Robert Smithson: Photo Works 0826314783, 9780826314789

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Front cover

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

·rorn Photograph from the Second Stop (Rubble). Second Mountam of 6 Stops on a Secuon: 1970. photoltthograph1c print. s12e

5905 WIishire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90036

vanable (ong1nal pr,nt 21 ½ x 21 ½ in. (54.6

and

x 54.6 cm]).

Los Angeles County Museum of Art , Ralph M. Parsons Fund

University of New Mexico Press 1720 Lomas Boulevard NE , Albuquerque, NM 87131. Copynght C> 1993 by Museum Associates. Los Angeles County Museum or Art. All r,ghts reserved. No part or this book may be reproduced or utilized 1n any form or by any means. electronic or mechanical, including photocopying ,

Endpapers Details from Robert Smithson (with Robert Fiore), Sp,raf Jetty. 1970, I6-mm ltlm with audio. Original in color. Fronltsp1ece

recording, or by any information storage and retneval

Contact prints. Great Notch Quarry, 1966, 2 rolls. 24 frames.

system. without permission 1n wrrt1ng from the publishers.

Est ate of Robert Smithson. court esy John Weber Gallery

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publtcation Data

Bac k cover

Sob1eszek. Robert A., I943-

Portrait of Robert Smi thson by umden1tf1ed photographer,

Robert Smithson : photo works / Robert $ob1eszek.

P.

cm.

Ousseldorf. 1969. Est ate of Robert Smithson. courtesy John Weber Gallery

Catalogue of an exh1b1hon held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. SepL 9-Nov. 28. 1993. lndudes bibltograph1cal references. ISBN 0-8263-1478-3 {hardcover) ISBN 0 -8263 -1479-1(softcover)

I. Photography, Art1st1c-Exh1bit1ons. 2 Smithson. Robert- Exh1b1t1ons. I. Smithson. Robert II Los Angeles County Museum ol Art. Il l Tille. TR647S578 1993 779' .092-dc20

93- 15962 CIP

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83 / 7 /5 X ARCH

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Foreword

8

Acknowledgments

Robert Smithson: Photo Works

50

Collages and Negative Prints

Robert A. Sobiuzek

66

Grids and Sequences

86

Monuments and Minor Monuments of Passaic

98

Nonsite (Slag), Oberhausen, Germany

110

Hotel Palenque

124

Displacements and Other Transitory Works

142

Proposed Mining Projects

150

Land Reclamation Projects

159

Checklist of the Exhibition

162

Selected Bibliography

166

Lenders to the Exhibition

166

Photo Sources and Credits

F0tewanl

From the mid-1960s until his death in 1973 Robert

Smithson's final projects attempted a collabora-

Smithson was a singular artist. His avant-garde sculp-

tion between art and industry. He believed that artists

ture, his ideas about the relationships between art

could assist in reclaiming such devastated areas as

and ecology, his prolific theoretical writ ings, and his

open-faced strip mines. As we near the end of this

earthworks, especially Spiral Jetty, have influenced,

century, it has become clear that the human conquest

directly or indirectly, an entire generation's approach

of nature is no longer the cause for celebration it once

toward art. He refused to limit himself or his art by

was; nor can we with any complacency view wilderness

either selection of materials or imposition of genre.

as isolated from the effects of our culture. Our expand-

He worked comfortably with metal, plastic, wood,

ing presence in and impact upon the land may have

minerals, asphalt, concrete, glue, and paper. He was

become so pervasive that the boundaries between

a painter, sculptor, theorist, filmmaker, earthmover,

nature and culture have been all but obliterated. Now,

photographer, and visionary.

two decades following his death, Robert Smithson's

There have been other exhibitions of his works,

lessons are all the more vital and significant.

but Robert Smithson: Photo Works is the first to examine his use of the camera and to present the way he

Michael E. Shapiro

saw the unique landscapes in which he traveled and

Director

located his art. As demonstrated by curator of photog-

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

raphy Robert A. Sobieszek, the photographic image was central to Smithson's art, whether in collages, montages, sequences, films, or alone. Thanks to the estate of Robert Smithson and especially the artist Nancy Holt, thousands of Smithson's extant negatives and slides have been made available to this exhibition, as were additional materials preserved in the Robert Smithson Papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

1

Acknowtt 1& ne.,ta

The idea for this exhibition occurred to me while

images and offered sound counsel. Dean Sobel and

researching my last major exhibition before joining

James DeYoung of the Milwaukee Art Museum worked

the staff of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

with us in helping to restore (reprint) the photo-

in late 1990. The New American Pastoral: Landscape

graphic portion of that museum's important work by

Photography in the Age of Questioning was an examina-

Smithson, Nonsite •une of Wreckage.· Bayonne, New

tion of a group of photographers who were involved

Jersey. Philip L. Coodax of the International Museum

with portraying lands that were disturbed, as it were,

of Photography at George Eastman House unstinting'y

by the collision between culture and nature, civiliza-

provided technical information about Smithson's cam-

tion and wilderness, the "machine" and the "garden."

eras. All errors of commission and sins of omission.

If the earlier photographic work of Ed Ruscha was

it should be stressed, remain mine alone.

a kind of inspiration for much of the cool and clinical

Others to be thanked include Lewis Baltz, Bernd

landscape photography of the 1970s, as was demon-

and Hilla Becher, Janet Borden of the Janet Borden

strated in the exhibition The New Topographies, 1975,

Gallery, Laurie Brown, Elizabeth Childress, Walter

it became obvious to me that it was the writings, the

De Maria, Robert Evren of the Museum of Modern Art

photographs, and the example of Robert Smithson

in New York, Robert Fiore, Connie and Jack Glenn.

that provided the spiritual if not precisely the aesthetic

Dan Graham, Nancy Green of the Herbert F. Johnson

background for many American photographers of

Museum of Art at Cornell University, David T. Hanson.

the 1980s and early 1990s.

Robert Heinecken, Kim Kapin of A& I Labs, Ray

This project was possible only because of the

Mortenson, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim,

willing and generous assistance of many individuals

Amy Plumb, Ann Reynolds of the University of Texas

and institutions. Foremost among them was the

at Austin, Ed Ruscha, and Christina Van Kirk.

artist Nancy Holt, who made available all of the photo-

I would like to express my appreciations to t he

graphic materials that still remain with the estate of

museum's former director, Earl A. Powell 111, and to

Robert Smithson, who carefully read and amended

its current director, Michael E. Shapiro, for their initial

the manuscript, and who enthusiastically encouraged

and continued faith in the project; to my secretary,

and assisted my research during the past two years.

