, pointing out that an investment
in art would be advantageous in terms of both their tax obligations
and their wider reputation, indeed, that Earth Art would increase
the value of their land: “Waste land is thus converted into
something practical and necessary, as well as becoming good to
look at.”384 He added that he could create an image for the
company much more effectively than any publicity campaign, and
one that museum exhibitions and television would disseminate.
Smithson’s Bingham Copper Mining Pit, Utah Reclamation
Project (1973), a proposal for one of the largest open-pit mining
operations in the United States, working one of the richest sources
of ore in the world, was also never realized. Once again there was
no interest. It seems, however, that—as before, in the case of Spiral
Jetty—he was fascinated by the significance of this site’s industrial
past and its spectacular dimensions. Bingham is known as the
cradle of the modern copper industry, for it was here in the early
twentieth century that engineers discovered how to profitably
exploit low-grade copper ore. Smithson wanted to leave the huge
pit untouched apart from a pattern inscribed into its base that
would create the impression that the site was one enormous
whirlpool—the “Grand Canyon of Earthworks” (see figure 37).385
FIGURE 37. Robert Smithson, drawing for Bingham Copper Mining Pit, 1973, Photostat and
plastic overlay with wax pencil, 20.5 × 14 in. (52.1 × 35.6 cm).
 Only two of Smithson’s Land Reclamation proposals resulted in
commissions. In one case, an Earth artist was wanted to landscape
the marshlands surrounding a newly constructed residential area
outside Chicago. The president of the construction company was an
art collector. At the time of his fatal airplane accident Smithson was
working on this project, Lake Crescents-Forest Park South, Illinois
(1972–1973). Once again his proposal envisaged a mixture of
channels and banks, as in Broken Circle/Spiral Hill. In this case,
Smithson wanted to create a park that nearby residents could
enjoy. But the proposal of his that had the best chance of being
realized was Tailing Pond (1973), in Creede, Colorado. The
Minerals Engineering Company in Denver, Colorado, commissioned
this work—no doubt, as Hobbs points out, because Smithson’s
mentor Collins was one of its biggest shareholders.386
In the late 1970s, Morris, following Smithson’s lead, came to the
view that the genre of Land Reclamation could provide
opportunities to create large-scale, site-specific works of art. With
the recession abating, he felt optimistic that this might become a
reality, for

on the horizon there is potential for widespread sponsorship

of outdoor earth and site-specific works. Local, state,
federal, and industrial funding is on tap. The key that fits the
lock to the bank is “land reclamation.” Art functioning as
land reclamation has a potential sponsorship in millions of
dollars and a possible location over hundreds of thousands
of acres throughout the country.387

For Smithson the political potential of the landscape also related

to questions of ownership. As mentioned earlier, unlike most other
Earthworks, Spiral Jetty is on federal land. At first sight this may
appear to be no more than a matter of chance. However, in view of
the economic history of the United States, land ownership was
clearly an important consideration in Smithson’s site-selection
process. In The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith outlined
the key role of land speculation in American economic
development. Whereas labor and capital became more productive
around the turn of the twentieth century, the land supply remained
constant. Thus rents “increased more than proportionately and
made the landlords the undeserving beneficiaries of advance.”
Galbraith spelled out the consequences:

The anticipation of rent increases and attendant speculation

in land values were also the cause of depression. (It is worth
recalling that the nineteenth century was marked by
recurrent outbreaks of real estate speculation, especially in
the American West. . . . Economic ideas, as ever, have their
nexus with their environment.) So long as there was private
property in land, poverty and depressions were the
prospect. Progress would make them worse.388

The fruits of progress could be fairly distributed, in Galbraith’s

view, only if land were either owned by the state or, in the case of
private land, taxed at a realistically high level.
Once again we see that Smithson’s approach to site selection
took account of an issue that was very much part of American
politics at the time but that commentators have since ignored.389 In
his essay “The Spiral Jetty” he reported having to reject what
looked like a perfectly suitable site because of warning signs and
irate locals: “The abandoned man-made harbors of Little Valley
gave me my first view of the wine-red water, but there were too
many ‘Keep Out’ signs around to make that a practical site for
anything, and we were told to ‘stay away’ by two angry
ranchers.”390 The criteria that underpinned his site selection and
the disdain he expressed for the relics of aristocracy preserved in
the art world mark a fundamental difference between him and
artists such as Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and James Turrell,
whose approaches to art were rooted in Romantic notions of the
natural landscape.
In 1972 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York
presented a major exhibition of the work of Frederick Law
Olmsted.391 Smithson was astounded by what he saw there, which
he took as affirmation of his own projects. He reviewed the
exhibition for Artforum, also using this opportunity to define more
precisely his ideas on landscape politics. He recommended
Olmsted’s work to all those who felt that Earth Art was suffering
from an “Ecological Oedipus Complex.” For Olmsted could now
serve as Smithson’s most persuasive argument that it was possible
to establish a working relationship between the landscape and
human beings, which went beyond mere aesthetic issues and
actually changed the conditions of the people’s daily life: rather
than write lyric poetry, artists could shift “ten million horse-cart
loads of earth to make Central Park.”392 In Smithson’s view,
Olmsted embodied a political stance that was still entirely relevant
in the twentieth century: “Olmsted, a great artist who contended
with such magnitudes, sets an example which throws a whole new
light on the nature of American art.”393 His landscape architecture
was a model for contemporary art: “A park can no longer be seen as
‘a thing-in-itself,’ but rather as a process of ongoing relationships
existing in a physical region—the park becomes a ‘thing-for-us.’ . . .
Nature for the dialectician is indifferent to any formal ideal.”394
Lewis Mumford cited Olmsted when he expressed a similar
sentiment, namely that it is a “common error to regard a park as
something to be produced complete in itself, as a picture to be
painted on canvas. It should rather be planned as one to be done in
fresco, with constant consideration of exterior objects.”395
Smithson’s Land Reclamation proposals were without doubt
some of the most promising artistic projects to emerge in the
1970s. His most important artistic legacies are his exhortation to
his fellow artists to make use of the physical potential around them
to create art on a grand scale and his refusal to kowtow to the
triumph of the autonomous art world. His achievement was not
least that he successfully exchanged the usual addressees in the art
world for a much broader-based public. Although so many of his
projects were not realized and his impact was ultimately largely
restricted to the art world, his proposals and realized Earthworks
clearly demonstrate the innovative principles of his work. The
failure of his other projects to go beyond the drawing board
tellingly reveals the limits that the art world—not art itself—had
imposed.
 The Limits to Art History

Our land ethic, especially in that never-never land

called the “art world,” has become clouded with
abstractions and concepts.
—ROBERT SMITHSON, “Cultural Confinement”

of Allan Kaprow and Robert

IN THIS STUDY I HAVE TRACED THE FOOTSTEPS

Smithson, two artists who knew each other but neither worked
together nor were associated with the same artistic direction or
group. The external impulse to create a composite of their
individual stories came as I waded along Smithson’s
semisubmerged, salt crystal-encrusted Spiral Jetty. In my mind
Spiral Jetty is a place where fact and fiction inextricably intertwine.
I found myself engaging with this work mimetically and without
critical distance, sinking into the “thick description” of the cultural
anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whereby although each stumble and
hesitation is unique and never to be repeated, the line of argument
still makes sense.1 I imagined somehow combining “performative
writing” with thick description, in the hope of possibly living up to
Henri Lefebvre’s requirement that a text should be true at a given
point in time but also have some loose ends, which others could
pick up and work on.2 And so it seems to me that the surface of
Spiral Jetty, imperceptibly crystallizing with the lake’s salt deposits,
is remarkably like the interaction between present perspectives
and historical residues.
I wanted neither to compare Kaprow and Smithson with each
other nor to speculate on the evolutionary processes that occurred
in art during the few years that separate the high points of their
careers. And I certainly did not want to pen them into the stylistic
categories—Happenings on one hand, Earth Art on the other—that
generally frame and sometimes neutralize the reception of their
work. Consequently I have made a point of demonstrating the
distinct difference in approach between Kaprow and Claes
Oldenburg and the gulf between Smithson and artists such as
Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria. I also
deliberately treated terms such as art, painting, and architecture as
perfectly normal and unproblematic, despite their being such a
source of controversy in Kaprow and Smithson’s day. In my view
these terms serve well as the basis for my discussion, particularly
since my concern here is not the definition of the nature of
different genres or artistic media—such as painted color, materials
placed in space, photography, and so on—but rather their changing
limits. (In any case, since the majority of artists have drawn on
various media jointly and in parallel since the 1960s, strictly
medium-related enquiries have become obsolete.) The decision to
concentrate on limits and boundaries—which, like national borders,
are subject to change and sometimes hotly disputed yet at other
times easy to locate and name—made it more feasible to situate
artistic phenomena in a wider sociological and historical context.
As though poring over a map, I sought answers to certain
questions: How far did the art world extend in American society at
that time? Where did painting lose ground? Where did the realms
of sculpture begin at a time when the demand for monuments
suddenly escalated? And the realms of architecture?
I also had no interest in instrumentalizing Kaprow’s or
Smithson’s attitudes as indicators of a period of transition or of a
hiatus between Modernism and Postmodernism. I use these terms
where they fill a need, but I do not regard these concepts of art-
historical periods as metaphenomena in their own right. We should
neither bow to nor ignore them. I take the view that they are
concepts, or products, created by cultural authorities who can be
readily pinpointed in an art-historical timeline—first and foremost
these were the cultural mediators, around 1980, who could see the
advantage to themselves of cultivating the continuity and
historicity of American art. Instead I have sought to present
Kaprow and Smithson as two artists who were quick to recognize
the Modernist/Postmodernist phenomenon and neither dismissed it
as a purely metaphysical development nor exploited it in their work
as value-neutral subject matter but rather launched an offensive
against it as the symptom of a cultural monopoly on meaning. In my
account of their motivation, I have demonstrated that—one after
the other, and independently of each other—they repeatedly put on
spurts, as it were, in their efforts to break free from the
gravitational pull of the dominant institutional ideation. Geertz
described the work of anthropologists as proceeding “in spurts”—
the same phrase could be used of the way Happenings such as
Sweeping, Overtime, and Sweet Wall engaged with their material,
or to describe the formation of Spiral Jetty as the bulldozers and
dump trucks negotiated the fragile salt bed of the Great Salt Lake.3
I see my own historiography as proceeding in this manner.
Like many artists of their time, Kaprow and Smithson found
ways to combat the compartmentalization of art on one hand and
its dependence on its mediators on the other. However, neither was
drawn to “participation” or “relational aesthetics.”4 Their aim was
that art should be autonomous, not absolute. When it came to their
own art, they anchored and weighed it down with so many
specifications and interpretations that it would be all the harder for
others to meddle with or replace them. The wealth of essays and
commentaries that Kaprow and Smithson wove into their art
production arose not from their determination to set commentators
on the right (and only) path but rather from their desire to set new
precedents in order to prevent the court of historicity from closing
their cases too quickly. They were very much concerned that their
art endure and that they be accorded a place in art history.
Unlike the painters of the 1950s and 1960s who presumed a
neutral beholder—timeless and placeless—Kaprow generally had a
specific idea of his audience. It comprised “participants,” “artists,”
“students,” “friends,” “television spectators,” and even particular
fellow artists in the case of Moving (A Happening for Milan Knizak),
Overtime (A Happening for Walter De Maria), and Transfer (A
Happening for Christo). From the early 1970s onward his
Happenings and Activities took place in increasingly precisely
specified contexts, even in private in the company of friends.
Meanwhile, Smithson, moving away from the ubiquitous Untitled
of the 1960s, started to adopt openly narrative titles that guided
readings of his works in a direction of his choosing. Some
commentators and critics regarded this practice as didactic or
overly transparent—the implication being that artists should
shroud their work in a certain mysterious opacity, which the act of
interpretation would lift. But Kaprow and Smithson had no
objections to didacticism—far from it. Their art was addressed to
both specialists and a wider audience, including people from
outside the art world who had no knowledge of the codes of art; in
the case of Smithson’s Land Reclamation projects, it was to be of
direct practical use. In interviews, both Kaprow and Smithson
referred at times to democratic—as opposed to aristocratic—art.
Both were deeply rooted in the middle class and in American
pragmatism. It seems not unreasonable to speculate that both may
have felt that the 1930s, when they were boys, was in some ways a
golden age, as a time when the federal government commissioned
artists to carry out Works Progress Administration projects, giving
them a real purpose within society.
For Smithson and Kaprow, cultural practices that derived their
meaning from a (constructive) critique of Modernist art were of no
interest, because they only served to advance Modernist historicity.
Moreover, art as a critique of earlier art or as a reflection on
artistic media or on the conditions of artistic production and
distribution was also suspect in their eyes, because it played into
the hands of artistic institutions: art museums, curators, and—
bringing up the rear—art history as an academic discipline.
Reflection on artistic media and institutional critique (especially in
the form of the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question of Modernism,
“What is art?”) are, as we have seen, in these institutions’ interest
because they support a signifying economy that takes for granted
that there are people—be they mediators or artists—whose cultural
authority enables them to answer these questions. In view of this, it
is clear that Pop Art, Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art—precisely
those artistic positions that the annals of Postmodernist art
scholarship credit with the greatest radicalism, with offering the
staunchest resistance to Modernism and its institutions and see as
the instigators of the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism—
were in fact the most faithful allies of those same institutions,
because they chose to speak their language.
With regard to their aspirations to achieve institutional
acceptance of an alternative to the mainstream, both Kaprow and
Smithson had to admit defeat. Neither of their names is attached to
any stylistic school, as are those of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol,
Donald Judd, Joseph Beuys, and Gerhard Richter. The
Modernist/Postmodernist system of values that Kaprow and
Smithson sought to subvert has continued to secure its position
since the 1980s and still dominates the mainstream. And as the
new millennium got under way, artistic institutions—first and
foremost museums of contemporary art and periodic exhibitions
such as biennials and triennials—successfully consolidated the
preeminence they first attained in the 1970s.
Neither Kaprow nor Smithson has achieved popularity.
Nevertheless, their roles within academic discourse and art
scholarship have not remained static. Whereas mostly only art
professionals knew of their work before the 1990s, it is now of
wider interest, not just to other artists but also for a growing
public. Their work was long marginalized in the canon of art, which
art historians now face the challenge of reshaping. The stories of
Kaprow and Smithson illuminate the limits that art historians set on
not only art in the 1960s but also their own writing, then and now.
My concern is thus to ask how present-day art scholarship can
fulfill its potential and carve out a useful place for itself in the field
of art mediation, distinct from that of the other institutions that
have been growing apace since the 1960s.
As art historians, how do we deal with art that—like Kaprow’s
Happenings—is an in-the-moment experience for the participants
and can be mediated only by means of documentation and
anecdote? How do we deal with art that—like Smithson’s
Earthworks—is easier to contemplate in the form of its
accompanying films, photographs, and expanded titles than
phenomenologically, with our own eyes, in situ? What is left for the
commentator to do when the work’s maker has already laced it
with explanations and historicizations? Where does that leave art
writing? Has it, as Donald Preziosi has written, become no more
than “the museum’s auxiliary discursive practice”?5 Do we even
need art history to provide a picture of this art? Do we need art
historians to reconstruct the work of artists such as Kaprow, who—
in his role as both artist and art historian—clearly staked out the
interpretation of his work, the vocabulary for its historicization, and
its relevant values? Are art historians obliged to simply reproduce
the models of interpretation that Kaprow and Smithson set up?
How should they respond to the competition from disciplines such
as sociology, aesthetics, media theory, cultural studies, and visual
culture?
In my view, the art of Kaprow and Smithson is particularly
amenable to a form of historiography that predominantly relies on
reproductions and texts. This art positively demands that art
historians set out and stand up for their discipline, that they take
advantage of their institutional autonomy and academic freedom to
seek out topics of interest and their own methods. The decade of
the 1960s is well suited to this kind of investigation because it saw
the beginning of the transition from a comparatively controlled
artists’ world with a small audience to an increasingly deregulated
art world and a much wider audience. The artists, art historians,
curators, collectors, dealers, and art historians of the time are
identifiable as distinct figures who were in competition with one
another and among themselves.
As I have shown, stylistic categorization cannot provide an
adequate framework for a better understanding of the works this
study describes. The numerous styles and schools that emerged in
the 1960s and early 1970s were propagated and defined by the
relevant authorities—be they the artists themselves, art critics, or
museum professionals. Since the ability to connect with art-
historical tradition was a prerequisite for success, stylistic
definition served as a means of legitimation. Terms such as
Happening, Specific Object, and Nonsite had no analytical value
but therefore all the more value in terms of rhetoric and
propaganda. I have illustrated some of the conditions that saw their
coining. I have also described and localized the mechanisms used
to construct and mediate meaning at particular moments in time.
Throughout this book I have aimed at promoting the interests of
my trade of art history. Even if art historians generally have
institutions such as art museums, publishers, and universities to
thank for their field of operation, this need not be treated as an
obligation to identify with those institutions. What may be welcome
to museum boards and long-term lenders—succinct accounts of
exclusive art-historical sequences with clearly fixed hierarchies, for
instance—is not necessarily in the interests of art-historical
scholarship. What may be welcome to art dealers—namely the
stylization of an artist’s output as a coherent, easily recognizable
oeuvre that promises continuity and a steady value to collectors—
may well conflict with the interests of the academic discipline.
Therefore, my intent has been to differentiate my account and to
leave room to maneuver in the meanings I ascribe to various
phenomena so that I may play my part in extending and refining
the workings of art-historical scholarship: the production of texts
and commentaries, the exchange of ideas in academic teaching,
and the retrieval and refinement of the documentary evidence of
art.

TEXTS, EPHEMERAL MEDIA, AND TECHNICAL

REPRODUCTIONS IN ART SCHOLARSHIP
Texts by Kaprow and Smithson—like those of many artists at the
time—should not be equated with art theory merely because they
are written as discursive prose. Like artists’ participation in
exhibitions, presentness in society, and works of art, these texts
were simply another indispensible component of artistic praxis.
Thus it is hard to give credence to Robert Haywood’s view that
Kaprow’s texts and essays were written at the expense of his
artistic production.6 Henry Sayre makes an equally problematic
claim when he suggests that Smithson’s texts—at least from the
perspective of the late 1980s, as he admits—were more important
than his art.7 Comments of this kind are rooted in the notion that
there is a radical difference between production and reception,
between artistic praxis and theory, and that reflection is
detrimental to artists’ creative powers. By the same token, it is a
misconception to assume that artists who use language as an
artistic medium are in any way theory-friendlier than those who
work in the medium of painting or of sculpture. Artists’ texts should
be neither fetishized, shelved, nor regarded as either mere by-
products of or keys to the “real” work. They should rather be
examined on the basis of their relationship to other areas and
media in their author’s artistic praxis.
In this study I have shown that Kaprow’s and Smithson’s
exhibition activities were closely intertwined with their writing and
publishing. Both used the written word as a rhetorical tool to
attract a level of public attention that they might not have received
solely through public presentations of their work, or at least not in
such a short space of time. Both also saw their publications as
means to continuously shape their historicization and reception.
Ultimately their written work was of course also a way to intervene
in the critical discourse—as we can see from their letters to art
journals and the countless references and quotes in the writings of
both artists. Kaprow’s texts interweave the jargon of the
professional art historian with the boldly visionary language of
artist’s statements. Smithson—depending on the context—can turn
his hand with equal ease to reportage, travelogue, science fiction,
or art history. Neither restricts himself to just one of the traditional
artists’ written genres (caricature, statement, diary, or interview)
but instead constantly rings the changes. In so doing they
demonstrate not only the contingent nature of discursive authority
but also the diminishing status of the traditional genre of the
artist’s text in the 1960s and 1970s. This in turn highlights the fact
that art critics lost much ground during this period to curators,
gallerists, and collectors. In short, they intend their literary praxis
not least to compensate for the inadequate representation of their
work in art criticism and art scholarship.
As with many artists who have incorporated art-critical
discourse into their work, it is all too tempting for the art historian
to describe Kaprow’s and Smithson’s projects in their own words.
Apart from this, it is a special pleasure to immerse oneself in
Kaprow’s playful prose and Smithson’s metaphors. Gary Shapiro,
for instance, describes Smithson’s work as “a major fault line in the
shifting of the ground under our feet.”8 Some of Smithson’s
formulations are surely sardonic allegories of the work of his
interpreters, as in the following passage from his essay “A
Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects”: “One’s mind and the
earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away
abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas
decompose into deposits of gritty reason.”9 Surely this must be a
warning to those historiographers who, believing in the primacy of
text and writing, have tended to read artists’ texts as the key to
their entire oeuvre— although in saying this it is important to
differentiate between successive phases in art theory in recent
years. In the 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, an artist’s writing
could be crucial to the evaluation of a new work. By the 1980s and
1990s, however, artists were producing a relatively small number
of texts. The reception of work by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and
Jeff Wall, for instance, depended much less on the texts they had
written than had been the case for artists working in the 1960s and
1970s.
The at times tedious debate that has been ongoing for the past
forty years (above all in the German-speaking art world) regarding
the status of artists’ texts is hopelessly entangled with the
discussion surrounding the “objecthood” of art and the “art
character” of photography and technical reproduction and has
seriously distorted the general view of objects and sources. Of
course, it is important to bear in mind that until well into the 1960s
photography was relegated to the margins of the art market.
Indeed, it seems that the appreciation of photography as a medium
on an artistic (and financial) par with painting and sculpture very
much lagged behind the Neo-Avant-Garde love of photographs. (At
the same time, of course, the marginalization and
underappreciation of this medium made it all the more welcome in
Neo-Avant-Garde praxis.) In terms of the historiography of
Conceptual Art, this debate may be of interest—as long as one
accepts that the changing hierarchy of artistic media was of central
importance around 1970.10 But as I have shown, “What is art?” and
“Is photography art?” are historically localizable questions that had
lost their edge by the 1980s.
Whether the photographs documenting Kaprow’s Happenings
are art or not (Kaprow sometimes said yes, sometimes no;
collectors say, “Oh, yes”) and whether Spiral Jetty should enjoy a
status equal to or higher than that of the film The Spiral Jetty
(Smithson says “equal”; commentators agree to disagree) is
primarily of interest with regard to insurance premiums and
matters of copyright. From the point of view of the art historian, it
seems more important to me to be able to determine with some
certainty when it might have been advantageous to the artist to
have his or her say by publishing texts in art magazines, what
difference it made if a video camera was used instead of a film
camera, what impact different methods of documentation had on
the production of art, how notions of temporality changed, and
what the conditions of production were (costs, assistants, time
pressures).
In “Notes on the Photographs” in his book Assemblage,
Environments and Happenings (1966), Kaprow remarks that
“photographs of art works have their own reality and sometimes
they are art in turn.” Moreover, “they refer to their models, but
strangely, as would a movie taken of a dream, stopped at
unexpected intervals.” By describing not only the ephemeral works
of art that are captured in photographs but also the chronological
arrangement of data that is set out in a book in terms of a dream,
Kaprow affirms the fictive nature of any kind of record. Thus,
documentation might as readily induce a dream state as the real
works of art, for “beyond art, sharing in dream processes is
probably what we call reality.”11 At around the same time, Kaprow
expressed this idea even more clearly in his essay “The Happenings
Are Dead: Long Live the Happenings!” He takes it as read that “the
Happeners, jealous of their freedom, deflect public attention from
what they actually do to a myth about it instead.”12 Indeed, their
aim, as he says, is to remove from direct scrutiny “certain
principles of action” that are important to the longevity of
Happenings:

Hence, it is in the spirit of things to introduce into this myth

certain principles of action, which would have the advantage
of helping to maintain the present good health of the
Happenings while—and I say this with a grin but without
irony—discouraging direct evaluation of their effectiveness.
Instead, they would be measured by the stories that
multiply, by the printed scenarios and occasional
photographs of works that have passed on forever—and
altogether would evoke an aura of something breathing just
beyond our immediate grasp rather than a documentary
record to be judged. In effect, this is calculated rumor, the
purpose of which is to stimulate as much phantasy as
possible, so long as it leads primarily away from the artists
and their affairs. On this plane, the whole process tends to
become analogous to art.13
 Accordingly, the purpose of photographs and written scenarios
was to avert the attention of art critics and scholars from the art.
They are a form of disguise used by artists as protection and a
means of prolonging the life of their work. Kaprow’s statement is
an indication that he was determined to continue pursuing his goal
of aesthetically autonomous art. The danger for this art, as he saw
it, was not its appropriation by society (as in the case of various
avant-ardes) but its appropriation by judgment and subsequent
historical, stylistic, and formal classification in an already fixed
system. In that sense, Kaprow’s interest in rituals and games can
be seen as a smoke screen. By conforming to the rationale of art
history (one style ousting the last, art critiquing past art), by
whistling nonchalantly, like the actors in some Happenings,
Kaprow’s art was able to prevent its meaning from being pinned
down. Critics liked to dismiss these feints as errors, but Kaprow
made it clear that he was entirely serious in what he was doing
—“with a grin but without irony.”
Instead of taking categorical distinctions between artistic work
and its representation as givens, Kaprow insisted on their
conventionality. Meaning is thus not a constant that the written
word can illuminate or obscure but rather something that is
constantly re-forming under the influence of continuously changing
constellations. Smithson, for his part, made the point that he was
not able to distinguish between a “real” object and its “not-real”
representation, for in fact an object was itself the “product of a
thought.” Photographs were not categorically different:
“Photographs are the most extreme contraction, because they
reduce everything to a rectangle and shrink everything down. . . .
Perhaps ever since the invention of the photograph we have seen
the world through photographs and not the other way around.”14
What better way to counter the fetishization of the ephemeral in
art scholarship in the 1990s? The disappearance of the Happenings
and the Earthworks, mourned by some, welcomed by others, was
by no means intentional. These works were created on the basis
that a range of different media would record and perhaps extend,
communicate, or even change their meaning, which would not be
tied down to a single event. For in that case nothing more than the
uniqueness of the event would replace the originality of the work,
and that would render the Happenings neither more present nor
more absent than object-works of art that languish in museums and
private collections, where they are endlessly subjected to
historiographers’ flights of fancy and re-presented with the aid of
technical reproduction. The idea of the dematerialization of the
work of art is untenable in that context, for it presumes that the
instigation of a continual process of materialization and
nonmaterialization is possible. As Kaprow’s friction with Claes
Oldenburg and Smithson’s critique of Marcel Duchamp show, that
kind of economy of transmutations seemed anachronistic to Kaprow
and Smithson. Their interest was in the physical, not purely
symbolic, dematerialization of tangible substances—be it the ice in
Kaprow’s Fluids or the glue in Smithson’s Glue Pour.

