Meaningless Reverberations: Robert Smithson, Temporality, Locality, and Entropy

Robert Smithson’s work involves entropy as an inextricable product of dislocating art from its history of categorisation through the incorporation of multiplicity in contemporary art. Entropy is the bedrock of Smithson’s artistic trajectory as one of the instigators of a postmodernist dissemination of mutually visual and verbal medium. His work is not built on reduction or negation but rather the mutation of an idea, which can be considered ad infinitum and intertextually. Through techniques that imply the stopping and compressing of time, Smithson situates the viewer in an entropic condition, his work neither about action nor reaction but the unlimited speculation that exists within that state. In ‘Interpolation of the Enantiomorphic Chambers’, Smithson’s points five to seven identify manifest aspects of his work that are crucial in his consideration of entropy:

“5. The surface plane (fluorescent green) is behind the framing support (blue). One cannot see the whole work from a single point of view because the vanishing point is split and reversed. The structure is “flat”, but with an extra dimension.
6. To see one’s own sight means visible blindness.

7. “They asked him if he still thought he could ‘see.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘That was folly. The world

means nothing... less than nothing!’” ​The​ Country of the Blind, H.G. Wells.”[1]

A description of his sculpture that refers to the unseeable; a reflection on the nature of seeing; and a reference to sci-fi that contains his own entropic argument about paradox, seeing and indeterminate meaning. His consideration of artistic outcome is based on the dialectical relationship between object and concept, since for him, “Somehow, to have something physical that generates ideas is more interesting to me than just an idea that might generate something physical.”2 Through writing creatively and critically Smithson undermines previous systems of criticism and conjecture around art. His contemporaries were similarly inclined to integrate writing as artwork, but Smithson’s treatment of sculpture and writing as correspondent objects that are never defined as wholes is indicative of his looking out beyond his art, resisting any urge for self-containment or individualism. Reflecting on Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’ and the artists of the 1960s, Dore Ashton writes, “if there was a center, they willed themselves away from it.”3 This resistance to centring is developed by Smithson into narratives of displacement and dislocation, as in his work the “Edges blur as one tries to distinguish an outline.” The entropic creation of temporal uncertainty, spatial dislocation and the multiplicity are means for Smithson to integrate his conceptual, textual and sculptural pieces as codependent bodies of work.

The idea of temporal uncertainty as being entropic is true to the ideological and formal innovations of the late ‘60s. The stability of what sculpture ‘meant’ was already in flux, as is discussed extensively by Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster. Foster writes:

“Secure, prior to the 19th century, on the pedestal of public representation, secure still in the 20th on the altar of autonomous art, sculpture has come to inhabit the uncertain space of the world, a space of contingency, where it sits amongst all the ruins of transcendence.”[5]

The notion of contingency particularly applies to Smithson’s practice, as progression and uncertain advancement come to equivocate the growth and resurgence that’s constantly being perpetrated in his practice. ​Plunge (fig. 1) can be viewed as an enactment of this progression, “made to seem complex by optical distortions of perspective but its form is the result of simple addition. [...] a linear extension of the progression implies that it could be continued ad infinitum.”[6] Systematic ordering creates a mechanical appearance as opposed to an idiosyncratic or expressionistic one, denying the work a sense of self-containment through association with technical reproduction. Many of his artworks possess this sense of metaphysical progression beyond the time the viewer exists in, with the intention to “advance specifically to get lost [...] ...at the end, if there is an end, are perhaps only meaningless reverberations.”[7] These chaotic tendencies do not imply a relegation of authority over his work, but rather an acknowledgement of the limitations of introverted expressionism. All of Smithson’s work is incredibly authored within the intertextuality and the process it presents, the process being foundationally linked to some progression of time.

