Between 1950 and 1975, some of the postwar era's most innovative artists
flocked to a very unexpected place: New Jersey. Appreciating what others
tended to ignore or mock, they gravitated to the state's most desolate
peripheries: its industrial wastescapes, crumbling cities, crowded
highways, and banal suburbs. There they produced some of the most
important work of their careers. The breakthroughs in land, conceptual,
performance, and site-specific art that New Jersey helped catalyze are
the subject of New Jersey as Non-Site, whose title evokes the
mixed-media sculptures that Robert Smithson began to create in 1968
while driving the state's highways with Nancy Holt.
This catalogue examines more than 100 works by sixteen artists,
including Amiri Baraka, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Gordon
Matta-Clark, and George Segal. Organized around three themes--ruin,
cooperation, and displacement--Kelly Baum's essay considers their work
in relationship to seismic shifts in the world of art and equally
dramatic changes to New Jersey's economy, infrastructure, landscape,
demography, and social stability.