CONCLUSION

“How do you make a happening critique?,” Kaprow once asked in

conversation with the art historian Judith Rodenbeck.15 Peggy
Phelan, Amelia Jones, and others have shown what performative art
scholarship can do. I hope I have successfully taken up where they
left off. The dedifferentiation of art-historical processes, the
standardization of value criteria, and the reduction of a whole cast
of artists to a handful of protagonists with instantly recognizable
styles is the thorny legacy left to art scholarship by the art
museums, exhibition centers, and galleries that became such a
force to be reckoned with in the 1960s. In their desire for
international compatibility in the art market, optimum visual
reproducibility, and—to the undeniable benefit of most players in
the art world—blessed quantitative growth, they have drastically
simplified the complexity and multiplicity of artistic phenomena. To
this day art criticism, once an autonomous force, has not recovered
from first being relegated to the margins and then, in the early
1970s, finding its function being absorbed into the duties of
museum spokespeople and exhibition makers. Whatever way we
choose to contemplate the changes in the working lives of art
professionals—and however permeable the boundaries between
artistic, curatorial, and art-critical praxis—art criticism as an
autonomous arbiter of style and taste has all but vanished since the
early 1970s. The publication of texts by Kaprow and Smithson is
not least an indication that they felt the lack of good art-critical or
art-historical analyses of the immediate present.
I hereby make a plea for a mode of art scholarship that will face
the challenges posed by recent art production and the art world as
it is today, continuously review its own premises, and not simply
ignore the position and motivation of the historian but—in the spirit
of “performative writing”—expressly incorporate these factors. As
an art historian I cannot and will not be “objective,” for I want to
reflect (on) the fact that the effort to arrive at a deeper
understanding of certain subjects can have a direct impact on the
instruments of observation and the criteria of evaluation. I base my
argument here on the premise that interpretation and
historicization are neither neutral nor disinterested but rather
integral components in the debate surrounding the means to
influence the infrastructure of the culture industry. It seems
particularly important to me in this context that both Kaprow and
Smithson incorporated the task of art mediation into their artistic
praxis. Moreover, they did so as individuals who at times most
certainly had the opportunity to profit from the mechanisms of
mediation and share in its wider success, did indeed repeatedly slip
into the role of mediators, very quickly recognized the constraints
that this placed on artistic potential, and accordingly set out in
pursuit of innovative ways to make direct contact with the public,
whatever that term may mean.
The triumph of Pop Art and Minimal Art can be criticized as the
art-immanent, stylistic continuation of the triumph of American
painting in the 1940s and 1950s. Kaprow repeatedly came up
against these developments in the first half of the 1960s, when this
course was set for Pop Art and not Happenings. His solution was to
accept his enforced retreat from the art world, to focus on
academia and teaching, and to develop—in the guise of Activities—
an artistic practice that included only a handful of participants and
virtually no audience. When Smithson lost his main backing in the
art world in 1971, after the closure of the Dwan Gallery, he turned
to the private sector. By addressing the mining industry he hoped
not only to find new sponsors for his art but also to open up a new
terrain that went beyond the limits of exhibitions in galleries and
museums.
In the 1960s and 1970s Kaprow and Smithson were among the
artists who were critical of the aspirations to self-referentiality of
culture and art. At first sight their stance may appear self-
contradictory. However, from their point of view, the demarcation of
a sphere of artistic autonomy was of less benefit to art than to the
institutions whose raison d’être lay in just such a demarcation: the
museums “protecting” art, the critics “evaluating” it, and the
historians “putting it in its place.” At the same time, Kaprow and
Smithson certainly did not want to be “constructive” in their
criticisms of these institutions, because that would only affirm the
status quo. Behind the tendency to open up cultural borders—be it
Donald Judd’s concept of the “specific object,” Joseph Beuys’s
notion of the “extended concept of art,” or the “dematerialization”
of Conceptual Art—they sensed the trend of the expansion of the
cultural sphere that, willingly or not, was prepared to conform to
the dictates of deregulated capitalism.
To counter this deregulation—which, in the realm of art,
manifested itself as a form of naturalism posited on a space-time-
mind continuum—Kaprow and Smithson set their rules of play and
limits, be it as scores for the former’s Happenings or containers in
the latter’s Nonsites. “Fraudulent art feels that it has no limits,” as
Smithson once put it.16 They met competition with play and self-
referentiality with irony and humor. They were always open to
ideas from the fantasy worlds of light reading, B-movies, and
comedy. And they insisted that art was a fiction, as were any
pronouncements on art. They countered the Modernist anxiety that
art would cease to exist (reflected in the obsessive interest in the
origins of art and their reenactment) with a very different focus, on
art’s place and purpose. Instead of pursuing a metaphysical
investigation into the essence of art, they took a pragmatic interest
in its functions.
There was no doubt in Kaprow’s and Smithson’s minds that their
approach was fundamentally different from an intrinsically
European one that was partially rooted in an aristocratic tradition
of art. This was certainly a major factor in their resistance to the
art-historical father figure of Duchamp and to the
anthropomorphism and naturalism that the practices of Pop Art,
Minimal Art, and Conceptual Art perpetuated. Their point of
reference lay not in the classical avant-gardes that flourished in the
first two decades of the twentieth century, but in the mid-1930s,
when the federal government actively integrated artists into
society; they looked not to idealism but to pragmatism. This
pragmatism also shaped the vision of a “professional” artist that
they both sought to promote. As their artistic praxis and rhetoric
amply demonstrate, both were striving for “democratic” goals:
Kaprow for “middle-class art,” Smithson for “dialectical art.”17
They were not in awe of technology like some of their fellow
artists and were among the few who made the connection between
unchecked growth and uncheckable collapse: Kaprow described it
in terms of the “impurity” or the “complexity” of life, and Smithson
spoke of “entropy,” which the “entropic” outflow of gold from the
United States to Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, set in motion by
the cost of the Vietnam War, could exemplify.18 In the 1960s the
U.S. dollar lost its position as the leading international reserve
currency, and this became a contributing factor to the world
economic crisis of the early 1970s. However, rather than seeking to
transfigure or deny the paradox of excessive growth and inevitable
collapse, Kaprow and Smithson took it as their starting point: while
Kaprow created variations on the circus of consumption and waste,
Smithson explored the workings of collapse in diverse scenarios.
One of the most promising activities of both artists was their site
selection—staking out the ground, whether it was occupied or not.
That this act of staking out was only a game in the real world,
which had long since parceled out the land, Kaprow and Smithson
saw not as a disadvantage but as a chance for art.
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Transcribed in Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Kepes

1972, pp. 222–232, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 143–153 (quote
on p. 149).
2. Jones and Stephenson 1999, p. 2.
3. Kostelanetz 1968b, p. xiii.
4. Gitlin 1987, pp. xxii, 14.
5. On the cultural history of the United States in the 1970s, see
Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance,
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.
6. Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for
the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind, New
York: Universe Books, 1972.
7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge, U.K.: Blackwell,
1990, p. 298.
8. For a discussion of historiography by decade, see Fredric
Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in Sayres et al. 1984, pp. 178–209.
9. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982 (first edition, New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1960).
10. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John
Goodman, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995 (originally published
as L’origine de la perspective, Paris: Flammarion, 1987).
11. See Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1974; Huyssen 1986; Buchloh 1984; “Who’s
Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” in Foster 1996, pp. 1–32.
 12. “Re-birth myths should not be applied as ‘meaning’ to art.”
Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal
Site,” in Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), pp. 36–40, reprinted in
Smithson 1996, pp. 52–60 (quote on p. 59).
13. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain
Hamilton Grant, London: Continuum, 2004, p. 27.
14. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 298.
15. See, e.g., Sophy Burnham, The Art Crowd: The Inside Story
of How a Few Rich and/or Powerful Figures Control the World’s Art
Market, New York: David McKay, 1973; Calvin Tomkins, The Scene:
Reports on Postmodern Art, New York: Viking Press, 1977; Fred
McDarrah, The Artist’s World, New York: Dutton, 1961.
16. Allan Kaprow, untitled article, in Manifestos, Great Bear
Pamphlet series, New York: Something Else, 1966, pp. 21–23,
reprinted as “Communications Programming,” in Kaprow 1967e,
pp. 12–14 (quote on p. 12).
17. “The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely
problems of use. The question posed by desire is not ‘What does it
mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’” Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, and Helen R. Lane, New York: Continuum, 2004, p. 119.
18. In another context Antonin Artaud makes the following
statement: “It is a question then of making the theater, in the
proper sense of the word, a function; something as localized and as
precise as the circulation of the blood in the arteries or the
apparently chaotic development of dream images in the brain, and
this is to be accomplished by a thorough involvement, a genuine
enslavement of the attention.” “The Theater of Cruelty,” in The
Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards, New York:
Grove Press, 1958, p. 92.
19. “The fifties had been a period in which the key word had
been security, personal and corporate, internal and external. The
young people appeared intent only on being absorbed into the
comfortable, well-regulated life of their elders. They were dubbed,
appropriately enough, ‘The Silent Generation.’” Quinn and Dolan
1968, p. 1.
20. The historian David Burner points to the ambivalent
situation of liberal intellectuals: “The connections between
government Cold War projects and the scientific and academic
communities, staffed in good part by people who considered
themselves liberals, compromised academic freedom.” Burner
1996, p. 4.
21. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Tomorrow’s Agenda,” Foreign Affairs,
July 1966, reprinted in Kostelanetz 1968b, pp. 317–326 (quote on p.
318).
22. Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of
Art,” Art International 12, no. 3 (March 1968), reprinted in
Smithson 1996, pp. 78–94 (quote on p. 91).
23. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959, p. 15.
24. Ibid., p. xi.
25. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing
American Character, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and
Nathan Glazer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950, p. 26.
26. William H. White Jr., The Organization Man, New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1956, p. 7.
27. Ibid., p. 11.
28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, Leipzig: C. G.
Naumann, 1908; Habermas 1991, pp. 12–14; Guy Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York:
Zone Books, 1995 (original: La Société du Spectacle, Paris:
Buchet/Chastel, 1967).
29. See “The Actor Deprived of His Art,” in Sennett 1993, pp.
313–336.
30. Kaprow 1966a, p. 184.
31. Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, trans.
Ralph Manheim, London: Lund Humphries, 1965 (original: Malerei
im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich: Prestel, 1955), vol. 1, p. 153.
32. “Liée à une crise historique et de structure, la modernité
n’en est pourtant que le symptôme. Elle n’analyse pas cette crise,
elle l’exprime de façon ambiguë, dans une fuite en avant
continuelle. Elle joue comme idée-force et comme idéologie
maîtresse, sublimant les contradictions de l’histoire dans les effets
de civilisation. Elle fait de la crise une valeur, une morale
contradictoire.”Jean Baudrillard, “Modernité,” in Encyclopaedia
Universalis, Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1992, vol. 15, pp.
552–554 (quote on p. 552).
33. “La modernité n’est pas la révolution, même si elle s’articule
sur des révolutions (industrielle, politique, révolution de
l’information, révolution du bien-être, etc.). Elle est, comme dit
Lefèbvre, ‘l’ombre de la révolution manquée, sa parodie’
(Introduction à la modernité).” Ibid., p. 554.
34. “Elle perd peu à peu toute valeur substantielle de progrès
qui la sous-tendait au départ, pour devenir une esthétique du
changement pour le changement. . . . À la limite, elle rejoint ici
purement et simplement la mode, qui est en même temps la fin de
la modernité.” Ibid., p. 553.
35. Walter Grasskamp, Die unbewältigte Moderne. Kunst und
Öffentlichkeit, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989; Hans Belting, Das Ende
der Kunstgeschichte. Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren, Munich: C.
H. Beck, 1995.
36. Belting 1995, pp. 51–52 (author’s translation).
37. Ibid., p. 173 (author’s translation).
38. Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of
Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994b.
39. On the identification of starting dates and periodization, see
also Damisch 1987, above all “The Question of the Origin,” pp. 74–
86.
40. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” in the section
“Documenta: A Portfolio,” Artforum 11, no. 2 (October 1972), p. 39,
reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 154–156 (quotes on p. 154).
41. Ibid., p. 156.
42. Kaprow 1958; O’Doherty 2000.
43. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art:
Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, p.8.