Time and its cons​tructs are vital to the ​Sandbox Monument (fig. 2) from ​Monuments of Passaic. Running counter-clockwise cannot unmix the black and white sand, the separateness of which was changed by running clockwise, and acknowledgement of this forces recognition of the object’s physical collapse it into a new condition. This prompts recognition of the irreversibility of temporal progression as energy is expended and never renewed, but constantly redefined:

“Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock.” [8]

The mixed sand presents past and future in the objective present. Smithson changes the basis of his field of iteration, having been inspired by Kubler’s 1960s essay ​The Shape of Time, which protested the trend of using biologically anthropomorphic descriptions for non-representational art, summarised here:

“Perhaps a system of metaphors drawn from physical science would have clothed the situation of art more adequately than the prevailing biological metaphors: especially if we are dealing in art with the transmission of some kind of energy [...] The time of history is too coarse and brief to be an evenly granular duration such as the physicists suppose for natural time; it is more like a sea occupied by innumerable forms of a finite number of types. A net of another mesh is now required, different to any now in use.” [9]

Smithson reiterates these sentiments (progressively) in relation to time and art in his discussion of entropy and the necessity for a new mode for art to act in:

“The workings of biology and technology do not belong in the domain of art, but to the ‘useful’ time of organic (active) duration, which is unconscious and mortal. Art mirrors the actuality that Kubler and Reinhardt are exploring. [...] In art, action is always becoming inertia, but this inertia has no grounds to settle on except the mind, which is as empty as actual time.” [10]

Here, Smithson puts forward his own net of another mesh for postmodern art. For works that followed the logic of process and anti-form, like ​Asphalt Rundown (fig. 3), irreversibility is crucial to the entropic idea of resisting inertia. As the truck pulls away and the work begins, the landscape and the asphalt being poured from the truck starts to vanish as a separate thing, as the spoiling of the landscape asserts that it was never one self-reproducing entity. In every reproduction, changes are irreversible and external forces like gravity are inevitable but prompted by the artist, creating a sense of ordered disorder in the action as it happens, which Smithson considers “a device for unlimited speculation.”[11] This evocation of the presence and absence of time is entropic and considers progress is based on an ideological consciousness of time that is perpetually discussed by Smithson across his body of written work: for example, in ‘Entropy and the New Monuments [12]; in Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space’ [13]; and in ‘Some Void Thoughts On Museums’ [14], among others. The temporary quality of works like ‘Asphalt Rundown’ and ‘The Sandbox’ perpetuate Smithson’s discourse about the nature of art itself and its aesthetic nature beyond physical manipulation. Smithson’s relation of time and simultaneity possesses an abstract consciousness of its own, contributing to the success of his oeuvre and his canonical but enigmatic position in the history of art.

The dislocation of art in a geographical, linguistic, economic and foundational sense also contributes to this delineation of entropy through considering displacement and convergence in Smithson’s work. He rendered works of environmental sculptural art that were predicated on temporal process and site; as such they were inseparable from inaccessible landscapes and therefore reliant on documentation as part of their iteration to the public. The non-sites act as evidence of an entropic process, a solution that reflexively functions as art in tandem with the work itself. Through this, Smithson creates dialectical sculptures involving the use of documentation as a sculptural element as an extension of his ideas of mind (non-site) and matter (site) that are naturally codependent and regurgitative of one another. Owens describes how “This desire to embed a work in its context characterizes postmodernism in general” [15] as art culture is submerged and bolstered by peripheral aspects of social and visual culture. In collapsing these distinctions, Smithson addresses the issues of suspending objecthood, categorisation and duration. Lyotard’s argument that challenging art needs time to be processed - the truly avant-garde “ontologically located outside the system” [16] - can certainly be applied to Smithson’s work, which preceded by his involvement in Minimalist sculpture, has the same sense of “defin[ing] or locat[ing] the position it aspires to occupy”; enacting the growing tendency to surround, the creation of environmental art, and the idea of geographical occupation as vital to the progress of artwork and theory [17]. Smithson’s extensive writing rejecting museums is partly responsive to the concept of the new foundational system for art that resists any kind of defining result. By functioning in the museum context, a work that occupies uncertain cultural space can be categorised in a variation of an old category. For Smithson, this presents a limitation that promotes inertia and resists entropy by its very nature. ​Spiral Jetty (fig. 4) presents the antidote. The entropy of his medium and concept relies on their disparate but codependent functions as simultaneously having the capacity to act as signs and signifiers. As the surface is overtaken, so is the order of seeing and it is therefore undone to some extent, vanishing to meet the outside of the spiral and the same system in reverse, revealing a basic lack of substance at the core of the fact. While it has no natural equivalent to anything physical it brings to mind physicality, as evidenced in the ​Spiral Jetty text (fig. 5), which uses the literal properties of the work to emphasise its conceptual strength. Smithson treats every element of ​Spiral Jetty as a sign pointing to something else, as an entropic Martian landscape that promotes its own obfuscation both textually and literally. This is iterated in the crystal sculptures, which by the fact of their existence grow to cover themselves, mutating over their own mutation and creating a paradoxical sense of homogeneity and divergence. Summatively, Smithson writes of the ​Spiral Jetty film:

