Mirror man

the couple accounts, to a certain stage present Smithson within a decidedly materialist framework, engaged in a dialogue with historically specific occurrences and texts. The materialist focus of this second-wave scholarship certainly owes abundant of its existence to the trove of documents donated to the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art by the agency of Smithson's widow, Nancy Holt, in 1987 The archive directs each author's analysis toward lesser-known works, unpublished alphabetic characters and notebooks, postcards, and marginal annotations from the artist's vast library. As Smithson was an artist who profoundly explored the transfiguration of information above time and space and the interrelation between presumably disparate discourses, it is understandable that scholars would be l to interpolate his capacious personal archive with his similarly expansive artistic production. (It is equally understandable, albeit certainly unintentional, that the greatest in quantity fascinating contribution to the catalogue for the new Smithson retrospective is a fifteen-page appendix listing the entire satisfieds of the artist's library and record collection.) Just as the disclosure of Smithson's early Christian-influenced drawings and paintings, first exhibited solitary in 1985, forced scholars to draw near to terms with that seemingly irrelevant aspect to the artist's life, this mammoth trove of possible sources will certainly hold fast them busy for years to advance The challenge will be to earth such archival analyses within the artist's material practice--a hazard that the two authors under discussion are for the greatest in quantity part sensitive to.