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[[note]] From: Robert Smithson: SCULPTURE
(Robert Hobbs) 1981 [[/note]]

INTRODUCTION  13

[[image]]
Installation view, Dwan Gallery, New York, February 1969. Photograph by Sy Friedman, Courtesy Dwan Gallery, Inc.

forms, industrially fabricated parts, the look of objectivity, and the appearance of rationality——as a means of undercutting simple-minded logic and as a way of pointing out the weaknesses of systems and networks. The innovations he made are to be found in the opposites he exposed. Although the approach sounds philosophical and dry, the intent was not without humor. Along with a cool approach, Smithson also developed a greater sense of humor in his work in the early sixties, an almost Zen humor that recognized the absurdity inherent in narrow forms of logic. In such works as Enantiomorphic Chambers, he posed himself the question, "If art is about vision, can it also be about nonvision?" Traditionally art has been a means of mirroring reality. In Enantiomorphic Chambers Smithson constructed a situation in which art mirrors no external reality but only its ability to reflect itself. Art becomes a tautology, a reflexive statement of its supposed function. Art's subject is its own being, and the result is a type of nonseeing or visual blindness. In this piece, then, the logic of the mirror is short-circuited, and an alogical system prevails. 

At the same time that Smithson was making quasi-Minimalist pieces, he also began a series of cartographic drawings in which he used maps because they are well-known conventions for depicting space. These spatial 

[[image - photograph]]  
Robert Smithson collecting obsidian for Double Nonsite, July 26-27, 1968. Photograph by Nancy Holt.