It has been 42 years since Robert Smithson took an Inter-City Transportation Company Bus at the Port Authority to Passaic, N.J.
In his ambulatory meditations, Smithson cheekily compared the wrecked landscape to ancient Rome. His vision was cinematic, it delineated a new way of artistic interaction with the urban environment in tension with the suburban one, and it became a founding document of minimalism.
Through Mar. 20, Smithson’s work, and that of his contemporaries Dan Graham and Gordon Matta-Clark, gets a reworking at Double-Bill, an enlivening show at Art in General.
The centerpiece of the show is a movie about the journey the three of them take back to New Jersey. The old sites of their Monuments have grown derelict, wrecked by industrial decline in a way unforeseen to the artists when they began their careers five decades ago. The house that Matta-Clark once sawed in two has become an office park. Skateboarders zoom by. When one falls and cuts himself, Matta-Clark comically explores the “rupture.”
A still from Redmond Entwistle’s Monuments.
“Surfaces,” he says, looking at the wound, “are too easily accepted as limits.”
Minimalism and post-minimalism have had a longer life in the seminar room than in the gallery, and the characters in Monuments are as much theories as artists; they travel through the area staring impassively at places where once they projected their art and reveling in their theories of art and urbanism.
“The museum and the city and the same,” intones Dan Graham. “My work has always been about the relationship between the city and the suburb.”
The film has a deliberate clacking, B-movie aesthetic, which Redmond Entwistle, the director and curator of the show, no doubt thought lent an air of 1960s art-documentary verisimilitude, but which rings hollow now.
Still, the film, which plays twice daily, is worth catching, as the rest of the show feels slight. The show also features paintings, by Mary Billyou of stenciled words stacked closely together on whitewashed canvases, works that seem more profound than they probably are. Suzanne Goldenberg has tiny, ephemeral sculptures made out of cardboard and other pieces of urban trash, which are charming in their delicacy. The strongest of the remaining pieces is Rafael Sanchez and Kathleen White’s “BOOKS RECORDS TAPES.” It is a long table featuring stacks of for-sale books, sheet music, chapbooks and magazines of the kind found all over the city where vendors are still given reign. The ventures of Smithson et al matter because they expanded the definition of art and pointed out new ways of seeing, Sanchez and White’s seemingly dashed together collections of detritus come closest to re-realizing that vision.
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Through Mar. 20. Art in General, 79 Walker St., 212-219-0473.
