New Jersey as Non-Site

by Kelly Baum, Beatriz Colomina (Contributor), Kathryn Dammers (Contributor)

Between 1950 and 1975, some of the postwar era’s most innovative artists flocked to a very unexpected New Jersey. Appreciating what others tended to ignore or mock, they gravitated to the state’s most desolate its industrial wastescapes, crumbling cities, crowded highways, and banal suburbs. There they produced some of the most important work of their careers. The breakthroughs in land, conceptual, performance, and site-specific art that New Jersey helped catalyze are the subject of New Jersey as Non-Site , whose title evokes the mixed-media sculptures that Robert Smithson began to create in 1968 while driving the state’s highways with Nancy Holt.

This catalogue examines more than 100 works by sixteen artists, including Amiri Baraka, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Gordon Matta-Clark, and George Segal. Organized around three themes―ruin, cooperation, and displacement―Kelly Baum’s essay considers their work in relationship to seismic shifts in the world of art and equally dramatic changes to New Jersey’s economy, infrastructure, landscape, demography, and social stability.

Genres: Art

176 pages, Hardcover

First published October 28, 2013

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was given to me by an astute friend who knows I have a practice of going on 20 mile walks across New Jersey as a kind of pure experience of changing urban, suburban, post-human, and natural landscapes, all of which can be repeatedly passed through along any given transect line. So this study of artists in the 60s and 70s pioneering post-studio practices, land art, architectural investigation, happenings, and much more with New Jersey as part of their expanded palette gives me quite a bit of exciting material to work with. Of particular interest to me are Nancy Holt's "tours" of abandoned sites, and Robert Smithson's theories of the Site and Non-Site, which also appeared, tantalizingly, in Fanny Howe's 1979 novel .