ABSTRACT
Beginning in 1966, American artist Robert Smithson and a circle of his friends set out
on a series of field excursions to the outskirts of New York City, motivated in part by
their growing desire to create large-scale artworks on the actual land. Most of these
group trips were to what Smithson termed ‘backwater’ or ‘fringe’ sites in New Jersey,
including defunct rock quarries, suburban wastelands and the desolate Pine Barrens in
the southern part of the state. Smithson would publish two New Jersey ‘travelogues’,
though the more famous of the two, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New
Jersey’ (Smithson 1967c), is based upon a solo journey undertaken to his former
hometown.1 Smithson’s ‘preoccupation with place’ (AAA, Smithson 1972) was deeply
embroiled with art world debates of the day and is only decipherable relative to a knot
of interrelated critiques he began waging in the mid-1960s: against nineteenth-century
Romantic views of nature, pictorialism and Abstract Expressionism, to name a few
targets. His early site-based activity also responded to emerging land-use patterns and
politics (e.g. the rampant suburbanization of postwar America, the shift of industrial
production from inner cities to exurban reaches, increasing public concern about ecolo-
gical degradation). In contrast to practitioners coming from empirically oriented disci-
plines such as architecture and geography, Smithson invented field destinations as a
creative-critical act. The field, in other words, functioned as a space in and through
which to stage a particular set of critiques. More specifically, New Jersey’s ‘backwa-
ters’ operated as an other space to the New York art world he associated with studio-
based art making and to wilderness, at least as defined by a rapidly expanding
back-to-nature movement toward which he held fundamental objections.
