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ART INTERNATIONAL APEX 1969
VOL XII 1/4

brought the outdoors indoors, collecting rocks and other geologic detritus at various American sites and displaying them mainly in neat, low-lying metal bins accompanied by many maps, diagrams, photographs, and abstruse manifests, all tending to relate the situation of the rocks in the gallery to their original situations out there. The shape of the bins was usually the most speaking detail, as in a series where the silhouettes of topographical cross-section maps are repeated in cutaway on the lids of bins containing stones allegedly collected in those regions. These Non-Sites, as they are called, are evidently intended to provoke thought, drawing the mind away from the desultory spectacle of the gallery rocks to the huge, the timeless presence of all those other rocks "out there", as well as into the fly-swarm of aesthetic casuistry that magically surrounds any ripe corpse of an idea these days to give it an appearance of life.

On another level, could this work be about the fascinating mania that drives people to pocket a pebble at the Grand Canyon as a "souvenir", receptacle for whatever heuristic emotions memory and imagination may afterwards inspire? Anyway, this is what I think about when I look at Smithson's Non-Sites: I try to imagine what possessed him to do it. As for the evocation itself of New Jersey quarries and extinct volcanos in Nevada, it's rather romantic but after all kind of silly. And, finally, there's just no way to satisfactorily explain all that tedious display in the gallery, which it is as impossible to look at with sustained interest as it is to think about with pleasure. I should say in fairness that I was intrigued by a couple of the works, notably a heap of stones that had been dropped onto a row of mirrors (cracking the glass) and were reflected (making everything symmetrical, in effect) in another row of mirrors affixed to the wall. But, in general, there is a discouraging air about this work, these indistinct, rhetorical ideas carried out in a lugubrious manner.

*Peter Schieldahl

Dog Tracks
From the "First Stop" on Six Stops on a Section

On the site of my "first stop" (Bergen Hill)* from Six Stops on a Section, I discovered an array of dog tracks around a puddle of water. The distribution of the tracks was indeterminate. Each of these tracks radiated many possible paths leading in all directions, a mase-like network come into view with the help of my camera, which noted as a single point of view from an aerial position. My wife counted 38 paw prints in the 35"X35" photo-blow-up of my snapshot, but many of the prints were obliterated by the overlapping of other print-points rendering a clear view impossible. Visualizing a direct route from any of these tracks would be hazardous, and bound to lead the viewer astray. The "section" of my "Six Stops" is based on a stratagraphic [[stratigraphic]] (sub-surface map) that extends along a line from New York City to Dingman's Ferry on the Delaware River in Pa. Each "stop" is a point where particles of earth were collected and then deposited into containers that follow the cross-section contours of the six mapped sites. The points of collected earth become enormous land masses in the containers. If you consider everything in N.Y.C. collapsed to the size of this [[strikethrough]] magazine [[/strikethrough]] frame, you will get some notion of the process. A point in the mind, or a paw print in the mud, becomes a world of serial closures and open sequences that overflow the narrow focus of conscious attention.

Robert Smithson

[[image - map]]
Smithson. Dog Tracks, from the "First Stop" on Six Stops on a Section, 1968.

View of Robert Smithson exhibition at the Dwan Gallery. From left to right, Gravel Mirror with Cracks & Dust (gravel from Bergen County, New Jersey): Double Nonsite: California & Nevada, 1968
[[image - photograph]]