The Journeys of Robert Smithson and Patrick Keiller
In 1967 Robert Smithson went to Passaic. A revelation of a new eternal city, Smithson excavated monuments from the ordinary and overlooked urban fabric. Photographing the quiddity of the quotidian landscape, Smithson unearthed the strange from the familiar with his Instamatic. Moving through the landscape was inherently cinematic, “I had been wandering in a moving picture that I couldn’t quite picture,” Smithson explains, grappling with the peculiar “self-destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur.” Time, film and ruins run through Smithson’s drifting, finding “ruins in reverse”, those that were still to be built, an “anti-romanitc mise-en-scene”. Cinema, Smithson imagines, might be a means of reversing time, for a time at least, such that it is an “illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution,” a “false immortality.” (p.51) And here, in this “suburban Odyssey” of Smithson’s, the monuments are crystallised with his Instamatic. 'The Fountain Monument ,' where six large pipes emerge into the river (see robertsmithson.com for images), a kind of homoerotic image of liquids and orifices which Smithson notes, then demurs, stating, “I will merely say, 'It was there'.” (p.50). And 'The Sand-Box Monument,' a poignant playground terrain, of a wooden box once a container for sand and now simply a type of mark, a ruin. Yet, here it is elevated to a metonymic mnemonic for time immemorial, “This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleakly growing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the drying up of oceans – no loner were there green forests and high mountains – all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and stones pulverized into dust.” (p.51)
In 1992 Patrick Keiller began his film, London . Here, in this eternal city, the monuments were unearthed at the margins. As with Smithson's microcosmic geology, Keiller confronts the way that matter matters within the city. The narrator (Paul Scofield, whose very voice is the epitome of melancholy) remarks how his companion, Robinson, “believed that if he looked hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of his own sorrowful events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future.” So London’s monuments fly below the radar. No Cleopatra’s Needle. No Nelson’s Column. Instead, the vertical shaft of Telecom Tower is decreed a monument to Rimbaud and Verlaine. And the towering edifice of Canary Wharf is consecrated as a monument to Rimbaud’s dockside wandering. Canon Street is declared a sacred site, and the No.15 sacred bus route for its passage by “the last remaining fragment of the London Stone”, that Robinson believes to be “the last stone of a circle that stood on St Paul ’s.”
Canary Wharf: monument to Rimbaud
Telecom Tower: Monument to Rimbaud and Verlaine
Keiller’s and Smithson’s urban drifts chart passages through a melancholy map, one that fascinates as much for its tears and creases as for any sense of ‘reality’. Crossing these maps are the rivers, Smithson’s Passaic River and Keiller’s Thames , both monumental, standing for a passage of time, cinematographic. Smithson described his experience of crossing the bridge – the first of its monuments, and which in itself was like “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.” In an interview for the Tate, with John House, Keiller spoke of his own attachment to the place of the river, “I spent a lot of time filming the river when I was making London in 1994. I started at Teddington with the idea of working my way up to Tower Bridge , often filming both sides of each bridge, though by the time I reached Vauxhall I had already encountered most of the remaining bridges in other shots, in particular the view from Monet's suite in the Savoy . I wanted to recover the river as a subject, and a space, rather as artists of this earlier period - Turner, Whistler and Monet - had depicted it.” (see Tate.org)
Neither Smithson nor Keiller mourn the objects upon which they bestow a mnemonic magnitude. Instead they strand the objects in time, attaching to them a certain longing. And they locate their monuments within the margins, the unseen, the terrain vague, and they find monumental moments that bypass the aggressive and arrogant stance of much memorial making. Perhaps a kind of ‘weak architecture’, as explored by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, who observes that, “Our culture detests the monument when the monument represents the public memory of power, the presence of the one and the same.”(p.123)
To be continued ...
Patrick Keiller. (1994). London
Robert Smithson. (1967) ‘The Monuments of Passaic ,’ ArtForum, 6(4)
Ignasi de Solà-Morales. (1995) ‘Weak Architecture’ in K. Michael Hays, Architectural Theory since 1968. Boston : MIT Press.
Ignasi de Solà-Morales. ‘Terrain Vague’, Anyplace. New York : Anyone Corporation.