Eve Schillo, editor, Chris Keledjian, designer, Scott

Equally crucial was the John Weber Gallery, which

Taylor, photographer, Jay K. McNally, and assista nt.

represents the artist's estate. John Weber critically

Paula Riff, for everything they did; and to the rest of

reviewed a draft of the essay, and Joyce Nereaux

the professional staff of the museum who helped 1n

initially had and continued to have confidence in what

the project for their generous assistance. I also wish

I wanted to achieve. Others to be thanked at the Weber

to sincerely and warmly thank my wife, Sonja Flavin,

Gallery are Maryl Drillich, Elyse Goldberg, Jeff Levine,

who has continued to guide and support me in all

Neil Scriptunas, and Wendy Wood.

matters and who has especially sustained me for the

The Archives of American Art, Smithsonia n

past three years. It is to her that I dedicate th is book.

Institution, which maintains the majority of Sm ithson's papers and photographs, was especially helpful. I would like to tha nk its director, Richard Wattenmaker, for approving the loan of many works and Judith Throm for steering me through the innumerable cartons and complexities of her domain. Stephen Focari, Shana Gallager, Elizabeth Joffrion, and Cindy Ott of the Arch ives were also very helpful. Thomas F. Barrow and Robbert Flick. after reading one or another version of the manuscript, offered inva luable suggestions as well as vita l ideas concern ing landscape photography in general. Lucy Lippard and Joseph Masheck freely gave permission to quote certain of their unpublished comments pertinent to Smithson and his work. Douglas Chrismas of Ace Contemporary Exhibitions an d Margo Leavin of the Margo Leavin Gallery assisted in obtaining pr ints and

•

Robert A. Sobleszek Curator of Photography Los Angeles County Mu.,eum of Art

Robert Smithson: Photo Worb

I prefer views that are expansive, that include everything.

One must be concerned not only with the landscape itself, but how one looks at it- the view is very important.'

10

--

..

I, who felt the horror of mirrors Not only in front of the impenetrable crystal Where there ends and begins, uninhabitable, An impossible space of reflections.2

All existence seemed tentative and stagnant.. ..Was I but a shadow in a plastic bubble hovering in a place outside mind and body? Et in Utah ego. I was slipping out of myself again.

11

1 Robert Smllhaon ( herealler

lntroductlorr

Smilhaon). "A Converullon in Salt Lake City: Smlt.luon + Peuena,• typed ltan&ily or Utah, 26 January 1972, Robert Smith90'1 Papert, Atthive5 or Amorican Art., Smllhaonian lnslitulion ( herealler Smllhaon Papers). reel 383~. rrame 882. An edited ~rslon or this Inter• vlflw can be found In •Converutloo In Salt LalPY or this work was in Smithson's library; see Valentin Tatrarullcy, •Catalo«ue or Robert Smith.1on's Ubrary: Books, Magazine,, a Reconl•" (hereafter Tatnn5l(Y). unpul>llshed plley SMet5 ( New York: New York University Preos, 1978). ms. 244. 1 Smllhson. "Thf Spiral Jelt)'," In Wrili..,., 113. Thi• -.y originally .,_n,d in A,.. qflloe E,wiron• ~ ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: 0eorp Brulller, l972i • Dan Cameron, "lnddent5 or Robert Smlthson: Poolhumous Dimensions or a Premature Pre-Modern," Fla.sh Art 23, no. 166 (liovember/ ~mber 1990): 106. 1 The term ~re,. lo mirroN'd objects or tmag,s, surh u hand.1 and tyf'~'I, or certaJn pairs or crystal rormalions that bear a mirror-Image N'latlonship LO earh olher. About his EnanliMno,.,,,,;,CJoa"""'n Smith'°n wrote that "tht• two separate 'pirtures' that arr u~u• ally plaC'Ni in a s lt>rt"'OM'op«> ha\'f' bttn replact'd by two Si«ollru/ Diacou,.., ill Ari, 82,

limits or distinguish among categories, whether artis-

tation and abstraction commensurately.

tic, philosophic, or linguistic. His art of "unresolved

To certain recent critics, such as Marjorie Perloff,

II Originally publlllhed In A rl.r JIO{/QZlM 41, no. I (November Ul66): 28-31; reprtnled in Wrili"9S, 32-:li\.

d1alectics"9 blurs all distinctions between the "verbal

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and John Johnson, Smithson

and the visual, the fictional and the factual, site and

remains firmly entrenched in the modernist tradition

non-site, presence and absence, object and concept.

stemming from and elaborating upon the poetic

nature and culture, sight and non-sight. center and

structures of Guillaume Apollinaire, the futurist mani-

circumference." 10 Seen by some as complete works of

festos of F. T. Marinetti, the suprematist theories of

art in their own right. Smithson's published writings,

Kasimir Malevich, and the film montages of Sergei

especially his "Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of

Eisenstein.19

Space," 11 easily and at times dizzyingly blend various

Prinz, promote Smithson's example as representing

texts, photographs, literary citations, maps, plans.

a thoroughly poststructuralist or postmodern strategy

graphs, and mathematics in complete inter- and

that "disperses the literary across the entire spec-

intradependence. These various modes of referencing

trum of aesthetic activity," contaminates truth with

are "not the same thing but they all refer," wrote

fiction, confuses the "distinction between theory and

Smithson. "It's like a kind of ensemble of different

art practice," and participates in a "grammatology"

mediums that are all discrete... all different kinds of

in which writing is transformed into some sort of

mental and physical abstractions.'' 12 Such a collision

"picto-ideo-photographic-filmic text." 17 Whether, how-

of mediums is most apparent in his site/nonsite

ever, Smithson is viewed as a modernist or a post-

works, in which gallery installations of metal bins filled

modernist (supposing the distinction is significant)

with mineral samples from, and maps, photographs,

might well depend on just how one also views the

Roger Connan, or, Paradoxes or Conduct In Mannerism AB Reftocted in the Cin,ma,• In ll'ntings. 214. Smithson's original Litle for lhe es.uy was the in\·erse or this publlJ!hed version: er. Smithson, ·Para• doxes or Conduct In Mannerism As Reftec~ In the Cin2-f>3. for an undat.N:i ms. entitled "Abs1rac1 Mannerism: in whi('h h(' wr.·rite!-i that "what Is 'cool' IOday Is In a way the rebirth the Mannerist S('nsibility.~

While some early critics hastened to label Smithson a romantic or a transcendentalist with regard to his attitudes to the landscape.1 3 it would be more apt to approach Smithson as a kind of mannerist artist whose intellectual concept of the artwork Is essentially more important than its realization into a specific tangible form. For Smithson, at least in

Others, such as Craig Owens and Jessica

postmodern critics for opposing reasons.