ALLAN KAPROW AND THE LIMITS TO PAINTING

 1. In 1991 and 1992, at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan and the
Studio Morra in Naples, Kaprow presented what he called two
“reinventions” of this environment, now titled Beauty Parlor and
Dead End. Allan Kaprow, “Beauty Parlor,” “Dead End (1992 Version
of Beauty Parlor),” in Kaprow, 7 Environments, cat., Milan:
Fondazione Mudima, 1992, pp. 34–52.
2. Park Tylor, untitled short review of the Allan Kaprow
exhibition at Hansa Gallery, Reviews and Previews, Art News 57,
no. 3 (May 1958), p. 14.
3. Anonymous, “Trend to the ‘Anti-Art,’” Newsweek 51, no. 13
(31 March 1958), pp. 94, 96.
4. Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004, p. 21.
5. It seems, however, that Hendricks may have confused the
autumn exhibition with the spring exhibition. Hendricks, quoted in
Joan Marter, “The Forgotten Legacy: Happenings, Pop Art, and
Fluxus at Rutgers University,” in Off Limits: Rutgers University and
the Avant-Garde, 1957–1963, ed. Marter, Newark, N.J.: Newark
Museum, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999, pp.
1–47 (quote on p. 45).
6. Kelley, Childsplay, p. 21.
7. Richard Bellamy, interview by Richard Brown Baker (1963),
AoAA, p. 37.
8. Fairfield Porter, untitled review of Allan Kaprow’s work, Art
News 57, no. 9 (9 January 1959), pp. 11–12 (quote on p. 12).
9. Allan Kaprow, “Conversation,” in Kostelanetz 1968a, pp. 100–
132 (quote on p. 109).
10. Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” Allan
Kaprow: An Exhibition, Hansa Gallery, 25 November-13 December
1959, reprinted in a slightly altered version in Kaprow 1993, pp.
10–12 (quote on p. 11).
11. Allan Kaprow, “Conversation,” in Kostelanetz 1968a, p. 106.
12. Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” in
Kaprow 1993, p. 12.
13. Allan Kaprow, “Introduction to a Theory,” in Kaprow, 7
Environments, pp. 23–26 (quote on p. 24).
 14. Kaprow repeatedly stated that he wrote this essay and sent
it to Art News immediately after Pollock’s death and that Thomas
Hess took two years to publish it. In view of the ongoing impact of
this text, the date of its composition is of secondary importance. I
have found no evidence either in Kaprow’s archive (Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles) or in the Hess Papers (AoAA) that it was
written at an earlier date.
15. See the history of the term postmodernity in Perry Anderson,
The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso, 1998.
16. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News 57,
no. 6 (October 1958), pp. 24–26, 55–57, reprinted in Kaprow 1993,
pp. 1–9 (quotes on p. 2).
17. Ibid., pp. 4, 3.
18. Ibid., p. 7.
19. Ibid., p. 9.
20. Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” radio interview,
broadcast February 1964, edited by Lucy Lippard and published in
Art News 65 (5 September 1966), pp. 55–61, reprinted in Battcock
1968, pp. 148–164 (quote on pp. 149–150).
21. Donna De Salvo, “‘Subjects of the Artists’: Towards a
Painting without Ideals,” in Ferguson 1992, pp. 67–93 (quote on p.
73).
22. Paul Schimmel, “The ‘Faked Gesture’: Pop Art and the New
York School,” in Ferguson 1992, pp. 19–65 (quote on p. 43).
23. Oldenburg 1967, p. 13.
24. Robert Rauschenberg, in conversation with the author,
Zurich, 30 April 1999.
25. Tomkins 1980, pp. 96–97.
26. “Les deux grands œdipiens, Proust et Kafka, sont des
œdipiens pour rire.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalism
et schizophrénie. L’anti-Œdipe, nouvelle édition augmenté, Paris:
Les éditions de minuit, 1975, appendice, p. 473. This appendix is
not in the English versions of Anti-Oedipus.
27. Kaprow 1966a, p. 160.
28. Hofmann (1948) 1986, p. 66.
 29. Allan Kaprow, “In Response: A Letter from Allan Kaprow,”
Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4 (Summer 1966), reprinted in
Sandford 1995, pp. 219–220 (quote on p. 220).
30. Allan Kaprow, “A Statement,” in Kirby 1965a, p. 44.
31. Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” in
Kaprow 1993, p. 11.
32. Hopps and Davidson 1997, p. 556.
33. Allan Kaprow, “Conversation,” in Kostelanetz 1968a, p. 105.
34. Johns 1996, pp. 272–273.
35. Porter 1959a, p. 12.
36. Robert Rauschenberg, “Untitled Statement 1959,” in Stiles
and Selz 1996, p. 321.
37. Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” in
Kaprow 1993, pp. 11–12.
38. Allan Kaprow, “Experimental Art,” in Art News 65, no. 1 (1
March 1966), pp. 60–63, reprinted slightly altered in Kaprow 1993,
pp. 66–80 (quote on pp. 70–71).
39. Richard Bellamy, c. 1963, AoAA, p. 1.
40. On the Tanager Gallery, see Brian O’Doherty, “Death of a
Gallery,” New York Times, April 1, 1962, reprinted in O’Doherty
1967, pp. 165–167. On the history of Tenth Street galleries, see
Joellen Bard, Tenth Street Days: The Co-ops of the 50’s—The
Galleries Tanager, Hansa, James, Camino, March, Brata, Phoenix,
Arae: An Artist-Initiated Exhibition, Works from 1952–1962, cat.,
New York: Education, Art and Service, 1977; Bard, “Tenth Street
Days: An Interview with Charles Cajori and Lois Dodd,” Arts
Magazine 52 (December 1977), pp. 98–103.
41. George Segal, “An Interview with Henry Geldzahler,” in
Artforum 3, no. 2 (November 1964), p. 27.
42. A copy of the contract with the gallery’s statutes has been
preserved in the Richard Stankiewicz papers, AoAA. See also the
different list of names in Bard 1977a, p. 8.
43. Document in the materials relating to the Hansa Gallery,
Richard Stankiewicz papers, AoAA.
44. Karp soon moved to the Leo Castelli Gallery. Bellamy
founded the Green Gallery, which, with the support of the collector
Robert Scull, became one of the most important for Pop Art and
Minimal Art.
45. Ten from Rutgers University, cat., New York: Bianchini
Gallery, 1965.
46. See the chronology in Waldmann 1994, p. 368.
47. Allan Kaprow, letter to Meyer Schapiro, 1 February 1955,
Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute, cited in Haywood
1993, p. 41.
48. The first masters degrees in art were awarded in the mid-
1920s. In the early 1940s there were just sixty graduate student
candidates at eleven art institutions. By 1950–51 there were as
many as 320 candidates at thirty-two institutions. In 1960 there
were 1,365 candidates in seventy-two institutions. During the
course of the 1960s, thirty-one new MFA programs were launched;
another forty-four were introduced in the 1970s. Between 1990 and
1995 more than ten thousand MFA degrees were awarded. Howard
Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American
University, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 6;
Crane 1987 (especially pp. 5–10).
49. Crane 1987, p. 149.
50. According to Richard Bellamy, in 1953 and 1954 Greenberg
was engaged for a huge fee but drew an audience of around only
twenty-five. Bellamy, 1963, AoAA, pp. 3, 11.
51. Allan Kaprow, “The Artist as a Man of the World,” Art News
63, no. 6 (1964), pp. 34–37, 58, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, pp. 46–
58 (quote on p. 49).
52. Bellamy, 1963, AoAA, p. 38.
53. In writing this section, I am indebted to the description in
Kirby 1965a, pp. 67–83 (quote on p. 67).
54. “Press release,” undated, Allan Kaprow papers, Getty
Research Institute.
55. The front and back of the flyer are reproduced in Eva Meyer-
Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (eds.), Allan
Kaprow: Art as Life, London: Thames and Hudson, 2008, pp. 120–
121.
 56. One example has been preserved in the Allan Kaprow
papers, Getty Research Institute.
57. The typewritten program for 18 Happenings in Six Parts by
Allan Kaprow and the “Instructions” are reproduced in Barry Rosen
and Michaela Unterdörfer (eds.), Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6
Parts, Göttingen: Steidl Hauser and Wirth, 2007. Robert Haywood
interviewed George Segal, who described details of the sequence of
events. Haywood 1993, pp. 193ff. Advertisements and the list of
visitors and monies paid are among the Allan Kaprow papers, Getty
Research Institute. Excerpts from these also appear in Rosen and
Unterdörfer 2007.
58. Allan Kaprow, “18 Happenings in Six Parts by Allan Kaprow,”
reprinted in Rosen and Unterdörfer 2007, p. 1, and reproduced as
“Cast and Instructions for 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,” in Eva Meyer-
Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (eds.), Allan
Kaprow: Art as Life, London: Thames and Hudson, 2008, p. 122.
59. Besides Kaprow, others involved with the Reuben Gallery
(1959–1961) were Red Grooms, who ran the City Gallery (1958–
1959) and the Delancey Street Museum (1959–1960), Jim Dine, and
Claes Oldenburg, who was connected to the Judson Gallery. From
1959 to 1961 the Reuben Gallery hosted a continuous sequence of
exhibitions and Happenings by artists such as George Brecht,
Samaras, Grooms, Kaprow, Whitman, and Oldenburg. In January
1965 the Guggenheim Museum, New York, presented a
retrospective exhibition of work by artists connected with the
Reuben Gallery, curated by Lawrence Alloway. See Eleven from the
Reuben Gallery (including list of exhibits).
60. McDarrah 1961.
61. Kirby 1965a, p. 74.
62. Johns later recalled: “One of us was told to paint circles and
the other straight lines. With a brush, I nervously drew unsteady
verticals on my side of the cloth and, as Bob’s circles bled through
the material, I was again impressed by his brilliance. He, having
discarded his brush, simply dipped the top of a jar into the paint
and then printed it onto the fabric.” “The Fabric of Friendship:
Jasper Johns in Conversation with David Vaughan,” Sunday Times
Magazine (London), October 29, 1989, reprinted in Johns 1996, pp.
235–237 (quote on p. 236).
63. In an homage to the pianist David Tudor at the American
Embassy in Paris in 1961, at which Niki de Saint Phalle, Johns, and
Jean Tinguely were also present, Rauschenberg presented a
variation on this motif. Standing behind a canvas, out of sight of the
audience, he made a First Time Painting; the sound of him working
was picked up on a microphone and relayed to the audience. Nancy
Spector, “Robert Rauschenberg and Performance, 1963–67: A
‘Poetry of Infinite Possibilities,’” in Hopps and Davidson 1997, p.
227.
64. Jürgen Becker, “Einführung,” in Becker and Vostell 1965, p.
11.
65. Goldberg 1988, p. 128.
66. Sayre 1989, p. 13.
67. Crow 1996b, pp. 11, 32. “On the eastern seaboard, the
political temperature of the art scene remained distinctly lower.
The nearer horizons of the art world were so much in evidence that
artistic ambitions did not so easily pass to the farther shores of
social dissent” (p. 32).
68. Kelley 2004, p. 26.
69. Allan Kaprow, “Something to Take Place: A Happening,” in
Anthologist 30, no. 4 (1959), pp. 5–16, reprinted in Kirby 1965a, pp.
53–65.
70. Michael Kirby, “Happenings: An Introduction,” in Kirby
1965a, p. 37.
71. See, e.g., McDarrah 1961, pp. 178–180.
72. Allan Kaprow [J. H. Livingstone, pseud.], “Mr. Kaprow’s 18
Happenings,” Village Voice, 7 October 1959; Kaprow, in
conversation with the author, Encinitas, Calif., October 1997.
73. Porter 1959b, p. 260.
74. Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and
Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957–1965, New York:
Arbor House, 1988, pp. 110–116 (quote on p. 116).
75. This Happening was documented on video.
76. André Lepecki, “Redoing ‘18 Happenings in 6 Parts,’” in
Rosen and Unterdörfer 2007, pp. 45–50.
77. Gavin Butt, “Happenings in History, or The Epistemology of
the Memoir,” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 2 (24 February 2001), pp.
113–126 (quote on p. 122).
78. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, introduction to “Checklist of the
Exhibition,” in Buchloh and Judith F. Rodenbeck (eds.),
Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts—
Events, Objects, Documents, New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach
Art Gallery, Columbia University, 1999, p. 111, cited in Butt 2001,
p. 123.
79. Butt 2001, p. 123.
80. “Press release,” undated, Allan Kaprow papers, Getty
Research Institute; Johnston 1962, p. 8–13.
81. Allan Kaprow, letter to Jill [Johnston], 12 April 1962, Jean
Brown papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
82. Allan Kaprow, “A Statement (Rewritten from a Recorded
Interview),” in Kirby 1965a, p. 49.
83. Hutcheon 1994, pp. 5, 33, 4–5. “Unlike metaphor or allegory,
which demand similar supplementing of meaning, irony has an
evaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional responses in
those who ‘get’ it and those who don’t, as well as in its targets and
in what some people call its ‘victims’” (p. 2).
84. Kelley 2004, p. 38.
85. However, it seems that no one else noticed this allusion.
Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997. There is
another obvious association, with the practice in the 1950s of the
Museum of Modern Art, New York, of stating the number of artists
in an exhibition in the title, as in Fifteen Americans (1952) and
Sixteen Americans, which opened in December 1959.
86. The program is reprinted in Rosen and Unterdörfer 2007, p.
1.
87. The motif of appearing in changing roles was probably
inspired by the lecture John Cage gave at Rutgers University in
early 1958 and published in the Village Voice that April. Cage,
“Composition as Process III,” in Cage 1961, pp. 41–56. A later piece
with an affinity with Cage’s and Kaprow’s work was Robert
Morris’s Performance 21.3 at the Surplus Theater in New York in
1964, in which Morris appeared as Erwin Panofsky. Berger 1989,
pp. 1–4.
88. Charles Gaulkin, “Painting Pulls the Audience In,” Newark
Star Ledger, 18 October 1959.
89. Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology, New
York: Dutton, 1965, p. 83.
90. Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His
Art,” in Metro 3, no. 4–5 (1962), reprinted in Steinberg 1972, pp.
17–54.
91. Art News 56, no. 9 ( January 1958), cover. The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, purchased the picture shown on this cover.
Johns 1996, p. 275.
92. Amelia Jones 1994a.
93. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing
American Character, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.
94. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
95. On early-twentieth-century German dance-gymnastics
groups, see Edward Gordon Craig, “Der Schauspieler als Über-
Marionette” (originally appeared in English in The Mask 2 [1908]),
translated into German and reprinted in Craig 1969, pp. 51–73.
96. Nancy Spector, “Rauschenberg and Performance, 1963–
1967: A ‘Poetry of Infinite Possibilities,’” in Hopps and Davidson
1997, pp. 226–245; Michael Kirby, “Happening: An Introduction,” in
Kirby 1965a, p. 32 (“There is no question that much of the material
and structure of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts resulted directly from
this work”); Banes 1993b, p. 29; Kostelanetz 1968a, p. 29; Henri
1974, p. 88; Goldberg 1988, p. 126.
97. For descriptions of the event, see Duberman 1993, pp. 350–
358; Fetterman 1991, pp. 174–187; Harris 1987, pp. 226, 228; Joan
Young and Susan Davidson, “Chronology,” in Hopps and Davidson
1997, p. 552.
98. When asked whether the White Paintings were exhibited
during this legendary event, Rauschenberg replied, rather
mysteriously, “No. I was playing music. The White Paintings were
there. But nobody could see them.” Rauschenberg, in conversation
with the author, 1999.
99. John Cage, “Composition as Process, Part II, Indeterminacy,”
lecture given in Darmstadt, 1958, published in Cage 1961, pp. 35–
40 (quotes on p. 39).
100. John Cage, “Experimental Music,” statement at a
convention of the Music Teachers National Association, Chicago,
winter 1957, first published in 1958, reprinted in Cage 1961, pp. 7–
12 (quote on p. 12).
101. In private conversation Kaprow expressed a measure of
skepticism regarding Cage, Johns, and Rauschenberg’s strategy of
“hid[ing] behind the phenomenon of chance” and cultivating a
“witty taste.” Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
102. Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner, “An Interview with
John Cage,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter 1965), pp. 50–
72, reprinted in Sandford 1995, pp. 51–71 (quote on p. 69).
103. In her book Body Art/Performing the Subject, Amelia Jones
addresses the problematics of narcissism in the chapter
“Postmodernism, Subjectivity, and Body Art.” Having reminded her
readers that in the 1960s and 1970s, Body Art—particularly the
feminist version—was criticized for its inherent narcissism, she
points to the Modernistic premises of this critique and presents a
fundamental reevaluation of Body Art: “Narcissism, enacted
through body art, turns the subject inexorably and paradoxically
outward. . . . Narcissism can be understood as endemic to late
capitalist commodity culture, which requires a ‘manufacture’ of
desire and the simultaneous turning outward of the self toward
commodities and obsessive self-absorption, in a ‘disturbance’ of the
oedipal structures by which subjects (and male subjects in
particular) have long attempted to project themselves into coherent
selfhood in Western patriarchy.” Jones 1998, p. 48.
104. Kirby and Schechner 1965, reprinted in Sandford 1995, p.
69.
105. Ibid., p. 52.
106. Butt 2001.
107. The metaphor of the “desiring-machine” in the writing of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari comes to mind here: “Desiring-
machines, on the contrary, continually break down as they run, and
in fact run only when they are not functioning properly: the product
is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a
graft, and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel
that makes it run.” Deleuze and Guattari 2004, p. 34.
108. Lepecki 2007, p. 45.
109. “Opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen
to be in the environment.” John Cage, “Experimental Music,” in
Cage 1961, p. 8.
110. John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo” (1958), in Cage
1961, p. 5. Michael Kirby underlines this when he writes, “In his
music Cage abandoned harmony, the traditional means of
structuring a composition, and replaced it with duration.” Kirby,
“The New Theatre,” in Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter
1965), reprinted in Sandford 1995, p. 33.
111. Kaprow 1961, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 19.
112. “The unconscious poses no problem of meaning, solely
problems of use. The question posed by desire is not ‘What does it
mean?’ but rather ‘How does it work?’” Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, New York:
Continuum, 2004, p. 119.
113. “Pollock’s choice of enormous sizes served many purposes,
chief of which for our discussion is the fact that by making mural-
scale paintings, they ceased to become paintings and became
environments.” Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” p.
56, reprinted, albeit with environments unitalicized, in Kaprow
1993, p. 6.
114. Allan Kaprow, “A Statement,” in Michael Kirby, Happenings:
An Illustrated Anthology, New York: Dutton 1965, p. 46. After
mentioning environments in “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,”
Kaprow had talked, in 1959’s “Notes on the Creation of a Total
Art,” of the connection between “literal space and painted space”
and sound, which meant the gallery visitor could be “surrounded”
by things. Reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 11.
115. Geoffrey Hendricks, verbal statement at a roundtable
discussion, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 12 November 2006.
116. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
 117. Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the
Happenings,” Artforum 4, no. 7 (March 1966), pp. 36–39, reprinted
in Kaprow 1993, pp. 59–65 (quote on p. 61).
118. Michael Kirby, “Happenings: An Introduction,” in Kirby
1965a, pp. 9–42, reprinted in Sandford 1995, pp. 1–28; Kirby, “The
New Theatre,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (1965), reprinted in
Sandford 1995, pp. 29–47.
119. “I remember that when a Red Grooms piece and a Kaprow
were put on together at the Reuben Gallery, in January of 1960,
there was really a lack of communication between the two groups;
they divided between an emotional and a rational expression. The
latter had come out of Cage’s ideas and what Kaprow had done
with the 18 Happenings.” Claes Oldenburg, “Conversation,” in
Kostelanetz 1968a, pp. 133–162 (quote on p. 135).
120. Allan Kaprow, interview by Moira Roth (1981), AoAA, p. 35.
121. Yoshiaki Tono, “Jackson Pollock et le groupe Gutai,” in
Jackson Pollock, cat., Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre
Georges Pompidou, 1982, p. 83–92; Michael Kirby, “Happenings: An
Introduction,” in Sandford 1995, p. 17.
122. Paul Schimmel, “Introduction and Acknowledgments,” in
Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979,
cat., ed. Schimmel, Los Angeles: Geffen Contemporary at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, New York: Thames and Hudson,
1998, pp. 11–15 (quote on p. 11).
123. For the history of the Judson Gallery, see Banes 1993a.
124. Kirby 1965a, pp. 121–133; Sohm and Szeemann 1970,
unpaginated.
125. Red Grooms, “A Statement,” in Kirby 1965a, pp. 118–120.
126. Red Grooms, “The Burning Building: The Production,” in
Kirby 1965a, p. 124.
127. Claes Oldenburg, “Brief Description of the Show” (1960), in
Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, cat., New York: Guggenheim
Museum Publications, 1995, p. 50.
128. Jim Dine, “A Statement,” in Kirby 1965a, pp. 184–188
(quote on p. 185).
129. Red Grooms, “A Statement,” in Kirby 1965a, p. 120.
 130. Jim Dine, “A Statement,” in Kirby 1965a, p. 188.
131. “My performances . . . are very much connected with my
work as a painter and sculptor.” Claes Oldenburg, “Conversation,”
in Kostelanetz 1968a, p. 141.
132. “The performance is the main thing but when it is over
there are a number of subordinate pieces which may be isolated,
souvenirs, residual objects.” Claes Oldenburg, “Residual Objects”
(1962), in Claes Oldenburg, p. 143.
133. Schimmel 198, pp. 68–69.
134. Allan Kaprow, interview by Moira Roth (1981), AoAA, p. 43.
135. These details are drawn from Kirby 1965a, pp. 94–104.
136. Kelley 2004, p. 55.
137. Ibid., p. 57 (including Kaprow quote).
138. Dewey 1934, p. 209.
139. Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical
Juxtaposition,” The Second Coming 1, no. 6 ( January 1965),
reprinted in Sontag (1966) 1981, pp. 263–274 (quote on p. 265).
140. Sontag (1966) 1981, p, 265.
141. Ibid., p, 273.
142. Ibid., pp. 273–274.
143. The notion that Happenings were a destructive art form
colored their reception in Europe for a long time. The 1966
Destruction in Art Symposium in London and the Actions of the
Viennese Actionists no doubt contributed to this.
144. “The following is a résumé—or ‘scenario’—of a happening
performed in the boiler-room of New York’s Maidman Playhouse
last March 22nd. It was given only this once, as is my frequent
custom, and probably will not be performed again. Therefore, the
story of it, along with a few photographs, is one way to tell others
about what happened.” Allan Kaprow, “A Service for the Dead
(Originally Untitled),” typescript, unpublished, undated,
unpaginated, Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
145. This meeting in the foyer is reminiscent of Luigi
Pirandello’s play Each in His Own Way (1924), whose audience also
meets the characters in a foyer.
 146. Kaprow, “A Service for the Dead (Originally Untitled),”
Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
147. Allan Kaprow, letter to Jill [Johnston], undated, Jean Brown
papers, Getty Research Institute.
148. Kelley 2004, p. 64.
149. Kaprow, “A Service for the Dead (Originally Untitled),”
Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
150. Kelley 2004, p. 70.
151. Allan Kaprow, “Calling: A Happening for Performers Only,
Performed Saturday/Sunday, 22 August 1965,” in Sandford 1995,
pp. 195–201; Kelley 2004, pp. 106–109.
152. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
153. Roland Barthes, “From Speech to Writing,” in The Grain of
the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985, pp. 3–7 (quote on p. 5).
154. Allan Kaprow, “Segal’s Vital Mummies,” Art News 62, no.
10 (February 1964), pp. 30–33, reprinted in Madoff 1997, pp. 331–
334 (quote on pp. 333–334).
155. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
156. A small catalogue with statements was published. Harriet
DeLong prepared a long essay for a book that was not published.
157. Geldzahler 1969, p. 35.
158. Henry Geldzahler, quoted in Peter Selz, “A Symposium on
Pop Art,” Arts Magazine, April 1963, pp. 36–45, reprinted in Madoff
1997, pp. 65–81 (quotes on pp. 65, 67).
159. See, e.g., Gene R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Part 1, Jim
Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol,” Art News
62, no. 7 (November 1963), pp. 24–27, 60–64; Swenson, “What Is
Pop Art? Part 2, Answers from Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist,
Stephen Drukee, Jasper Johns,” Art News 62, no. 10 (February
1964), pp. 40–43, 66–67.
160. Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a
System,” Art-forum 11, no. 1 (1972), reprinted in Alloway 1984, pp.
3–15 (quote on p. 4).
 161. Henry Geldzahler, interview by Paul Cummings (1970),
AoAA, pp. 24, 71.
162. He made particular mention of Barr’s Fantastic Art, Dada
and Surrealism (cat., New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936).
Ibid., p. 27.
163. Henry Geldzahler, quoted in Selz 1963, reprinted in Madoff
1997, p. 66.
164. Geldzahler 1970, AoAA, p. 73.
165. Hilton Kramer, quoted in Selz 1963, p. 38.
166. Lippard 1966a, p. 9.
167. Ibid., p. 13.
168. Ibid., pp. 74–75.
169. Ibid., p. 79.
170. Ibid., p. 85.
171. See, e.g., Paul Mattick’s critique of the decontextualized
interpretations of Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto, Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, Rainer Crone, and Thomas Crow, “The Andy Warhol of
Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” Critical Inquiry 24,
no. 4 (Summer 1998), pp. 965–987.
172. Constance Glenn, “American Pop Art: Inventing the Myth,”
in Marco Livingstone 1991, pp. 30–39.
173. Paul Schimmel, “The Faked Gesture: Pop Art and the New
York School,” in Ferguson 1992, pp. 19–65 (quote on p. 19).
174. “Modernism’s march from the heroic gestures of Abstract
Expressionism, through Minimalism’s reductive tendencies, to
Conceptual art’s objectlessness is paralleled in the action-based
works in this exhibition.” Paul Schimmel, “Leap into the Void:
Performance and the Object,” in Schimmel 1998, pp. 17–119 (quote
on p. 17).
175. See, e.g., Gibson 1997.
176. Geldzahler 1970, AoAA, p. 35.
177. Lil Picard, “New Yorker Pop-Report,” in Becker and Vostell
1965, pp. 96–98.
178. Lawrence Alloway, introduction to Eleven from the Reuben
Gallery, unpaginated, reprinted in Alloway 1975b, pp. 151–154
(quotes on pp. 151, 152).
179. Allan Kaprow, “Die Zukunft der Pop Art,” talk presented on
3 March 1963 at a symposium at the Jewish Museum, directed by
the Gotham chapter of the National Women’s Committee of
Brandeis University, not published in English; trans. Tomas Schmit,
in Jürgen Becker and Vostell 1965, pp. 86–95 (quote on p. 92).
180. Ibid., p. 94.
181. Ibid., p. 95.
182. The exhibition was on view in New York from 2 October to
12 November 1961; following that it went to the Dallas Museum of
Contemporary Art and then the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Stephan Geiger, The Art of Assemblage. The Museum of Modern
Art, 1961. Die neue Realität der Kunst in den frühen sechziger
Jahren, Munich: Silke Schreiber, 2008.
183. Seitz 1961, p. 166n21.
184. Allan Kaprow, letter to William Seitz, 25 January 1961,
Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
185. Geiger 2008, p. 106.
186. William C. Seitz, “Attitudes and Issues,” in Seitz 1961, pp.
90–92 (quotes on p. 92).
187. Allan Kaprow, letter to Harold Rosenberg, 10 August 1968,
Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
188. Sontag 1965, reprinted in Sontag (1966) 1981, p. 265.
189. Allan Kaprow, “Happenings in the New York Scene,” Art
News 60, no. 3 (May 1961), pp. 36–39, 50–62, reprinted in Kaprow
1993, pp. 15–26 (quote on p. 25).
190. Ibid., pp. 22–23.
191. Ibid. p. 24.
192. Ibid.
193. Ibid., p. 22.
194. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
195. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(1852), trans. Daniel De Leon, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1907, p. 5.
196. William H. White, The Organization Man, New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1956.
197. Kaprow, 1966c, reprinted slightly altered in Kaprow 1993,
p. 79.
198. Kaprow “Happenings in the New York Scene,” reprinted in
Kaprow 1993, p. 25.
199. Ibid., p. 26.
200. Ibid., p. 25.
201. Rose 1970, p. 25; Claes Oldenburg, “Conversation,” in
Kostelanetz 1968a, pp. 133–162.
202. See Haywood 1993, above all chapter 4, “Vanguard Art and
the Judson Memorial Church,” pp. 240–286.
203. Rose 1970, p. 30.
204. Claes Oldenburg, “Conversation,” in Kostelanetz 1968a, p.
138.
205. Claes Oldenburg, letter to Kaprow, 5 October 1960, Allan
Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
206. Oldenburg wrote to Kaprow, “I got the catalogue from MJ
[Martha Jackson] yesterday and I wanted to tell you I like your
contribution very much and also the whole catalogue, except that I
got no credit for the poster.” Ibid.
207. “Press Release: Environment—Situations—Spaces, 25 May
1961,” reprinted in Sohm and Szeemann 1970, unpaginated.
208. “It was so exciting that we continued this show in the fall.
In October we had it again, because many people were out of town
and they wanted to see it.” Martha Jackson, interview by Paul
Cummings (1969), AoAA, p. 45.
209. Rose 1970, p. 64.
210. With the exception of an extended stay in Tucson when he
had suffered from a lung complaint as a child, Kaprow had mainly
lived in New Jersey before he moved to Manhattan in 1945.
211. In the end he did not buy any. Looking back he described
The Store as a “caricature of a gallery.” Allan Kaprow, in
conversation with the author, 1997.
212. See reproductions of Oldenburg’s photographs of the area
in Achim Hochdörfer (ed.), Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, cat.,
Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2012, pp. 14–
17.
213. Claes Oldenburg, letter to Allan Kaprow, 27 June 1961,
Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
214. Claes Oldenburg, letter to Allan Kaprow, 15 July 1961, pp.
1, 2, Allan Kaprow papers.
215. “Your works become more and more truncated and
scarified to mental constructions. You are chopping away at
yourself. The reason Red’s Building was so thrilling to me, apart
from its details, was that the projection was so clear and fulfilled,
so perfectly artistic, a true cosmos.” Ibid., p. 3.
216. “That is why I am against your ‘dreaming.’ . . . Within art
this is perfectly OK, art is a dream, but outside art a dream is a lie,
and you can’t live by lies, not to mention that lies are dangerous to
others. Or should I say: of course we live by lies, but we must never
give up trying not to lie to ourselves. You are giving up. This is
again the confusion in you between your artist reality (the
permissible dream) and philosophical reality (which must be as
little a dream as possible.” Ibid., p. 4.
217. “I am inclined to encourage what is bizarre because I
believe in it creatively. I am inclined to encourage you, while not at
all in sympathy with you. . . . I am quite aware I think of what you
are doing and I am one of the few, if not the only one, who does not
see your fictional creation of yourself as pure ambition.” Ibid., p. 4.
218. Ibid, pp. 4–5.
219. Allan Kaprow, letter to Claes Oldenburg, 31 July 1961, Allan
Kaprow papers.
220. Allan Kaprow 1964b, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 49.
221. Allan Kaprow, letter to Claes Oldenburg, 31 July 1961, Allan
Kaprow papers.
222. Claes Oldenburg, letter to Allan Kaprow, 31 August 1961,
Allan Kaprow papers.
223. Ibid.
224. Claes Oldenburg, letter to Allan Kaprow, 21 December
1961, Allan Kaprow papers.
225. Oldenburg 1967, p. 8.
 226. Kaprow 1964b, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 47.
227. Oldenburg 1967, p. 10.
228. Kaprow 1981, AoAA, p. 45.
229. Kaprow 1964b, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 46.
230. Ibid., p. 50.
231. Ibid., p. 57.
232. Robert Smithson, letter to Enno Develing, Haags
Gemeentemuseum, 6 September 1971, Robert Smithson and Nancy
Holt papers, AoAA.
233. Kaprow 1964b, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 50.
234. Ibid., p. 51.
235. Ibid., p. 49.
236. Duchamp 1957, reprinted in Stiles and Selz 1996, p. 818.
237. Thomas Hess, “Editorial: The Artist as a Company-man,”
Art News 63, no. 6 (October 1964), p. 19.
238. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character, in collaboration with Reuel Denney
and Nathan Glazer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950, p. 21.
239. Kaprow “Happenings in the New York Scene,” Art News 60,
no. 3 (May 1961), pp. 36–39, 50–62, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, pp.
15–26 (quotes on pp. 20, 21).
240. Kaprow 1958, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 9.
241. Walter Benn Michaels, “The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism,” in Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, pp. 137–180.
242. H. Barbara Weinberg, “Thomas B. Clarke, Foremost Patron
of American Art from 1872 to 1899,” American Art Journal 8, no. 1
(May 1976), pp. 52–83.
243. “Indeed, trompe l’oeil paintings of money and photographs
work precisely by staging the triumphant failure of even those
objects that are nearest to being nothing but surface ever actually
to be nothing but surface.” Michaels 1987, p. 165.
244. “By now it has been established, it would seem, that the
irreducible essence of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive
conventions or norms: flatness and the delimination of flatness; and
that the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create
an object which can be experienced as a picture: thus a stretched
or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture—though not
necessarily as a successful one.” Clement Greenberg, “After
Abstract Expressionism” (1962), in Greenberg 1993, vol. 4, pp.
131–132.
245. Michaels 1987, pp. 162–163, 165.
246. Ibid., p. 154.
247. Seitz 1961, p. 12.
248. Claes Oldenburg, in the podium discussion “New Uses of
the Human Image in Painting,” Judson Church, December 1959.
Some of the other participants were Jim Dine, Lester Johnson, and
Kaprow. See Haywood 1995, p. 192.
249. Oldenburg 1967, p. 8.
250. Oldenburg, untitled article (1962), in Claes Oldenburg, p.
130.
251. Claes Oldenburg, letter to Allan Kaprow, 21 December
1961, Allan Kaprow papers, Getty Research Institute.
252. Haywood 1993, p. 192.
253. Oldenburg 1967, p. 14.
254. Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, interview by Christopher Knight
(1985), AoAA, p. 30.
255. Panza was proud of never having paid more than $10,000
for a work of art. At first he used just revenues from his fortune,
and he only gradually dipped into his capital. Ibid., pp. 35–37.
Panza’s correspondence with Leo Castelli survives in Panza’s
archive at the Getty Research Institute. Among other things, it
records the minimal savings in customs charges made by
presenting fictitious invoices. Castelli, letter to Panza, 10 May
1960.
256. At the time skilled dealers limited the supply of works by
newly launched artists, only allowing more into the marketplace
when demand was lively enough. Lawrence Alloway recalls that
André Emmerich would not allow the number of works in Morris
Louis’s estate to be revealed at his retrospective at the
Guggenheim Museum. Lawrence Alloway, “The Great Curatorial
Dim-Out,” Artforum 13, no. 9 (May 1975), pp. 32–34, reprinted in
Alloway 1984, p. 156.
257. Bellamy knew how to handle Panza. In letters to the
collector (now in the Giuseppe Panza papers, Getty Research
Institute), he repeatedly states that museums were also interested
in purchasing Oldenburg’s works: he mentions that the Art
Institute of Chicago wanted to buy Breakfast Table (Bellamy, letter
to Panza, 6 December 1962) and that the Museum of Modern Art
was interested in Wave (Bellamy, letter to Panza, 3 November
1962). He writes that prices will go up by 20 percent at the
beginning of 1963 (Bellamy, letter to Panza, 6 December 1962),
that he will provide only the artwork Bride (Bellamy, letter to
Panza, 17 November 1962), and that he and Panza are almost alone
in their recognition of Oldenburg’s status: “I think sometimes it is
almost a secret that we share that he is a great artist” (ibid.). In
1962 Panza received an invoice from the Green Gallery that lists
the objects from The Store at $400 to $1,200 [Green Gallery invoice
(Bellamy) to Panza, 6 December 1962].
258. “He [Oldenburg] is now his own dealer; however, I do not
know how long this condition will last. He is president of the
concern called Ray Gun Manufacturing Co. . . . The prices are more
than doubled.” Bellamy, letter to Panza, 15 May 1963. Soon after
this Bellamy withdrew from the art market. It is worth noting that
in the second half of the 1960s both Paul Maenz and John Gibson
described their new galleries as agencies.
259. Schimmel 1998, p. 66.
260. Claes Oldenburg, “Notes” (1960), cited in Haywood 1995,
p. 199, which also pictures Ray Gun Spex Money.
261. Claes Oldenburg, “Residual Objects” (1962), in Claes
Oldenburg, p. 143.
262. Claes Oldenburg, untitled article (1961), in Claes
Oldenburg, p. 96.
263. Claes Oldenburg, “The Store Described & Budget for the
Store,” in Claes Oldenburg, p. 104.
264. Warhol 1975, pp. 94, 93.
 265. Michaels 1987, p. 146.
266. “I like to work in material that is organic-seeming and full
of surprises, inventive all by itself.” Claes Oldenburg, untitled
article (1960), in Claes Oldenburg, p. 60.
267. Claes Oldenburg, untitled article (1961), in ibid., p. 97;
Oldenburg, untitled article (ca. 1970), in ibid., p. 36; Oldenburg,
untitled article (1960), in ibid., p. 60.
268. Claes Oldenburg, untitled article (1961), in ibid., p. 120;
Oldenburg, letter to Allan Kaprow, 15 July 1971, Allan Kaprow
papers, Getty Research Institute.
269. Kaprow 1967b, p. 92.
270. Michaels 1987, p. 148.
271. Allan Kaprow, letter to Harold Rosenberg, 10 August 1968,
Allan Kaprow papers.
272. Billy Klüver, fax to Lars Blunck, cited in Brandon W. Joseph,
“Rauschenberg’s Refusal,” in Paul Schimmel (ed.), Robert
Rauschenberg: Combines, cat., Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, Göttingen: Steidl, 2005, pp. 257–283 (quote on
p. 271).
273. Claes Oldenburg, untitled article (1961), in Claes
Oldenburg, p. 120.
274. Oldenburg regarded the integration of “real” objects into
works of art as problematic. He wrote to Panza that he had
removed the “real plates and ash trays” from Breakfast Table and
had replaced them with an espresso cup and saucer because this
improved the work of art, making it “more constant in effect.”
Oldenburg, letter to Panza, Paris, 29 July 1964, Giuseppe Panza
papers, Getty Research Institute.
275. Kaprow 1961, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 23.
276. Michaels 1987, p. 169.
277. Ibid., p. 172.
278. Adorno 1997, pp. 31–33.
279. Oldenburg 1967, p. 8.
280. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Editor’s Note,” in Asher 1983, p.
vii.
 281. Kaprow 1966c, reprinted slightly altered in Kaprow 1993,
p. 80; Robert Smithson, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: Interview
with Moira Roth,” Artforum 7, no. 2 (October 1973), reprinted in
Smithson 1996, pp. 310–312 (quote on p. 311).
282. Asher 1983, pp. 138–145.
283. The asking price was first $15,000, then $6,000. Michael
Asher, letters to Giuseppe Panza, 28 May and 26 August 1976,
Giuseppe Panza papers, Getty Research Institute.
284. Panza first declined the offer due to his lack of confidence
in Asher. Panza, letter to Sands, Pachter, and Gold, attorneys, Los
Angeles, 8 November 1974. For his final refusal, due to lack of
funds, see Panza, letter to Asher, 14 April 1977, Giuseppe Panza
papers.
285. Michaels 1987, p. 169–170.
286. Oldenburg 1967, p. 7.
287. Allan Kaprow, “Impurity,” Art News 61, no. 9 ( January
1963), pp. 30–33, 52–55, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, pp. 27–45.
288. Haywood 1995, p. 189.
289. Claes Oldenburg, “Fotodeath (Excerpts from the Script),” in
Claes Oldenburg, p. 63.
290. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
291. Kaprow 1961, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 21.
292. Ibid., p. 18.
293. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the
Art World of Our Time, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980, p. 58.
294. Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban
Change, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
295. This feature, introduced by Thomas Hess, who had recently
been appointed the magazine’s editor-in-chief, launched in summer
1949 with his essay “Feininger Paints a Picture,” Art News 48, no. 4
( June-August 1949), pp. 48–50, 60–61.
296. For more on the art market at the time, see Robson 1995.
297. See, e.g., the chapter “Downtown” in Altshuler 1994, pp.
156–173; Tomkins 1980, p. 61.
298. The history of the gallery space, particularly in the 1950s,
when the New York art world was expanding so remarkably, has
been only partially researched. See Reesa Greenberg, “The
Exhibited Redistributed: A Case for Reassessing Space,” in Reesa
Greenberg, Ferguson, and Nairne 1996, pp. 349–367.
299. Kaprow 1964b, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 52.
300. Claes Oldenburg, “Conversation,” in Kostelanetz 1968a, p.
133–162 (quote on p. 142).
301. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
302. Sontag 1965, reprinted in Sontag (1966) 1981, p. 268.
303. On the occasion of his retrospective in 1967 he wrote, “I
am put off by museums in general. . . . Most advanced art of the
last half-dozen years is, in my view, inappropriate for museum
display. It is an art of the world: enormous scale, environmental
scope, mixed media, spectator participation, technology, themes
drawn from the daily milieu, and so forth.” Allan Kaprow, Allan
Kaprow: An Exhibition, sponsored by the Art Alliance of the
Pasadena Art Museum, cat., Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum,
1967, p. 3.
304. Allan Kaprow, letter to the organizer of Open House 61, 2
May 1961, Kaprow archive, Getty Research Institute.
305. Dewey 1934, p. 13.
306. See, e.g., Felshin 1995; Jacob, Brenson, and Olson 1996;
Kwon 1997; Lacy 1995; Meyer 1995; Miles 1997; Suderburg 2000.
307. Kaprow 1966a, pp. 153–154, 155.
308. The hotel in question was in Greenwich Village and built by
Stanford White, who also designed the Judson Memorial Church. It
belonged to the city and had long been used as emergency
accommodation for alcoholics. It was scheduled to be demolished in
the early 1960s. Kaprow was a member of the committee that
wanted to prevent this demolition and convert the building into a
cultural center instead—albeit without any success. After
abandoning his first idea, of using the hotel’s empty passageways,
he concentrated on its inner courtyard, which could be lit from
below through a glass-brick floor. Kaprow, in conversation with the
author, 1997. The score and program are reprinted in Sohm and
Szeemann 1970, unpaginated.
 309. “By some reasonable but unplanned process, Happenings,
we may suspect, have emerged as an art that can function precisely
as long as the mechanics of our present rush for cultural maturity
continue,” Kaprow 1961, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, p. 25. See also
the discussion of “‘child-centered society” in Dobriner 1958, pp.
152–153.
310. In 1962 Kaprow planned to perform Fight, a staged battle
of the sexes on both sides of a partially collapsed brick wall on the
twelfth floor of the condemned Engineers Society Building.
However, because of a conflict among the participants, it had to be
canceled. “Four Happenings by Allan Kaprow are planned and will
be announced singly. Their common title ‘Fight’ will apply to sub-
themes: combat, money, eating and sex. A description of each
Happening will be mailed in advance, and after reading it, those
wishing to take part may contact Mr. Kaprow, who will select from
them. The events will be performed without spectators. Smolin
Gallery, October 1963.”Smolin Gallery flyer, reprinted in Sohm and
Szeemann 1970, unpaginated.
311. In 1962 the nineteen-year-old Gordon Matta, who later took
the name Gordon Matta-Clark, enrolled at Cornell University to
study architecture. Having gone to Paris for a year in 1963, he did
not take part in Household. For more on Matta-Clark as a student
at Cornell, see Gwendolyn Owens, “Lessons Learned Well: The
Education of Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are
the Measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussmann, cat., New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007,
pp. 162–173.
312. Lévi-Strauss 1996, p. 16; Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture
without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-pedigreed
Architecture, cat., New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965.
313. “College is all too close to home for the researcher who
prefers to study problems ‘out there’. . . . Colleges are not pre-
contact island tribes; they are more like ‘small town in mass
society’ than they are an isolated ‘Plainville, USA.’” David Riesman,
“The Influence of Student Culture and Faculty Values in the
American College,” in Varieties of Modern Social Theory, ed.
Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, New York: Dutton, 1963, p. 324.
314. See Dobriner 1958.
 315. Graham 1966–67, reprinted in Graham 1993, pp. 14–24.
316. Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned
Deterioration of America’s Landscape, New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1964.
317. Kaprow 1966a, pp. 167, 168, 169.
318. Ibid., p. 169.
319. Fluids poster, reproduced in Allan Kaprow, Allan Kaprow:
An Exhibition, sponsored by the Art Alliance of the Pasadena Art
Museum, cat., Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1967, p. 54, and in
Sohm and Szeemann 1970, unpaginated.
320. Allan Kaprow, Allan Kaprow: An Exhibition.
321. Robert Haywood, “Critique of Instrumental Labor: Meyer
Schapiro’s and Allan Kaprow’s Theory of Avant-Garde Art,” in
Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts—
Events, Objects, Documents, ed. Benjamin Buchloh and Judith
Rodenbeck, New York: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Gallery, Columbia
University, 1999, p. 43.
322. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
323. Haywood 1999, p. 43.
324. Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic: Has Passaic
Replaced Rome as the Eternal City?,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December
1967), pp. 48–51, reprinted as “A Tour of the Monuments of
Passaic, New Jersey,” in Smithson 1996, pp. 68–74 (see p. 72);
Smithson, “Insert Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque 1969–1972,”
Parkett, no. 43 (March 1995), pp. 117–133; Anarchitecture was the
name of a group of artists and architects around Gordon Matta-
Clark c. 1973–1974.
325. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
326. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
327. Jane Livingston, “Allan Kaprow: Pasadena Art Museum,”
Artforum 6, no. 3 (November 1967), pp. 65–66.
328. Allan Kaprow [pseud. Dad Kaprow], letter to the editor,
Artforum 6, no. 5 (January 1968), p. 4.
329. Robert Morris, “Anti-form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968),
pp. 33–35, reprinted in Morris 1993, pp. 41–49.
 330. Allan Kaprow, “The Shape of the Art Environment: How
Anti-form Is ‘Anti-form’?,” Artforum 6, no. 10 (Summer 1968), pp.
32–33, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, pp. 90–94 (quotes on p. 92).
331. Ibid. pp. 93–94.
332. Kaprow 1976a, unpaginated.
333. Ibid.