“Disparate elements assume a coherence. Unlikely places and things were stuck between sections of film that show a stretch of dirt road rushing to and from the actual site in Utah. A road that goes forward and backward between things and places that are elsewhere. You might even say that the road is nowhere in particular. The disjunction operating between reality and film drives one into a sense of cosmic rupture.” [18]

The separation of properties in site and non-site is impossible because of their codependence and collaboration with one another, creating entropy in the work through the creation of a chasm between two conditions, despite the material of the work being the same. To consider one work as more artistic than the other implies some dialectical reduction of the work to one new product of converging conflicting forces, which limits the presence of the art itself. In creating the sites and non-sites Smithson delineates the “reciprocity of verbal and visual, but also in the fact that it offers an antidote to the totalizing impulses of art” [19] rather than generating a new object of conflation. The “textuality of the non-site” [20] resists the consideration of the work as a single entity with supplementary texts: “All of Smithson's work acknowledges as part of the work the natural forces through which it is reabsorbed into its setting.” [21] This is particularly true of the ​Ithaca Mirror Trail (fig. 6) and the mise en abyme of referentiality that exists in such equivocal works. It presents a mirror surface as a kind of photograph with a chaotic relationship to the nature of mirroring, reflected in a moment of time and space. Here and in the ​Yucatan Mirror Displacements, (fig. 7) Holt and Smithson create a set of wild genres in one piece of photojournalistic collage incorporating science fiction, geology, cultural history, and contemporary art theory. The images become separate but inseparable as autonomous from the sites because of the newly complicated relationship between what is external and internal to the exhibition. Smithson’s environmental art simultaneously consumes and digests notions of time, space, physicality and creation while using writing as a stabilising and destabilising force. The reciprocity of sculpture, writing and video are represented conceptually in these sites and non-sites as a strategy for treating what was presented at the gallery as a non-site pointing back out at itself using actual material of the site through relative properties, mapped location and photo-documentation.

The role of documentation and writing has ambivalent purpose in Smithson’s work. It accentuates the impermanence of his work while cementing its presence, emphasising the decentred position of the viewer, who can neither identify a locus of the work nor situate their experience as that locus. The same goes for ​Spiral Jetty’s written material, which is closely studied by Owens in ‘Earthwords’, particularly the ideas of centring and vision:

“Thus what is described by Smithson in this text is that dizzying experience of decentering which occurred "at the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse." [22]

The Barthesian ideas that were evidently familiar to Smithson have profound effect on his practice and ideological consideration of art, particularly the idea that “It would be futile to separate out materially works from texts.’’ [23] Smithson’s integration of text and sculpture carries through the ideas of temporal duration and multiplicity involved in his enactments of displacement and referential art. Considering the myopic self-reflexivity in the preceding artistic culture, the sheer richness of Smithson’s work presents his entropic artistic tendencies as a continuum of critical renewal and relation. Owens describes this relation, as evidenced in Smithson’s ​Heap of Language (fig. 8) and Strata (fig. 9): “Smithson's view of language as material also discloses the absolute congruence, and hence interchangeability, of writing and sculpture.” [24] This convergence, as with the convergence of various other polarities in Smithson’s work, establishes the entropic conditions that are enacted in and beyond the works themselves.

