Editing Robert Smithson (section)

====Frederick Law Olmsted's influence====
Smithson's interest in the [[wikt:Temporal|temporal]] is explored in his writings in part through the recovery of the ideas of the [[picturesque]]. His essay ''[[Frederick Law Olmsted]] and the Dialectical Landscape'' was written in 1973 after Smithson had seen an exhibition curated by [[Elizabeth Barlow Rogers]] at the [[Whitney Museum]] entitled ''Frederick Law Olmsted's New York'' as the cultural and temporal context for the creation of his late-19th-century design for Central Park.<ref name="writings" /><ref name="Getty symposium" /> In examining the photographs of the land set aside to become Central Park, Smithson saw the barren landscape that had been degraded by humans before Olmsted constructed the complex 'naturalistic' landscape that was viscerally apparent to New Yorkers in the 1970s. Smithson was interested in challenging the prevalent conception of [[Central Park]] as an outdated 19th-century picturesque aesthetic in landscape architecture that had a static relationship within the continuously evolving urban fabric of New York City. In studying the writings of 18th- and 19th-century picturesque treatise writers Gilpin, Price, Knight and Whately, Smithson recovers issues of site specificity and human intervention as dialectic landscape layers, experiential multiplicity, and the value of deformations manifest in the picturesque landscape.<ref name="Getty symposium" /> Smithson further implies in this essay that what distinguishes the picturesque is that it is based on real land.<ref name="auto">{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | p = 160 }}.</ref> For Smithson, a park exists as "a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region".<ref name="auto"/> Smithson was interested in [[Central Park]] as a landscape which by the 1970s had weathered and grown as Olmsted's creation, and was layered with new evidence of human intervention.<ref name="writings" />

{{blockquote|Now the Ramble has grown up into an urban jungle, and lurking in its thickets are "hoods, hobos, hustlers, and homosexuals," and other estranged creatures of the city{{nbsp}}.... Walking east, I passed [[graffiti]] on boulders{{nbsp}}... On the base of [[Cleopatra's Needle (New York City)|the Obelisk]] along with the hieroglyphs there are also graffiti.{{nbsp}}... In the spillway that pours out of the Wollman Memorial Ice Rink, I noticed a metal grocery cart and a trash basket half-submerged in the water. Further down, the spillway becomes a brook choked with mud and tin cans. The mud then spews under the [[Gapstow Bridge]] to become a muddy slough that inundates a good part of The Pond, leaving the rest of The Pond aswirl with oil slicks, sludge, and Dixie cups.<ref>{{harv | Smithson | 1996 | pp = 169–170 }}.</ref>}}

In revisiting the 18th- and early 19th-century treatises of the picturesque, which Olmsted interpreted in his practice, Smithson exposes threads of an anti-aesthetic anti-formalist logic and a theoretical framework of the picturesque that addressed the [[dialectic]] between the physical landscape and its temporal context. By re-interpreting and re-valuing these treatises, Smithson was able to broaden the temporal and intellectual context for his own work, and to offer renewed meaning for Central Park as an important work of [[modern art]] and landscape architecture.<ref name="Getty symposium" />