Robert Smithson: An Artist in Love with Entropy

This is an excerpt from the Robert Smithson chapter of Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970

The art critic Bill Berkson remembers Smithson at the Cedar bar in the early 196Os.  "He had the look of a brooder," says Berkson.  "Always alone, never talking to anyone."  Smithson was in his early twenties then, not yet firmly connected to the art scene.  He became a talker at Max's Kansas City, where he had the stature of a star, though a not a brightly shimmering one.  Smithson was tall and somewhat gangling, with large features in a face that seemed at once wide and compressed from above, narrowing his forehead and forcing his eyebrows into a scowl.  When he wasn't talking, his lips were set in a tense line.  The grain of his being was morose.

 Setting aside his brushes as the 1960s got under way, he took up a fine-tipped pen to draw floating, muscular figures with two sets of ancestors: the superheroes of action comic books and the gods of William Blake's invented theology.  Smithson had no reluctance to put low, commercial art on a par with the illuminated poems of Blake.  After all, his other favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, had mixed any number of modes and manners in The Wasteland, 1922.  Smithson liked clashes of style, disparities of tone, any mismatch that interrupts the smooth flow of imagery and leaves doubt in its wake.  He was arriving at the suspicion that there no truths, only fictions lively enough to feel compelling.  He found these everywhere, in high art and lowly genres of the novel, in major poetry and in the Hollywood movies he watched in the second-run theaters of Forty-Second Street with an artist named Nancy Holt. 

 In 1963 Smithson and Holt married and moved into an apartment on Greenwich Avenue, in the West Village.  By Smithson's reckoning, the next year marks the start of his career as a mature artist.  He had found a way to induce a work of art to inspire doubt instead of trust.  Eliminator, 1964, suspends four zigzag tubes of red neon between two sheets of mirrored glass.  The reflections of the neon are as vivid as the neon itself; or the neon looks as insubstantial as its reflection.  This is a sculpture engaged in a kind of picturing.  Or is it a picture dependent on a sculptural element?  It is not clear what is what or why, and as Eliminator flashes on and off at irregular intervals, you feel a slight chronometric disruption.  As Smithson said, "Eliminator is a clock that doesn't keep time, but loses it."  

 In his next sculptures, mirrors mirror mirrors, and the eye is of course confounded.  Though the dazzle of these objects gives them the slightly seedy air of a magician's sleight-of-hand, their designs originated in sober facts about the structure of crystals—bits of science Smithson gathered from his reading.  The growth of a crystal follows no familiar, organic rhythms.  Its form is geometric but not haunted by Euclid or the canons of correct proportion.  Ruminating on crystals, Smithson felt himself breaking free of history—art history, in particular—yet his freedom did not alienate him from the art world.  He found that his preoccupation with angular form gave him affinities with the Minimalists.   

In 1965 he met them all: Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin.  Before the year had ended, they were his friends.  But he was not one of them.  The Minimalists offered their objects as unimpeachable embodiments of clear ideas: box, grid, pillar.  Smithson was too skeptical to believe in a perfect fit between a name and the thing it names.  Yet the Minimalists' friendship had tactical value.  He needed to find a way of praising their art.  Also, he had to condemn it, for he was always true to his doubts.  Smithson's solution to this dilemma was wonderfully duplicitous, and brave, for he presented it openly, in an essay called "Entropy and the New Monuments,"1966.

The Minimalists, he explained, were devotees of "mistakes and dead-ends" who fully intended the "vapidity and dullness" of their art.  Repetitive without purpose, these artists have affinities with the forces that produced "slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number of housing developments of the postwar boom."  Minimalist objects "are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages," he wrote.  "Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future."  Thus they come to rest, inertly, in Smithson's grim present.  He had commandeered Minimalism as decor for his mood.  And he borrowed Minimalist geometry to make Plunge, the ten-part metal sculpture he showed at the Dwan Gallery in 1966.  

Robert Smithson, Plunge, 1966. Denver Art Museum

Its ten units stand in an orderly row.  Angular, stepped, and identical in shape, they range in height from fourteen and a half to nineteen inches.  This work disconcerts by playing a double game, at once supporting and undermining the habits of the eye.  From each of the sculpture's ten parts one takes a firm sense of its volume and proportion.  The eye is reassured.  Uneasiness sets in with a scan of the series, for simplicity does not govern the relations between the sculpture's parts.  Their sizes vary at the bidding of equations using squared factors (the linear equations that form each unit turn quadratic to govern the series), with results that run counter to the eye's expectations.  From one angle, the elements of Plunge seem to zoom into the distance too quickly—thus the title of the piece.  Reverse the viewpoint and Plunge no longer plunges.  It appears to back up against space, as if the usual effects of perspective had been stalled.  

With Plunge and the three Alogon pieces he made in 1966, Smithson argued that Minimalist geometry need not establish a clear and untroubled relation between objects and ideas.  Encouraging Euclidean form's secret aptitude for obscurity, his art takes the audience to zones where systems fail to make the sense they promised, and eventually fail even to make promises.  Smithson gloated over those failures.

His 1969 show at the Dwan Gallery featured Nonsites, bins filled with material collected in the places mapped by the documents he mounted on the gallery walls.  The thirty-one steel compartments of A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey, 1968, contained sand from the wide patch of terrain represented by the six-sided map accompanying the piece.  As the artist noted in a wall label, "Tours between the Nonsite and the site are possible."  Though few made these treks, the Nonsites made their point: the walls of a gallery may enclose the body of an artwork, but its mind wanders at large. 

