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1961

THE ICONOGRAPHY OF DESOLATION

by Robert Smithson

"I wish I hadn't cried so much! said Alice as she swam about, trying to find her way out. 

Lewis Carroll

Any effort to regain iconography from the total tangle of Sacred and Profane must create a[[strikethrough]] [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] wrath that propels the suppliant artist down the rabbit hole into Desolation, where All is spilled and spoiled below belief. 

Since popular inclinations toward Relativity have exploded the proportions of revealed iconography, post-Einstein art-lovers believe iconography to have had a "literary" origin; i.e., the Prophets are mutated into "folk-poets" by research analysis. As a result, the art-lover is dogmatically interested in the spatial thrills of "plasticity" as put into motion by Impressionism, Expressionism, and Picassoid art history. One should realize that such art-loving may lead to visual fornication - a very sticky topic that only the Elect know about. 

After many [[strikethrough]] honest [[/strikethrough]] secular ambushes, iconography is oriented into the snares of [[strikethrough]] [[ignorance?]]   [[/strikethrough]] mediocrity called OBJECTIVITY - declassic and deromantic -which in time and space break down into NON-OBJECTIVITY. [[strikethrough]] [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] "Plasticity" [[strikethrough]] [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] when opposed to the graphic is natural matter without proportion, but with the illusion of imagined dimensions. Revelation, once given, passes through the symmetry of grace (not to be confused with style, manner, or elegance), whereas imagination, once taken, begins with worldly fixations on human environments fed by the duration of factual events. When revelation is eclipsed by the decaying force of duration,