Mirror man

Jennifer L Roberts. Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. of recent origin Haven: Yale University Press, 2004 176 pp 10 color ills., 71 b/w $40

Ron Graziani. Robert Smithson and the American Landscape. fresh York: Cambridge University Press, 2004 243 pp 43 b/w ills. $75

It is single of the great ironies of present art that Robert Smithson's enormously influential earthwork Spiral mole (1970) is located miles from nowhere in receptacle Elder County, Utah, and until single recently was nearly invisible, submerg beneath the briny waters of the Great Salt Lake. And nevertheless it is also entirely appropriate. No other artist has been as closely associated with the postmodern critique of the autonomous work of art as Smithson. While ostensibly a material composite of stones dirt, salt, and water, Spiral Jetty's ultimate significance is formed from a constellation of true copys photographs, maps, and a film, as well as the existence itself, all of which create further reverberations in the seemingly unrelated discourses of science, aesthetics, and history. Smithson's art of interrelation and displacement creates a particular challenge for the writer addressing his work. single is faced with a methodological choice: to analyze in what way Smithson's work defies any univocal and universal interpretation or to isolate individual inflection from its many resonances and momentarily stabilize the seemingly endles chain of connotations produc by dint of his art in the name of temporal and (as the artist was in like manner instrumental in demonstrating) provisional semantic closure

The first wave of Smithson scholarship, which gradually emerg after the artist's death in 1973 took the former path. Scholars rest within Smithson's oeuvre the resurgence of allegory, the invasion of language into the visual arts, the diffusion of aesthetic practice beyond conventional institutions, and an exemplary manifestation of Georges Bataille's universal of the informe. (1) All of these critical interventions shared a post-structuralist approach that celebrated the apparent multivalence breeded by his art. Yet today, with in like manner much of Smithson's pioneering critique of modernist autonomy largely incorporated into mainstream art practice and criticism, this initial approach has not to be found some of its pertinence. sum of two units recently published books and a large traveling exhibition provide an opportunity to reexamine the artist's career for an audience for whom the institutional critique of present art is a given. (2) Rather than exploring Smithson's shoot forward of allegorical impurity and semiotic indeterminacy, these new additions to the growing material substance of criticism devoted to Smithson try to find to invest his works with a easy in mind correlative to his structural innovations and, with varying stages of success and commitment, attempt to historicize his resolutely contingent art. The authors of these volumes enter new variables into the artist's algorithmlike works to bring out fresh and considerable results. If Smithson's art is allegorical in the bounds made famous by Walter Benjamin, as first-wave scholar Craig Owens influentially argued, then these second-wave authors act as "interpretative artists" who have taken up the challenge of arranging the artist's various heaps of words and things into of recent origin and relevant constellations of meaning. (3)

Of these fresh books none is more adamant in revising the canonical account of Smithson than Mirror-Travels. As a scholar of American art, Jennifer Roberts brings an unorthodox place of preoccupations and a decidedly historical bent to her analysis. While a certain quantity of readers will surely shudder at her invocations of the transcontinental railroad and Thomas Cole's Course of Empire series (1836) in relation to similar a cerebral and futuristic artist, this arguably unfashionable evidence situates Smithson within a fresh yet wholly relevant discourse and, more important, dislodges the overused narrative of Greenbergian modernism that has serv as a theoretical foil (and sometimes straw man) in many postmodernist accounts of the artist's work. History provides Roberts with an effective theme to unite the seemingly disparate activities that Smithson engaged in quite through his artistic production. According to Roberts, Smithson's "entire career can be understood as a continuing, and constantly renegotiated, engagement with the practice and philosophy of history" (1) Mirror-Travels reads like a Bildungsroman of sorts, the story of Smithson's gradual disillusionment with his youthful idealism of an eternal and decidedly Christian faculty of perception of time and culminating in a composite and more ambivalent (yet, as Roberts skillfully demonstrates, no les contradictory) temporal philosophy. It also should be noted that the book's concision and vibrant prosaic place it within that rarest of categories of art-historical writing: a useful read.

Roberts begins her investigation with attentive and compelling analyses of the artist's oftentimes brutal and cartoonish watercolors, demonstrating in what manner Christian eschatology (which, at of the like kind crucial moments as the Incarnation, shows the intersection of eternal and mortal temporality) plant the stage for Smithson's lifelong search for a dialectical conception of time, individual Roberts defines as a fashion of transcendence based on "infinite skepticism, infinite fragmentation, infinite duration" (34) through relying on close readings of these undeniably strange images, Roberts manages to make these works interesting in their possess right rather than just significant because of their relevance to the artist's mature output After a three-year hiatus Smithson reemerg in 1964 with a of recent origin intellectual system, crystallography, modifying the Christian notion of the Deposition (another point of time of convergence between the divine and mundane) into individual of mineral sedimentation. Because crystal growing does not obliterate past accretions on the contrary rather builds around them, thus keeping all flashs of its existence in physical suspension, of that kind a model suggested a notion of time that was vertical, nonprogressive, and synchronic. As Roberts keenly notes, Smithson's stir from religious models of temporality to a mineralogical paradigm poised the artist to find a place within the emerging antihumanist discourse of 1960 art. Moreover, the enantiomorphic forms of crystals (that is, their proportion predicated upon a difference between sides--such as one's right and left hands) became "a primary metaphor" (47) for Smithson, providing a spatio-temporal design that leveled any distinctions between discrete twinklings while simultaneously revealing the inevitable interference that be met withs in any form of semiotic deposition, smooth the most apparently natural and neutral way s of representation, like mirrors.