Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatan

I actually value indifference. I think it's something that has aesthetic possibilities. --Robert Smithson, "What Is a Museum?" 1967 [1]

Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens were one as well as the other New Jersey-born residents of Manhattan, wherefrom each embarked upon a well-publicized excursion to the Yucatan Peninsula. individual left New York on Monday, October 9 1841 aboard the cargo ship Tennessee the other upon Tuesday, April 15, 1969, aboard Pan Am flight 67 [2] the two published narratives of their travels: Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Yucatan was a two-volume volume published by Harper and Brothers in 1843 while Smithson's "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" appeared as an article in the September 1969 issue of Artforum. [3] one as well as the other narratives included illustrations (Figs. 1 2)

The immediate similarities extremity there. Stephens's antebellum adventure, abrupted in nineteenth-century imperialist and positivist rhetoric, bears for a like reason little direct resemblance to Smithson's meandering, skeptical treatment that the sum of two units barely seem worth discussing in the same breath. [4] Indeed, Smithson himself downplayed his connection to Stephens; although he knew Stephens's writings and allude toed in his title a desire to throw back on them, he avoided any direct regard to Stephens in the material substance of his article. When he did speak explicitly of Stephens, it was solitary to negate him; in individual interview he referred to his Yucatan trip as an "anti-expedition" to Stephens's. [5]

notwithstanding despite Smithson's apparent attempts to disavow Stephens and his nineteenth-century baggage, Smithson's Yucatan shoot forward can be fruitfully examined in terminuss of the dialogue it invites with the tradition of expedition narrative. This essay will argue that by the agency of forcing Smithson's Yucatan expedition into this historical perspective, we find ourselves be opposite toed with new questions about his entire material part of landscape production.

Although Smithson is best known today as a land or earthworks artist (his Spiral Jelly provides a standard illustration of the change for art history survey texts) his quintessential medium was arguably neither land nor earth on the other hand rather travel. Smithson spoke many times of his desire to be "thrown on the outside to the edges," and in nearly all of his greatest in quantity influential work--his Site/Nonsites (Fig. 8) his eccentric Artforum travelogues, his far-flung earthworks--he used the act of expedition to establish a trademark dialectic between center and periphery. [6] In interpreting this mingled expeditionary dialectic, scholars of Smithson's work have generally focused upon its radical opposition to the high-modernist aesthetics prevailing in the 1960 This approach, which interprets Smithson as a lock opener figure in the transition from "modern" to "postmodern" patterns of art production, has shown in what manner Smithson's traveling practice dislocated the traditional sites of artistic production, complicated the authorial function, violated disc iplinary boundaries, and obscur the distinctions between the visual and the verbal. [7]

These analyses have done an crack and necessary job of accounting for--indeed, helping to determine--Smithson's status as single of the most influential artists of the late twentieth hundred Yet in their emphasis upon Smithson's proto-postmodernism they have been obliged to extract Smithson's travels from broader historical connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss notably the long (and largely unsavory) Western expeditionary tradition. The postmodern analytical len rightly dioceses Smithson's iconoclastic trip to Mexico as an attack upon his immediate high-modernist critical forebears, like as Michael Fried and lenient Greenberg, but it fails to illuminate the simultaneous dialogue that the shoot forward sets up with earlier precursors, like as Hernan Cortes and Stephens. Moreover, attuned as it must be to indeterminacies, this criticism cannot address the determinate part that late 1960s attitudes toward primitivism, Central America, and the Maya played in Smithson's cast Thus, it cannot explain in what way Smithson's expedition might have been differe nt had it occurr at another historical twinkling of an eye or in some other tropical landscape, nor can it clinch Smithson politically accountable for the image of the region that he constructs

through repositioning Smithson's project within the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of American travel narrative, my aim is not simply to provide Smithson with a tidy nineteenth-century pedigree. It is, rather, to reveal aspects of his work that complicate our faculty of perception of his postmodernity, to help initiate critical debate about the historical implications of his expeditionary methodology, and to hint despite Smithson's frequent renunciations of "anthropomorphism" and politics, that his expedition to the Yucatan Peninsula constituted the pair an anthropology and a politics of peripheral encounter

I give chase to this analysis by tracing the universal of indifference as each traveler applies it to the landscape and the inhabitants of the Yucatan Peninsula. Stephens's narrative, of course, places "indifference" into play as a pejorative term; by the agency of constructing the people of Yucatan as indifferent to their have a title to history, Stephens authorizes his be in possession of extraction of archaeological artifacts from the region. Smithson controls such imperialist operations to a blistering critical inversion, and a great deal of of this essay will be devot to exploring that critique. on the contrary I also hope to display that in some of the greatest in quantity sophisticated aspects of Smithson's critique, particularly in his attempts to imagine a form of "dedifferentiated" vision and history, Stephens's notion of indigenous indifference is necessarily retained.