THE LIMITS TO SCULPTURE : ROBERT SMITHSON

AND EARTH ART

1. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, Encinitas,

Calif., October 1997.
2. Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson, “The Museum World,”
Arts Yearbook 9 (1967), pp. 94–101, reprinted as “What Is a
Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson,”
in Smithson 1996, pp. 43–51 (quote on p. 47).
3. Ibid., p. 44.
4. Robert Smithson, “Interview with Robert Smithson for the
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,” conducted by
Paul Cummings, 14 and 19 July 1972, reprinted in Smithson 1996,
p. 275.
5. Allan Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997.
6. Both make the point that they would like to take their leave of
art history: Allan Kaprow stated that he “tried to step outside of
history.” Kaprow, in conversation with the author, 1997. Smithson
said, “I think there’s a kind of false view of art history in this
country—there’s an attempt to try to set up a lineage, as I said
before. I would like to step outside that situation.” Robert
Smithson, “Moira Roth: An Interview with Robert Smithson
(1973),” ed. Naomi Salwelson-Gorse, in Robert Smithson, cat., Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004, pp. 80–94 (quote on p. 85).
7. While he was still in high school, from 1953 to 1956 (until he
was eighteen), Smithson was able to attend evening classes at the
Art Students League, New York, thanks to a grant, and in 1965 he
studied for one year at the Brooklyn Museum School.
8. Thomas Crow, “Cosmic Exile: Prophetic Turns in the Life and
Art of Robert Smithson,” in Robert Smithson, pp. 33–56 (quote on
p. 36).
9. It was only in the 1980s that this early work came to light
again. A major publication in this connection is Eugenie Tsai (ed.),
Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1991; see also Jennifer L. Roberts,
Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004.
10. See the amiable letter of refusal that William P. Liebermann,
the curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the
Museum of Modern Art, wrote to Smithson, 6 October 1961, Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA.
11. William Seitz, letter to Robert Smithson, 1 July 1964, Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers. See also Reynolds 2003, p. 55.
12. Robert Smithson, letter to George Lester, 22 February 1963,
cited in Crow 2004, p. 44n49.
13. Robert Hobbs, “Chronology,” in Hobbs 1981, pp. 231–243
(quote on p. 238).
14. Eugenie Tsai, “Early Smithson,” in Tsai 1991, pp. 16n55, 24–
25. Tsai also points out that Smithson viewed his early drawings as
“private and of a diaristic nature . . . rarely ever shown to fellow
artists” (p. 24).
15. Caroline Jones 1996, pp. 278–343.
16. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the
Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, trans. Alastair Laing,
rev. Lottie M. Newman, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981
(original: Die Legende vom Künstler: ein geschichtlicher Versuch,
Vienna: Krystall-Verlag, 1934); Rudolf Wittkower and Margot
Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of
Artists—A Documented History from Antiquity to the French
Revolution, New York: Norton, 1969 (first edition, New York:
Random House, 1963).
17. “[The period] 1965–66 . . . that’s when I consider my
emergence as a conscious artist. . . . I was doing crystalline type
works and my early interest in geology and earth sciences began to
assert itself over the whole cultural overlay of Europe. I had gotten
that out of my system. . . . Out of the defunct, I think, class culture
of Europe I developed something that was intrinsically my own and
rooted in my own experience in America.” Robert Smithson,
“Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution,” conducted by Paul Cummings, 14 and 19
July 1972, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 270–296 (quote on p. 284).
18. Robert Smithson, “Quick Millions: Artist’s Statement,” in
O’Doherty 1965, reprinted in Smithson 1996, p. 3.
19. Kynaston McShine (ed.), Primary Structures, cat., New York:
Jewish Museum, 1966. See also Colpitt 1990, p. 2; Altshuler 1994,
pp. 220–235.
20. “Smithson’s intricacy and suspension of definite closure
seem to me decisive separations from what Minimal Art was
supposed to be.” Lawrence Alloway, “Robert Smithson’s
Development,” Artforum 11, no. 3 (November 1972), pp. 52–61,
reprinted in Sonfist 1983, pp. 125–141 (quote on p. 127; see also p.
126).
21. Ibid., pp. 127, 126.
22. Smithson’s estate also includes his notes on the back of an
envelope evidently taking down information from Judd. Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA.
23. Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in Seven Sculptors, cat.,
Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, [1965], reprinted in
Smithson 1996, pp. 4–6 (quote on p. 4).
24. Ibid., p. 6.
25. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965), pp.
74–82, reprinted in Judd 1975, pp. 181–189. It has not been
possible to determine which of the texts by Smithson and Judd on
specific objects appeared first, nor whether they compared
manuscripts.
26. Ibid., p. 184.
27. Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd,” in Smithson 1996, p. 6.
28. Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson, “The Museum World,”
Arts Yearbook 9 (1967), pp. 94–101, reprinted as “What Is a
Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson,”
in Smithson 1996, pp. 43–51 (quote on p. 48).
29. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965),
reprinted in Judd 1975, pp. 184, 187.
30. Robert Smithson, “Fragments of an Interview with P. A.
Norvell,” in Lippard 1973, pp. 87–90, reprinted in Smithson 1996,
pp. 192–195 (quote on p. 193).
31. Undated letter (probably from January 1966) with an
illegible signature on behalf of the editors of Harper’s Bazaar,
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA.
32. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” Harper’s Bazaar, May
1966, pp. 72–73, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 7–9.
33. Rhea Anastas, “Minimal Difference: The John Daniels Gallery
and the First Works of Dan Graham,” in Dan Graham: Beyond, cat.,
Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2009, p. 115.
34. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” pp. 7–8.
35. Ballard 1966, p. 61. Ann Reynolds makes the point that
“both Smithson and Ballard reconfigure signification or
representation as a fixed set of constantly circling deferrals or
referrals rather than as a simple progression from signifiers to
signified that depends on a specific referent.” Reynolds, Robert
Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2003, p. 82.
36. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” in Smithson 1996, p.
8.
37. In the following years, in the films East Coast—West Coast
(1969) and Swamp (1971), which he made with Holt, Smithson
ironically highlighted the fixed lines of demarcation between male
and female artists.
38. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” in Smithson 1996, pp.
8, 9.
39. Robert Smithson, “The Monument: Outline for a Film”
(1967), Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, in
Smithson 1996, pp. 356–357.
40. Lytle Shaw rightly points out that Smithson’s texts
contradict the notion of a transparent medium that prevailed in the
discourse and, rather than taking his readers “toward an
increasingly buttressed answer to these questions” instead guides
them “through a series of physicalized encounters with sites and
ideas.” Lytle Shaw, “Smithson, writer,” in Smithson, 2005, p. 123.
41. It has not been possible to determine whether Smithson’s
sculpture was shown in the exhibition Plastics.
42. “Each of the literal equivalents parodies the function it
manifests. Even the overall structure of Untitled becomes an ironic
comment on the then recently proclaimed shaped canvas that
supposedly eliminated residual illusionism in favor of the real.”
Robert Hobbs, “The Works,” in Hobbs 1981, p. 58.
43. Smithson, quoted in ibid.
44. Robert Smithson, “The Cryosphere,” in Primary Structures,
ed. Kynaston McShine, cat., New York: Jewish Museum, 1966,
reprinted in Smithson 1996, p. 38.
45. Robert Smithson, “The Eliminator” (1964), in Smithson
1996, p. 327.
46. Ibid.; Robert Smithson, “Quick Millions: Artist’s Statement,”
in O’Doherty 1965, reprinted in Smithson 1996, p. 3.
47. On Smithson and the crystalline, see the chapter “The
Deposition of Time” in Jennifer Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert
Smithson and History, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, pp.
36–59.
48. Robert Smithson, “Ultramoderne,” in Smithson 1996, pp. 62–
65 (quotes on pp. 64, 63).
49. Dan Graham ( John Daniels Gallery), letter to Holt and
Smithson, 11 March 1966, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
papers, AoAA.
50. Eugenie Tsai, “Interview with Dan Graham by Eugenie Tsai,
New York City, October 27, 1988,” in Meschede and Kalthoff 1989,
p. 14.
51. “Trip, Judd, Friday, 7.30” is noted in Smithson’s planner for
18 November 1966. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
AoAA.
52. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,”
Artforum 4, no. 10 (June 1966), pp. 26–31, reprinted in Smithson
1996, pp. 10–23 (quote on p. 18).
53. Robert Smithson, “The X Factor in Art,” Harper’s Bazaar,
July 1966, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 24–25 (quote on p. 25).
54. Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space,”
Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966), reprinted in Smithson
1996, pp. 34–37 (quote on p. 37). Robert Rauschenberg and Billy
Klüver had just inaugurated their Experiments in Art and
Technology (E.A.T.) with Nine Evenings.
55. See Poggioli 1968; Bürger 1974.
56. Dan Graham, in conversation with the author, New York, 1
March 1996.
57. In March 1966 LeWitt sent Dwan some photographs of
Smithson’s sculptures and the manuscript of “The Crystal Land”
with the comment “I think it is the first good exposition of the sort
of art I am involved with, even though I don’t buy everything he
says.” LeWitt, letter to Dwan, March 1966, copy in the Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA. A note in Smithson’s diary
(also in the AoAA) records a meeting with Dwan for the first time
on 20 April 1966 (2:30–8:00 P.M.), with LeWitt present. Further
meetings with her took place on 11, 13, and 27 May 1966.
58. Karl Ruhrberg [pseud. K.R.], “Vorwort,” in Minimal Art, cat.,
Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1969, p. 3.
59. Robert Smithson [pseud. Eaton Corrasable], “Language to be
Looked at and/or Things to be Read,” Dwan Gallery press release,
June 1967, reprinted in Smithson 1996, p. 61.
60. Smithson’s first solo exhibition took place from 29 November
1966 to 5 January 1967. Jeanne Siegel wrote of him, “The
spokesman for the so-called ‘minimal sculptors’ (Judd, Morris,
Flavin, LeWitt) says their monuments celebrate ‘inactive history’ or
‘entropy’ and are concerned with nullities and null dimension. . . .
Smithson too is concerned with all of these ideas and more. He
comes the closest to Judd.” Jeanne Siegel, “Robert Smithson at
Dwan,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 3 (December 1966-January 1967), p.
60.
61. Donald Judd, “To the Editor,” Arts Magazine, February 1967,
reprinted in Judd 1975, p. 217.
 62. Shapiro 1995, p. 246n1.
63. Donald Judd, “Art and Architecture,” lecture at the
Department of Art and Architecture, Yale University, 20 September
1987, printed in Judd 1987b, pp. 25–36 (quote on p. 32).
64. Robert Smithson, “Can Man Survive,” manuscript (1969),
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, printed in
Smithson 1996, pp. 367–368 (quote on p. 367).
65. Robert Smithson, “Art through the Camera’s Eye,”
manuscript (c. 1971), Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 371–375 (quote on p. 375).
66. Robert Smithson, “Four Conversations between Dennis
Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969–1970),” edited and annotated
by Eva Schmidt, in Smithson 1996, pp. 196–233 (quote on p. 212).
However, Smithson still noted in his planner a meeting with Judd
and the openings of Judd’s exhibitions (“26.2.68 Don Judd’s
Opening 6–8 pm,” 9 A.M. on 30 April 1972, and 8 A.M. on 1 October
1972).
67. Ilona Genoni, “Just What Is It That Makes It So Different, So
Appealing? Art Basel: Von der Verkaufsmesse zum Kulturereignis,”
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Zurich, 2009.
68. Brian O’Doherty, “New York and the New Whitney Museum,”
Art and Artists, October 1966, reprinted in O’Doherty 1967, pp.
184–190 (quote on p. 184).
69. Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic: Has Passaic
Replaced Rome as the Eternal City?,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December
1967), pp. 48–51, reprinted as “A Tour of the Monuments of
Passaic, New Jersey,” in Smithson 1996, pp. 68–74 (quote on p. 69).
70. Ibid., p. 70.
71. Ibid.
72. These photos were published only much later, in Robert A.
Sobieszek (ed.), Robert Smithson: Photo Works, cat., Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1993.
73. Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” p. 71.
74. Ibid.
75. Victor Burgin, “The Absence of Presence,” in Burgin 1986,
pp. 29–50 (quote on p. 44).
76. Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,”
in Smithson 1996, p. 72.
77. Ibid.
78. Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in Robert Smithson, “Entropy and
the New Monuments,” Artforum 4, no. 10 ( June 1966), reprinted in
Smithson 1996, p. 11.
79. Brian O’Doherty, “A Platonic Academy—Minus Plato,” Art
and Artists, September 1966, reprinted in O’Doherty 1967, pp.
240–244, also reprinted as “Minus Plato,” in Battcock 1968, pp.
251–255 (quote on p. 252).
80. Brian O’Doherty, “Minus Plato,” in Battcock 1968, p. 255.
81. Ibid., p. 254; Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of
Passaic,” p. 72.
82. Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,” p 73.
83. Ibid., pp. 72, 73–74.
84. Ibid., p. 74.
85. Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the
Yucatan,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969), pp. 28–33, reprinted
in Smithson 1996, pp. 119–133.
86. Smithson’s personal library contained a copy of John L.
Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, vol. 1., New York: Dover,
(1843) 1963.
87. See chapter 5 in ibid., pp. 54–64.
88. Philip Drucker and Robert F. Heizer, “Gifts for the Jaguar
God,” National Geographic, September 1956, pp. 366–375, cited in
Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” in
Smithson 1996, p. 123.
89. “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” in Smithson
1996, p. 123.
90. Ibid., p. 127.
91. Ibid., p. 125.
92. Ibid., p. 127.
93. Ibid., p. 154.
 94. Robert Bliss, at the time the chair of the Faculty of
Architecture at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, interviewed
by Hikmet Dogu, in Dogu 1996, pp. 168–169; Ursprung 1996a.
95. Nancy Holt, in conversation with the author, Galisteo, N.M.,
7 October 1996.
96. Hotel Palenque was not shown as a work of art during
Smithson’s lifetime. It consists of a series of thirty-one color slides
(square Instamatic shots, Format 126) projected consecutively, with
a sound recording of the lecture. The photographs were published
in Robert Smithson (1993), pp. 110–122; a transcript of the lecture
appeared as Smithson, “Insert Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque
1969–1972,” Parkett, no. 43 (March 1995), pp. 117–133.
97. Smithson, “Insert Robert Smithson,” p. 121.
98. “This is sort of the door. . . . The door probably opens to
nowhere and closes on nowhere so that we have to leave the Hotel
Palenque with this closed door and return to the University of
Utah.” Ibid., p. 132.
99. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character
and Its Origin” [1903], Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), pp. 21–51.
100. On Morris’s 21.3 performance at Surplus Theater, New
York, see Berger 1989, pp. 1–4.
101. Ehrenzweig 1967, pp. 258–59, 283–86. James Wines took
up Smithson’s concept in “De-architecturization,” Arts in Society
12, no. 3 (Fall-Winter 1973), reprinted in Esthetics Contemporary,
ed. Richard Kostelanetz, Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989, pp.
266–277 (see p. 276).
102. “The true avant-garde of architecture, the adventurous,
risk-taking, experimenting, problem-seeking, re-defining fringe, is
not in architecture. It is in the jetties, towers, tunnels, walls, rooms,
bridges, ramps, mounds, ziggurats, the buildings and landscapes,
structures and constructions of environmental art.” Michael
McDonough, “Architecture’s Unnoticed Avant-Garde (Taking a
Second Look at Art in the Environment,” in Sonfist 1983, pp. 233–
252 (quote on p. 233).
103. Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson, “The Domain of the
Great Bear,” Art Voices 5, no. 4 (Fall 1966), reprinted in Smithson
1996, pp. 26–33; Robert Smithson, “Fredrick Law Olmsted and the
Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum 11, no. 6 (February 1973), pp. 62–
68, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 157–171.
104. “I guess the Paterson area is where I had a lot of my
contact with quarries and I think that is somewhat embedded in my
psyche. As a kid I used to go and prowl around all those quarries.
And of course, they figured strongly in Paterson. When I read the
poems I was interested in that, especially this one part of Paterson
where it showed all the strata levels under Paterson. Sort of proto-
conceptual art, you might say.” Robert Smithson, “Interview with
Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution,” conducted by Paul Cummings, 14 and 19 July 1972,
published in Smithson 1996, pp. 270–296 (quote on p. 285).
105. J. G. Ballard’s use of the genre as a means to criticize the
present no doubt left a deep impression on Smithson. Set in the
late twentieth century, Ballard’s novels, unlike popular films and
fiction in the 1950s, are not filled with robots and spaceships. In his
words, “Science Fiction should be concerned with the here and
now, not with the far future but with the present, not with alien
planets but with what was going on in the world in the mid-’50s.”
Ballard, “From Shanghai to Shepperton,” RE/SEARCH, nos. 8–9
(1984), p. 121, cited in Tsai 1988, p. 72. Eugenie Tsai rightly points
out that Smithson took up aspects of New Wave science fiction in
his excursions. Tsai 1988, p. 75. See also Lytle Shaw, “Smithson,
Writer,” in Cooke and Kelly 2005, pp. 115–145.
106. Richard Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 4 (
January 1965), reprinted in Battcock 1968, pp. 387–399; Colpitt
1990, pp. 1–5; Meyer 2001.
107. Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology,
New York: Dutton, 1968; Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern
Sculpture, New York: Viking Press, 1977.
108. See Sandler 1970.
109. Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Foster, The Return
of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 35–68 (quote on p. 36).
110. James Meyer 2001, p. 4.
111. “By equating the reproduced artifact with the autonomous
work of art, Minimal Art took a stand against formalist art criticism
(as expounded by Greenberg and his followers), against those who
believed they could define Modernist standards of quality and
developmental tendencies and—in institutions such as the Museum
of Modern Art—lay claim to them for the American context.”
Author’s translation from Gregor Stemmrich, “Vorwort,” in
Stemmrich 1995, pp. 11–12.
112. Krauss, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for
Sculpture,” in Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, New York:
Viking Press, 1977, pp. 243–288 (quote on p. 270).
113. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Moments of History in the Work
of Dan Graham” (1978), in Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture
Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 179–201 (quote on p. 185).
114. Stemmrich 1995, p. 11.
115. Jutta Held, “Minimal Art. Eine amerikanische Ideologie,” in
Neue Rundschau 83, no. 4 (1972), reprinted in Stemmrich 1995,
pp. 444–470 (quote on pp. 458–459).
116. Bundesamt für Kultur (ed.), Minimal Tradition: Max Bill
und die ‘einfache’ Architektur 1942–1996, XIX Triennale di Milano,
cat., Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 1996; Philip
Ursprung, “Minimalism and Minimal Art,” in Ilka Ruby, Andreas
Ruby, Angeli Sachs, and Ursprung, Minimal Architecture, Munich:
Prestel, 2003, pp. 6–14.
117. Gregory Battcock, introduction to Battcock 1968, p. 26.
118. “The new Minimal style should not be considered a
repudiation of the earlier Abstract-Expressionist aesthetic.” Ibid., p.
31.
119. “Both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism mainly
accepted and reinforced traditional criteria. They owe their content
and direction to serious, historical recognition of the artistic
principles developed during seven hundred years of Western art.
Frequently both movements sought justification and licence in the
scholarship of traditional aesthetics.” Gregory Battcock, “Herbert
Marcuse,” in Battcock 1977, p. 35.
120. Gregory Battcock, introduction to Battcock 1968, p. 36.
121. Ibid., p. 32.
 122. Brian O’Doherty, “A Platonic Academy—Minus Plato,” Art
and Artists, September 1966, reprinted in O’Doherty 1967, pp.
240–244, also reprinted as “Minus Plato,” in Battcock 1968, pp.
251–255 (quote on p. 252). O’Doherty exhibited artistic work under
the name David Ireland; he also worked as a critic for the New York
Times, among other publications, was active as an exhibition
curator, and held a key position in the scholarships program of the
National Endowment for the Arts (founded in 1965).
123. Ibid., p. 251.
124. Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” radio
interview, broadcast February 1964, edited by Lucy Lippard and
published in Art News 65, no. 5 (September 1966), pp. 55–61,
reprinted in Battcock 1968, pp. 148–164 (quote on p. 156); Brian
O’Doherty, “Minus Plato,” in Battcock 1968, p. 254.
125. In his capacity as the director of Kunstmuseum Basel,
Franz Meyer purchased Donald Judd’s Six Cold Rolled Steel Boxes
(1969) on the strength of a photograph he saw at the Art Basel fair.
“‘Das amerikanische Vierteljahrhundert,’ Ein Interview mit Franz
Meyer von Philip Ursprung,” in Schmidt and Ursprung 1999, p. 48.
126. Brian O’Doherty, “Minus Plato,” in Battcock 1968, pp. 254,
255.
127. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983;
Jürgen Harten, “Der romantische Wille zur Abstraktion,” in Harten
(ed.), Gerhard Richter. Bilder 1962–1985, cat., Düsseldorf:
Städtische Kunsthalle, Cologne: Dumont, 1986, pp. 9–62, says the
term capitalist realism first cropped up in a letter by Gerhard
Richter dated 29 April 1963 (p. 15n12); Brian O’Doherty, “Minus
Plato,” in Battcock 1968, p. 254.
128. Virginia Dwan, interview by Charles F. Stuckey (1984),
AoAA, p. 2.
129. Galbraith 1975, p. 307.
130. In New York the Whitney Museum of American Art marked
its reopening with Contemporary American Sculpture (6 April-27
May 1966). The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston presented
Multiplicity (16 April-5 June 1966). These were soon followed by
Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York (27 April-12
June 1966), then Art in Process: The Visual Development of a
Structure at the Finch College Art Museum (11 May-30 June 1966).
The Sachs Gallery, New York, put on New Dimensions (10–28 May
1966), and the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, showed Pattern Art
(4–29 October 1966). At Virginia Dwan, 10 was on show in October
(4–29 October 1966), followed by solo exhibitions by Michael
Steiner in November and Smithson in December 1966. Tony Smith
had his first solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in
Hartford, Conn., and at the Institute of Contemporary Art,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Next the artists’
cooperative Park Place Gallery, supported by Virginia Dwan,
showed 20, and Anthony Caro exhibited new painted sculptures at
the Emmerich Gallery in New York.
131. In the fall the exhibition transferred to the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, with what must have looked like a monumental
catalogue. In it Maurice Tuchman makes the point that in this new
kind of sculpture, “elements of nuance and light and shade
modulation seem irrelevant beside the concern for a grand and
authoritative presence (Morris, Judd, Bladen).”He set great store
by categories such as “gravity,” “stillness,” “surface quality,” and
“scale, the foremost concern of sculptors now.” Tuchman,
introduction to Tuchman 1967, pp. 10–11. On Grosvenor see David
Bourdon, “The Cantilevered Rainbow: Robert Grosvenor’s Brightly
Colored Constructions Are Soaring through Museums and
Galleries; Soon They Will Invade the Ocean,” Art News 66, no. 4
(Summer 1967), pp. 28–31, 77–79.
132. The main works were Tony Smith’s Smoke and The X by
Ronald Bladen, an X-shaped construction braced against
architectural columns like an abstract Samson. See Andrew
Hudson, “Scale as Content: Bladen, Newman, Smith at the
Corcoran,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967), pp. 46–47.
133. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6
(February 1966), pp. 42–44; “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” Artforum
5, no. 2 (October 1966), pp. 20–23; “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3:
Notes and Non-Sequiturs,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967), pp. 24–
29; “Anti-form,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968), pp. 33–35; “Notes
on Sculpture, Part 4: Beyond Objects,” Artforum 7, no. 8 (April
1969), pp. 50–54; reprinted in Morris 1993, pp. 1–70; parts 1 and 2
also reprinted in Battcock 1968, pp. 222–235.
134. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,”
Artforum 4, no. 10 ( June 1966), pp. 26–31, reprinted in Smithson
1996, pp. 10–23.
135. Artforum 5, no. 10 ( June 1967); Mel Bochner, “The Serial
Attitude,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December 1967), pp. 28–33; Dan
Graham, “Oldenburg’s Monuments,” Artforum 6, no. 5 ( January
1968), pp. 30–37; Allan Kaprow, “The Shape of the Art
Environments: How Anti-form Is ‘Anti-form’?,” Artforum 6, no. 10
(June 1968), pp. 32–33, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, pp. 90–94.
136. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (
June 1967), pp. 12–23, reprinted with some minor alterations in
Battcock 1968, pp. 116–147, also reprinted in Fried 1998, pp. 148–
172.
137. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Fried 1998, p. 153.
138. Ibid., p. 157.
139. “A year when—to cite the most legendary instance—one
issue of Artforum could throw together Michael Fried’s ‘Art and
Objecthood,’ its diametric opposite in Robert Morris’s ‘Notes on
Sculpture,’ and for good measure Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs of
Conceptual Art,’ which attempted entirely to transcend the terms
of that epic disagreement.” Crow 1996b, p. 86.
140. “Audiences of all kinds most applaud what they like best. . .
. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which
represent our understanding. This is a prime manifestation of
vested interest. For a vested interest in understanding is more
preciously guarded than any other treasure. It is why men react,
not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to the
defense of what they have so laboriously learned. . . . In some
measure, the articulation of the conventional wisdom is a religious
rite. It is an act of affirmation like reading aloud from the
Scriptures or going to church. . . . Scholars gather in scholarly
assemblages to hear in elegant statements what all have heard
before. Again, it is not a negligible rite, for its purpose is not to
convey knowledge but to beatify learning and the learned. . . . But
the rule of ideas is only powerful in a world that does not change.
Ideas are inherently conservative.” Galbraith (1958) 1984, pp. 6, 7,
10, 17.
141. Allan Kaprow, letter to the editor, Artforum 6, no. 1
(September 1967), p. 4.
142. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Art News
57, no. 6 (October 1958), pp. 24–26, 55–57, reprinted in Kaprow
1993, pp. 1–9.
143. Robert Smithson, letter to the editor, Artforum 6, no. 2
(October 1967), p. 4, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 66–67.
144. Ibid., p. 66.
145. “While writers like Judd and Fried may attempt to avoid the
abyss, it has an uncanny way of emerging in their own language;
rather than engaging in impossible efforts to suppress it, Smithson
wants to construct strategies that would allow us to acknowledge
it, even if this involves an uncontrollable vertigo.” Shapiro 1995, p.
93.
146. Walter Benn Michaels, “The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism,” in Michaels 1987, pp. 137–180 (quotes on p. 165; see
also note 33).
147. On the critique of Greenberg and the Greenbergers, see
Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism
and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 352–359.
148. “Almost every work of Minimal art I have seen reveals in
experience a more or less conventional sensibility. The artistic
substance and reality, as distinct from the program, turns out to be
in good safe taste. I find myself back in the realm of Good Design,
where Pop, Op, Assemblage, and the rest of Novelty art
live.”Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in Clement
Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, vol. 4, p. 254.
149. Robert Smithson, “The Pathetic Fallacy in Esthetics (1966–
67),” in Smithson 1996, pp. 337–338 (quote on p. 338).
150. “I maintain that abstraction is not governed by ‘expression’
or what Greenberg calls ‘experience,’ but by a mental attitude
toward esthetics that is in no way dependent on formal reduction.”
Ibid., 337.
151. Clement Greenberg, “Cross-Breeding of Modern
Sculpture,” Art News 51, no. 4 ( June-August 1952), pp. 74–77,
123–124, reprinted with alterations as “Modernist Sculpture, Its
Pictorial Past,” in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical
Essays, Boston: Beacon, 1961, also reprinted in Clement Greenberg
1993, vol. 3, “Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956,” pp. 107–113;
Robert Smithson, “What Really Spoils Michelangelo’s Sculpture,”
manuscript, 1966–1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 346–348 (quote on p. 346). On
the shift in Greenberg’s criteria, see Reynolds 2003, pp. 37–42.
152. Robert Smithson, “Fredrick Law Olmsted and the
Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum 11, no. 6 (February 1973),
reprinted in Smithson 1996, p. 162.
153. “There is no escaping nature through abstract
representation; abstraction brings one closer to physical structures
within nature itself.”Robert Smithson, quoted in Hobbs 1981, p. 39.
154. Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of
Art,” Art International 12, no. 3 (March 1968), pp. 21–27, reprinted
in Smithson 1996, p. 85.
155. Robert Smithson, “Four Conversations between Dennis
Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969–1970),” edited and annotated
by Eva Schmidt, in Smithson 1996, pp. 202, 213.
156. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture” and “Notes on
Sculpture, Part 2,” in Morris 1993, pp. 5, 17.
157. “In the perception of relative size, the human body enters
into the total continuum of sizes and establishes itself as a constant
on that scale.” Ibid., p. 11.
158. Robert Morris, “Anti-form,” in Morris 1993, p. 46.
159. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4: Beyond
Objects,” in Morris 1993, p. 52. “The Flags were not so much
depictions as copies, decorative and fraudulent, rigid, stuffed,
ridiculous counterfeits. . . . The background became the wall. What
was previously neutral became actual, while what was previously
an image became a thing.” Ibid., p. 51.
160. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and Non-
Sequiturs,” in Morris 1993, p. 23.
161. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2” and “Notes on
Sculpture, Part 3,” in Morris 1993, pp. 17, 27.
162. Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the
Yucatan,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969), pp. 28–33, reprinted
in Smithson 1996, pp. 119–133 (quote on pp. 131–132).
163. “I didn’t particularly like to be out in these areas. . . . I’ve
never been one to react positively to nature. I lived in Brooklyn, I
didn’t have a studio: I just worked on a desk. I’d look at a
map.”Dennis Oppenheim, interview by Suzaan Boettger (1995),
AoAA, p. 62.
164. Robert Smithson, “A Refutation of Historical Humanism,”
manuscript, 1966–1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 336–337 (quote on p. 336).
165. Ibid.
166. Harold Rosenberg, Act and the Actor: Making the Self,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
167. Robert Smithson, “A Refutation of Historical Humanism,” in
Smithson 1996, p. 337.
168. Robert Smithson, “Four Conversations between Dennis
Wheeler and Robert Smithson” (1969–1970),” edited and annotated
by Eva Schmidt, in Smithson 1996, pp. 196–223 (quote on p. 209).
169. Robert Smithson, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: Interview
with Moira Roth,” Artforum 7, no. 2 (October 1973), reprinted in
Smithson 1996, pp. 310–312 (quote on p. 312).
170. Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Alberro
and Stimson 1999, pp. xxxviii-lii (quote on p. xliii).
171. Robert Smithson, “Fragments of an Interview with P. A.
Norvell,” in Lippard 1973, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 192–195
(quote on p. 194).
172. Robert Smithson, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: Interview
with Moira Roth,” in Smithson 1996, p. 311.
173. Amelia Jones 1994b.
174. Thomas B. Hess, “Mixed Mediums for a Soft Revolution,”
Art News 59, no. 4 (Summer 1960), pp. 45, 62, reprinted in Madoff
1997, pp. 10–11 (quote on p. 10).
175. Robert Smithson, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: Interview
with Moira Roth,” in Smithson 1996, pp. 311–312 (quote on p. 310).
See also the fuller version of the interview: Robert Smithson,
“Moira Roth: An Interview with Robert Smithson (1973),” ed.
Naomi Salwelson-Gorse, in Robert Smithson (2004), pp. 80–94.
176. Robert Smithson, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: Interview
with Moira Roth,” in Smithson 1996, p. 310.
177. Ibid.
178. Robert Smithson, “A Refutation of Historical Humanism,”
manuscript, 1966–1967, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 336–337 (quote on p. 337).
179. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,”
Artforum 4, no. 10 ( June 1966), pp. 26–31, reprinted in Smithson
1996, pp. 10–23 (quotes on p. 12).
180. Robert Smithson, “Robert Smithson on Duchamp: Interview
with Moira Roth,” in Smithson 1996, p. 312.
181. Ibid., pp. 310, 312.
182. Ibid., p. 311.
183. I am grateful to Nancy Holt (interviewed in Galisteo, N.M.,
October 1996), Richard Nonas (interviewed in New York, February
1998 and February 2006), and Dan Graham (interviewed in New
York, March 1996, and Stuttgart, February 2009) for their
information.
184. Rhea Anastas, “Minimal Difference: The John Daniels
Gallery and the First Works of Dan Graham,” in Dan Graham:
Beyond, cat., Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009, pp. 111–126.
185. Gregory Battcock, “Photographs by Dan Graham,” in
Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York: Dutton,
1968, pp. 175–179 (quotes on p. 175).
186. Graham later objected to being described as a
Postmodernist artist: “My position is that one has to defend a kind
of critical modernism, including a critique of modernism that isn’t
post-modernist.”Graham, interviewed by Ludger Gerdes, in
Graham, Dan Graham: Selected Writings and Interviews on Art
Works, 1965–1995, ed. Adachiara Zevi, Rome: Libri di Zeryhthia,
1996, p. 78, cited in Gregor Stemmrich, Dan Graham, Cologne:
Dumont, 2008, p. 65.
187. “Big Brother is among us. Thus it is important that
Graham’s architectural idiom—at the point when architecture in
general was degenerating, when Philip Johnson encountered the
American suburb and the formal inventions of De Stijl intersected
with the repetitive aesthetic of “Homes of America”—anticipates
modernist ideals. . . . In citing the formal legacy of Mondrian and
Rietveld, which—with the International Style—capitulated in the
face of the monopolies and the system, Dan Graham points out that
he could have pursued a different course, that he could have
realized the autonomy of a disalienated society. . . . In a time when
all illusions have been lost and any form of idealism is out of the
question, it is dangerous to blame the formalism of modern
architecture, for this is our legacy too.”Trans. from Thierry de
Duve, “Dan Graham und die Kritik der künstlerischen Autonomie,”
in Dan Graham: Pavilions, p. 71.
188. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Moments of History in the Work
of Dan Graham (1977)” and “Augenblicke der Geschichte in der
Arbeit von Dan Graham (1977),” in Chevrier, Sekula, and Buchloh
1992, pp. 211–223 (quotes on pp. 211, 223). The essay is printed in
French, German, and English, the last of which omits the second
part of the sentence: “which had ‘prevented an appropriate
evaluation of the meaning of his works’” (translation from German
by the author). The English version also appears in Buchloh, Neo-
Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and
American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2000, pp. 179–201.
189. Trans. from Jean-Hubert Martin, “Vorwort,” in Dan
Graham: Pavilions, p. 3.
190. Buchloh 1989, p. 46.
191. Chris Dercon et al., “Walker Evans and Dan Graham,” in
Chevrier, Sekula, and Buchloh 1992, p. 6.
192. Jean-François Chevrier, “Dual Reading,” in ibid., pp. 14–25
(quote on p. 14).
193. In reference to “suburban sadness” and the blurring of
boundaries between leisure and work time, William Dobriner
writes, “The artist, . . . for whom there is no real division between
work and play, invents what may someday be possible; but even the
artist, with his ideology of l’art pour l’art, needs usually to feel he is
being of some use (if only in acting out a counterpoint to Philistine
utilitarianism).”Dobriner 1958, p. 379; see also Dobriner 1963;
Wood 1959.
194. Crow 1996b, p. 185.
195. “Homes for America actually was very influenced by the
songs ‘Nowhere Man’ by the Beatles and ‘Mr Pleasant’ by the
Kinks. . . . It’s a parody. . . . It’s not—I hate sociology—it’s actually
anthropological. And it’s a fake think piece. . . . And Buchloh says
it’s critical of Conceptual art—it’s not. It’s also not serious: It’s
flat.” Dan Graham, “Dan Graham Interviewed by Rodney Graham”
(2008), in Dan Graham: Beyond, cat., Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009, p. 104.
196. Jean-François Chevrier, “Dual Reading,” in Chevrier,
Sekula, and Buchloh 1992, p. 16.
197. A typical instance of this pose is seen in “From Criticism to
Complicity” (Steinbach et al. 1986), a discussion revolving around
ways of not “rejecting” consumerism but instead accepting and
using it as a springboard for artistic activity.
198. Jean-François Chevrier, “Dual Reading,” in Chevrier,
Sekula, and Buchloh 1992, p. 14.
199. Ibid. In the catalogue text the letters in the title “Homes for
America” are spaced farther apart than usual, without the
quotation marks that would mark it as an essay or the italics used
for the titles of works of art and books.
200. See, e.g., Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and John Johnston,
“Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty,” October 1 (Spring 1976),
pp. 65–85, October 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 71–90, October 3 (Spring
1977), pp. 90–101.
201. Craig Owens, “Photography en abyme,” October 5
(Summer 1978), pp. 73–88, reprinted in Craig Owens 1992, pp. 16–
30; “Earthwords,” October 10 (Fall 1979), pp. 120–130, reprinted in
Craig Owens 1992, pp. 40–51; “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a
Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 67–86,
and “Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” part 2, October 13
(Summer 1980), pp. 58–80, reprinted in Craig Owens 1992, pp. 52–
69.
202. Robert Smithson, “From Ivan the Terrible to Roger