Usmlthson In "'W•II, In lialure You Can Fall orr Clirts.. .': Four Conversations betw..-n Dennis Wheeler and Smithson (1969- 19701" in Eu8"nie Tsai, Robert Smil.\lon lh=rtlwl: Drawi11111, ~ Wrili"9'(New York: Colulllbla UniV1'rsity Pres.,, 19111~ 104. 11 E.g., Sidney Tillim, "Earthworks

and the New Plduresqu,:,Ar(/'on,111 7, no. 4 (0-mber 1968): 42-46; and Donald 8 . Kusplt, -n,,. Pascallan Spiral: Robort Smithson's Drunken Boat." Arll Magazin, D6, no. 2 (OclOber 1981): 82-AA. 14 SmithM>n, "From Ivan the Terrible IO

or

11 Cr. Jeremy Gilberl-Rolrr and

John John.st.on, ·Hra\·ity'~ Rainbow

and the Spiral Jelly" (pl. 3 ), O,·toh,r 3 (Spring 1977): 94; and ~••Jorie Perloff, 11u> F'uluri.,·t .41cmu:nt: A,., a,,i.Gardt", A,~nl Guern·. and 1hr IAnguagr of Ruptur,; ((:hifa~n: Unlvr~ity of Chicago Prrss. l!lJ-ifi).

the mid-1960s, mannerist aesthetics were preferable

lllo-2:l4.

to those of expressionism as found in the art of

17 Prinz. Art Diiu:our.q•,· /)i. passage as an epigraph to his posthumously put,. limed CM&)', "The Ar1l,t .. SileSeer; or, A Dlntorpltie EMay." In Tsai, Smillison ~artloed, 74. A copy of th• B•rkley paperback of Ballard's book was In Smithson's library; -T&LtanslSraphy/ Mldtown: New \'ork. 1992~ See James I. Sheldon and Jock Reynolds, Motion a•d &qu,mc,, and '1'1111,. Eadwa nJ

DOrtlf'JI

Am""""" P1,otogroph11 (Andover, Ma..u chu.etL,: Addison Gallery

or American ArL Phillips Academy, 1991~ ~ al!IO Vicki Goldberg, "Seven Tho"'3nd Pict ures Are Setter than One: N~ )Ort 1\mes (23 Augu~t 1992). 2f,, 30. a revi,w of OK\ ICIVMidtl>wn f'xhilnllon wilh a brief commentary on the gnd in phoLOgraphy.

23

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was A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, which he described as "an indoor earthwork."68 Thirty-one aluminum containers painted blue were filled with sand from the actual site; each container was configured to match a single section of a hexagonal, topographic map of the abandoned airport area at the Pine Barrens, which Smithson selected as the center of his site. An accompanying photostat of the map was included along with the nonsite to further locate Figure 14 Sot LeWltt, , _ . . . l(Jndl

l.,.. and All Tllelr ComlllnalloM In flf'INn Parta. 1969, pen and 11111. c-,..y the artist and John of $t,alpt

Webet'Gallery Figure 13

Robert Smithson. A Nonslte. Pine . ., _ ,..,, .Jenr/,

1968. map pholostat. Collection of Vl,clnla Dwan

the pos1t1on of the site (figure 13). All of Smithson's s1te/ nonsite pieces from 1968 included metal containers of differing configurations filled with either sand. m inerals. or rocks collected from the sites: A N onsrte.

Franklin, New Jersey; Nonsite ·une of Wreckage." Bayonne, New Jersey; Nonsite (Palisades, Edgewater, New Jersey); Mono Lake Nonsite; Nonsite (Slag). Oberhausen. Germany; Nonsite, Site Uncertain ; Double Nons,te, Caldornia and Nevada; S11c Stops on a Sect ion. Nonsite (Slate from Bangor, Pa.); Nonsite (Mica from Portland, Connecticut); and Gypsum Nonsite. Benton, California. John Elderfield, curator at the Museum of Mode rr Art, New York, characterized a certain type of g rid structure used by such artists as LeWitt (figure 14) and Agnes Martin during the 1960s as a form of int:, mat,onal containment:

The recent trend to use grids as, literdlly, fra n,eu-or/., mark.~ a return to an informational or 1Jig11ifyi11g sensibility: ofgrids, once more, as contai11ers ....Th ,ideational grid work I mentioned doe.~ seem of 1111.• k ind, and a/lies itself therefore to recent Concept11alist concerns: most especially, 1 suppose. to tJtose who n.~e the grid.~ of map.~ and charts to present a rl rather than rreate it. 511 Although not mentioned in EJderfield's art1de. Sm1:"son's small photographs, arrayed in grid formations. 24

j

-· -

--- - -

.

.u~:: ....., .....

-s:::aiiiiii•i.iil---

---

Figure 15 Robert SmlthlOfl, 400 S . Horlrona (dntroyed~ 19611,

function precisely as containers for the photographs

IMUllatlon Yin. courtety John WeberG.llwy

he took of various mineral samples found at the Buckwheat Mineral Dump in Franklin, New Jersey, or the photographs made of him and Heizer shoveling chalk from the bed of a pickup truck in Snap Shot

Notes.. .. Smithson·s actions atop the truck as well as the seemingly random shots of minerals at Franklin are loose enough to require some sort of structure to

Figure 16 Lucy Lippard and ot!Mn, .....,co,rporat..i photo1raph for 400 Seattle Horizons. 19611, 1elatln-sllv« print, Robert