The richness of allusion and textuality in his work and their simultaneous destructive and constructive properties creates a new net for postmodernism that puts preconceived artistic notions into contention with one another through entropy. Owens correctly identifies the importance of Smithson’s writing and sculpture and what these contentions mean for the art object: “Not only does this complex web of heterogenous information-part visual, part verbal-challenge the purity and self-sufficiency of the work of art; it also upsets the hierarchy between object and representation.’ [25] Entropy is intrinsic to the practice of Robert Smithson, whose work disputed the foundation, nature and criticism of art in the late 1960s and diverted the trajectory of modern art to the postmodern expanse of possibility.

References:

1. Robert Smithson, ‘Interpolation of the Enantiomorphic Chambers’, Finch College Catalog, ​Art in Process (1966), from​ ​Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 39-40, 40
NB: All Smithson texts hereafter are cited from​ ​Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings so only the essay itself will be footnoted with the page number referred to as it is within ​The Collected Writings

2. Robert C. Morga​n, ​Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (1994: MacFarland & Co. Inc. Publishers, North Carolina), 67

3. Dore Ashton ‘Reflections on Six American Sculp​tors’, from ​Crossroads of American Sculpture, Holliday T. Day, (Indiana: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2000) 17

4. Mel Bochner and Smiths​ on, ‘The Domain of the Great Bear’, ​Art Voices, Fall 1966, 26-33, 27

5. Hal Foster, ‘Sculpture After the Fall’, ​Connections, (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1983) 10

6. Frances Colpitt, ​Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (1990: UMI Research Press, Washington), 62

7. Smithson, ‘A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art’, ​Art International, March 1968, 78-94, 78

8. Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’,​ (​Artforum, June 1966) 10-23, 11

9. George Kubler, ​The Shape of Time, 1962, from ​Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994) 737-738

10. Smithson, ‘Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space’, ​Arts Magazine, November 1966, 34-37, 34

11. Smithson, ‘Entropy’, ibid, 21

12. Smithson, ‘Entropy’, ibid: ‘Time as decay or biological evolution is eliminated by many of these artists: this displacement allows the eye to see time as an infinity of surfaces or structures, or both combined without the burden of what Roland Barthes calls the “undifferentiated mass of organic sensation.”’11

13. Smithson, ‘Quasi-Infinities’, ibid: ““The isolated time of the avant-garde has produced its own unavailable history or entropy.” 37

14. Smithson, ‘Some Void Thoughts On Museums’, ​Arts Magazine, February 1967: “History is a facsimile of events held together by flimsy biographical information. [...] History is representational, while time is abstract.” 41-42, 41

15. Craig Owens, ‘Earthwords’, ​October, Vol. 10 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 120-130 (Massachusettes: The MIT Press, 199), 129

16. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘On Theory: An Interview’, ​Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984) p29

17. Colpitt, ibid, p82

18. Smithson, ‘Spiral Jetty’, ​Arts of the Environment, ​1972, ​edited by Gyorgy Kepes, 143-153, 149

19. Owens, ‘Earthwords’, ibid, 124
20. Owens, ‘Earthwords’, ibid, 127
21. Owens, ‘Earthwords’, ibid, 129

22. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) 280.
23. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, 1971, from ​Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994) 942

24. Owens, ‘Earthwords’, ibid, 124 25 Owens, ‘Earthwords’, ibid, 127

WORKS CITED:

Crawford, Donald. ‘Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationships’, ​The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 49-58, published by Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978

Foster, Hal. ‘Sculpture After the Fall’, ​Connections, (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1983) 10

Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, ​Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994

Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field.’ ​October, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979): 30-44.
Morgan, Robert C. ​Conceptual Art: An American Perspective. North Carolina: MacFarland & Co. Inc.

Owens, Craig. ‘Earthwords’, ​October, Vol. 10 (Autumn, 1979). (Massachusettes: The MIT Press, 199) 120-130

Publishers, 1994
Colpitt, Frances. ​Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective. Washington: UMI Research Press, 1990.

Smithson, Robert. ​Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)