Smoke and Mirrors

I first became interested in Robert Smithson’s work through the book, The Writings of Robert Smithson, in particular a text entitled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” The opening paragraph of this text is typical of the unpretentious reportage of Smithson: “On Saturday, September 30, 1967 I went to the Port Authority Building on 41st Street and 8th Avenue. I bought a copy of the New York Times and a Signet paperback called Earthworks by Brian Aldiss. Next I went to ticket booth 21 and purchased a one-way ticket to Passaic.”

It doesn’t take long however, for Smithson’s guided tour to take an ironic turn. Using the New York Times and the science fiction novel as his guidebooks he investigates the mundane industrial and suburban structures along the Passaic River through the tongue-in-cheek guise of an archaeologist transported back from some future world.

Smithson seems to have always had this combination of the prosaic and exotic, the real and the imaginary. Even as a child he planned the routes of family outings to various geological and palaeontological sites in North America and also visited the dioramas of ancient life at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

Smithson extended the definition of art making by applying his interest in geology to his activities as an artist. His interests in areas previously outside the parameters of art may explain to some extent the difficulty of fitting him conveniently into the definition of minimalist sculptor. While his work bears the hallmarks of minimalism—use of industrial materials, clarity of construction and acknowledgement of the viewer—it aims equally in the opposite direction: use of unaltered natural materials; acceptance of entropy and exclusion of the viewer. This duality—one of the unique features of his work, is perhaps best exemplified in his works that utilize mirrors.

Mirrors are physical things. They are made of glass and silvered on one side. But their magic is their reflectivity. Smithson exploited both the physical and reflective properties of mirrors in a piece entitled Gravel Corner Piece. This work consists of three square mirrors propped in a corner with a pile of gravel nestled against them. The pile of gravel holds the mirrors in place. So far, pretty minimal.

The gravel pile is reflected in the two mirrors on the walls and the one on the floor. Because the mirrors also reflect each other, there is a third generation of reflections that are not mirror-images but reversed mirror images or virtual simulations of the original pile. The reflections also extend under the floor mirror in a kind of anti-pile. Altogether there is one real; corner pile, three virtual piles and four mirror-image piles, all clustered around the corner axis like a crystal of eight parts.

The experience of looking at this piece is somewhat like that of standing alone inside a mirrored elevator and seeing an infinite number of reflections of yourself but still being unable to see the back of your head. In Gravel Corner Piece you can shift your point of view to see more sides of the gravel in the reflections. You can just barely glimpse the anti-pile hanging under the floor. But you can never actually enter this virtual space. Being excluded from this mirror world makes you aware of two things: one, the reflection provides a unique view quite distinct from your own point of view, and: two, your own point of view is also the centre of your awareness of your self and the world. As Smithson put it, we are trapped in the “double prison of the eyes.”

In Nine Mirror Displacements, executed during a trip through the Yucatan in 1967, Smithson inserted twelve mirrors into nine different sites and took a photograph of each arrangement. In reality, these works would have been three-dimensional collages, as if Smithson had cut out twelve inch square blocks of reality and replaced them with other blocks from somewhere else. Both the pre-existing reality and the inserted virtual space have been displaced. The photograph—which always carefully excludes a reflection of Smithson the photographer—freezes the shifting reflections.

“Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” is Smithson’s companion text that documents the physical and psychological circumstances of each mirror displacement. Typical of Smithson, he methodically lists the titles of all the guide books resting on the car seat beside him and then adds: “In the rear-view mirror appeared Tezcatlipoca—demiurge of the “smoking-mirror.” “All those guide books are of no use,” said Tezcatlipoca, “You must travel at random, like the first Mayans, you risk getting lost in the thickets, but that is the only way to make art.” I think Smithson followed his advice.

Robert Fones
In Robert Smithson, Operations on Nature, Matthew Teitelbaum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Sept. 1995