Smithton Pap«s, Archives of

Americ• Art, Smithsonian Institution

make them presentable; grids and sequences are convenient and clear structures. "Their neutrality," wrote Elderfield about grids, "permits a rudimentary ordering that doesn't look composed and their stab1l1ty Is a quickly grasped support for the improvisatory and the gestural." 60 And. with both grids and progression s. the elements of time, duration, and travelelements critical to Smithson's art- come into play. The following year. 1969, Smithson was invited to part1c1pate 1n Lucy L1ppard's contemporary art exh1b1tion 557.087 at the Seattle Art Museum. The title of the exhibition referred to the then current population of Seattle. Smithson sent Lippard the following instruct ions in order to have a work of his fabricated: "400 squar e snapshots of Seattle Horizons-should be empty. plain, vacant, surd. common, ordinary blank dull level beaches, unoccupied uninhabited, deserted fields, scanty lots. hou seless typical average roads, sand bars, remote lakes, distant timeless sites-use Kodak lnstamatic 804. 8 rows of 50 ganged on wal l.'' 81 Smithson's grid of 400 Seattle Hor,zons was executed by Lippard and fr iends driving around the city searching for horizons amid the hills; the resulting snapshots were glued to the museum wall, and the work was subsequently destroyed. A not-quite-clear installat ion photograph exists (figure 15). as do a few unincorporated snapshots by Lippard (figure 16).~ 2 The exhibition took place between 5 September and

M Hob!», Rol»rt Sm/JJ,;,on., 104. M Elderlleld , •Grl Sml1h,on. ~mllh«;n

Papers, ~I !.Uiet:I, rrame :!U In 11 l(•lt--phonf ron,·t•nauon on 7 Autwst 1992 Lh>pard ,·enfi,~ that ,tw, ra.nd M>mt> others dro,•f' lln)und W hills of Scanlt .se.ar-ctnnl' fo r and photo• g.ra~lhing lhe honzons for Sm1lh.~on.

25

5 October 1969, nine months following the pubhca: ~of Richard Brautigan's autobiographical story ·w, a: Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Ch: s:mas Trees?" 63 While the sheer act of photographing so many discarded trees in January of 1964 was su4

.

cient for the writer, for Smithson it was not the ac: o' photography that was important but the eventual containment of the photographs' information on tnt gallery's wa lls. Lippard also abbreviated and rearranged the wording of Smithson's directions to serve as the ..,y ; ; ~ -111 I~ I I ■ l ' . I ',

,--- -,---,-I

..

,_

wall capt ion and inserted the term "alogon· after Smithson's "surd." In an interview Smithson expia•ne;

. ,I

these two terms: "A surd area is beyond tautolog,c.. not really beyond, there's no beyond. As a matter o' fact. it's a region where logic is suspended... .There·s no commensurable relation, or it's incommensura:Jl: So you're into a kind of irrational area.... Alogon rs something that suspends rationa lity...sort of the c•e,· with logic, the break with the gestalt."M "Surd" .iltimately derives from Euclid and the notion of an ar•ational number or mathematical root; it also may :-n:"· deaf. mute. or indistinct. For Smithson. it may hal'e

....

been adapted from Beckett, undoubtedly as a sho-te··

•• .

ing of "absurd." 06 "Alogon" is the Pythagorean terrr

. . . l. ---- -

in mathematics that refers to the incommensurabl:

~

. . . .: .,..,~·&..; .

..

Figure 17

Figure 18

Ed Ru■c11a. Ewwy 81 ldlat;; . . . . , _ lloulffanf (Nlail),

Robbert Fllcll, ......,_ IINcll LOMq Nor1fl fnlm ......_

19H, KCOI dlor,-foldecl, P,~IIH b.Mlk, LOI AnplN ot Art

1980, P,~IIH 1911, platlnlllwer print. LOI AnplN

County ....._

County··- ot Art. M.P--■ Funcl

-..

Ralph

....

-.,

28

the unnamable, and "the unaccountable imperfections

Entropy, according to the Oxford English Dictio-

of control which are word and image, and, to some

nary, is the measure of the unavailability of a closed system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanica l work; the term also refers to the measure of the degradation or disorganization of the entire universe. In theory, as Jeremy Rifkin described it. whenever any phenomenon takes place in the natural world, a certain amount of energy ends up being lost and

extent, to nullify them." 87 Smithson's montage was an

rendered unavailable for future work.71 The concept

absurd and nearly incommensurable take on the

was first stated by the German physicist Rudolf

banality of the present day landscape, poised some-

Clausius in the 1860s and was, by the 1960s, extended

where between Ed Ruscha's Every Building along

to apply to any social or cultural system. The British

Sunset Boulevard (figure 17), 1966, and Robbert Flick's Manhattan Beach Looking North from Marine (figure 18), 1980-81. Where the progression of Ruscha's images was completely dictated by his linear travels

anthropologist Gregory Bateson defined entropy

in the numerical fabric of the universe."et Needless to say, Smithson's 400 Seattle Horizons was an alogical and atemporal arrangement of elements that, like the montage technique itself, tended, in the words of William S. Burroughs, to "break down the instruments of control, the principal instruments

along the Los Angeles boulevard, Smithson's arrange-

as the "degree to which relations between the components of any aggregate are mixed up, unsorted, undifferentiated, unpredictable, and random.'' 72 In the mid-1960s Smithson argued that the "new

ments in Nonsite "Line of Wreckage; Bayonne, New

film" of Jean-Luc Godard and the "new novel" of Alain

Jersey, Franklin Site, New Jersey, the Seattle piece, and even the later Edgewater Site (pages 72-73), 1972, were utterly random and sequentially without logic. Similarly, whereas Flick, in his Sequential Views, seemingly nullified any logical order of his physical position

Robbe-Grillet were essentially entropic. He was also most likely familiar with Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy," published in 1960, in which the character Callisto "found in entropy or the measure of disorganization for a closed system an adequate

by arbitrarily photographing from various vantage

metaphor to apply to certain phenomena in his own

points within the site, he nonetheless emphasized the

world.'' 73 In a later essay Smithson wrote that entropy

temporal aspect of his procession through the land-

was "a condition that's irreversible, it's a condition that's moving towards a gradual equilibrium and it's suggested in many ways....You have a closed system which eventually deteriorates and starts to break apart and there's no way that you can rea lly piece it

scape. Smithson, in his montages, again completely avoided any visual or structural guide to either his spatial or temporal orientation.811 The grid for Smithson was a tight, compact matrix for the containment of his multiple views of the

back together again."74 Smithson sought to visualize

landscape, but its regularity and predictability was at

the undifferentiated or "dedifferentiated" landscapes

the same time usually weakened by the complete

of entropy, and grid structures were ultimately too

randomness of the images within it. A metaphor for

ordered, too constraining, and too artificial to signify

conventional limits and definitions, the grid and its

such a state of nature. "We live in frameworks," he

logic all but dissolved with Smithson. In an interview

wrote in 1970-71, "and are surrounded by frames of

given in 1971, he remarked: "I would like to compile

reference, yet nature dismantles them and returns

all the different entropies. All the classifications would

them to a state where they no longer have integrity."7~

lose their grids."118 Commenting on his film Spiral

By dismantling his own grids and by moving toward

Jetty in an interview the following year, he said: "After a point, measurable steps...descend from logic to the 'surd state.' The rationality of a grid on a map sinks into what it is supposed to define. Logical purity suddenly finds itself in a bog, and welcomes the

a photographic form that stressed greater unpredict-

unexpected event. The 'curved' reality of sense perception operates in and out of the 'straight' abstractions of the mind" 70 While the structure of the grid could conveniently contain a grouping of inchoate and incommensurable images, by the ease with which Smithson dissolved its logic it was also one way of

suggesting the "surd state" of the entropic landscape.

ability and randomness, he would more closely approximate his own sense of place with in these landscapes.

