Model Desert, Sandbox Monument

Abstract

When Robert Smithson visited Passaic, New Jersey, the town where he was born, he recognized in the deserted sandbox a ‘model desert’ and a ‘sandbox monument.’ Following Smithson’s lead, this narrative will thread spatial instances that explore how a box full of sand, where children usually play, could encapsulate the potency of some vast barren lands eliciting war and destruction, burial, and death. In the hands of some players, the sandbox also becomes a monument to unattainable lands, a monument to the passage of time—a playground to a future yet to come.

Keywords:

• land art
• model
• monument
• playground
• sand

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships, the Office of the Provost and the Gibbs College of Architecture, University of Oklahoma.

Notes

1 Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Artforum 6:4 (December 1967): 48–51. The author presented an initial version of this article at the ACSA Fall conference in Marfa, TX in 2017.

2 Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague” in Anyplace, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge: MIT Press/Anyone Corporation, 1995), 120.

3 The contact sheets are published in Robert A. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Photo Works (LACMA and University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 86–91.

4 All monuments in this paragraph are called out in Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments,” 49–50.

5 Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments,” 50.

6 Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments,” 51.

7 Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments.” Two thorough studies of the Passaic trips are by Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 100-121; and Jennifer L. Roberts, Mirror Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 60–85. Roberts writes that Smithson copied verbatim the experiment from a physics textbook where the mix was between white and red sands and changed it to white and black—certainly to match, in the reader’s eye, the black and white photographs, but also to emphasize the racial divide in town that specifically took place on either side of the railroad tracks—now covered by the Parking Monument. See Roberts, Mirror Travels, p. 84 for the physics experiment; Reynolds and Roberts for the racial tension in Passaic, NJ.

8 Liane Lefaivre and Ingeborg de Roode, eds., Aldo Van Eyck: The Playgrounds and the City (Amsterdam and Rotterdam: Stedelijk Museum and NAi Publishers, 2002); as well as Anna van Lingen, Denisa Kollarova and Donald Geradts, Seventeen Playgrounds, Amsterdam (Eindhoven: Lecturis, 2016).

9 Giorgio Agamben, “In Playland: Reflections on History and Play,” in Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 65–88.

10 Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks, Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). The first chapter, “October 1967: A Corner of a Larger Field,” sets Oldenburg’s work as the cornerstone of Land Art to come.

11 Boettger, Earthworks, 2.

12 See Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People and Fantastic Adventures, from Chess to Role-playing Games (Unreason Press, 2012).

13 For the only extensive aerial photographs of the site, see Emmet Gowin, The Nevada Test Site (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

14 Two important publications have expanded the discourse on the art history and cultural geography of earthworks to include practices that involve the mediatization of Earth, the politics of land use, as well as scientific investigations and personal experiences. The first book, accompanying an exhibition, is Philip Kaiser and Miwon Kwon’s Ends of the Earth, Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: LACMA, and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2012). The second is Lucy Lippard’s Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West (New York: The New Press, 2014). Lippard creates an artwork as she unearths and juxtaposes links between landscape of the West, Land Art of the 1960s and 1970s, and larger narratives of mining and extraction.

15 These photographs are part of the Robert Smithson Estate, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

16 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anarchronisme des images (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2000).

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Tamar Zinguer

Tamar Zinguer is an architect, architectural historian, and educator who examines the pedagogy of design through history and across scales. Her book Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys (University of Virginia Press, 2015) explored how ludic models reflected their surroundings, while her present manuscript, Sandbox: An Architectural History, follows a ubiquitous space over two centuries, examining how it activates both inner and outer landscapes. Another book manuscript in progress, Architecture Degree Zero, traces writing and projects exhibiting significant modalities of nothingness. Zinguer teaches at the University of Oklahoma, where she leads students in playful experiments.