Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History, by Jennifer L. Roberts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 162 pages. $40.
CANONIZED FOUNDER OF EARTHWORKS, film-maker, respected antiformalist theorist, "preconscious" religious visionary, homoerotic draftsman, and Beat poet (not to mention posthumous market-driven photographer)--these Robert Smithsons have proliferated since the artist aligned himself with the new 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 produced from roughly 1964 to 1969 (Minimalism's heyday) are useful tools for scholars trying to get 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 current exhibition "A Minimal Future?" and its upcoming Smithson retrospective under the curatorial direction of. Eugenie Tsai, as well as landscape architect Mitchell Rasor's planned "Trespassage" on Smithson turf and art historian Jennifer L. Roberts's new monograph on Smithson and history, we seem to be in yet another phase of Smithsonian crystallization. But like the four Smithson works exhibited at MOCA, including a mirror "vortex" and a diminishing mirrored "Mirage," this set of Smithsons will be as uneasy and vertiginous as the rest, spilling backward and forward into the "fossilized sexuality," to borrow Smithson's words, of our own scholarly desires. We've yet to achieve the cool entropic calm the artist envisioned in the heat of the 1960s. Doubtless we never will--there's too much to be gained by multiplying our mirrors of Smithson, too much pleasure to be had in activating his buried …
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