P Rlcha:d Braullpn, "What Are You Going I.O Do with 390 Pho«ographs of

Chrlslm&a Trees?" Evnvr,na R,vi,>u; 12, no. 81 (December 1968): 26-26. 14 Smilh9on In ••well, In Nature

You Can Fall off curr,..,.. In Tuai, s,,.u.uo,, U-rt/wd, 97. •TsaJ, S,,,ilMo,t U-rllud, 124 n. 9. • Lawrence Alloway, "Robert

Smlt.haoll's Development." Ar({orum 11, no. 3 ( November 1972): 64. 11 Daniel Odler, • Journey through

Thne-Space: An lntervi~ with

WIiiiam S. Burroughs," Evnvr,en RnMtD 13, no. 67 (June 19611): 78. NA rel&~ body of work Is Chrl•LO• Dlkealios's lutonl Plwto l,vorma, t.-.,,., 11170, in which multiple sho13 of Vancouver are taken rrom a mov• Ing car and published as an artist's book. Stt Jack Dale and Michael cleCourcy, ed!., B C Alma11&(4) C-8 ( Vancouver: National FIim 8oa:d of Canada, 1970~ unpa«inaied. I am snietuJ LO Robbert Flick for brlngln« this source LO 11\Y au.enlion. • smJt.haoll, "'...The Earth, Subject lO Cataclysms, b a Cruel Ma!ter; · in Writi- ISL

10Smtthaon, "The Spiral Jetty; in Writi- 112-13. 71 Jerell\)' Rifkin, with Ted Howa:d.

ENlroJJII: I"'° 1M ~ World, rev. ed. ( New York: Bantam Books, 1989~ 49. n Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nalvrt1: A N,-l'JI U..il11 (New

York: E. P. Ouuon, 1971l~ 228. 71 Smithson, "The X l'lclor in the New Ari; Smithson Papers, rff.l 3834, frame 939. Thomas Pynchon, •Enl.N>py." Slow uamer: Earl11 &onu (Bool.On: Li~. Brown. 11184). 88. The sl.Ory was ftrst published In thc spring 1960 Issue or the Km"°" RetN11J. Another short sl.Ory by Pynchon may have been important LO Smlthaon. In "Low-Lands," written In the late 19/iOs and flr.11 publishNI in New World Writing 16 (March 1960~ a group or characters de-nd a Ion~ spiral road LO the boll.Om of a larg• urban prboge dump that is in the process of a slow t nlrOpic merging with the hou•ing de,elopment sur• roundin« it. Pynchon, "Low-Lands; Slow uanin-, 6.'3-64. Cf. also Gilbert• Rolfe. and Johnsl.On, ·Gravity's Rainbow and the Spiral Jeuy"(pt. ii 88-74. Cf. also llalo Calvino, "Th• Spiral," in 0J."111ic:omU's (~('w York: Collier Book,, 1970), 16i-~n. in whic•h a prlmlth·e mollusk not only "make>" a spiral around ltslf but caust•s tht' creation of images and vision it.'\elf. A r,0py of this book was in Smith~m·s.

library; see Tatran. ~onum('nL"I or Pa.s..u ic" in th• Smithson Pap,rs are combined wilh those from Pt>inl.l altrll/1 a

and at Palenque's tourist hotel sadly caug ht between

Nt'11.• Jrrsey SuiamA a St"-ries dirfrr• ~ntiatcd by Smithson on his n~ativc

destruction and construction in 1969. In each of

""''Plope.,.

31

a

t2smilhlon, In Paul Toner, "Interview wllll SmlU..On," 4 April 1970, ~ r l p l , SmllNOn Papers, reel

these locations the artist's engagement with the site

an essay entitled "Art through the Camera's Eye:

as a whole was significant; but equally critical were

written most likely in 1971:

3833, rrame 1184.

his multiple points of arrested interest within the pro-

N Georgt Santayana, So,J,licin, a,od A,u111Gl FailA, died In SmtWon, •fncidenu or Mirror-Traffl In lhe Yucatan," in Wnti-, 100.

cess of that engagement. Speaking about his Yucatan

Some artists are insane enough to imagine they ca,; tame this wilderness created by the camera. One ll'ay is to transfer the urge to abstraction to photogruphy and.film. A camera is wild in just anybody's ha11ds. therefore one must set limit8. But cam.ems hm'f a !;_ti of their oum. Cameras care nothing about cults or is·ms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes. readg to devour anything in s-ight. They are lenses of the u11limited reproduction. Like mirrors they may be scorned for their power to duplicate our indiridual experiences. It is not hard to consider an lnfi11ite Camera without an ego. Somewhere between till:' sti!I and the 11w1rie camera, I postulate the /11.finite Camera (110 truth value 11h-01tld be attache,d to thi$ postulation, it should be regarded as some.thing /(J u'Tite about) ...

M Henri Cartler-Bresson, •fnll'Oduc-

tlon,• 77w O.cui,~ MMll#fll (New York: Simon A Schuster, 11162); reprinted in Nalllan I.yon&, ed., Pltologrop/len Plt4U,grop41f (New York: Prentice-Hall, !866~ 44.

°"

•smllNOn, "lncldentaorMlnorTravel in lhe Yucatan,• In llnli,.,.,

100. NSmlthMn, "Art lhrou&h lhe

Camera's Eye," In 'l'lal, S,,,il.\,mt U-,rfMd, 89. Tsai polnt.s OUI (p. 63 n. 17) lllat Smllllson cllee a Spring l971 l11ue or 35-m'" Plt4U,grop411 ln Ille essay, which IIIQelll ill dale.

