Brand New Garden: Tending to the Real with Robert Smithson Imagine Central Park in 1973, when Robert Smithson walked us through it and talked us through it. Remember how he took us back to the park’s “prehistoric” beginnings, its glacial past, before the carousel that now stands. And remember how he heralded the park’s creator, Frederick Law Olmstead as an artist of serious worth and magnitude, making ponds and not simply contemplating them. Recall all the sedimentations that Smithson recorded, both geological and verbal, and add on the thirty-nine years that have followed and continue to create thin sheets of sediment, coating his essay with a strange historical patina, burdening us to answer his call towards a non-metaphysical art, a dialectical art. He called for a dialectical mode of life that would not separate the sylvan and the industrial to idealize them, but instead reveal their mutual reliance upon one another - in fact, one constituting the other. Smithson was quick to have done away with the rust he called “Philosophy”, and the “unknown lumps” he called “Aesthetics,” but he did this against a particular historical landscape that fed a criticism which fell short of describing the art of his time. He did this as a challenge to the authorities of the “Establishment” and to nd a way towards new forms of art-making and the context surrounding it. But what if Smithson’s antagonism against his era of misunderstood Kantianism and idealism turned him off of philosophy and metaphysics too quickly? What if he gave up too swiftly on something that could have provided a powerful ally in opposing idealism and reductionism? With thirty-nine years of retrospection, and with so many walks in the park, what if we were to give one more walk-through of Smithson’s writing and work? Where would it take us? * * * It’s strange. Smithson remains such a concrete, materialist thinker when it comes to the landscape, to things, and our reckoning with them, but nevertheless his dialectical method erodes all objects until there remains nothing more than the play between fact and ction. He seems unable to believe in the utter reality of material, without being able to give up on this reality altogether. Any attempt to quarantine nature away from man is a form of mental malnutrition, but, dialectics remain foundational to Smithson’s understanding of the play between nature and man, thus designating a general location of nature as somewhere “over there,” as ecologist Timothy Morton often says. Smithson criticizes the contemporary artist saying that most of them, “and most intellectual activities, the culture itself, are completely separated, you know, have lost any contact with the natural world.” 1 Nevertheless, rather than address the agency and objecthood of all things - some of which humans generate, others which are not - he dissolves the physical world. “Separate ‘things,’ ‘forms,’ ‘objects,’ ‘shapes,’ etc., with beginnings and endings are mere convenient ctions: there is only an uncertain disintegrating order that transcends the limits of rational separations. e ctions erected in the eroding time stream are apt to be swamped at any moment. e brain itself resembles an eroded rock from which ideas and ideals leak.” 2 He never denies the real, only the shear “thingness” of reality. Instead, reality is one bubbling ux of growing entropy. In turn, reality’s constant movement cannot be accounted for by a 1 Jack Flam, ed. Robert Smithson: e Collected Writings, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 265 2 ibid, 112