Corman, or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism as Reflected in the
Cinema,” manuscript, 1967, published in Smithson 1996, pp. 349–
353 (quote on pp. 350–351), quoted in Craig Owens, “Earthwords,”
reprinted in Craig Owens 1992, pp. 47–48.
203. Reynolds 1988.
204. Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” in Craig Owens 1992, p. 50.
205. “. . . an essay such as this [The Affluent Society] is far more
important for what it destroys—or to speak more accurately, for the
destruction which it crystallizes, since the ultimate enemy for myth
is circumstances—than for what it creates. This is sharply at odds
with conventional wisdom. The latter sets great score by what it
calls constructive criticism. And it reserves its scorn for what it is
likely to term a purely destructive or negative position. In this, as
so often, it manifests a sound instinct for self-preservation” (my
italics). Galbraith (1958) 1984, pp. 215–216.
206. The symposium was part of the Tenth Alumni Convocation,
14–17 June 1966. There is confirmation of Smithson’s participation
in this event: Gibson A. Danes, dean, Yale School of Architecture,
letter to Robert Smithson, 19 May 1966, Robert Smithson and
Nancy Holt papers, AoAA.
207. Prokosch wrote numerous articles on the building of the
airport, with particular reference to the relevant growth
projections: “It becomes necessary, therefore, for the planner to
prepare at least two sets of space requirements: those upon which
design for immediate construction will be based; and a set which
will indicate the probable limits of expansion.”Prokosch, “Airport
Design: Its Architectural Aspects,” Architectural Record 109, no. 1
( January 1951), pp. 110–115 (quote on p. 112).
208. Walter Prokosch, letter to Smithson, 20 July 1966, Robert
Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA.
209. TAMS, letter to Smithson, 29 August 1967, thanks him for
the invoice for July 1967 but points out that the contract had ended
in June and expresses the hope that a new contract will be
forthcoming from Dallas and Fort Worth. Robert Smithson and
Nancy Holt papers, AoAA. Although TAMS had developed more
than forty projects during the airport’s planning phase from 1956
to 1968, in 1969 a joint-venture contract for the terminals went to
the firms of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (St. Louis) and
Brodsky, Hopf and Adler (New York). TAMS was retained to
engineer the overall project, excluding the terminals. See Thomas
M. Sullivan, executive director, Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Airport
Board, letter to the editor, Architectural Record 148, no. 4 (October
1970), p. 62; “Master Planning: The Necessary Prelude—
Dallas/Fort Worth Revised,” Architectural Record 148, no. 2
(August 1970), pp. 118–119; “Dallas-Ft. Worth: Two-Mile Trunk
with Many Branches,” Architectural Forum 128 ( January-February
1968), p. 94; Rita Robison, “Dallas/Fort Worth Airport: A Thrust
towards 2001,” Progressive Architecture 54, no. 12 (December
1973), pp. 68–72; “Aeroport de Dallas-Fort Worth,” L’architecture
d’aujourd’hui 172 (March-April 1974), pp. 36–42.
210. On the opening ceremonies, see William Cannady and
Jonathan King, “DFW: Airport as Big as Manhattan,” Architectural
Design 44, no. 1 (1974), pp. 345–348.
211. Smithson even remained in touch with Prokosch after his
contract came to an end. Diary entry for 22 October 1969, “Yale
Club, 44th Street, Meeting with Walter Prokosch,” Robert Smithson
and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA.
212. Robert Smithson, “Interview with Robert Smithson,”
conducted by Paul Toner (1970), Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
papers, AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 234–241 (quote on p.
234).
213. “I felt it was wrong to consider sculpture as an object that
you would tack onto a building after the building is done, so I
worked with these architects from the ground up. As a result I
found myself surrounded by all this material that I didn’t know
anything about—like aerial photographs, maps, large-scale
systems.”Robert Smithson, quoted in “Earth: Symposium at White
Museum, Cornell University (1969),”printed in Smithson 1996, pp.
177–187 (quote on p. 177).
214. “So I invented this job for myself as artist-consultant, and
for about a year and a half, from 1965 to 1966, I went there and
talked with the architects. And that’s where the mapping and the
intuitions in terms of the crystal structures really took hold in
terms of areas of land—I was dealing with grids superimposed on
large land masses, so that the inklings of the earthworks were
there.”Robert Smithson, “Interview with Robert Smithson for the
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,” conducted by
Paul Cummings, 14 and 19 July 1972, published in Smithson 1996,
pp. 270–296 (quote on pp. 290–291).
215. Ibid., p. 296.
216. Eugenie Tsai, “Early Smithson,” in Tsai 1991, here p. 32.
217. Shapiro 1995, p. 189.
218. Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey
and Elsewhere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 133, 134–
135.
219. Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air
Terminal Site,” Artforum 5, no. 10 ( June 1967), pp. 36–40,
reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 52–60; Smithson, “Aerial Art,”
Studio International 175, no. 89 (February-April 1969), reprinted in
Smithson 1996, pp. 116–118.
220. Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air
Terminal Site,” in Smithson 1996, p. 56.
221. “With a few happy exceptions, airliners have been
converted bombers, unsuccessful bombers, prototypes of bombers,
or by-products of bomber-development programmes.”Reyner
Banham, “The Obsolescent Airport,” in “The Landscape of
Hysteria,” special issue, Architectural Review 132, no. 788
(October 1962), pp. 252–253 (quote on p. 252).
222. “A big airport is not unlike a giant exhibition. In the case of
Heathrow, in addition to the 6.5 million passengers who at present
use it annually for its basic purpose and the 10 million people who
are there to see them off, another million come particularly in the
summer months just to look, attracted by the comings and goings,
the general air of excitement and bustle, and of course, the
areoplanes. Moreover, some 30,000 people at present work at
Heathrow, many doing highly skilled and responsible jobs. There
are cogent reasons why all three groups of people would benefit
from a clarified airport aesthetic.”Raymond Spurrier, “Towards a
Clarified Aesthetic,” in “The Landscape of Hysteria,” special issue,
Architectural Review 132, no. 788 (October 1962), pp. 253–260
(quote on p. 260).
223. Ibid., pp. 258, 260.
224. Ibid., p. 260.
225. Robert Smithson, “The Monuments of Passaic: Has Passaic
Replaced Rome as the Eternal City?,” Artforum 6, no. 4 (December
1967), pp. 48–51, reprinted as “A Tour of the Monuments of
Passaic, New Jersey,” in Smithson 1996, pp. 68–74; Smithson,
“Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” in Smithson
1996, p. 58.
226. Robert Smithson, “Aerial Art,” in Smithson 1996, p. 116.
227. Smithson and those discussing his work have adopted a
variety of orthographies for site and non-site. As a rule, Nonsite
and Non-Site are capitalized to indicate a work of art as opposed to
the site, which is referred to entirely in lower case.
228. Virginia Dwan wrote a letter on 21 April 1967 to express
interest in “a small parcel” on Pine Barrens Plains. A number of
replies indicate that the sales did not take place until that winter,
or that no land was available. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
papers, AoAA.
229. Hobbs 1981, p. 105; photographs of this excursion in
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA. Sobieszek 1993,
pp. 74–75, reproduces shots of the airfield.
230. Robert Smithson, “Discussion with Heizer, Oppenheim,
Smithson,” in Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), reprinted in Smithson 1996,
pp. 242–252 (quote on p. 244).
231. An invisible vanishing point is the subject of Smithson’s
sculpture Pointless Vanishing Point. In spring 1968 he exhibited it
at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and in a solo exhibition at
the Dwan Gallery. Hobbs 1981, pp. 98–101.
232. “If the airport wasn’t going to happen, then where were
they going to put these works of art? . . . In the late spring of 1968,
. . . we still hadn’t found land in New Jersey to put these
earthworks on. . . . We wanted to find some vehicle, and the only
thing that seemed available was the gallery space, which was very
definitely our last choice.”Virginia Dwan, interview by Charles F.
Stuckey (1984), AoAA, pp. 40–41.
233. Hobbs 1981, p. 111.
234. Caroline Jones 1996, p. 318.
235. Hobbs 1981, p. 104.
236. Virginia Dwan (1984), AoAA, pp. 40–41.
237. Shapiro 1995, p. 73.
238. Robert Smithson, quoted in “Earth: Symposium at White
Museum, Cornell University (1969),” Robert Smithson and Nancy
Holt papers, AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 177–187 (quote
on p. 178).
239. Ibid., p. 187.
240. Sayre 1989, p. 229.
241. Robert Smithson, quoted in Shapiro 1995, p. 91.
242. “In the early, almost pastoral phase, aircraft . . . had to take
off and land into the eye of the wind. . . . They needed an
omnidirectional airfield.”Banham 1962, p. 252; the following quotes
are from the same source.
243. “We do not know yet the full extent and structure of our
(unconscious) scanning powers, but somehow we must search for
undifferentiated low-level sensibilities not unlike syncretism for an
explanation.”Ehrenzweig 1967, p. 17.
244. “I would say the designation is what I call an open limit as
opposed to a closed limit which is a non-site usually in an interior
space. The open limit is a designation that I walk through in a kind
of network looking for a site. And then I select the site. There’s no
criteria; just how the material hits my psyche when I’m scanning it.
But it’s a kind of low level scanning, almost unconscious.”Robert
Smithson, “Fragments of a Conversation,” ed. William C. Lipke
(1969), in Smithson 1996, pp. 188–191 (quote on p. 189).
245. Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air
Terminal Site,” in Smithson 1996, p. 60; quote also appears on p.
96 in Smithson, “A Thing Is a Hole in a Thing It Is Not,” Landscape
Architecture, April 1968, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 95–96.
246. However, Smithson’s practice did not replace the use of
labels by galleries and museums. Ann Reynolds cites an exhibition
at the Whitney Museum that showed Smithson’s Nonsite (Palisades,
Edgewater, New Jersey) without the relevant photographs or maps.
Reynolds 1988, p. 126.
247. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extension of
Man, New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.
248. Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of
Art,” Art International 12, no. 3 (March 1968), pp. 21–27, reprinted
in Smithson 1996, pp. 78–94 (quote on p. 78).
249. Lawrence Alloway, quoted in Sayre 1989, p. 229.
250. Ibid.
251. Robert Smithson, “Four Conversations between Dennis
Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969–1970),” edited and annotated
by Eva Schmidt, in Smithson 1996, p. 199.
252. “Fragments of an Interview with P. A. Norvell (1969),” in
Lippard 1973, pp. 87–90, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 192–195
(quote on pp. 193–194).
253. Shapiro 1995.
254. List compiled by Valentin Tatransky (1974), in Robert
Smithson (1993), pp. 246–266.
255. Derrida’s first U.S. lecture was “Structure, Sign, and Play,”
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.
256. Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context: A
Communication to the Congrès international des Sociétés de
philosophie de langue française, Montreal, August 1971,” in
Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 307–330 (quote on p. 329). (Original:
“Signature, Événement, Contexte,” in Marges de la philosophie,
Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1972, pp. 365–393 [quote on p. 392]).
257. Robert Smithson, “A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey,
Winter 1968,” transcript of label in Hobbs 1981, p. 104.
258. Robert Smithson, “Nonsite (Palisades, Edgewater, New
Jersey), 1968,” transcript of label in Hobbs 1981, p. 110.
259. “The concept of representation is indissociable here from
the concepts of communication and expression. . . . Representation,
certainly, will be complicated, will be given supplementary
waystations and stages, will become the representation of
representation in hieroglyphic and ideographic writing, and then in
phoneticalphabetic writing, but the representative structure which
marks the first stage of expressive communication, the idea/sign
relationship, will never be suppressed or transformed.”Derrida,
“Signature, Event, Context,” pp. 312–313.
260. Gary Shapiro makes a connection between Smithson’s
concept of the abyss and notions of the uncanny, the oceanic, and
the sublime. Shapiro 1995, p. 91.
261. “On the site are the traces of an old trolly system that
connected Palisades Amusement Park with the Edgewater-125th St.
Ferry. The trolly was abolished on August 5, 1938. What was once a
straight track has become a path of rocky crags— the site has lost
its system. The cliffs on the map are clear cut contour lines that tell
us nothing about the dirt between the rocks. . . . Instead of putting
a work of art on some land, some land is put into the work of art”
Robert Smithson, “A Nonsite (The Palisades),” 1968, in Hobbs
1981, p. 110.
262. “We will not say, as one might be tempted to do, that
semiolinguistic communication is more metaphorico entitled
‘communication,’ because by analogy with ‘physical’ or ‘real’
communication it gives passage, transports, transmits something,
gives access to something. We will not say so: “1. because the value
of literal, proper meaning appears more problematical than ever,
“2. because the value of displacement, of transport, etc., is
constitutive of the very concept of metaphor by means of which one
allegedly understands the semantic displacement which is operated
from communication as a nonsemiolinguistic phenomenon to
communication as a semiolinguistic phenomenon.”Jacques Derrida,
“Signature, Event, Context: A Communication to the Congrès
international des Sociétés de philosophie de langue française,
Montreal, August 1971,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 309.
263. Robert Smithson, “Four Conversations between Dennis
Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969–1970),” edited and annotated
by Eva Schmidt, in Smithson 1996, p. 199.
264. When Smithson cited Kaprow’s words “Most humans, it
seems, still put up fences around their acts and thoughts,” he was
criticizing the use of hand-me-down concepts and categories by
some art critics—most notably Michael Fried. Smithson, “A
Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Artforum 7, no. 1
(September 1968), pp. 44–50, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 100–
113 (quote on p. 103).
265. Here Smithson’s view is similar to that of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty: “But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts
essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an
understanding of man and the world from any starting point other
than that of their ‘facticity.’” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of
Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 1962, p. vii.
(Original: “Mais la phénoménologie, c’est aussi une philosophie qui
replace les essences dans l’existence et ne pense pas qu’on puisse
comprendre l’homme et le monde autrement qu’à partir de leur
‘facticité.’” Merleau-Ponty 1945, p. i.)
266. Anthony Robbin, “Smithson’s Non-site Sights,” Art News
67, no. 10 (February 1969), pp. 50–53, reprinted in Smithson 1996,
p. 175.
267. Robert Smithson, “Fragment of an Interview with P. A.
Norvell (1969),” in Smithson 1996, p. 194.
268. “Fragments of a Conversation (1969),” ed. William C. Lipke,
reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 188–191 (quote on pp. 190–191).
269. Robert Smithson, “From Ivan the Terrible to Roger
Corman, or Paradoxes of Conduct in Mannerism as Reflected in the
Cinema,” manuscript, 1967, published in Smithson 1996, pp. 349–
353 (quote on pp. 352–353).
270. Shapiro 1995, p. 93.
271. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” in
Smithson 1996, p. 104.
272. Robert Smithson, “Fragments of a Conversation,” ed.
William C. Lipke (1969), in Smithson 1996, p. 190.
273. Robert Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” interview with
Alison Sky, On Site 4 (Fall 1973), reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp.
301–309 (quote on p. 301).
274. Robert Smithson, “. . . The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, Is
a Cruel Master,” interview with Grégoire Müller, Arts Magazine 46,
no. 2 (November 1971), reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 253–261
(see p. 257). Smithson’s use of entropy alludes to Claude Lévi-
Strauss, who had proposed that “entropology” should replace the
study of anthropology. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques: The
Complete Translation of the Classic Work by the Dean of Structural
Anthropology, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, New
York: Penguin, 1973, p. 414.
275. “The awareness of the ultimate collapse of both mechanical
and electrical technology has motivated these artists to build their
monuments to or against entropy.” Robert Smithson, “Entropy and
the New Monuments,” Artforum 4, no. 10 ( June 1966), pp. 26–31,
reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 10–23 (quote on p. 12).
276. Ibid., p. 10–11.
277. Ibid. p. 13.
278. On the philosophical-historical context of Smithson’s notion
of entropy, see Shapiro 1995, pp. 26–29.
279. Robert Smithson, “. . . The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, Is
a Cruel Master,” in Smithson 1996, pp. 256–257.
280. Robert Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible,” interview with
Alison Sky, in Smithson 1996, p. 302.
281. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the
Economic Process, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1971, p. 3.
282. Ibid., p. 6.
283. Alan Wolfe, America’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the
Politics of Growth, Boston: South End, 1981. The following details
are from this source.
284. Ibid., p. 149.
285. Ibid., p. 153.
286. Ibid.
287. On the diminishing economic power of the United States,
see Chafe 1986, pp. 445–450.
288. Galbraith 1975, pp. 357–359.
289. “Biography,” in Robert Smithson (1993), p. 232;
“Chronology,” in Hobbs 1981, p. 222.
 290. “It’s not a completely ephemeral piece, so it should last for
quite some time.” Robert Smithson, “Four Conversations between
Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson (1969–70),” edited and
annotated by Eva Schmidt, in Smithson 1996, p. 225.
291. Robert Smithson, “Kulturbeschränkung,” in documenta 5,
Befragung der Realität: Bildwelten heute, cat., Kassel: Documenta
Verlag, 1972, unpaginated, reprinted as “Cultural Confinement,” in
the section “Documenta: A Portfolio,” Artforum 11, no. 2 (October
1972), p. 39, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 154–156 (quote on p.
154).
292. Hobbs 1981, pp. 185–186.
293. Michael Brown and John May, The Greenpeace Story,
Ontario: Prentice Hall Canada, 1989; Paul Wapner, “In Defense of
Banner Hangers: The Dark Green Politics of Greenpeace,” in
Ecological Resistance Movements, The Global Emergence of
Radical Popular Environmentalism, ed. Bron Raymond Taylor,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 300–314.
294. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, in Hobbs
1981, p. 191.
295. George Baker rightly complained of the “minor scandal” of
Smithson’s Los Angeles retrospective: the showing of The Spiral
Jetty separately from the rest of the exhibition, as a “film about the
making of Robert Smithson’s epic earthwork.” George Baker, “The
Cinema Model,” in Cooke and Kelly 2005, pp. 79–113 (quote on p.
79).
296. Bob Phillips, “Building the Jetty,” in Cooke and Kelly 2005,
p. 188.
297. On reviews of the film The Spiral Jetty, see Elizabeth C.
Childs, “Robert Smithson and Film: The Spiral Jetty Reconsidered,”
Arts Magazine 56, no. 2 (October 1981), pp. 68–81.
298. Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, cited in
Dogu 1996, p. 30.
299. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Arts of the
Environment, ed. György Kepes, New York: Braziller, 1972, pp.
222–232, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 143–153. Hikmet Dogu
conducted interviews and on-site research that confirmed
Smithson’s account; see Dogu 1996, pp. 167–182.
 300. Robert Smithson, “Fredrick Law Olmsted and the Dialectics
of Landscape,” Artforum 11, no. 6 (February 1973), reprinted in
Smithson 1996, pp. 157–171 (quote on p. 165–166).
301. Dogu 1996, pp. 25–26. See also Smithson’s 1970 drawings
“Red Circled ‘J’” and “Counterclockwise ‘J’” in the collection of
Mike Phillips (reproduced in Dogu 1996, p. 75, figs. 13 and 14); the
photograph of the unfinished first version of Spiral Jetty, Ace
Gallery Collection (reproduced in Dogu 1996, p. 81, fig. 20) and the
photographs Gianfranco Gorgoni took of the unfinished work
(reproduced in Müller 1972, p. 89). Bob Phillips, who helped
construct Spiral Jetty, noted, “On those maps [Smithson’s sketches]
there was a little J drawn.”Phillips, “Building the Jetty,” in Cooke
and Kelly 2005, p. 187.
302. Bob Phillips, “Interview with Bob Phillips,” in Dogu 1996,
pp. 171–182 (quote on p. 176).
303. Ibid., p. 179.
304. Bob Phillips, in conversation with the author, at Spiral Jetty,
March 2012.
305. Bob Phillips, “Building the Jetty,” in Cooke and Kelly 2005,
p. 191.
306. Ballard 1962, p. 47.
307. Ibid., p. 22.
308. William Carlos Williams, Paterson, New York: New
Directions, (1946) 1998, p. 6; Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,”
in Smithson 1996, p. 146.
309. Richard Serra also attached great importance to this
chronological reality. In an interview, when the conversation turned
to Smithson’s concept of photography, he said, “If you reduce
sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you’re passing on
only a residue of your concerns. You’re denying the temporal
experience of the work. You’re . . . denying the real content of the
work” (my italics). Douglas Crimp, “Richard Serra’s Urban
Sculpture,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 5 (November 1980), reprinted in
Serra 1994, pp. 125–139 (quote on p. 129).
310. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Smithson 1996, p.
148.
 311. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, p. 414.
312. Ibid., p. 399.
313. Ibid., p. 226.
314. Robert Smithson, “. . . The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, Is
a Cruel Master,” interview with Grégoire Müller, Arts Magazine 46,
no. 2 (November 1971), reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 253–261
(quote on p. 261).
315. Robert Smithson, letter to Mark Crystel, land specialist,
Dept. of Natural Resources, Division of State Lands, Salt Lake City,
Utah, 30 December 1971, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers,
AoAA.
316. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Smithson 1996, pp.
145, 146.
317. Martin Warnke, Political Landscape: The Art History of
Nature, trans. David McLintock, London: Reaktion, 1994, p. 9.
318. Ibid., p. 19.
319. Ibid., p. 62.
320. Michael Heizer, “The Art of Michael Heizer,” Artforum 8,
no. 4 (December 1969), reprinted in Celant 1996, p. 134.
321. “Earthworks, even at their present scale, would not work in
cities either: there is just too much interference from a lively and
complex environment. . . . Hence the only place to realize large
works is not in the country, exactly, but in Continental America,
which is to say in places where there is no prior cultivation, or very
little.”Lawrence Alloway, “Site Inspection,” Artforum 15, no. 2
(October 1976), pp. 49–55, reprinted in Alloway 1984, pp. 247–254
(quote on p. 249). In a similar vein, Gerry Schum, the creator of the
legendary television exhibition Land Art (1970), said, “Art should no
longer be made for the privacy or exclusiveness of dealers or
collectors.”Schum, letter to Mr. Youngblatt, 29 June 1969, cited in
Philipp von Rosen, Michael Heizer: Outside and Inside the White
Cube, Munich: Silke Schreiber, 2005, p. 101.
322. Maurice Berger goes furthest, in his study Labyrinths,
when he casts Morris as an artist opposing certain norms: “From
1961 to about 1974—a period roughly commensurate with the
upheavals of the 1960s from the blossoming of the New Left in the
early 1960s to the oil crisis of 1973 that generated yet another, this
time conservative, shift in the political economy of the United
States—Morris’s production reveals an intense commitment to
social issues and to political and cultural active ism. . . . Rather
than being part of a specific movement or canon Morris’s work of
the 1960s and early 1970s is decidedly independent and even
marginal. By exposing this marginality, we can better understand
Morris’s sensitivity to the greater social issues of the 1960s,
problems that were themselves more or less peripheral to the
mainstream art world.”Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris,
Minimalism, and the 1960s, New York: Harper and Row, 1989, p. 5.
323. Dennis Oppenheim, interview by Suzaan Boettger (1995),
AoAA. “The artists who developed this and practiced this had an
absolutely no play—if you would interview them, you would find
they had practically nothing to do with the sixties, oddly enough.
Relatively little to do with the political phenomenon itself” (pp. 77–
78). “But you see, unfortunately, art didn’t mix well with this. You
have to kind of decide what you want to be. I mean it’s a shame.
Outside of perhaps the context of theater, to do good art—high art
—powerful art, with social conscience— is very difficult. . . . Very
few people do it well. You can count them on one hand. Invariably
the work is heavily weighted down by necessity to transmit social
and political conscience. It never survives the weight” (p. 80). “But
in remembering my associations with the other artists—Bruce
[Nauman] and Vito [Acconci] and Chris Burden and some of the
others—there was very little interest there. . . . There was simply
this intense and gross involvement with the art-making procedure,
without the need to posture it in any kind of social and political
discourse. If the work could be interpreted as that way, but yet it
wouldn’t compromise itself to that mission, all the better, in other
words” (p. 81).
324. Dennis Oppenheim, “Radicality,” in Oppenheim 1991, pp.
88–89.
325. See, for instance, the formulation by the American scholar
Michael North: “The most notable development in public sculpture
of the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the sculpture
itself. Ever since Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York destroyed
itself at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, sculptors have tried to
find new ways to make the sculptural object invisible, immaterial,
or remote. . . . However various these experiments may seem, they
began with a single motive: to escape the constraints of the
pedestal, the gallery, and finally of art itself. . . . The political nature
of these motives also meant that much of this ‘sculpture’ could be
considered ‘public’. . . . As the aesthetic focus shifts from the object
to the experience it provokes, the relationship of the two goes
beyond mere implication: the public becomes the sculpture.”North,
“The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament,”
Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990), pp. 860–861.
326. Gene Swenson was one of the few critics who expressed
misgivings about the hidden political agenda of institutions such as
the Museum of Modern Art and the Castelli Gallery and leading
figures in the art field such as Thomas Hoving, Clement Greenberg,
and Henry Geldzahler. Swenson died in a traffic accident at the age
of thirty-five in 1969. He had already caused a considerable stir
with exhibitions such as Art in the Mirror at the New York Museum
of Modern Art in 1967 and an intervention in 1968, when he spent
weeks drawing attention to the connections between art politics
and imperialism by picketing the Museum of Modern Art at
lunchtime with a huge question mark on a pole. As Gregory
Battcock later wrote, “He was thus the first art-world personality to
protest publicly the politics and administration of the museum—
protests that were revived on a broad scale by the Art Worker’s
Coalition in 1969 and 1970.”Battcock, “The Art Critic as Social
Reformer—with a Question Mark,” in Battcock 1977, pp. 30–34
(quote on p. 32).
327. The opening lines of the chronology in Hobbs 1981 (p. 231)
are: “Robert Irving Smithson, born January 2 [1938], in Passaic,
New Jersey, to Irving Smithson, at the time an automobile
mechanic, who eventually became vice-president of a mortgage
loan firm, and Susan Smithson (née Duke). Great-grandfather,
English émigré Charles Smithson, and Grandfather Samuel did the
ornamental plaster work in the New York City subway system
(opened in 1904), in the American Museum of Natural History, in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in more than one hundred
churches.”The first document in the Robert Smithson and Nancy
Holt papers (AoAA) is a cutting from the newspaper Public
Inspector (February 1905, p. 25) with the headline “The Man Who
Did All the Plastering of the Subway” and a photograph of Charles
Smithson.
328. Michael Heizer, quoted in Douglas C. McGill, “Illinois
Project to Turn Mined Land into Sculpture,” New York Times, 3
June 1985, reprinted in Celant 1996, p. 44.
329. Michael Heizer, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Onward and
Upward with the Arts: Maybe a Quantum Leap,” New Yorker 47,
no. 51 (5 February 1972), p. 48, reprinted in Celant 1996, p. 128.
330. Michael Heizer, quoted in Julia Brown (ed.), Michael
Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse, cat., Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1984, p. 33, reprinted in Celant 1996, p. 78.
331. Celant 1996, p. 188.
332. Ibid.
333. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Kepes 1972, pp.
222–232, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 143–153 (quote on p.
147).
334. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, New York:
Viking, 1977 (reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 282.
335. Ibid., p. 1.
336. Ibid., p. 283.
337. Ultimately nothing came of a possible sale of Double
Negative in 1971 to a German collector, instigated by the gallerists
Heiner Friedrich and Bruno Bischofberger. In 1985 Dwan donated
it to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Rosen 2005, p.
105. With reference to Displaced/Replaced, Heizer commented,
“What is sold here is land, not art. Potentially, the most malleable
aspect of this work is the deed to the property.”Quoted in ibid., p.
103.
338. Heizer later took a different view. Ibid., p. 77n213.
339. “It takes at least an entire day to walk over the piece to
really understand what it is, its size, its space, all of it.”Michael
Heizer, quoted in Samuel Wagstaff, “Interview with Michael Heizer,
on the Occasion of the Exhibition ‘Michael Heizer, Photographic
and Actual Work,’ Detroit, 1971,” unpaginated typescript, Archive
of the Detroit Institute of Arts, cited in ibid., p. 47n36.
340. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983;
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archéologie, Paris: Éditions du CCI, 1975
(reprint, Paris: Les Éditions du Demi-Cercle, 1991). See also
Guilbaut and Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of
the Cold War,” Artforum 12, no. 10 ( June 1974), pp. 39–41.
341. Chafe 1986, p. 291.
342. “The soldier did not melt into the landscape until he began
to operate from within it.”Warnke 1994, p. 59.
343. Chafe 1986, p. 293.
344. Ibid., p. 291.
345. Lyndon B. Johnson, cited in ibid.
346. “For the first time in history . . . aerial and orbital war
prevailed over classical terrestrial combat.”Paul Virilio, Desert
Screen: War at the Speed of Light, trans. Michael Degener,
Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2005, p. 76.
347. Michael Heizer, quoted in Julia Brown (ed.), Michael
Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse, cat., Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1984, p. 13, reprinted in Celant 1996, p. 92.
348. Philip Leider, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation, or Art
and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah,”
Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1970), pp. 40–49.
349. Ibid., p. 41.
350. Ibid., p. 42.
351. Ibid., p. 43.
352. Ibid., p. 48.
353. I have Richard Nonas to thank for the idea that the
reception of Smithson’s work depoliticized it. Nonas, in
conversation with the author, New York, February 1998. See, for
example, Eleanor Heartney, “Ecopolitics/Ecopoetry: Helen and
Newton Harrison’s Environmental Talking Cure,” in Felshin 1995,
p. 142.
354. See Berger 1989, pp. 107–123, for accounts of Morris’s
support for the strike outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1970; Rosalyn Deutsche, “Property Values: Hans Haacke, Real
Estate, and the Museum,” in Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business,
ed. Brian Wallis, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986, pp. 20–37; on Buren’s
connection with developments in 1968, see Jean-Hubert Martin,
“Einige Feststellungen zur Arbeit von Daniel Buren,” in Daniel
Buren: C’est ainsi et autrement, cat., Bern: Kunsthalle, 1983,
unpaginated.
355. Dan Graham, in conversation with the author, New York,
March 1996, and Stuttgart, February 2009.
356. Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of
Art,” Art International 12, no. 3 (March 1968), pp. 21–27, reprinted
in Smithson 1996, pp. 78–94 (quote on p. 81).
357. “Smithson was too much of a pragmatist to join in the
orgies of rage and desperation in which some of us were
passionately involved. He watched the AWC as a detached
bystander, too aware of our powerlessness to join in, and amused
by the spectacle of all of us ‘idealists’ scrapping with each other.
He was probably as politically confused about the role of the artist
as the rest of us, but he also probably enjoyed it more, since chaos
moving toward entropy was his natural element. He brought to our
common dilemma an ironic mixture of Marxism and anarchy that
applied directly to his own art and ideas: ‘Art should not be
considered merely as a luxury, but should work within the process
of actual production and reclamation. We should begin to develop
an art education based on relationships to specific sites. How we
see things and places is not a secondary concern, but primary.’
Such statements were significant not for their uniqueness, but
because of their incorporation into the mainstream of an art
practice that had hitherto ignored them; Smithson presented them
as art itself, which allowed them to pass. By applying his analysis of
‘space control’ to life as well as to art, he exposed social
implications that had previously been buried in aesthetics.”Lucy
Lippard, “Breaking Circles: The Politics of Prehistory,” in Hobbs
1981, p. 36.
358. Ibid., p. 37; “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium,”
Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1970), pp. 35–39. Smithson’s
contribution was “Art and the Political Whirlpool or the Politics of
Disgust,” reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 134–135.
359. Robert Smithson, “Art and the Political Whirlpool or the
Politics of Disgust,” in Smithson 1996, p. 134.
360. Ibid., p. 135.
361. Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report
for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind,
New York: Universe Books, 1972, pp. 184–185.
362. Robert Smithson, “Letter to György Kepes, 3.7.1969,”
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, in Smithson 1996,
p. 369.
363. Galbraith (1958) 1984, pp. 215–216.
364. Robert Smithson, “Kulturbeschränkung,” in documenta 5,
Befragung der Realität: Bildwelten heute, cat., Kassel: Documenta
Verlag, 1972, unpaginated, reprinted as “Cultural Confinement” in
the section “Documenta: A Portfolio,” Artforum 11, no. 2 (October
1972), p. 39, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 154–156 (quote on p.
156).
365. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement” in Smithson
1996, pp. 156, 154–155.
366. Ibid., p. 155.
367. Harald Szeemann, “Invididuelle Mythologien,” in
Szeemann, Museum der Obsessionen, Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1981,
pp. 87–92.
368. Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement” in Smithson
1996, p. 155.
369. Ibid., pp. 155, 156.
370. Hobbs 1981, pp. 208–214; Robert Smithson, “. . . The
Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, Is a Cruel Master,” interview with
Grégoire Müller, Arts Magazine 46, no. 2 (November 1971),
reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 253–261.
371. In the foreword to the Sonsbeek 71 catalogue, Wim Beeren
wrote that “a number of artists have been asked to design a work
for a location of their own choosing.”W. A. L. Beeren, “From
Exhibition to Activity,” in Sonsbeek 71, cat., [Arnhem,
Netherlands]: [no publisher], 1971, vol. 1, p. 11.
 372. Robert Smithson, “. . . The Earth, Subject to Cataclysms, Is
a Cruel Master,” in Smithson 1996, p. 253.
373. Ibid., p. 258.
374. Ibid., p. 255.
375. Robert Smithson, letter to Enno Develing, Haags
Gemeentemuseum, 6 September 1971, Robert Smithson and Nancy
Holt papers, AoAA.
376. Letter from Robert Smithson, in Hobbs 1981, pp. 213–214.
377. Hobbs, 1981, pp. 215–227; Graziani 1994a and 1998.
378. Robert Smithson, “Untitled (1971),” Robert Smithson and
Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, p. 376.
379. Robert Smithson, “Proposal for the Reclamation of a Strip
Mine Site in Terms of Earth Art and Its Relation to the Ohio State
University Conference on Art Education,” 1972, Robert Smithson
and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, printed in Smithson 1996, pp. 379–
380 (quote on p. 380).
380. Robert Smithson, letter to Ralph Hatch, 10 June 1972,
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, cited in Hobbs
1981, p. 217.
381. Hobbs 1981, p. 219.
382. Hanna Coal Company, letter to Smithson, 20 November
1972, Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA.
383. Hobbs 1981, pp. 215–227. Parts of this correspondence
have been preserved in the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt
papers, AoAA, including letters of rejection from companies such as
the Union Carbide Corporation, the Kenneth Copper Corporation,
and Peabody Coal.
384. Robert Smithson, letter to W. G. Stockton, 1 March 1973,
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA, cited in Hobbs
1981, p. 220.
385. Hobbs 1981, p. 224.
386. Ibid., p. 225.
387. Robert Morris, “Notes on Art and/as Land Reclamation,”
October 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 87–102, reprinted in Morris 1993,
pp. 211–232 (quote on p. 225). Morris mentions Smithson’s work
only in two footnotes.
388. Galbraith (1958) 1984, pp. 43–44.
389. The title page of a New York Herald Tribune published on
the day Smithson was born, 2 January 1938, has been preserved in
the Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, AoAA. The headlines
read, “7,822,914 to 10,870,000 Jobless” and “W.P.A. Economist Puts
Blame for Price Rises on Monopolies.”
390. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Kepes 1972,
reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 143–153 (quote on p. 145).
391. See Elizabeth Barlow, Fredrick Law Olmsted’s New York, in
association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York:
Praeger, 1972; Albert Fein, Fredrick Law Olmsted and the
American Environmental Tradition, New York: Braziller, 1972.
392. Robert Smithson, “Fredrick Law Olmsted and the
Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum vol. 11, no. 6 (February 1973), pp.
62–68, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 157–171 (quote on p. 164).
393. Ibid., p. 170.
394. Ibid., p. 160.
395. Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in
America, 1865–1895, New York: Dover, (1931) 1955, p. 91.