On a trip to Sanibel, an island off the west coast of Florida, Smithson placed a row of eleven mirrors at water's edge.  Facing out to sea, addressing themselves to immensities of water and light, they formed no link with the enclosed spaces of the art world.  The artist's name for works like these was "mirror displacements."  As memory can charge the present with the past, so a sheet of reflective glass can capture fragments of sky and landscape and disrupt the even flow of space.  From disruptions like these come ambiguities of vision and thought, puzzles of the kind that the Minimalists tried to prevent.  If audiences were to be persuaded for even a few seasons that the Minimalist object had attained clarity, it had to stay safely indoors, enclosed by an interior that seconded its geometries.  Impatient with the yearning for order, Smithson took art outdoors, to landscapes as disorderly as he could find.

Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacement, 1969. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

In September 1969, Artforum published "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan," his account of a trip to that jungly region of Mexico.  At nine sites discovered in his wanderings through the Yucatan peninsula, he placed a set of mirrors on the ground or amid the branches of a tree.  At Palenque he notes that "writing about mirrors brings one into a groundless jungle where words buzz incessantly instead of insects."  In the terrain traversed by "mirror-travel," language and world collude, yielding details that are both linguistic and not, and every hybrid nuance of the scene is afflicted by entropy, the decay of the particular that inclines all things toward sameness. 

To execute Asphalt Rundown, 1969, his first earthwork, Smithson had a truckload of asphalt dumped over an eroded cliff in an old gravel quarry near Rome.  On the campus of Kent State University, in Ohio, he directed a backhoe operator to pile earth on an abandoned shed until its roof beam cracked.  In 1970 he built his best-known work, Spiral Jetty, a ramp of mud and rocks that reaches 1,500 feet over the surface of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, turning in on itself as it goes.  This massive form disappeared beneath the rising waters of the lake in 1972.  Distressed, Smithson devised plans to build the jetty higher in case the lake did not recede.  It didn't.  In 1973 he was killed in the crash of a small plane he had hired for aerial inspection of the scrub land staked out for his fifth earthwork, Amarillo Ramp.  The crash also killed the pilot and a photographer.  Smithson was thirty-five years old.

Spiral Jetty is still submerged.  Smithson intended it to vanish slowly, not in a season or two, for it was to celebrate entropy, not be its easy victim.  Though he mocked the hope of monumental permanence, the solidity of his earthworks and his attempts to preserve them suggest that he felt this hope as strongly as other artists do.  An earthwork is an emblem of the earthworker's will, and the will does not seek its own demise.  Proud of his place on the New York scene, Smithson intended his art to make him an equal of the father-figures he had recruited from the ranks of the American avant-garde’s mythical leaders.

Spiral Jetty is a grand implication of Pollock's gesture.  Amarillo Ramp, completed to his specifications after his death, can be understood as a variant, on dry land, of Spiral Jetty.  Broken Circle/Spiral Hill, an earthwork constructed in the Netherlands in 1971, looks like a gargantuan reprise of the quasi-Minimalist sculptures he built in 1966.  The lumbering splendor of these earthworks and the avant-garde logic of their development make it easy to overlook Smithson's dedication to the entropic forces that ruin everything splendid and dismantle all the structures of logic. 

In an essay, "The Spiral Jetty," 1972, Smithson argues that the purpose of art is to render its audience "conscious of the actualities of perception."  Attending to minutiae, one sees through the reassurances of history and ideology, esthetic and political.  One notices entropic pressures at work everywhere, and especially in places ignored by optimism and good taste.  Smithson contemplated debased imagery and ramshackle landscapes much as St. Jerome contemplated the human skull he kept beside him in the wilderness.  Any reminder of the entropic end delighted him, for it sharpened his sense of the mortality we share with everything, even dust. 

Entropy is the inexorable implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which Smithson never bothered to master.  It wasn't a truth for him so much as an image, his master-fiction, the one that generated meanings more compelling to him that any truth.  To be conscious of entropy was to construe consciousness as entropic, to feel it in the processes of seeing, thinking, remembering.  "The brain," he wrote, "resembles an eroded rock from which ideas and ideals leak."  

The surge and fizzle of thought electrified Smithson, prompting him to fabricate sculptures, make jaunts between sites and nonsites, perform arduous mirror displacements, supervise the building of earthworks, write long essays, give involuted interviews—in sum, to produce the oeuvre that equates his doubts, uncertainties, indifference, fatigue, and forgetfulness with the power that is reducing all things to a null state in which there is no difference between life and death, between then and now, between anything and anything else. 

Smithson's point, irritably, interminably reiterated, is that we have something to gain by facing our situation in the art world, in contemporary culture, in a universe that is running down as surely as a badly made watch.  It illuminates us to wander through derelict sites, like Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Roman Coliseum, musing on the idea of ruin and feeling the fact of it one's bones and breathing.  As Shelley wandered, he felt the consolations of high art.  His dread gave way a bit as he conjured up the vague and luminous ideal of "intellectual beauty," the redemptive "mystery."  Smithson understood ideals and essences as demeaning temptations, buzzing errors to be swatted away like flies. 

Nothing but the promise of universal death was entirely alive for Smithson.  When a landscape meshed with his feelings, he felt that he possessed it.  He felt alone there, like Pollock in his infinite.  When Pollock said, "I am nature," he claimed the full force of all creative energy.  At his most grandiose, Smithson claimed to be one with nature's destructiveness.  He celebrated the force that now and from the beginning of time has worked against order, intelligibility, meaning, the force that tirelessly bears the universe back to its origins and further, to primordial chaos.  Inverted heir of Romanticism, artist of the entropic sublime, Smithson was the anti-Pollock, devoted to a dream of apocalypse in reverse—not the ultimate revelation but the ultimate darkness, the state of absolute unknowability.