ORO Editions

Elissa Rosenberg

Form and Formlessness

In the 1950s, long before apocalyptic views of emptiness and picturesque urban decay filled photography collections and popular magazines such as Time and Life, photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher began their systematic documentation of Germany’s industrial architecture [9-1]. 1 The abstract quality of the Bechers’ images aestheticized these abandoned water towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, mineheads, and grain elevators; they were shot frontally in black and white, stripped of their contexts, and generally organized in a grid. The Bechers referred to them as “anonymous sculptures.”2 By transforming these derelict structures into objects of beauty and granting them architectural value, the Bechers’photographs made an important contribution to a nascent industrial aesthetic.

Around the same time the Bechers were recording abandoned mining sites, artist Robert Smithson was exploring the postindustrial landscape. “My own experience,” he wrote, “is that the best sites for ‘earth art’ are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization or nature’s own devastation.”3 In 1967, he published his celebrated essay “The Monuments of Passaic” in Artforum, a tribute to the industrial remnants of Smithson’s hometown in New Jersey.4 Using a cheap Instamatic camera, he extolled the banal decaying “monuments” of the contemporary American city: the steel bridge, the “fountain monument” of sewage-outfall pipes, parking lots, and a suburban sandbox [9-2].

A year later Smithson joined the Bechers on a “field trip” to Oberhausen, one of the largest industrial complexes in the Ruhr district, not far from Düsseldorf, where Smithson was to have his first solo exhibition. Smithson’s snapshots from that visit stand in stark contrast to the Bechers’ analytic and even elegiac photographs. While the Bechers were preoccupied with the subtle formal aspects of the industrial structures, Smithson was drawn to the formlessness and disintegration of the surrounding landscape: the wasted ground, the mounds of slag, the marks left by tires. Terrain, he held, was a constantly changing, physical material, subject to what he called “chance and change in the material order of nature.”5