Erasmus

About Robert Smithson’s “Nonsite”

A nonsite is located in an art gallery and "represents" a place outside this room, usually in a marginal or suburban area. It consists of three elements placed on the walls and floor of the art gallery.

1.    geological samples (sand and rocks) collected at the selected site

2.    one or more metal containers containing these samples and serving as an indication of their location at the place (as evidence)

3.    various site documentation (maps, photographs and texts)

Concerning the place (the site of the nonsite), a nonsite does not represent the first. At the same time, it refers to this place, records this place, samples it and contains it. This is accomplished through a combination of many different elements (maps, photographs, texts and geological samples), through the adoption of many media (sculpture, photography, drawing) and modes of representation in the same artwork. It is a partnership of different media that remain all distinct. The optical fugues seen from above are translated into the shape of the containers, the map is cut into the shape of these containers and thus a morphological continuity is aquiered. This morphological continuity does not have any aesthetic character; it is a strategy in order to find identity relationships between the materials and the media. We therefore recognize at the nonsite the important idea of introducing different forms of implementation that are unified in the name of the artwork.

Concerning the space that contains the nonsite (art gallery, museum), it also becomes temporarily part of the nonsite because it contains it. The nonsite is not, however placed, neither in the gallery nor in the landscape, it is not located in a particular place. We cannot say exactly where a nonsite is. No specific geographic location can contain it. The information contained in the artwork does not clarify this mental and spatial confusion. At the same time, it cannot be perceived as a purely abstract or purely conceptual artwork because of the intense materiality that characterizes it. While the site remains outside the art gallery and outside of the view at the time of the exhibition, it is not outside of the artwork. So, in the nonsite we also have the idea of an art that is not entirely present.

For the viewer, a nonsite creates more a mental intensity rather than a visual affect. The view of the artwork does not offer any direct, holistic perception. The viewers’ attempting to incorporate that complexity into a coherent idea leads him to a process of reconstructing viewing, viewing becomes a journey, a reading process, or a process similar to the process of viewing a movie. In any case it is a time process. Neither the artwork nor the place become the focus of attention, as someone would expect. Nobody sees the place, nor the artwork, as the nonsite is also non-sight.

Bibliography

http://crco.cssd.ac.uk/35/256/Appendix_J_Non-site.pdf
http://roberthobbs.net/book_files/Robert_Smithson_Sculpture.pdf

Roland Barthes, No address
https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/roland-barthes-empire-of-signs1.pdf