" Smilllson, "Art lhrou,i, Ille Camera'• Eye," in Tsai, SmitMolo U-.rlMberflac,..,., c. 1968, &eletln• allver print, Robert Smlthaon Pa~a, Archlv.. of Am•rlcan Att. Smltllaonlan IMtltutlon

locates the HOttenwerk Ober hausen in the right backgrounct.100 With permission from the company to photograph the site, Smithson documented slag heaps, trash piles, tire-scarred mud, and the factories themselves set off fa r in the distance. Twenty-five square pictures from the series were incorporated into his Nonsite (Slag), Oberhausen, Germany along with five location plans and five bins of slag.110 Smithson took at least five rolls of fi lm at the site; sixty negatives are among the Robert Smithson 35

Displacements

Smithson's involvement with photography began with

their temples, it was nonetheless "very dedifferent1-

and Other

his early collages, evolved into his gridded montages,

ated" and without logic-in other words, a surd site.

Tr-atory Works

which in turn became expanded black-and-white

At one point he simply said, "This is just some balcony.

sequences of stills culminating in the Passaic and

I don't even know where it was... it just was sort of a

Oberhausen projects. His first use of color photography

convenient place to take a picture from." 11 ' On the same trip Smithson traveled across the

occurred with Nonsite "Line of Wreckage; Bayonne,

New Jersey in 1968, and from then until his last projects he alternated between monochrome and color film. In 1969 Smithson began moving away from the site/nonsite dialectic toward works that were constructed in the landscape, photographed, and either dismantled by his own deinstallation, as in his various "mirror displacements," or else left to decay or erode by human or climatic forces, as in his "pours" and "rundowns" of 1969 or his Partially Buried Woodshed

tive "mirror displacements"-installations of twelve or so square mirrors in widely scattered sites (pages

129-33).a 16 At each location he carefully photographe-j the "displacement" in color, disassembled the construct, moved to the next site, and reconfigured another arrangement of mirrors. The nine color transparencies were then published in his Artforum essay.

and Spiral Jetty, both 1970. In 1969 Smithson, Holt,

which is part adventure, part meditation, and part travelogue, not unlike "The Monuments of Passaic.-

and the art dealer Virginia Dwan traveled to Mexico,

Smithson, in these mirror displacements, was con-

where Smithson ·executed" six individual works

cerned with vision and seeing, comprehension and

that reflect his changing use of photography: Hotel

uncertainty, image and reflection, earth and sky,

Palenque, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," Overturned Rocks (1-6), Hypothetical Continent of Gondwanaland-Ice Cap, Roots & Rocks, Pa/enque, and

and ultimately the impossibility of ever understandi:ig the world in its entirety. Here the camera was not

his Third Upside-Down Tree.

Instead of photographically collecting as many

With Hotel Pa/enque (pages 110-22) Smithson

used as it was at Passaic or even in Hotel Palenque. entropies as he could, Smithson used the camera to

continued his interest in encyclopedically collecting

freeze nine separate events, to embalm "memory

images of entropic disintegration but this t ime with

traces" and to create "ghostly photographic remains" 11•

architecture instead of landscapes.111 He photo-

of quite vivid but fleeting experiences. Early in h is

graphed, in thirty-one Kodachrome slides (126 format),

trip, after all, the demiurge Tezcatlipoca had told him.

the dilapidated hotel in Palenque in which the group

"'That camera is a portable tomb, you must remem-

stayed.112 At the time the hotel itself was caught

ber that.'" 117

between the seemingly equal forces of slow disintegra-

Writing about the fourth displacement. which he

tion and periodic construction. Unpublished in the

installed on the Gulf of Mexico, just south of Campec:-ie

usual sense, the slides were used by Smithson in a

Smithson commented that "mirrors thrive on surds.

lecture given to architecture students at the University

and generate incapacity. Reflections fall onto the

of Utah in 1972. The audience, expecting to come to a

mirrors without logic, and in so doing invalidate every

lecture about the famed Mayan ruins just outside the

rational assertion. Inexpressible limits are on the othe•

town, failed to comprehend the artist's dry wit and

side of the incidents, and they will never be grasped· ?!•

humorous interpretation of his subject until well into

Describing the seventh displacement, installed and

the lecture. Smithson praised the multicolored bricks

photographed at Yaxchilan, he wrote:

strewn across the courtyard, doors haphazardly cut

As one looked more and more possibilities emergnf beca.use nothing wa-, certain. Nine ofthe twel 1·e mirror11 in the photograph are plainly 1.-i,~ible. t 11-0 have. sunk into 11hadow.... The dillplacement is dirid,d

into walls, sections of roofless interiors, and the hotel's empty swimming pool (a subject frequently encountered in Ballard's fiction). In his talk, which was recorded and partially transcribed, Smithson made

when you'll have some traveler. some tourist who

info five rows. On the site the rows w01,ld come a 11d go as the light fell. Countl.ess chromatu- patche,~ w,·n wrecked on the mirrors, flakes of sumhi ne di :,.~per.~,•a· 01,er the rejlecf.ing surfaces and obliterated lite sq11a ... edges, leauing indi$tinct pulverizatiom of rolor 011 ,11,

comes to the hotel and he wants a place that doesn't

indeterminate grid .... Bits of reflected jungle retrea•,·d

such statements as "You can see that sort of nice stained wooden facade there and just meditate on that all afternoon, you know" and "You never know

have a roof on

it." 113

Although he sensed that the

hotel was built with the same spir it the Mayans built 38

Yucatan peninsula in order to construct nine consecu -

from ones percepti-rg,•d

1:ision under a wilclernus of unassimilated seeing. Scrap$ of sight accumulated until the eyes were engulfed by scrambled rejlectio'Tl8.119 In what Smithson called the "shattered recesses" of the jungle, he erected nine discrete adjustments to the landscape, nine separate arrangements of visual hand grenades, that destructuralized any literal logic the scene might have had.a20 He fashioned his own "inverted" and "discontinuous" 121 landscapesnot unlike Borges's "uninhabitable...impossible space" cited in epigraph number two at the beginning of this essay-that nonetheless could be experienced firsthand for a moment and then deinstalled, leaving · nothing but memory traces" and nine color slides. Smithson's ·memory traces" had their origin in his complex Six Stops on a Section of the year before, a site/nonsite project stretching along a line from New York City to Dingman's Ferry on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. The entire work includes six containers, six charts showing the cross section of the earth beneath each stop, a large map of the area, a written statement, and a 35-by-35-inch enlarged photograph from 1969 entitled Dog Tracks that functions somewhat peripherally to the work.122 As an addendum to the finished Six Stops on a Section, Smithson carried out a group of individual "displacements" in which 30-by-30-inch black-and-white photographs taken at each stop were returned to the original sites and rephotographed in the landscape (pages 124-25). Interviewed, Smithson called these