THE LIMITS TO ART HISTORY

1. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive

Theory of Culture,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New
York: Basic Books, 1973, pp. 3–30.
2. Lefebvre (1974) 1991, p. 39.
3. Geertz 1973, p. 25.
4. Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2006.
5. Donald Preziosi, “The Art of Art History,” in The Art of Art
History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Preziosi, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998, p. 507.
6. “It appears that academic pressure and job survival led
Kaprow to produce one of the strongest bodies of critical writing of
the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps, however, at the expense of his
art.”Haywood 1993, p. 41.
7. Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American
Avant-Garde since 1970, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989, pp. 215–216.
8. Shapiro 1995, p. 2.
9. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth
Projects,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968), pp. 44–50, reprinted
in Smithson 1996, pp. 100–113 (quote on p. 100).
10. Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography
in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965–
1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, cat., Los Angeles:
Museum of Contemporary Art, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995,
pp. 247–266.
11. Allan Kaprow, “Notes on the Photographs,” in Kaprow
1966a, p. 21.
12. Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the
Happenings,” Artforum 4, no. 7 (March 1966), pp. 36–39, reprinted
in Kaprow 1993, pp. 59–65 (quote on p. 61).
13. Ibid., pp. 61–62.
14. Robert Smithson, “Fragments of an Interview with P. A.
Norvell,” in Lippard 1973, pp. 87–90, reprinted in Smithson 1996,
pp. 192–195 (quotes on pp. 192, 193).
15. Allan Kaprow, quoted in Judith Rodenbeck, “Foil: Allan
Kaprow before Photography,” in Buchloh and Rodenbeck 1999, pp.
47–67 (quote on p. 64).
16. Robert Smithson, “Fragment of an Interview with P. A.
Norvell,” in Smithson 1996, p. 194.
17. Allan Kaprow, “The Artist as a Man of the World,” Art News
63, no. 6 (1964), pp. 34–37, 58, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, pp. 46–
58 (quote on p. 57); Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Arts of
the Environment, ed. György Kepes, New York: Braziller, 1972,
reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 143–153 (quote on p. 146).
18. Allan Kaprow, “Impurity,” Art News 61, no. 9 ( January
1963), pp. 30–33, 52–55, reprinted in Kaprow 1993, pp. 27–45;
Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum 4,
no. 10 ( June 1966), pp. 26–31, reprinted in Smithson 1996, pp. 10–
23 (quote on p. 18).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHIVES OF AMERIC AN ART (AOAA ) ,

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Estates and Archives

Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles and New York) records, 1959–1971
Thomas Hess papers, 1941–1978
Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt papers, 1905–1987
Richard Stankiewicz papers, 1948–1984

Oral History Interviews

Bellamy, Richard, interview by Richard Brown Baker (1963)
Castelli, Leo, interview by Paul Cummings (1969/1973)
Dwan, Virginia, interview by Charles F. Stuckey (1984)
Geldzahler, Henry, interview by Paul Cummings (1970)
Hutchinson, Peter, interview by Dorothy Seckler (1967)
Jackson, Martha, interview by Paul Cummings (1969)
Judd, Donald, interview by Bruce Hooton (1965)
Kaprow, Allan, interview by Moira Roth (1981)
Karp, Ivan, interview by Paul Cummings (1969)
LeWitt, Sol, interview by Paul Cummings (1974)
Oldenburg, Claes, Interview by Bruce Hooton (1965)
Oppenheim, Dennis, interview by Suzaan Boettger (1995)
Panza di Biumo, Giuseppe, interview by Christopher Knight (1985)
Rauschenberg, Robert, interview by Dorothy Seckler (1965)
Samaras, Lucas, interview by Paul Cummings (1968)
Segal, George, interview by John Jones (1965)
Segal, George, interview by Paul Cummings (1973)
Smithson, Robert, interview by Paul Cummings (1972)

GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES

Jean Brown papers, 1916–1995

Experiments in Art and Technology Los Angeles records, 1969–
1975
Galerie Paul Maenz records, 1956–1991
Allan Kaprow papers, 1940–1997
Giuseppe Panza papers, 1956–1990

INTERVIEWS BY THE AUTHOR

Jane Crawford, Westport, Conn., February 1997; Boston, February

2006; Berlin, April 2007
Bob Fiore, Westport, Conn., February 1997
Dan Graham, New York, March 1996; Stuttgart, February 2009
Nancy Holt, Galisteo, N.M., October 1996
Allan Kaprow, Encinitas, Calif., October 1997
Richard Nonas, New York, February 1998; New York, February
2006
Bob Phillips, at Spiral Jetty, March 2012
Robert Rauschenberg, Zurich, April 1999

LITERATURE

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 266–277.
Wittkower, Rudolf, and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The
Character and Conduct of Artists—A Documented History from
Antiquity to the French Revolution, New York: Norton, 1969
(first edition, New York: Random House, 1963).
Wolfe, Alan, America’s Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of
Growth, Boston: South End, 1981.
Wollheim, Richard, “Minimal Art,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 4 (January
1965), reprinted in Battcock 1968, pp. 387–399.
Wood, Robert, Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics, Cambridge,
Mass.: Riverside, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959.
Young, Joan, and Susan Davidson, “Chronology,” in Rauschenberg
1997, p. 552.
Zukin, Sharon, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
 ART CREDITS

FIG. 1. Photo by Philip Ursprung.

