Theory of Non-Sites, by Robert Smithson (1968)

In 1967 Robert Smithson began exploring the industrial areas around New Jersey and, after assisting to dumper trucks excavating tons of earth and rocks, he described them as the equivalent of the monuments of antiquity. The series of “Non-Sites” resulted from the installation in the gallery of gravel, rocks, salt materials collected from specific mines, excavations or quarries, usually contained in boxes of galvanized steel or situated within mirrors formations.

 

Whereas a “Site” is scattered information, a place you can visit, experience, travel-to, a “Non Site” is a container, an abstract work about contained information. Crucial to the notion of “Non-Sites” was the condition of displacement and the conservation of meaning after the removal to another site.

Instead of putting something on the landscape, I decided it would be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the Non-site, which is an abstract container. (Kasther and Wallis, 1998: 31)

The dialectic tension between Sites and Non-Sites is established by the photographs, and above all, by the maps exhibited with the containers. They provided the viewer the link between the original sites and their representations, – that is: between outdoors and indoors -, and implied the performance aspect of the passage between the two locations, throwing emphasis on the spatial practices based on time, duration and physical participation.

 

From the Robert Smithson own website: “Literal and allegorical, the Nonsites confounded the illusion of materiality and order. The mirrors functioned to order and displace, to add and subtract, while the sediments, displaced from its original site, blur distinctions between outdoors and indoors as well as refer the viewer back to the site where the materials were originally collected.”

The aesthetical and conceptual analogy between the “Non Site”s and the” One and three” series (Chairs/Tables/Saws/Lamps, and so on..) by Joseph Kosuth (1965) is evident in the linguistic analysis by Lawrence Alloway in his essay: “Sites/Nonsites,” from the book “The Writings of Robert Smithson”, where he states  “The relation of a Nonsite to the Site is also like that of language to the world: it is a signifier and the Site is that which is signified.”

 

A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites

(From: http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm)

By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a “logical two dimensional picture.” A “logical picture” differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor – A is Z.

The Non-Site (an indoor earthwork)* is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it – this The Non-Site. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn’t look like a picture. “Expressive art” avoids the problem of logic; therefore it is not truly abstract. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely “new sense of metaphor” free of natural of realistic expressive content. Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that “travel” in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions. Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Non-Site. The “trip” becomes invented, devised, artificial; therefore, one might call it a non-trip to a site from a Non-site. Once one arrives at the “airfield”, one discovers that it is man-made in the shape of a hexagon, and that I mapped this site in terms of esthetic boundaries rather than political or economic boundaries (31 sub-division-see map).

This little theory is tentative and could be abandoned at any time. Theories like things are also abandoned. That theories are eternal is doubtful. Vanished theories compose the strata of many forgotten books.

*Non-Site #1. Smithson changed the title for this text which was initially “Some Notes on Non-Sites.” It has been partially excerpted by Lawrence Alloway in “Introductions 1: Options, Milwaukee Art Center, 1979, p. 6

from Unpublished Writings in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, published University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 2nd Edition 1996

 

Image at the top of the post:

Airfield in the Woodmansie Quadrangle

 

 

 

 

 

 

Further reading:

Robert Smithson – Mapping, and the Concept of the Non-Site
Robert Smithson: An introduction

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