Seeing New Jersey as a State of Inspiration

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The New York art world’s attitude toward New Jersey has not changed much since the art critic Ted Castle wrote in 1978, “New Jersey is practically not a place.”

Young artists looking for ample studio space in a postindustrial setting gravitate to Bushwick, not Hoboken. Curators mount show after show on downtown New York in the 1970s — there’s one at the Whitney right now, “Rituals of Rented Island” — and overlook just how much radical, site-specific art originated in the nonplace next door: Robert Smithson venturing into rock quarries near Paterson, Gordon Matta-Clark cutting up houses in Englewood and Allan Kaprow staging Happenings on George Segal’s South Brunswick farm.

The view across the Hudson is bound to look different after a visit to two shows that position New Jersey smack-dab in the center of the postwar avant-garde. “New Jersey as Non-Site,” at the Princeton University Art Museum through early January, looks at the challenging Post-Minimal, Conceptual and performance art being made in the state between 1952 and 1976. And in February, the Montclair Art Museum’s “Robert Smithson’s New Jersey” anchors this Passaic-born artist’s work in the local landscape.

These are important shows, and not just for a local audience; both give us a new way to look at “post-studio” art, one that’s less centered on New York lofts and Los Angeles campuses. They introduce visual artists like Smithson, Dan Graham and Dennis Oppenheim to a conversation long dominated by writers, musicians and directors, figures including Philip Roth, Bruce Springsteen and David Chase.

And at a moment when New Jersey is serving as a stage for national politics, these exhibitions are reminders that the state has long been a laboratory for issues affecting the rest of the country: migration to the suburbs, deindustrialization, urban blight and renewal, and environmental crisis.

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