FIG. 2. Photo by Linda Cassens Stoian.
© Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
FIG. 4.

Photo probably by Jon Henry.

© Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
FIG. 5.
Photo by Anita Reuben Simons.
FIG. 6. © Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
Jasper Johns © 2012, ProLitteris, Zürich, Copyright © 1958,
FIG. 7.
ARTnews, LLC, January.
© Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth,
FIGS. 8, 9, 10.

Zurich. Photo © Estate of Robert R. McElroy/Licensed by VAGA,

New York, NY.
© Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth,
FIGS. 11, 12, 13.
Zurich. Photo by Peter Moore © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, New
York, NY.
© Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
FIG. 14.

Left: Photo by Ken Heyman. Right: Courtesy Claes Oldenburg.

FIG. 15. © Allan Kaprow Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
© Allan Kaprow Estate, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
FIG. 16.

Photo by Sol Goldberg, courtesy Sol Goldberg.

© Allan Kaprow Estate, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
FIG. 17.
Photo by Bruce Breland, courtesy Bruce Breland.
© Allan Kaprow Estate, courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
FIG. 18.
Photo by Dick Higgins, courtesy Dick Higgins.
FIG. 19. Photo © Nancy Holt/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Donald Judd, Art © Judd Foundation / 2012, ProLitteris,
FIG. 20.

Zurich. Photo by Rudy Burckhardt © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich.

Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy James
FIG. 21.

Cohan Gallery. Photo by John Weber Gallery.

Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy
FIGS. 22, 23.

James Cohan Gallery.

FIG. 24. Courtesy Dan Graham.
Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy
FIGS. 25, 26, 27.
James Cohan Gallery.
Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy James
FIG. 28.

Cohan Gallery. Photo by Robert Smithson.

Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy James
FIG. 29.

Cohan Gallery. Photo by Christos Dikeakos, from Glue Pour by

Robert Smithson, January 7, 1970, 1970/2000, silver gelatin print,
Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Accession-nr.: VAG-
2000.43.1s, Acquisition Fund.
Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy James
FIG. 30.

Cohan Gallery. Photo by Gianfranco Gorgoni.

FIG. 31. Courtesy Dennis Oppenheim.
Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich. Courtesy James
FIG. 32.
Cohan Gallery. Photo © Nancy Holt/Licensed by VAGA, New York,
NY.
FIG. 33. Photo by Yale Joel/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Robert Smithson © 2012, ProLitteris, Zurich.
FIGS. 34, 35, 36, 37.
Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.
 INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abstract Expressionism, 9–10, 29, 30, 66, 78, 97, 101, 131;
Guilbaut and, 16–17, 198; Minimal Art and, 88–90, 143–144,
146, 147, 243n174, 258nn118–119; Pop Art and, 66, 67–70, 147
Acconci, Vito, 273n323
Action Painting, 9–10, 25, 39, 41, 47, 50, 70, 75, 195. See also
Kaprow, Robert, writings and lectures, “The Legacy of Jackson
Pollock”
Adorno, Theodor, 96
airports. See Smithson, Robert, and the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport
Aldiss, Brian, 126, 203; Earthworks, 133
Alloway, Lawrence, 66, 70, 172, 237n59, 246n256, 272n321;
“Robert Smithson’s Development,” 122, 252n20
Andre, Carl: Smithson and, 127, 137, 141, 151–152, 164, 165, 167,
182, 205, 206; Stella’s reference to, 121; and TAMS proposal,
165, n221. Works: Spill, 182; Tin Ribbon, 182
architecture: Kaprow and, 99, 104–114, 118; Smithson and, 118,
140–141, 142, 163–167, 265n206
Armstrong, Harry, 210
Artaud, Antonin, The Theater and Its Double, 48, 54, 232n18
art fairs. See exhibitions
art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art), 25, 71, 131, 151, 152–153,
264n193
artists’ colonies: Black Mountain College, 41, 65, 131;
Provincetown, 49, 131
artists’ cooperatives, 28; Area Gallery, 28; 813 Broadway, 28;
Camino Gallery, 28; City Gallery, 78, 237n59; Hansa Gallery, 20,
 21, 21, 22, 26, 27–30, 78, 117; March Gallery, 28; Park Place
Gallery, 193, 259n130; Tanager Gallery, 28
art market, 16, 92, 120, 144, 145, 209, 224, 227, 247n258
Arts and Crafts, 123
Art Workers’ Coalition, 203, 274n326
art world, xi, xii, 8, 9, 13, 15, 16, 31, 44, 46, 48–49, 58, 62, 64, 66,
71, 72, 87, 90, 96, 143–144, 147, 159, 201, 218, 221, 224, 227,
237n67, 248–249n298, 272–273n322, 273–274n326; Earth Art /
Earthworks and, 16, 192–193, 200; Kaprow and, xi, 16, 29, 34,
36, 38, 44, 47, 75, 77, 84, 86, 109, 122, 219, 228; Minimalism
and, 145, 146; Smithson and, xi, 16, 119, 122, 124, 127, 128,
136, 137, 141, 155, 168, 204–205, 209, 214, 215, 217, 219, 228;
as a term, 9
Asher, Michael: Buchloh on, 97; and Panza, 97–98, 248n284
Ashton, Dore, 67
Assemblage, 68, 261n148; Kaprow and, 25, 26, 32, 109;
Stankiewicz and, 30, 74. See also exhibitions, The Art of
Assemblage
Austin, J. L., 4
avant-garde, 8, 9, 14, 25, 34, 67, 82, 96, 127, 131–132, 136, 144,
145, 147, 152, 159, 192–193, 205, 225, 229, 256–257n102
Ayer, A. J., 178

Baker, George, 271n295

Baldessari, John, 120
Balkan War, 201
Ballard, J. G.: Smithson and, 126, 136, 138, 142, 172, 187–188, 203,
253n35, 257n105. Works: The Cage of Sand, 136; Crash, 9; The
Crystal World, 126–127, 138; The Wind from Nowhere, 187–188
Banham, Reyner, “The Obsolescent Airport,” 165, 170, 266n221,
267n242
Barr, Alfred H., 66, 242n162
Barthes, Roland, 63–64
Battcock, Gregory, 258n119; Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology,
143, 146, 156–157, 258n118; on Swenson: 273–274n326
Baudelaire, Charles, 13
Baudrillard, Jean: on modernité, 13, 233nn32–34
Bauhaus, 50, 130, 145
Becher, Bernd, 141
Becker, Jürgen, 34
Beckwith, Jacques, 28
Beeren, Wim, 276–277n371
Bell, Larry: Smithson’s reference to, 177
Bellamy, Richard, 30, 68, 71–72; and the Green Gallery, 92, 236n44,
246–247n257, 247n258; and the Hansa Gallery, 21, 28, 117,
236n50
Belting, Hans, 14
Benglis, Lynda, Bounce, 182
Berdoy, Lilly, 28
Berger, Maurice, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the
1960s, 272–273n322
Berlin Wall: Kaprow’s Sweet Wall and, 113, 114
Beuys, Joseph, 14, 220, 228
Bischofberger, Bruno, 274n337
Black Mountain College. See artists’ colonies
Bladen, Ronald, 259n131; The X, 291n132
Blake, Peter, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of
America’s Landscape, 108
Bochner, Mel, 141; “The Serial Attitude,” 148
Body Art, 9–10, 16, 239n103
Borges, Jorge Luis, 172
Botticelli, Sandro, Primavera: Kaprow’s reference to, 52
Brecht, George, 47, 56–57, 237n59; Repository, 74
Bretton Woods system, 7, 178–179
Breuer, Marcel, 133
Brown, Julia, 195
Brown, Robert, 59
Brown, Trisha, 55–56, 142
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 10
Buchloh, Benjamin, 15, 36, 144, 158, 160, 243n171; and Asher, 97;
 and Graham, 158, 263n188, 264n195
Burden, Chris, 273n323
Buren, Daniel, 97, 202, 205
Burner, David, 232n20
Butler, Judith, 4
Butt, Gavin, 34, 36, 37–38, 51

Cage, John, 39, 40, 68; Kaprow and, 26, 35, 41–44, 48, 78, 238n87,
239n101, 240n110, 240–241n119. Works: Untitled Event, 41, 42,
65; Variations VII, 65; 4’33”, 43
Caro, Anthony, 259n130
Carter, Jimmy, 10
Castelli, Leo, 68, 72, 101, 120, 132. See also galleries, Leo Castelli
Gallery
Celant, Germano, 97
Chafe, William, 200
chance, role of, 37, 42, 43–44, 46, 152, 239n101
Chaplin, Charlie, 77
Chevrier, Jean-François, 158; “Dual Reading,” 158–160, 264n199
Childs, Lucinda, 65
Christmas, Douglas, 182
Christo, 59; Kaprow’s reference to, 113, 219. Works: Wrapped
Coast, 186
Clarke, Thomas B., 89
Cold War, 10, 65, 147, 198, 232n20
collage: Kaprow and, 25–26, 32, 109
Collins, Timothy, 210, 213
commodity culture, 239n103
Conceptual Art, xi-xii, 9–10, 97, 143, 145, 158, 220, 224, 228, 229,
243n174, 264n195; Smithson and, 140, 153–154, 169, 205
Constructivism, 144
consumerism: art and, 55, 144, 146, 155, 191, 264n197; Minimal
Art and, 146–147; Pop Art and, 8, 70–71, 147. See also Kaprow,
Allan, works, Bon Marché; Oldenburg, Claes, works, The Store;
Rauschenberg, Robert, works, Black Market
Coppola, Francis Ford, The Conversation, 9
Corner, Philip, 47, 55–56
Crone, Rainer, 243n171
Crow, Thomas: on Smithson, 119
crystals / crystalline, 1–2, 123, 124, 125–130, 162, 164, 167, 175–
176, 184–185, 188, 189, 190, 195, 197, 204, 217, 252n17,
266n214
Cubism, 73, 75
cultural institutions / museums: Andrew Dickson White Museum,
107, 137; Art Institute of Chicago, 148, 246–247n257; Corcoran
Gallery of Art, 148; Dia Art Foundation, 16, 184, 191; Finch
College Art Museum, 121, 156, 259n130; Fondazione Mudima,
233n1; Gemeentemuseum den Haag, 208; Guggenheim
Museum, 148, 237n59, 246n256; Institute of Contemporary Art,
Boston, 121, 259n130; Institute of Contemporary Art,
Philadelphia, 122, 259n130; Jewish Museum, 9, 26, 70, 121, 129,
259n130; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 66, 67, 274n327;
Museum of Contemporary Art, Dallas, 243n182; Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 69, 157, 274n337; Museum of
Modern Art, 48, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 90–91, 133, 238n85,
238n91, 246–247n257, 252n10, 257n111, 273nn325–326;
Pasadena Art Museum, 109; Philadelphia Museum of Art,
259n131; San Francisco Museum of Art, 243n182; Seattle Art
Museum, 182; Stedelijk Museum, 48, 94; Wadsworth Atheneum,
259n130; Walker Art Center, 267n231; Whitney Museum of
American Art, 121, 133, 147–148, 210, 214, 259n130, 268n246
Cummings, Paul, 163
Cunningham, Merce, 26, 35, 41, 78

Dada, 67, 153–154

Daled, Herman, 145
Dalí, Salvador, 48
Damisch, Hubert, The Origin of Perspective, 8
Danto, Arthur C., 243n171
Debord, Guy, La Société du Spectacle, 12
de Duve, Thierry, 158; on Graham, 263n187
de Kooning, Willem, 41, 146; and Rauschenberg’s Erased de
Kooning Drawing, 24–25
Delancey Street Museum. See Grooms, Red
Delany, Samuel, The Motion of Light in Water, 35–36
Deleuze, Gilles, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with
Guattari), 10, 25, 44, 232n17, 235n26, 240n107, 240n112
DeLong, Harriet, 242n156
De Maria, Walter, 180, 193; Kaprow’s reference to, 113, 219;
Smithson and, 191, 197, 204, 214, 217–218. Works: Lightning
Field, 191, 197–198
Derrida, Jacques: Smithson and, 172–174, 188, 268n255, 268n259,
269n262
de Saint Phalle, Niki, 55–56, 237n63; Tableaux-Tirs, 48
De Stijl, 263n187
Develing, Enno, 208
Dewey, John, Art as Experience, 54, 100, 104
Dine, Jim, 47, 49–50, 67, 69, 78, 83, 237n59, 246n248. Works: Car
Crash, 52, 74; The House, 50; The Smiling Workman, 50
Dobriner, William, 264n193
documentation: of Kaprow’s Happenings, 31, 45, 46, 99, 102, 221,
224, 225, 226, 238n75; of Smithson’s Earthworks, 181, 184,
186, 197, 221, 224
Dogu, Hikmet, 271n299
Duchamp, Marcel, 15, 48, 68, 156–157, 220; Kaprow and, 44, 53,
85; Smithson and,
Duchamp, Marcel (continued)
134, 139, 151, 154–156, 169, 220, 226, 229. Works: Etants donnés,
139; Fountain, 134
Dwan, Virginia, 120, 121, 132, 137, 141, 147, 167, 168, 193, 197,
209, 254n57, 259n130, 267n228, 267n232, 274n337. See also
galleries, Dwan Gallery

Earth Art / Earthworks, 8, 12, 16, 107, 162, 272n321; and

consumerism: 8, 12, 191–192; Oppenheim and, 152, 192, 192,
262n163; Smithson and, xi, 64, 122, 137, 141, 152, 162, 163,
181–190, 193–198, 206–215, 217, 221, 226, 266n214, 267n232,
 271n295; and the Vietnam War, 165, 191–192, 198–201, 199,
266n221. See also exhibitions, Earth Art; Earthworks; Smithson,
Robert, Land Reclamation; Nonsites; works, Spiral Jetty
economic crisis / recession, of the 1970s, xi, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 178–180,
213, 229
Ehrenzweig, Anton: Smithson and, 140, 171, 177, 267n243
Eisenhauer, Lette, 56, 57
Emmerich, André, 246n256. See also galleries, Emmerich Gallery
Environmental Protection Agency, 209
Environments, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 64, 79, 81; Kaprow and, 20–22,
21, 25, 26, 27–30, 31, 32, 43, 44, 45, 72–73, 78, 79, 79–81, 98,
99, 100, 104, 111–112, 233n1, 240nn113–114; Oldenburg and,
50, 51, 79, 81, 91–92, 98–99
Ernst, Max, 53
exhibitions: Allan Kaprow, 109; Ambiente/Arte, 97; American
Sculpture of the Sixties, 148; Architecture without Architects,
107; Armory Show, 154; Art Basel, 133, 258n125; Art in the
Mirror, 273n326; Art in Process, 259n130; Art and Technology,
204; Art ‘65, 120; Artists of the New York School: Second
Generation, 9, 26, 70; The Art of Assemblage, 48, 68, 72–74, 88,
90, 91, 119, 243n182; Bewogen-Beweging (Motion in Art), 48,
94; Can Man Survive, 132; Contemporary American Sculpture,
259n130; Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 67; Dan
Graham: Beyond, 157; documenta, 14, 206; documenta 5, xi, xii,
15, 205, 206; Dylaby (Dynamic Labyrinth), 48; Earth Art, 107,
137, 163, 175–176; Earthworks, 133, 168, 193; Environment,
Situations, Spaces, 78, 79, 81; Events, 148; An Exhibition of
Collages and Constructions, 72; Fantastic Art, Dada and
Surrealism, 242n162; Fifteen Americans, 238n85; Futurism, 67;
Hand Painted Pop, 69; Homage to New York, 72, 90, 273n325;
Land Art, 272n321; Minimal Art; Multiplicity, 259n130; Nevada-
New York, 193; New American Sculpture and Prints, 147–148;
New Dimensions, 259n130; New Forms—New Media I, 78; New
Horizons in Sculpture, 148; Ninth Street Show, 101; Nonsites,
167; The Nouveaux Réalistes, 48; Out of Actions, 49, 69, 79; Out
of the Ordinary, 72; Pattern Art, 259n130; Plastics, 122, 124,
253n41; Primary Structures, 121, 129–130, 259n130; Projected
 Art, 156; Ray Gun Show, 49–50, 92; The Responsive Eye, 119;
São Paulo Biennial, 64, 122, 204; Scale as Content, 148,
259n132; Scale Models and Drawings, Language I, 133; Scale
Models and Drawings, Language II, 133; Sculpture ‘67, 148;
Sculpture: A Generation of Innovation, 148; Sculpture from
Twenty Nations, 148; Sculpture in Environment, 148; Seven
Sculptors, 122, 131; Sixteen Americans, 72, 238n85; Sonsbeek
71, 206, 208, 276–277n371; Venice Biennale, 97; When Attitudes
Become Form, 205; 10, 132; 20, 259n130; 557087, 182; 955000,
181–182, 183
Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 65, 254n54
Expressionism, 48, 58, 96

factories / industrial buildings: as studio-exhibition spaces, 49, 100–

101. See also lofts
Fahlström, Oeyvind, 65
Flavin, Dan, 146, 254–255n60; Smithson’s reference to, 177
Fluxus, 9–10, 48, 49
Follet, Jean, 28
Forst, Barbara, 28
Forst, Miles, 28
Foster, Hal, 143, 144
Francis, Sam, 31
Frankfurt School, 4
Fried, Michael, 134–135, 260n145, 269n264; “Art and Objecthood,”
148–150
Friedrich, Heiner, 274n337
Fuller, Buckminster, 178
Fulton, Hamish, 152
Futurism, 75; Italian, 13

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 147, 180; The Affluent Society, 87, 149,
162, 204, 213–214, 264–265n205
galleries: Ace Galleries, 182, 185; Allan Gallery, 119; Artists
Gallery, 119; Betty Parsons Gallery, 27, 100–101, 259n130; David
 Anderson Gallery, 78; Dwan Gallery, 16, 64, 132, 133, 167, 169,
185, 189–190, 193, 228, 259n130, 267n231; Emmerich Gallery,
259n130; Galerie l’Attico, 181; Galerie René Block, 113; George
Lester Gallery, 119; Green Gallery, 68, 92, 102, 127, 236n44,
247n257; Hauser & Wirth New York, 79; John Daniels Gallery,
122, 156–157; Judson Gallery, 49–50, 78, 102, 237n59; Leo
Castelli Gallery, 38, 72, 101, 122, 236n44, 273n326; Martha
Jackson Gallery, 48, 78, 79, 86–87; Reuben Gallery, 30–31, 33,
35, 40, 49, 50, 52, 53, 68, 70, 102, 237n59, 240n119; Richard
Castellane Gallery, 119; Sachs Gallery, 259n130; Sidney Janis
Gallery, 48; Smolin Gallery, 102, 249n310; Sun Gallery, 49;
Vancouver Art Gallery, 181–182. See also artists’ cooperatives
garbage dumps, 105, 107–108, 126, 128, 182
Gautier, Théophile, 13
Geertz, Clifford, 217, 218–219
Geldzahler, Henry, 66, 67, 242n162, 273n326; New York Painting
and Sculpture: 1940–1970, 66; and Pop Art, 66–68, 70
geology, 123, 124–125, 128, 131, 252n17
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, The Entropy Law and the Economic
Process, 178
Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, 5
Glaser, Bruce, 146
Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 11
Goldberg, Roselee, 34
gold standard: end of, 7, 179–180. See also Michaels, Walter Benn,
“The Gold Standard and the Limits of Naturalism”
Gorgoni, Gianfranco: as photographer of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,
184, 200, 271n301
Graber, Hedy, 2–3
Graham, Dan, 118, 122, 131, 136, 148; reception of, 157–160,
263nn186–188; Smithson and, 122, 131, 132, 136, 141, 156–161,
166, 202. Works: “Homes for America,” 108, 156–157, 157, 158,
159–160, 166, 264n195
Grant, Cary, 187
Grass, Günther, 131
Great Depression, 179
Greenberg, Clement, 15, 29, 97, 123, 150–151, 154, 236n50,
257n111, 261n148, 273n326; Michaels and, 89, 150, 246n244;
Smithson and, 149–151, 155, 261n150
Greenpeace, 182–183
Grooms, Red, 49, 78, 237n59; and Happenings, 31, 47, 48, 49, 50,
56, 67, 82, 83, 237n59, 240–241n119. Works: The Burning
Building, 48, 49, 82; A Play Called Fire, 49
Grosvenor, Robert, 148, 180
Gruen, Jane Wilson, 28
Gruen, John, 28
Guattari, Félix Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with
Deleuze), 10, 25, 44, 232n17, 235n26, 240n107, 240n112
Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art:
Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, 16–17, 198
Gulf War, 201
Gutai Group, 48

Haacke, Hans, 97, 202, 205

Haberle, John, 89, 97; The Changes of Time, 90; Imitation, 89
Habermas, Jürgen, 12
Haftmann, Werner, Painting in the Twentieth Century, 13
Hansen, Al, 47
Happenings, 9–10, 12, 16, 49–50, 66–67, 147, 237n59; and The Art
of Assemblage, 72–74; Grooms and, 31, 47, 48, 49, 50, 56, 67,
82, 83, 237n59, 240–241n119; Kaprow and, xi, 12, 23–24, 30–65,
66–67, 72–81, 82–83, 84, 86, 87–88, 93–94, 99, 100, 102–114,
127, 128, 140, 142, 171, 217, 218–219, 221, 224, 225–226, 228,
236n57, 238n75, 239n96, 240–241n119, 241–242n144,
249nn309–310; Oldenburg and, 47–48, 49–51, 55, 56, 67, 78,
81–83, 87, 91, 102, 171, 237n59, 241nn131–132, 244n206;
reception of, 54–55, 66–69, 241n143; at universities, 16, 102–
103, 105–107
Hard Edge, 9–10, 68
Harvey, David, 7, 8, 9
Hay, Alex, 65
Hay, Deborah, 65
Haywood, Robert, 110, 222, 236n57
Heckscher, August, 148
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 76–77
Heizer, Michael, 64, 137, 180, 191; and Smithson, 64, 141, 186,
187, 191, 193–198, 204, 214, 217–218; and the Vietnam War,
198–200, 201. Works: Black Dye and Powder, 198; Complex
One/Complex Two (City), 198; Compression Line, 198;
Displaced/Replaced, 195, 274n337; Double Negative, 186, 187,
193, 196, 197, 198, 202, 274n337, 274n339; Five Conic
Displacements, 198; Kick Gesture, 195; Nancy Holt and Robert
Smithson—Mono Lake (with Smithson), 193, 194; Nine Nevada
Depressions, 193, 198, 199; Primitive Dye Painting I, 198
Heizer, Robert, 137
Held, Jutta, 145
Hendricks, Geoffrey, 21, 29, 46, 234n5
Hess, Thomas, 29–30, 154, 248n295; and Kaprow’s Art News
essays, 85–86, 234n14
Higgins, Dick: and Happenings, 31, 47, 49–50, 59, 113
Hitchcock, Alfred, 175; North by Northwest, 187, 189
Hobbs, Robert, Robert Smithson: Sculpture, 119, 168, 210, 213,
253n42
Hofmann, Hans, 28; Kaprow and, 25, 28, 58, 79–80, 111–112
Holt, Nancy, 116, 131, 191, 193, 194; and Smithson’s excursions,
137, 139, 141, 167. Works: Swamp (with Smithson), 253n37
Hoover Dam, 198
Hopps, Walter, 66, 71–72
Hoving, Thomas, 148, 273n326
Huelsenbeck, Richard, 53
Hutcheon, Linda, Irony’s Edge, 37, 238n83
Hutchinson, Peter, 141, 180

Indiana, Robert, 121

International Style, 263n187
Iraq War, 201
Ireland, David. See O’Doherty, Brian
Irion, Sue, 3

Jackson, Martha, 78, 244n206, 244n208.