Ill Smlllwon had been ructnaled wltll arch.l&ectural "-7 .. early .. 1987. In gMn, toun, or the Puaalc monWMnU to his and Holt's friends, the IJ'OUP8 would often piher a& the site or an abandoned mansion In the hills around Pu.sale; a rew snap, slloll or the bulldln, and IU grounda are wltll the artist'• eslale. ~ (Mw Spr,ad), his impromptu acllon or 1970, took place al the sue or an abandoned cabin near Spiral .hlq; - ibid., 197-98. On a lrip to Plorlda In 1971, Smltllson wu lnlriCUed witll a dllapldaled IOI or plant nunerles, entwined wltll ...erpown plants and Wlered nel coverlnp; a set or color slides or Ulla site are also witll the est.ate. Ulllmalely, or course, l'Drliolli, hrwd W.od.Mtd or early 1970 had him eueerb&Un, the entropic c1ewt1o. . Uon of a tempcrary stor-,e shed a& the ed8e of Kent St.ate Univen,lty.

112See Virginia Dwan, Vlrpjaia

0 - . - b i , CAarla F. Shoc4'q (Washington, D.C.: Arc"'or American Art, Smllhlonlan Institution, 11184 ~ 16 and 18 M-, 11184, lranacrlpt to Lape 8, pqe IL 1usm1u..on. "Hocel Palenque." undaled mt. In Smllhlon Papen,, ""'' 3834, rramee 631-32. 114 Ibid., rramo 632. 115 Although Smllhlon comlstently refers to ""Ive mlrron, INOupC>U\ the piece, there are deuly U.lrteen mirron, In the Slcoftd Mirror

100. 117 Ibid., 96.

11, Ibid., 97.

120 I am Indebted

a dialectic. These photo-markers do the reverse.

the phrase "visual hand grenades."

to Sol\l& Plavln ror

W Sm1UIS011, •tnddenl.S or MirrorTravel In U.. Yucat.an." In Wnli-

determinant; actual mirrors would dematerialize or

lOS. The quol.atlon marlc• around lhe words "inverted" and "dboonUnuous• refer to Alain Robbe-Grlllet, "Three Reftected Visions; In Sisal" Moll, trans. Bruce Morlrissette (New York: Gro,-e Press. 1968), 14: "This admirable landscape Is not only Inverted, bul also discontinuous. The hatching ol lhe sun's rays over the surface ol lhe mirror cuu U.rough U.. picture with brigllter llnes. equally spaced and perpendlc,. ular to the reftected tne tnlnu... glvln, this part or the 'deep clown' woods a cheekered appearance."

shatter the scenes to a greater extent and render

122See Hobbs, /w/Nrl Smi/4,,,11,

the time in which they were seen that much more

117-22. The work is in U.. collection or the Museum or Modern Art. Vienna; Ludwig f-0llectlon, Aad•)n.

enframes history. A picture taken at one arrested moment in the past was returned to the scene and deposited. as it were, back into the ongoing continuum. Smithson considered using the same strategy also in

his Cayuga Salt Mine Project of 1968-69 but sub-

stituted mirrors. Photography, often called the "mirror of nature," was apparently too specific and overly

discontinuous.

rocks were overturned In Uxmal, • near Muna, In the stale or Yw:atan; - Hobbs, Robm SwlilA,o,,, 161~2. Smllhlon, on the contrary, writes lhat "on the outakiru or Palenque... rocb were overturned" and does not •peel!), the number; "lncldenll or Mirror-Travel In the Yucatan" In Writi11g1, 98. Smltllson found. ...erturned, and took slldee or a number or rocks in the Yucatan. His eslale has a& least ten pain or slides or overturned rock.I rrom Palenque and six pain, rrom Uxmal; cf. Sheldon and Reynolds, Mo4W11 alld Doclllllffll, ~ alld n-, 77, 96. Becau.~ the p ~ alleles varied greatly In color balance, Smllhlon decided they should be printed only In black-and-wllite.

111Smllhlon, •tnddenu of Mirror•

outdoors and bring it inside in containers. This starts

reverse happens." 123 With the photo-markers, time

124 Hobbo dalnls lhat only five

Travel In lhe Yucatan," In Wrili1191.

111 lblcl., 100.

ficial. In the gallery, History frames Time. Here the

brilliantly U.at with u.... photographs Smilhoon desll'Oyed the sense of the pllot0graph u a document and lhat hb acl or placln, them In the landscape wu "simply an i1111nr -•t, and no1 the object, or slgnltl,. caUon. The photograph is the work." See Craig Owens, "Photography ,a /Jbrtw." in &i,o,wJ R de\-eloped structures in a ~I.alt> of

dlsln~ratlon"; see Smithson, •Com-e1'5&tloo In $ah IAk•• Cit)." In H-nll"g.t, 187 m Sdlmldl, •Et In l tah Ego; 49. 13•

Smith!i0n, "A Clnematir Mopia; In Wrtliff91l, 107. This ~y wa., ongJnally published In Artfon,m 111, no. I (Sept~mber 11171), 5:1~'1.~. tJt"l'M pas.sage ,.,.. wn11en d°" n

b) SmJLluon In lus .lfutv 'l'rtaJ ntnll

for Sp,raJ Jt1111, fir,,1 part, 1970; -

Hobbs, H1Jbnl SnuJ!u,._ 111-1.

SN' al10 Samuel lwckru, Tit, l',tr,amnbt,,. in Tltrrecology, and indust·ry as they e-xi.st wday a re for the most part abstracted from the physical realit i.es of specific lamucapes or sites .... The artist must accE·,x and enter into all ofthe rea,l problems that confro11J. the ecologi.st and indttstrialist.... Art should not be considered as merely a lttxnry, but should work within the processes of actiwl production and red a. mation. We should begin to develop an a-rt. ediu:at ion based on relatwnships to specific sites. How t~>e see things and places ui 1wt a secondary concern. but primanJ. 141 What was once the domain of the artist's cherished solitude had now become the arena for public art. Accordi ng to Smithson, desolate industrial wastelancs were to be re fashioned by artists, the artist was to avoid the elite isolation of the gallery and museum world, and creating utopias was not to be the business of art. In a way the trajectory of Smithson's earthworks as well as his critical writings had been a 1m1rg toward this position for some time.

