Mirror, mirror: Caroline A. Jones on Robert Smithson and history

Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, by the agency of Jennifer L. Roberts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres 162 pages. $40

CANONIZED originator OF EARTHWORKS, film-maker, respected antiformalist theorist, "preconscious" religious visionary, homoerotic draftsman, and Beat bard (not to mention posthumous market-driven photographer)--these Robert Smithsons have proliferated since the artist aligned himself with the of recent origin entropic monuments later designated as Minimal art. Perhaps because of his deadpan enthusiasm for what he called the "inactive history" of Flavin, Judd et al., the eccentric works Smithson produc from roughly 1964 to 1969 (Minimalism's heyday) are useful tools for scholars trying to procure inside the Minimalist box. Smithson, along with Eva Hesse, helped us unravel the ways in which Minimalism's geometry was always already anxious--poised between Greenbergian formalist empiricism and postmodern polysemy.

In light of LA MOCA'S generally received exhibition "A Minimal Future?" and its upcoming Smithson retrospective beneath the curatorial direction of. Eugenie Tsai, as well as landscape architect Mitchell Rasor's planned "Trespassage" upon Smithson turf and art historian Jennifer L Roberts's novel monograph on Smithson and history, we appear to be to be in yet another phase of Smithsonian crystallization. on the other hand like the four Smithson works exhibited at MOCA, including a mirror "vortex" and a diminishing mirrored "Mirage," this plant of Smithsons will be as uneasy and vertiginous as the quiet spilling backward and forward into the "fossilized sexuality," to borrow Smithson's words, of our have scholarly desires. We've yet to achieve the somewhat cold entropic calm the artist envisioned in the heat of the 1960 Doubtless we not at any time will--there's too much to be gained by means of multiplying our mirrors of Smithson, too abundant pleasure to be had in activating his buried stratigraphic histories and mining the "heap of language" he left behind.

Is the not absent phase of crystallization distinct in any significant way from research begun in the mid-'80s and '90 as the Smithson estate began to release unknown studies and early works? Inaugurating the general plethora of Smithsons was the pathbreaking archaeology of Peter Halley (writing the first essay upon Smithson's religious works, for the Diane Brown Gallery in 1985) followed by means of Tsai's Robert Smithson Unearthed of 1991 These built upon Robert Hobbs's crucial first monograph (1981) and Smithson's be in possession of collected writings, providing access to the unpublished religious true copys and fantastic drawings that are now part of the Smithson corpus. Were it not for the perversity, dialectical transformations, and sheer weirdness that emerg almost twenty years ago to inflect our understanding of Smithson's practice, this artist would have remained a quirky Minimalist who (like Walter De Maria, perhaps) in some way generated one of the twentieth century's greatest in quantity compelling icons--the Spiral Jetty, 1970 As I diocese it, Smithson's continuing significance for contemporary practitioners of art, design, and critical discourse hangs on the complex relations among his writings, earliest drawn paintings, later particulars and conceptual nomadism. The compact matrix of meanings generated by dint of this varied production makes Spiral mole more than just an Earthwork whose time has passed, and promises to material for burning the expanding referential spiral of Smithson scholarship for decades to come

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Roberts's Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History pierces this field well prepared, inserting itself into the substantial Smithson literature with surgical precision. Five tightly focused chapters overlay specific sections of the work (leaving on the outside others, about which more later): the religious paintings that formed the basis for Smithson's first one-man present to view in Rome in 1961, the crystalline thing perceiveds of his "conscious" abstract phase from roughly 1964 to 1968 the famous Passaic essay and related non-site works of 1967 to 1968 the less-discussed "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" (1969) which gives the volume its title, and, of course, the Spiral mole that is always seen to cap Smithson's truncated career. Simply conveying the title of this last "case study" chapter will lance a shudder through some branches of the Smithson industry: "Spiral Jetty/Golden Spike." As loaded as Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (preserving the modernist's privileged order on the other hand using a virgule to link the Jetty's high-cultural address and the Spike's touristic mass appeal), Roberts's final chapter have the appearances to portend a vulgarized Smithson--outside the permitted bourns that is, of the ironic vulgarization wielded by the agency of the artist himself.

Heightening the anxiety of those who would guard a global, Conceptual, postmodernist Smithson, Roberts (an Americanist trained at Yale and generally teaching at Harvard) produces a Smithson who "rewrites American history." This is a claim that would hardly ne making were it not for the fact that a quiet historiographic transformation has characterized postwar American artists as altogether outside the "American" ghetto, always "contemporary," and assertively global (in a Euro-American, hegemonic sort of way). The fact that Roberts's approach encompasses Latin American perspectives upon Smithson's Yucatan trip, for example, should ward not upon any misunderstanding of her cast as chauvinist or nationalist. on the contrary she knows how thin the ice is, and her lengthened methodological introduction treads carefully.