While Watching PBS...

Recently while watching NJN (New Jersey Network) a PBS affiliate broadcasting from Trenton, New Jersey, a brief bit of video footage caught my eye. The footage was labeled "Robert Smithson's 'Floating Island' in the Hudson River" and showed a bright red tugboat pulling a rusty barge loaded with trees along the busy New York City waterfront.

New Jersey, of course, claims all the "good parts" of New York City, including the island that the Statue of Liberty stands on. While the natives 'over there' can and do debate who owns what and where the state line should be drawn, New Jersey undoubtedly has some of the finest views of the New York City skyline.

But a tugboat pulling barge full of trees? What is this? I had to find out.

Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938–July 20, 1973) was an American artist famous for his land art. Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League.

Two of his works, his 'Spiral Jetty' (1970) and 'Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island' (1970-2005) are probably the best known (not to say well-known!) and are rather interesting, at least to me.

Built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, a 1,500-foot-long curlicue jetty extends into lake. As the water levels rises and lowers, the salt left behind has crystallized on the dark black rocks.

Unique to say the least. So what's the deal with the barge full of trees?

Smithson was a radical who enjoyed musing on nature and the cosmos. He revered Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City's Central Park, and his floating island project called for a barge of vegetation to be towed around Manhattan by tugboat.

This can be seen as an odd, off-beat, kind of homage to his nineteenth-century land art predecessor. As Olmstead's Central Park is, in effect, an artificial model of nature, so the floating island is an artificial model of Central Park.


Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan was conceived in 1970 by Smithson but it was never realised in his lifetime.

It was thirty five years later, to coincide with a major retrospective of his oeuvre at the Whitney Museum, Smithson's miniature island finally and dramatically set sail.


In September 2005, the floating island of Robert Smithson was created in about a week, in a ragged-looking barge yard on Staten Island using a 30-by-90-foot rusty barge, 10 trees, 3 huge rocks, a bunch of shrubs, rolls of sod and a whole lot of dirt.

There was no blueprint to follow except Ms. Holt's (his widow) memories and guidance and Mr. Smithson's rudimentary sketch - which was very specific in some areas, for example, specifying the island's trees were to be native to the New York region and that there should be moss growing on one boulder; yet vague in others, no dimensions; no color scheme; only a rough ideas about the topography and placement of bushes and trees that Smithson might have wanted.


I think the whole thing was pretty cool!

The only thing I would have done differently would have been to put an orange traffic cone on the barge somewhere. :) I found all of these photos on the Internet while looking for the story.

Spiral Jetty

The first one of the floating island came from Brain Sholis' Flickr site and he has some really interesting pictures. I'd recommend a visit if you have time.

Floating Island off the Ruined Pier

Floating Island Going by Man Reading