42

---- ·Figure 28 Robert Smlttteon and Robert Floft, Centnl ,....., 1172, platln-lllvw print. Robert SmltMon Papen, An:"'- of Americ., Art. Smlthlonlan lnatltutlon

Smithson and Robert Fiore (who filmed Spiral

natural erosion transformed the deformed landscape

Jetty) explored and documented New York's Central Park in the fall of 1972 (figure 28) for an article entitled "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape." 1.ii Regarding a photograph taken as Olmsted and Calvert Vaux began to work on Central

into a picturesque site; for Smithson, it was to be the

Park in the 1850s, Smithson commented that the

industrialist shortly after he completed Broken

area rem inded him of "the strip-mining regions

Circle/Spiral Hill in 1971.161 The following year, struggling to find commercial support for his ideas, he toured Hanna Coal's and Peabody Coal's strip mines in southeastern Ohio. For Hanna's mine in Egypt Valley, a thousand-acre tract slated to be turned into

I saw last year in sou theastern Ohio" and that this "man-made wasteland" evoked F. Scott Fitzgerald's descr iption of "the valley of ashes" in The Great Gatsby, "'where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.'" 149 In the essay Smithson's medi tations on landscape gardening turned to the

artist who accomplished this. Smithson wrote his first statement about land reclamation through earthworks and the need for artists to mediate between the ecologist and the

a recreationa l park, Smithson designed Lake Edge

t4J See Hobbs, R~rt S milluor~ 132-38.

144 See lnstaJlallon photograph In

Ibid.• 1:16. • 05 in

a leuet to Douglas Chrlsmas, January 1973, SmJU..on selected Lile Pacific Madrone t.ree for VancoU\-er; letter In the collection or AC. ~

~

--

-

Concrete Pour, 1969 Negative photostat print. image; 71/, x 7 3/, in. (19.7 x 19.7 cm) on

81/, x 9 in. (21 x 22.9 cm)

Robert Smithson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

C-Olloges and N,gatitJO Prin/4

63

.

-

....

-

__. .. •

'

f'

Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970 Negative photostat print. ,mage: 71/a x 71/a ,n (19 4 x 19 4 cm) on 8\/i x 10¾ 1n. (20 6 x 26 4 tm)

Robert Smithson Papers, Archives of Amer.can Art, Sm,thson,an lnst,tut,on

New JerHy, N-Yortc with 2 PhotOI , 1967 Getat,n-sitver prints. map. ink, and graphite, 22 x 17 ¼ in. (55, 9 X 43.8 cm) Collect,on of Agostino and Patnz,a Re Rebaudengo

----. '

66

5"/'JA.P 5HOT

!\/Ori::> f£ATAININ6-

ro

oub/,c_ s if-e.

c~

0

i Ot-/ q

A}e "t.:,-/q

..,.,e 4,-

8 q k~rC ir.eler

C o7'\-es Roe. k Col/cieft~ at s

ii1!

(LAVA) di"?'\ o{

P.e,t t\

Vo.1/ey N0r1s ;fe.. 1? o c. k

Co I Jeef,~ ~

S/f~

cc.-11~,-k)

Snap Shot Note1 - PertalninI to "Double Non1ite" California I. Nevada near Baker Cinder Cone1/ Rock Collected at Site (lavaJ/ and "Oeath Valley Nonllte• Rock Collected at Site (ChalkJ, 1968 Gelatm-s,iver contact pron ts and ,nk. 20 x 7 ¼ In.

(50.8 x 20 cm) Estate of Ro~rt Smithson, courtesy John Weber Gallery

Oriu a11d Sequrnrt':S

17

-------

Franklin Site. 1968

Gelat,n-s,lver prints. 17 ½ x 171/1 m. (44.5 x 44.5 cm) Collection of Robert Foore and Jane Crawlord

Photo,m\auU", Gcrma •11

103

Nonalte (Sl•a~ OberhauHn, Germany

104

No11sil e (Slag), Obtrlulu,..,n. Guman11

105

Contact prints

Nonllte (S1•1~ OberhauHn. Garmany, 1968 5 rolls, 60 frames Robert Smithson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian lnst,tut,on

106

•

Hotel Palenque

--- --------- - - - -

=

,.,

'W

Hotel Palenqu., 1969 126 format, chromogenic-development slides Estate of Robel'l Smithson, coul'lesy John Weber Gallery Quotations are from a lecture given by Smithson at the University of Utah in 1972.

"At one point evidently they decided to build some floors and decided that that wasn't a very good ,~a

110

so they demo lished t hem. but they left this kind of spiky, irregular, cantilevered effect coming off the side of the wal l. It sort of suggests Piranesi."

1/otel l'ul~nquit

111

Hotel Palenque

"This is just some balcony. I don't even know where ,t was .... lt was just sort of a convenien t place to take a picture from:

112

- -------------- - Hotel Palenque

114

-

"You never know when you'll have some traveler, some tourist who comes to the hotel and he wants a place that doesn't have a roof on 1t."

Hotel Palenque

"You can see that instead of Just teari ng ,t all down at once, they tear 1t down partially so you' re not deprived of the com plete wreckage situation

116

It's not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up at the same time."

Hot•/ Pulenque

117

Hotel P■lenque

"Here we have some bricks piled up with sticks sort of resting on these bric•s

ua

and they signify something- I never really figured it out while I was there. but they seem to suggest some kind of permanence actually.''

llotel Pol..,.q1Jt

119

HotelPalenque

120

"The logic of the whole place is just 1mposs1ble to fathom: there's no way that you could possibly figure 11 out."

--

Hotel Palenque

! 1, I

,' I I I

122

-- ------

er

en

••'!: = ~...- _ _ _

Dlsplac.....,ts and OUIW Transitory Wortcs

"Photo-Marltera• [ from S,x Stops on a Sect,on], 1968 126 format. chromogen,c-development shdes Estate of Robert Smithson. courtesy John Weber Gallery

I

' I' I

I I

I•

124

-

O,.q,/a,.,.,,,, ,,~• n"d Olltt•r 1'mnsilo'11 11\irks

125

--

Cayup Salt Mine Project, 1968-69 Gelatin-sliver prints, approximately 6 5/a x 9¼ ,n. each

(16.8

X

24,8 cm)

Robert Smi thsoo Papers. Archives of American Art, Sm1thSon,an Institution

128

,.

-

--

-

-···- ·-

I

I

•

,I

...

-

I.

l>isplanm,ent.v and 01.1,,,, Tran.