See also galleries, Martha Jackson Gallery
Jameson, Fredric, 15; Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, 15, 65, 89
Jeanne-Claude, 59, 60
Johns, Jasper, 26, 38, 69, 72, 139, 152, 155, 237n63; and Kaprow’s
18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 33–34, 38, 237n62; Smithson’s
reference to, 139. Works: Green Target, 26; Target with Four
Faces, 38, 39
Johnson, Lester, 31, 246n248
Johnson, Lyndon B., 179; and the Vietnam War, 200, 201
Johnson, Philip, 263n187
Johnston, Jill, 36–37
Jonas, Joan, 201
Jones, Amelia, 4, 226; Body Art/Performing the Subject, 239n103;
Postmodernism and
the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, 15, 154
Jones, Caroline, 119–120, 168
journals, magazines, and newspapers: Artforum, 111, 131, 133,
134, 135, 137, 148, 149, 154, 164, 177, 201, 203, 214, 260n139;
Art News, 20, 21, 22, 24, 29–30, 38, 39, 39–40, 64, 74, 78, 81,
83, 85, 101, 234n14; Arts Magazine, 131, 132, 157, 158;
Harper’s Bazaar, 124, 129, 131, 177; Life, 48, 198, 199, 200;
The Nation, 35; National Geographic, 137; Newsweek, 20; New
York Herald Tribune, 277n389; The New York Times, 48, 133,
258n122; October, 160; Studio International, 164; The Village
Voice, 35, 238n87; Die Welt, 70
Judd, Donald, 146, 150, 151, 206, 220, 259n131; Smithson and, xii,
120, 121, 122–133, 134–135, 136, 139, 141, 151–152, 177, 205,
217–218, 252n22, 252–253n25, 254–255n60, 255n66, 260n145;
“Specific Objects,” 123, 228, 252–253n25. Works: Six Cold
Rolled Steel Boxes, 258n125; Stacks, 139; Untitled, 124, 125,
131
Judson Memorial Church, 78, 249n308. See also galleries, Judson
 Gallery

Kahn, Wolf, 28
Kaprow, Allan, 10; Activities of, 3, 3, 219, 228; and architecture, 99,
104–114, 118; and Assemblage, 25, 26, 32, 109; and Cage, 26,
35, 41–44, 48, 78, 238n87, 239n101, , 240n110, 240–241n119;
and collage, 25–26, 32, 109; critique of Modernism, 23–27, 87,
93, 99, 149, 218, 220, 228; and Environments, 20–22, 21, 25, 26,
27–30, 31, 32, 43, 44, 45, 72–73, 78, 79, 79–81, 98, 99, 100, 104,
111–112, 233n1, 240nn113–114; and Happenings, xi, 12, 23–24,
30–65, 66–67, 72–81, 82–83, 84, 86, 87–88, 93–94, 99, 100, 102–
114, 127, 128, 140, 142, 171, 217, 218–219, 221, 224, 225–226,
228, 236n57, 238n75, 239n96, 240–241n119, 241–242n144,
249nn309–310; and Hofmann, 25, 28, 58, 79–80, 111–112; and
“middle-class art,” 84, 85, 229; and Morris’s “Anti-form,” 112;
and Oldenburg, xii, 47–48, 50–51, 77–99, 112, 117, 127, 128,
132, 217–218, 226; and Pollock, 16, 22–27, 30, 40, 42, 67, 73,
77, 88, 122, 149, 234n14, 240nn113–114; and Pop Art, 70–71;
and Rauschenberg, 26–27, 33, 35, 77; and Segal, 31, 59, 64,
236n57; and site specificity, 102, 104–108, 112; and Smithson,
xi-xii, 9, 12, 16, 84, 97, 102, 107, 111, 116–118, 117, 122, 127,
128, 130, 132, 141–142, 149, 161, 171, 174, 178, 183, 217–229;
teaching career of, 28–29, 87, 228.
Kaprow, Allan, works: Beauty Parlor, 233n1; Bon Marché, 93–94,
95, 104; Calling, 59–64, 60, 61, 63, 104, 106, 142; Chapel, 72–
73, 74; Coca-Cola, Shirley Cannonball?, 50, 78; Courtyard, 51,
104, 249n308; Dead End, 233n1; Eat, 104; Fight, 106, 249n310;
Fluids, 108–113, 109, 116, 226; Gas, 64–65, 111; Household,
105–108, 105, 128, 142, 250n311; Hysteria, 26; Kiosk:
Rearrangeable Panels with Lights, 25; Moving (A Happening for
Milan Knizak), 219; Mushroom, 104; The Night, 103; Orange,
51, 104; Overtime (For Walter De Maria), 113, 218–219;
Pastorale, 64; Performing Life, 3, 3, 4–5; Push and Pull (A
Furniture Comedy for Hans Hofmann), 111–112; Self-Service,
111; A Service for the Dead, 51, 55–58, 57, 62, 104, 241–
242n144, 242n145; A Service for the Dead II, 58–59, 59; A
Spring Happening, 51, 52–54, 53, 56–58, 61, 103; Sweeping,
218–219; Sweet Wall, 113–114, 113, 218–219; Transfer (A
 Happening for Christo), 113, 219; Tree, 64; Untitled
Environment (March 1958), 20–22, 21; Untitled Environment
(November 1958), 20–22; Words, 63–64, 98; Yard, 67, 79–81, 79,
86–87, 104, 107–108, 109, 111–112; 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,
30–46, 33, 35, 47, 49, 50, 51–52, 78, 104, 140, 239n96, 240–
241n119.
Kaprow, Allan, writings and lectures: “The Artist as a Man of the
World,” 47, 84–86; Assemblage, Environments and Happenings,
75, 79, 104, 224–225; “The Happenings Are Dead: Long Live the
Happenings!”, 225; “Happenings in the New York Scene,” 75–
77, 81, 84, 87–88, 128; “Impurity,” 99, 229; “The Legacy of
Jackson Pollock,” 16, 22–27, 30, 44, 74, 75, 84, 128,
240nn113–114; “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” 22,
240n114; “Notes on the Photographs,” 224–225; “Paintings,
Environments and Happenings,” 72; “Piet Mondrian: A Study in
Seeing,” 28; “Segal’s Vital Mummies,” 64; “The Shape of the Art
Environment: How Anti-form is ‘Antiform’?”, 148; “What is a
Museum? A Dialogue between Allan Kaprow and Robert
Smithson,” 116; “Die Zukunft der Pop Art,” 70–71
Karp, Ivan, 28, 68, 236n44
Kelley, Jeff, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow, 21, 34, 37, 53, 56,
58–59
Kelly, Ellsworth, 67–68, 148
Kennedy, John F., 5, 84, 200
Kepes, György, 204
Keynes, John Maynard, 179
Khrushchev, Nikita, 10
Kiefer, Anselm, 14
Kienholz, Edward: Smithson and, 120, 169, 171. Works: Concept
Tableaux, 171
King, Martin Luther, 5
Kirby, Michael, 42, 59, 240n110; Happenings: An Illustrated
Anthology, 31–32, 34, 35, 38, 49
Kitchen Debate, 10
Klein, Yves, 48, 169; Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérialle,
171
Kline, Franz, 146
Klüver, Billy, 65, 254n54
Knowles, Alison, 59
König, Kasper, 71–72
Koons, Jeff, 145, 224
Kostelanetz, Richard, 5
Kosuth, Joseph, 140
Kramer, Hilton, 67–68
Krauss, Rosalind: Passages in Modern Sculpture, 143, 144, 196–
197; “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 175
Kunitz, Stanley, 67
Kusama, Yayoi, Sex Obsession Food Obsession Macaroni Infinity
Nets & Kusama, 51

landscape: politics of, 190–192

Lansner, Fay, 28
Late Modernism, 23, 40, 67, 69, 70, 77, 88, 111, 143–144, 148,
150–151, 162. See also Modernism
Leavitt, Thomas W., 175–176
Lefebvre, Henri, 13, 233n33; The Production of Space, 188–189,
190, 217
Léger, Fernand, 68
Leider, Philip, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation, or Art and
Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco and Utah,” 201–202
Lepecki, André, 36, 45–46
Leslie, Alfred, 31, 41
Lessing, Gotthold, Laocoon, 196
Lester, George, 119
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 107, 270n274
LeWitt, Sol, 141, 155, 206, 254–255n60; “Paragraphs of Conceptual
Art,” 260n139; Smithson and, 120, 121, 128, 132, 134, 141, 164,
165, 167, 169, 177, 205, 254n57. Works: Buried Cube
Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value, 165
Lichtenstein, Roy, 28–29, 68, 69, 78, 121
Liebermann, William P., 252n10
Limbourg brothers, Très Riches Heures, 190
Lippard, Lucy, 122, 159, 181–182; “Breaking Circles: The Politics of
Prehistory,” 203, 275–276n357; Pop Art, 68–69, 143; Six Years:
The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 154
Livington, Jane: on Kaprow, 111–112
lofts, 31, 40, 100, 101–102
Long, Richard, 152
Louis, Morris, 246n256
Lyotard, Jean-François, Libidinal Economy, 9

Maenz, Paul, 145, 247n258

Manet, Édouard, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 130–131
Mannerism, 150; Smithson and, 123, 161, 175
Marker, Chris, La Jetée, 164
Martin, Jean-Hubert, 158
Marx, Karl, 76–77
Marx Brothers, 40
Mason, Brian H., Trap Rock Minerals of New Jersey, 124–125
Matisse, Henri, 154; Joy of Life, 202
Matta-Clark, Gordon, 9, 111, 118, 140–141, 250n311, 250n325
Matthieu, Georges, 48
Mattick, Paul, 243n171
McDarrah, Fred, The Artist’s World, 31
McLuhan, Marshall, 10, 171–172
McShine, Kynaston, 121
Meadows, Donella H. (et al.), The Limits to Growth, xi, 5, 6, 180,
203–204
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 269n265
Meyer, Franz, 258n125
Meyer, James, 143, 144
Michaels, Walter Benn, “The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism,” 88–90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98, 150, 178–179, 246n243
Michelangelo, 151
Milder, Jay, 31
Minimal Art / Minimalism, xi-xii, 9–10, 12, 68, 97, 101, 111, 121,
220, 236n44; and Abstract Expressionism, 88–90, 143–144, 146,
147, 243n174, 258nn118–119; O’Doherty and, 136, 146–147;
rise / institutionalization of, xii, 111, 143–147, 148–149, 150,
180, 227–228, 257n111, 261n148; Smithson and, 120, 121–124,
127–128, 130, 131, 132–133, 136–137, 149–150, 151–152, 153,
156, 161, 167, 168–169, 229, 252n20, 254–255n60
mirrors, use of, 137, 153, 176, 177
Modernism, 13, 54, 72, 90, 107, 121, 152, 188, 195, 243n174;
American and European perspectives on, 12–15, 96, 143–144;
Kaprow’s critique of, 23–27, 75–76, 84, 87–88, 93–94, 99, 149,
218, 220, 228; and Minimalism, 136, 143–144, 145, 149, 150–
151, 257n111; and Postmodernism, xi, xii, 7–8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 89,
149, 160, 218, 220. See also Kaprow, Allan, writings and
lectures, “Happenings in the New York Scene”; Late Modernism;
Michaels, Walter Benn, “The Gold Standard and the Logic of
Naturalism”; Postmodernism; Smithson, Robert, and Duchamp
Moira Roth, 154
Mondrian, Piet, 28, 73, 263n187
Monet, Claude, 73
Montague, Rosalyn, 31, 33
monuments. See Smithson, Robert, writings and lectures, “Entropy
and the New Monuments,” “The Monument,” “The Monuments
of Passaic”
Moore, Peter: and Kaprow’s Calling, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63
Morris, Robert, 146, 151, 206, 254n60, 259n131; “Anti-form,” 112,
152; Berger on, 272–273n322; Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” and,
148–149; “Notes on Sculpture,” 148, 152, 260n139, 261n157,
261n159; Smithson and, 121, 127, 132, 136, 139, 140, 141, 151–
152, 155, 164, 167, 177, 191, 202, 205, 213. Works: Earth
Mound, 165; Labyrinth, 196; 21.3, 140, 238n87
Morse, Samuel F. B., Allegorical Landscape of New York University,
133
Motherwell, Robert, Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, 68
Müller, Jan: and the Hansa Gallery, 28, 30
Mumford, Lewis, 215
Murger, Henri, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, 130–131
museums. See cultural institutions / museums

Nabokov, Vladimir: Smithson’s reference to, 135–136

Namuth, Hans, 39–40, 48
NASA, 204
National Endowment for the Arts, 148, 258n122
Nauman, Bruce, 273n323; Corridor, 196
Neo-Avant-Garde, 8, 131, 144, 145, 224
Neo-Dada: as a term, 67, 68
Neo-Expressionism, 144, 158
New Deal, 130, 178–179
New Left, 110, 191–192, 272–273n322
Newman, Barnett, 55, 134–135; Leider’s reference to, 202
New School for Social Research, 26
New Wave science fiction. See science fiction
New York School, 9–10, 91, 182. See also Abstract Expressionism
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12
Nixon, Richard, 10, 179, 202
Noland, Kenneth, 67–68, 97, 148, 151
Nonas, Richard, 275n353
Norris, Frank, McTeague, 90
North, Michael, 273n325
Nouveau Réalisme, 9–10, 88, 90, 91, 127

O’Doherty, Brian, 16, 258n122; and Art ’65, 120–121; and Minimal
Art, 136, 146–147
Oldenburg, Claes, 24, 68, 69, 72, 119, 148, 152, 237n59; and
Bellamy, 92, 246–247n257; as dealer of his work, 92, 247n258;
and Happenings, 47–48, 49–51, 55, 56, 67, 78, 81–83, 87, 91,
171, 237n59, 241nn131–132, 244n206; and Kaprow, xii, 47–48,
50–51, 77–99, 112, 117, 127, 128, 132, 217–218, 226; and
Michaels’s “Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism,” 91–99,
247n266, 248n274; and Panza, 87, 92, 246–247n257, 248n274;
and Smithson, 116, 117, 141; Soft Sculptures of, 92; Store Days,
 93.
Oldenburg, Claes, works: Autobodies, 48; Breakfast Table, 246–
247n257, 248n274; Bride, 247n257; Circus
(Ironworks/Fotodeath), 50, 54, 99; Injun (N.Y.C.) I, 50; Injun
(N.Y.C.) II, 50; Nekropolis I, 50; Nekropolis II, 50; Police Station,
98; Ray Gun Theater, 50; Snapshots from the City, 50, 99; The
Store, 50, 52, 69, 79, 79, 81, 83, 86, 91–92, 94, 98–99, 244n211,
246–247n257; Store Day I, 50; Store Day II, 50; The Street, 50,
98; Voyages I, 50; Voyages II, 50; Wave, 246–247n257; World’s
Fair I, 50; World’s Fair II, 50
Olitski, Jules, 148
Olmsted, Frederick Law: Smithson and, 214–215
Olsen, Charles, 41
Ono, Yoko, 47
Op Art, 9–10, 261n148
Oppenheim, Dennis, 152, 180, 192, 262n163, 273n323; Radicality,
192, 192
Owens, Craig, 15; and Smithson, 160–161

Panofsky, Erwin: Morris’s reference to, 140, 238n87

Panza, Giuseppe, 97, 145, 247n255; and Asher, 97–98,
248nn283–284; and Oldenburg, 69, 87, 92, 246–247n257,
248n274
Parker, Ray, 67–68
Pasilis, Felix, 28
Passaic. See Smithson, Robert, writings and lectures, “The
Monuments of Passaic” Paxton, Steve, 55–56, 65
Peacock, Mary, 167
Pei, I. M., 164
Performance Art, 9–10, 16, 34, 51
performative writing, 4–5, 217, 227
Phelan, Peggy, 4, 226
Phillips, Bob, 186–187, 271n301
Picard, Lil, 70
Picasso, Pablo, 15, 101, 154; Head, 148
Pirandello, Luigi: Kaprow’s references to, 38, 242n145. Works:
Each in His Own Way, 242n145; Six Characters in Search of an
Author, 38
Poe, Edgar Allan, 53
Polke, Sigmar, 14
Pollock, Jackson, 15, 40, 41; Kaprow and, 16, 22–27, 30, 40, 42, 67,
73, 77, 88, 122, 149, 234n14, 240nn113–114; Namuth’s images
of, 39–40, 48; Smithson and, 112, 182
Pontormo, Jacopo da, 175
Pop Art, xi-xii, 8, 9–10, 158–159, 229; Kaprow and, 70–71; rise /
institutionalization of, xii, 66–70, 74, 91, 97, 119, 121, 133, 143,
144, 145, 220, 227–228, 236n44
Pope.L, William, 79
Porter, Fairfield: on Kaprow, 21, 26, 35
Post-Minimal Art, 143
Postmodernism, 14, 15–16, 35, 93, 150, 154, 160; Graham and,
157–158, 263n186; Minimalism and, 143; and Modernism, xi, xii,
7–8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 89, 149, 160, 218, 220; as a term, 15, 23
Prendergast, Shirley, 31
Preziosi, Donald, 221
Process Art, 205
Prokosch, Walter, 162–163, 265n207, 265n211
Provincetown. See artists’ colonies
Pynchon, Thomas, 172; Gravity’s Rainbow, 9

quarries, 124, 125, 126, 127–128, 131, 141, 181, 206, 209,
257n104

Rachel, Vaughn, 59
Rainer, Yvonne, 55–56, 65
Rauschenberg, Robert, 41, 55–56, 68, 69, 78, 90, 121, 141; and
Combines, 26–27, 74, 94–95, 239n101; and Experiments in Art
and Technology (E.A.T.), 65, 254n54; Kaprow and, 26–27, 33, 35,
77. Works: Black Market, 94–95; Canyon, 74; Erased de Kooning
Drawing, 24–25; First Time Painting, 237n61; Open Score, 65;
 Talisman, 74; White Paintings, 27, 239n98
Readymades, 124–125, 134, 155
Reaganomics, 159
Realism, 88
Reinhardt, Ad, 132
Renaissance, 123, 150
Reuben, Anita. See Reuben Gallery
Reynolds, Ann, 164, 253n35, 268n246
Richards, M. C., 41
Richter, Gerhard, 14, 220
Richter, Hans, 53
Riegl, Alois, 139–140
Riesman, David, 250n313; The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character, 11, 40, 86
Rietveld, Gerrit, 263n187
Rodenbeck, Judith, 226
Rodin, Auguste, 196
Rosenberg, Harold, 74–75, 130, 153; “The American Action
Painters,” 39; The Tradition of the New, 8
Rosenquist, James, 68, 69
Rosler, Martha, Bringing the War Home, 201
Rothko, Mark, 55
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 130
Ruscha, Edward, 136; Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 128

Samaras, Lucas, 29, 67, 237n59; and Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6

Parts, 31, 32, 140. Works: Untitled, 74
Sandback, Fred, 205
Sandler, Irving, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of
Abstract Expressionism, 88
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 11
Sayre, Henry, 34, 170, 222
Schapiro, Meyer, 28, 29
Schimmel, Paul, 48, 69, 243n174
Schlingensief, Christoph, Kaprow City, 36
Schneemann, Carolee, 47, 67; Eye Body, 51; Meat Joy, 51; Snows,
21
Schneider, Rebecca, 4
Schum, Gerry, 272n321
science fiction, 126, 128, 130, 177, 203, 223. See also Aldiss, Brian;
Ballard, J. G.
Scull, Robert, 92, 236n44; and Heizer, 193, 195
sculpture: rise / institutionalization of, 111, 147–148, 180, 259n130
Second World War, 6–7, 8, 12–13, 40, 101, 107–108, 113, 178, 186,
197–198, 200
Segal, George, 29, 67, 69, 120; and the Hansa Gallery, 28, 30;
Kaprow and, 31, 59, 64, 236n57
Seitz, William: and The Art of Assemblage, 72–74, 88, 119
Sekula, Allan, 136
Selz, Peter, 67
Sennett, Richard, 12
Serra, Richard, 196–197, 199–200, 272n309; and Leider’s “How I
Spent My Summer Vacation,” 201–202. Works: Casting, 182;
Shift, 196
Shapiro, Gary, 150, 164, 169, 172, 175, 223, 260n145, 268n260
Sharp, Willoughby, 175–176
Shaw, Lytle, 253n40
Sherman, Cindy, 224
Siegel, Jeanne, 132, 254–255n60
Simmel, Georg, 11
site selection, 102, 170, 185–186, 213, 214, 229
site specificity, 102, 104–108, 112
Smith, Tony, 148, 259n130; Smoke, 259n132
Smithson, Charles, 274n327
Smithson, Irving, 274n327
Smithson, Robert, 8, 10, 117; and Aerial Art, 164, 167; and Aldiss,
126, 133, 203; and architecture, 111, 118, 140–141, 142, 163–
167, 265n206; and Ballard, 126, 136, 138, 142, 172, 187–188,
203, 253n35, 257n105; and Conceptual Art, 140, 153–154, 169,
 205; and crystals / crystalline, 1–2, 123, 124, 125–130, 162, 164,
167, 175–176, 184–185, 188, 189, 190, 195, 197, 204, 217,
252n17, 266n214; and the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, 132, 162–
167, 186, 265n207, 265n209, 265n211, 265nn213–214; and
Derrida, 172–174, 188, 268n255, 268n259, 269n262; and
documenta 5, xi, 15, 205–206; and Duchamp, 134, 139, 151,
154–156, 169, 220, 226, 229; and Dwan, 121, 132, 137, 141,
167, 168, 193, 197, 209, 254n57, 259n130, 267n228, 267n232,
274n337; early career of, 119–120; and Earth Art, xi, 64, 122,
137, 141, 152, 162, 163, 181–190, 193–198, 206–215, 217, 221,
226, 266n214, 267n232, 271n295; excursions of, 127, 128, 130–
131, 134, 137, 141–142, 152, 156, 167, 168, 193, 257n105; and
Fried, 134–135, 149–150, 269n264; and Graham, 122, 131, 132,
136, 141, 156–161, 166, 202; and Heizer, 64, 141, 186, 187, 191,
193–198, 204, 214, 217–218; and Judd, xii, 120, 121, 122–133,
134–135, 136, 139, 141, 151–152, 177, 205, 217–218, 252n22,
252–253n25, 254–255n60, 255n66, 260n145; and Kaprow, xi-xii,
9, 12, 16, 84, 97, 102, 107, 111, 116–118, 117, 122, 127, 128,
130, 132, 141–142, 149, 161, 171, 174, 178, 183, 217–229; and
Land Reclamation, 162, 167, 205, 206–215, 219; and Minimal
Art, 120, 121–124, 127–128, 130, 131, 132–133, 136–137, 149–
150, 151–152, 153, 156, 161, 167, 168–169, 229, 252n20, 254–
255n60; and Nonsites, 137, 142, 162, 167–170, 171–176, 181,
184, 186–189, 193–195, 222, 228, 267n227, 268n246, 269n261;
politics of, 160, 202–203, 275n353, 275–276n357; and site
selection: 102, 170, 185–186, 213, 214, 229; and travelogues,
128, 133, 137, 138, 141, 142, 223, 256n86.
Smithson, Robert, works: Aerial Map—Proposal for Dallas-Fort
Worth Regional Airport, 164, 185–186; Alogon, 121, 122; Asphalt
Rundown, 181, 181; Barge of Sulfur (Panama Canal), 183;
Benton, 193; Bingham Copper Mining Pit, Utah Reclamation
Project, 211, 212; Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, 191, 206–209, 207,
208, 210, 213; California, 193; California and Nevada, 193;
Cayuga Saltmine, 137; Clear Zone, 164; The Cryosphere, 129–
130; Discontinuous Aggregates, 164; Double Nonsite, 193; Earth
Mound, 165; Earth Windows, 164; East Coast—West Coast,
253n37; The Eliminator, 130; Enantiomorphism Chambers, 121;
Four-Sided Vortex, 121, 129; Glue Pour, 181–182, 183, 226;
Gypsum Nonsite, 193; Gyrostasis, 185–186; A Heap of
 Language, 172, 173, 188; Juggernaut, 183; Lake Crescents—
Forest Park South, Illinois, 213; Lake Edge Crescents—Egypt
Valley, Ohio (Hanna Coal Reclamation Project), 210–211, 211;
Mono Lake Nonsite, 193; Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson—
Mono Lake (with Heizer), 193, 194; A Nonsite (An Indoor
Earthwork) (A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey), 167–168,
169; Nonsite (Palisades, Edgewater, New Jersey), 173, 174,
268n246; Partially Buried Woodshed, 183–184, 188–189;
Pointless Vanishing Point, 267n231; Quick Millions, 120–121,
130; Spiral Jetty, 1–2, 2, 3, 4–5, 184–190, 185, 191, 193, 195–
198, 206, 207–208, 211, 213–214, 217, 218–219, 224, 271n299,
271n301; The Spiral Jetty (film), 1–2, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190,
197, 224, 271n295; A Surd View for an Afternoon, 163–164;
Swamp (with Holt), 253n37; Tailing Pond,
213; Terminal, 164; Three-Sided Vortex, 129; Untitled, 128–129,
129, 253n42; Vancouver Project: Island of Broken Glass (Island
of Broken Concrete), 182–183; Wandering Earth Mounds and
Gravel Paths, 164, 165.
Smithson, Robert, writings and lectures: “Aerial Art,” 164; “Art and
the Political Whirlpool or the Politics of Disgust,” 276n358; “Art
through the Camera’s Eye,” 132; “Can Man Survive,” 132;
Collected Writings, 139; “The Crystal Land,” 124–128, 130–131,
132, 138, 156, 177, 253n35, 253n37, 253n40, 254n57; “Cultural
Confinement,” xi, 15, 205–206, 217; “Entropy and the New
Monuments,” 131, 135–136, 148, 177–178, 270n275; “From Ivan
the Terrible to Roger Corman, or Paradoxes of Conduct in
Mannerism as Reflected in the Cinema,” 161; Hotel Palenque,
138–141, 140, 256n96, 256n98; “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in
the Yucatan,” 137–138, 256n86; “The Monument: Outline for a
Film,” 128; “The Monuments of Passaic: Has Passaic Replaced
Rome as the Eternal City?”, 133–137, 135, 166–167; “A Museum
of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” 172; “A Refutation of
Historical Humanism,” 153; “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth
Projects,” 223–224, 269n264; “The Spiral Jetty,” 185, 188, 195–
196, 214; “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,”
164–167, 231n12; “What is a Museum? A Dialogue between
Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson,” 116; “The X Factor in Art,”
131
Smithson, Susan, 274n327
Snelson, Kenneth, 148
Sonnabend, Ileana, 74
Sontag, Susan, 75; “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition,”
54–55, 103
Speer, Albert, 202
Spielberg, Steven, Jaws, 7
Spoerri, Daniel, 48
Spurrier, Raymond, “Towards a Clarified Aesthetic,” 166, 266n222
Stankiewicz, Richard, 72; and the Hansa Gallery, 28, 30. Works:
Untitled, 74
Steinberg, Leo, 38, 67
Steiner, Michael, 259n130
Stella, Frank, 24, 67–68, 146; shaped canvases of, 121; Smithson’s
references to, 139, 177
Stemmrich, Gregor, 143–145, 257n111
Stephens, John L., Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, 137, 256n86
Stephenson, Andrew, 4
Stimson, Blake, 154
Stout, Myron, 28
structuralism, 164
suburbia. See Graham, Dan, “Homes for America”; Smithson,
Robert, excursions of; writings and lectures, “The Monuments of
Passaic”
Surrealism, 96; Happenings and, 23, 48, 54–55, 67
Swenson, Gene, 273–274n326
Szeemann, Harald, 15–16, 66, 71–72; and documenta 5, xii, 205,
206

Taylor, Frederick, The Principles of Scientific Management, 40

Taylor, Paul, 34
Tenth Street galleries. See artists’ cooperatives
Thatcherism, 159
Thek, Paul: Smithson’s reference to, 177
Thomson, Robert, 31
Tinguely, Jean, 237n63; Homage to New York: A Self-Constructing
and Self-Destroying Work of Art, 72, 74, 90–91, 273n325
Tippetts-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton (TAMS), 162–163, 164, 166,
167, 265n209
Tomkins, Calvin, 100
travelogues, 128, 133, 137, 138, 141, 142, 223, 256n86
trompe l’oeil, 88–90, 91, 96, 97, 150, 152, 159, 246n243
Tsai, Eugenie, 119, 163, 252n14, 257n105
Tuchman, Maurice, 259n131
Tudor, David, 41, 65, 237n63
Turrell, James, 204, 214
Tyler, Dick, 78, 83
Tylor, Park, 20

universities: artists’ training at, 29, 236n48; as sites for

Happenings, 16, 102–103, 105–107

Very Large Array, 197–198

Viennese Actionism, 241n143; Blood Organ, 48
Vietnam War, 6, 179, 191–192, 229; and American art, 191–202;
and Earth Art, 165, 191–192, 198–201, 199, 266n221; mass-
media coverage of, 198–201
Virilio, Paul, 198, 275n346
von Bruggen, Coosje, 91
Vostell, Wolf, 48

Wagner, Richard, 12
Wall, Jeff, 224
Warhol, Andy, 68, 69, 71, 93, 120, 121, 156, 220, 243n171; The
Factory, 86
War in Afghanistan, 201
Warnke, Martin, Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature,
190–191, 275n342
Watergate scandal, 6
Watts, Robert, 29
Weber, John, 132
Weibel, Peter, 71–72
Weiner, Lawrence, 169
Wesselmann, Tom, 68, 71
Wheeler, Dennis, 132–133
Whistler, James McNeill: Smithson’s reference to, 133–134
White, Stanford, 249n308
White Jr., William, The Organization Man, 11, 77
Whitman, Robert, 29, 55–56, 65, 83; and Happenings, 31, 34, 47,
49–50, 52, 54, 237n59. Works: The American Moon, 52; Mouth,
54
Williams, William Carlos: Smithson and, 126, 141, 172, 188. Works:
Paterson, 141
Wines, James, 256n101
Wolfe, Alan, America’s Impasse, 178–179, 180
Wollheim, Richard, 143
Works Progress Administration, 110, 219–220

Yampolsky, Phyllis, 78
Young, La Monte, 47, 55–56
Yucatan. See Smithson, Robert, writings and lectures, “Incidents of
Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan”

Zola, Émile, L’OEuvre, 130–131