Dr. Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg, Département d’études anglaises et nord-américaines)
WHEN? Monday 21st November at 4 PM – 5:30 PM
WHERE? Grimond: Room GS 6
Rome/Passaic: Eternal Cities. On Robert Smithson’s A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey
Abstract:
My talk will deal with “negative sightseeing” in the 1960s, especially in New York and New Jersey, via an investigation of Robert Smithson’s exploration of suburbia in his essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967). “Negative sightseeing” refers to many artists’ fascination at the time with urban ruins, industrial landscapes, suburbs, slag heaps, strip mines, polluted rivers, rock quarries, burnt-out fields, abandoned airstrips, sand banks, remote islands, swamps, and deserts. Smithson and other artists of his generation saw such negative spaces not only as themes, but as conditions of art. I will insist on the role of New Jersey (traditionally seen as a marginal and empty cultural place) in the experimental and innovative art created at the time. I will use archival material from the Robert Smithson archives at the Smithsonian. Smithson’s reflection on the urban condition is based on a seemingly absurd transatlantic mirroring between famous historical capitals (Rome as the Eternal City) and suburban Passaic as the American “non-place”. I will try to demonstrate that, in Smithson’s vision, this mirroring of polar opposites (Rome/Passaic) is culturally and artistically meaningful.
Bio:
Dr. Manolescu is Associate Professor of English at the University of Strasbourg, France, working on 20th century and contemporary American literature and art. She holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot (2005) on Vladimir Nabokov’s representations of space and geographies. She has published two books on Vladimir Nabokov and articles on a variety of American writers and artists. The main focus of her research is on the ways in which space is imagined, experienced and invested in 20th century American literature and art. More recently, she has examined the city as privileged subject and medium in the practices of a certain number of American artists after 1960. She has a special interest in theories of the spatial turn and the connections between cartography, art, and literature. She was a “visiting scholar” at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2011-2012, and will visit the IAS again for the second semester of 2016-2017.
Please note that Dr. Manolescu will be visiting the University of Kent during November 21-25. If anyone wishes to meet with her please email her at: manoles@unistra.fr
