excerpted from Paul Toner's Interview w/ Robert Smithson, 1970.*
"In a technological society, the values have dissipated, and the ecology thing is a way of delivering one from death. The ecology thing represents moral confusion, and a need to continue. It is a media issue, like "the war on poverty". My work isn't about the war on poverty, or the war on anything. I'm not a salvationist. I know there is that need to transcend one's condition. You know that you are growing older, and that you are going to die, and you want some kind of continuance. People always thought that nature is self-sufficient, and that it was going to continue. Now nature itself is threatened. The dinosaurs lived and died and ice ages have come and gone. It might be quite natural that Lake Erie is filling up with green slime. It might just be another stage. There is no going back to Paradise or 19th century landscape, which is basically what the conservationist attitude is. People have always had different views of what nature is. The early view of Paradise is a nostalgia for the closed garden. There is not consciousness of that now. There is a whole history of how man views the earth. In the 16th century people thought they were leaving the notion that the earth was corrupted by the fall. The attitude in the "middle ages" was to say that the mountains weren't spoiled, or the corroded aspect of a corrupted situation. Then the romantics came along. They aestheticized mountains--and produced "the mountain controversy"--whether or not the mountains were the habitation of the devil. That was changed by the Romantics (who actually were leagued with the devil). The sentimental idea of the landscape as a "beauty spot" is directly out of that romantic preoccupation with the landscape. There has always been the war between the formal and the anti-formal. It goes back to the natural and unnatural gardening techniques. It was a political issue in the time of Alexander Pope. His view of the garden was that it was to be meandering and twisting , as opposed to the gardening of the French. You can see that views of the earth, or how to treat the landscape, have political implications. I'm interested in all types of places, not just the outdoors; that can become a stance that doesn't have any resolution, or become overly precious. I'm more interested in the way things are. A lot of working outdoors is just escapism because things are so horrible. People want to get out into the fresh air, and that becomes a sentimental escapist tendency. The tendency to go out is a peripheral concern, and peripheral concerns are romantic--going out into the infinite. If you bring that back, it is more of a classical thing--it completes the dialectic. So I am neither romantic nor classic, but working in the tension of both areas."
*.pdf available soon
