The American Sublime (Page 2)

Though he studied painting at the Art Students League, Smithson found his calling as a sculptor in the 1960s, when that medium was undergoing an immense transformation. He was included in the exhibition "Primary Structures," which took place in April 1966 at the Jewish Museum on upper Fifth Avenue. Curated by Kynaston McShine, the show gave the larger art world its first real glimpse of what was happening in sculpture as it began to replace painting as the defining medium of artistic experiment.

The paradigmatic "primary structure"--the term was controversial at the time--was drab, monolithic, industrial, repetitive, empty and monumental. Smithson showed a set of six "cryomorphic" hexagons, arrayed in a single row, based on the geometry of ice crystals. That year he published a stunning essay in Artforum, "Entropy and the New Monuments," which connected the Second Law of Thermodynamics with "primary structures," explaining the latter's Minimalist aesthetics in terms of civilization running down.

An autodidact, widely read in science fiction, amateur geology and crystallography, Smithson was a singularly original thinker who brought to bear in his art and writing as many of his intellectual pursuits as he could. His master concept was entropy--a statistical measure of energy disorder or randomness--which gripped him much as the concept of blind will gripped Arthur Schopenhauer, as the ultimate reality against which form and order crumple and collapse. He connected the coolness of contemporary sculpture with the inevitable cooling down of physical systems. Thus, he suggested, the most important new works in American sculpture "bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age"--an allusion that suddenly vests his abstract ice crystals with a certain prophetic meaning. The new sculptors, in Smithson's view, "provided a visible analog for the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which extrapolates the range of entropy by telling us energy is more easily lost than obtained, and that in the ultimate future the whole universe will burn out and be transformed into an all-encompassing sameness." The "cold glass boxes" of contemporary architecture have "helped to foster the entropic mood...free from the general claims of 'purity and idealism.'" We are left with "the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, bland after blank; in other words, that infinitesimal condition known as entropy." One is reminded here of Warhol's aesthetics of boredom, as exemplified in his marathon films in which nothing happens.

It is difficult to imagine any art magazine--any magazine at all today--printing an essay like this, or like Smithson's marvelous "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," which appeared in Artforum the following year. In the essay he explores, like a travel writer, the monumental ruins of Passaic--six large pipes out of which water gushed like "liquid smoke," parking lots, rusting machinery and "the houses mirror[ing] themselves into colorlessness." And he asks with delicious irony, "Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?" Passaic is eternal in the sense that it is Everywhereville. All cities are on the downward entropic path of the center city parking lot. "Primary Structures," in his view, captured the direction of contemporary life to perfection.

Smithson's conception of contemporary sculpture was striking, but it's not clear the sculptors in question would have recognized their work in it. Many of these artists--Carl André, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin--went on to become Minimalists, and their philosophy of art was far closer to Greenberg's than to his. Their work often stressed purity of form and belonged to the museum, an institution about which Smithson had the deepest reservations. "Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void," he wrote in 1967. "Hallways lead the viewer to things once called 'pictures' and 'statues.'... Painting, sculpture, and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. Art settles into a stupendous inertia."

How to break this inertia? In a dialogue held later that year with Allan Kaprow titled "What Is a Museum?" Kaprow suggested an answer to Smithson: "You mentioned building your own monument, up in Alaska, perhaps, or Canada. The more remote it would be, the more inaccessible, perhaps the more satisfactory. Is that true?" Smithson replied: "I think ultimately it would be disappointing for everybody, including myself." Still, there can be little question, judging from the ecstatic language of his writing about Spiral Jetty, that in Great Salt Lake he found something more primordial than primary structures, something more rawly connected to the energies of nature.

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