Robert Smithson (1938-1973)
(copyright owners please read: p.s. at the bottom of this post, thank you)
Dear Readers,
today it is time again for a few thoughts by one of the greatest american artists of all times: Robert Smithson. This time I have chosen a few passages about mirrors (for the connection of HNW and mirrors, see my review ):
Why do mirrors display a conspiracy of muteness concerning their very existence ? When does a displacement become a misplacement ? Those are forbidding questions that place comprehension in a predicament. The questions the mirrors ask always fall short of answers. Mirrors thrive on surds, and generate incapacity. Reflections fall onto the mirrors without logic, and in so doing invalidate every rational assertion. Inexpressible limits are on the other side of incidents, and they will never be grasped.
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The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an ongoing abstraction that is always available and timeless. The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure. Space is the remains, or corpse, of time, it has dimensions. "Objects" are "sham space", the excrement of thought and language.
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Only when art is fragmented, discontinuous and incomplete can we know about that vacant eternity that excludes objects and determined meanings. The mirror and the transparent glass brings us to those designations that remain forever abolished in the colorless infinities of a static perception.
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The artificial ingenuity of time allows no return to nature. Mirrors in time are blind, while transparent glass picks up reflections in this spaceless region of inverse symmetry and shifting perspectives - the mirror reflects the blank surface in the suburbs of the mind. There is nothing to "understand" about such a region except the consciousness that makes understanding impossible.
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A mirror looking for its reflection but never quite finding it.
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Timelessness is found in lapsed moments of perception, in the common pause that breaks apart into a sandstorm of pauses.
- Robert Smithson
P.S. All texts by Smithson are taken from the volume: Robert Smithson, Slideworks. Carlo Fura 1997.
