hal foster rosalind krauss yve-alain bois benjamin h. d. buchloh david joselit third edition with 884 illustrations, 579 in colour art Since 1900 modernism antimodernism postmodernism @ Thames a Hudsonss frst published essays, “Entropy and the New Monu- 66), Robert Smithson singles out a passage from a exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s painting, written, Judd, notes Smithson, “speaks of'a lot of visible “pland and empty?” such as “most commercial w Colonial stores, lobbies, most houses, most t aluminium, and plastic with leather texture, the ike wood, the cute and modern patterns inside jets and "Near the super highway surrounding the city?” discount centers and cut-rate stores with their On the inside of such places re maze-lke coun- of neatly stacked merchandise; rank on rank it sumer oblivion. The lugubrious complexity of has brought to art a new consciousness of the dul. Bus this very vapidisy and dullness is what providing one of the carliest and still essments of Minimalism. have been among the early supporters of as a surprise—his short articles on the - bout of a “simulacral” reading of Pop develops later about Warhol—but only ‘mistakenly read, against the intent re continuation ae ‘geometrical es this model was the law of eno entire artistic production, and (© in all his writings (his last interview +m ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Robert Smithson marks s a generative concept of artistic practice in the late sixties conducted a few months before his death, was entitled “Entropy ‘Made Visible’), Formulated in the nineteenth century inthe field of thermodynamics (itis the second foundational principle of that science), the law of entropy predicts the inevitable extinction of ‘energy in any given system, the dissolution of any organization into a state of disorder and indiffereniation. It asserts the inexorable and irreversible implosion of any kind of hierarchical onder into a terminal sameness. Smithson’s example for entropy is very close to the first one given by scientists, which ha to do with the temperature ‘of water:*Picture in your mind's eye the sandbox civided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other, We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grays afer that we have him run antilockaese, ut the result wil not bea restoration of the original division buta greater degree of grayness and an increase of entropy ‘The concept of entropy had fascinated many people since its inception, especially hecauise the example chosen by Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), one of its ereators, was the fact that the solar system would inevitably cool down (this understandably fed the mille narian and cosmic pessimism of many books written atthe end of the nineteenth century), Very early on—and Smithson directly borrowed from this tradition—the law of entropy was applied both to language (the way words empty out when they become clichés) and to the displacement of use-value by exchange-value in an economy of mass production, The final book of the nineteenth- ‘century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet,one ‘of Smithson’ favorites, already merged these two lines of enquiry in recounting the growth of the entropic shadow being cast on our lives and our thought under the condition of capitalism. Repetition (of goods on the marketplace, of words and images in the media) is profoundly entropic; i is from this discovery thatthe theory of {information would emerge in the at forties,a mathematical model of communication according to which the content of any fact is in Jnverse proportion to its probability —Kennedy’ assassination wasa ‘world event, but ifthe rule were for every American president to be |Glled in order to end his term, it would have had no more content than dusk or dawnand would have barely made the headlines. But while for Flaubert and his peers our entropic fate—a defining characteristic of modernity —was sheer doom, Smithson Smithson and entropy | 1867. 10961 69%961-0061 reread the very inexorability of this process as the promise of @ definitive critique of man and his pretenses, It was not only the pathos of Abstract Expressionism (long become suspect) that was rendered irelevant once the entropic logic was followed tothe ends, bbut also the modernist struggle against arbitrariness in art (the purported elimination, in each art, of any convention that was not “essential” to it), a notion that had turned increasingly ‘dogmatic in the writings of Clement Greenberg, Entropy is for Smithson the ultimate in what the structuralist term “motivated” cor nonarbitrary. Since itis the only universal condition of all things and beings, there is nothing arbitrary about entropy It wasin order to manifest jst this pervasive nature of entropy that soon after the «© 1969 exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form,” and perhaps as 4 rebuttal ofthe emphasis on form ints title, Smithson conceived of 1 Asphalt Rundown (1) as a reading of Pollock’ drip process and its ‘gravitational pull as profoundly entropic. ‘Writing in “Entropy and the New Monuments” that Minimalist art had eliminated “time as decay.” Smithson indicated his disenchantment with the movement as failing to posh into the domain of entropy: “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future) he wrote. But what ifone were to connect the future with the distant past—what if posthistory (time after the demise of man) were nothing but the mirror image of prehistory? Smithson’ childlike fascination with dinosaurs and fossils stemmed from his essentially antihumanist conception of history as a cumulative succession of disasters, Time as decay thus became one of his strongest concerns and with tthe necessity of creating not merely “new” monuments, but “antimonuments” ‘monuments to the wane ofall monuments Th fact, one did not even need to create such artifacts, the world seas already full of them. This is what Smithson discovered when, in September 1967, with his Instamatic camera hung from his shoulder just like a tourist in Rome (*Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?” he asked), he revisited his small, industrial home town. The result, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, [New Jersey is a mock travelogue documenting various “mon ments” to decay (the lst of them being the sandbox mentioned above), particularly construction sites that Smithson saw as facto tiesof ruins in reverse”: “this s the opposite of the romantic ruin’ ‘because the buildings don't fall nto ruin afer they are bust but ‘ather rise into ruin before they are built” Everything, whatever its pest, even before it has any past, is geared inthe end toveard the Fame equal state—which also means that there is no justifiable ‘enter, no possible hierarchy. In short, what might at fist seer 2 dive prospect—the fact that man, though lhe often chooses to fgnot it, has crated for himself a universe without quality cn lho be liberating fora workd without center (which is alo. world “where the self has no boundaries, no propriety) is labyrinth open ‘ te exploration. ‘was alone in making entropy the most important fe concep of art practice atthe end of the ssi his 1 + Robert Sithson Asphalt Rundown, Rome, October 168 ‘a Spiral Jetty an Earthwork that was covered by the water of Us Great Salt Lake shortly aftr its “completion” in 1970, and whic has now temporarily reemerged, whitened by salt crystals the ‘water receded—remains the quintessential “monument” to this decade of radical expansion of the sculptural field. But many ott artists often before him, yet without theorizing it—also adopted ntropic” mode in their work. Deadpan transience (One such artist was Bruce Nauman, Working in Califoniy and thus in relative isolation from the New York art world Naw produced his first casts of interstitial spaces in the midis (for example A Cast of the Space under My Chair tl oF Paes Made Up of the Space between Tivo Rectangular Bases OH Floor (1966]). Thus even before Upturmed Tie (1969) Smithson had shown that in an entropic universe, Beta shorn of any other meaning than the ireversibility of timeeS thing. is reversible but time, and everything is eavalt signification, Nauman explored this same depletion of — were it not for their ties, we would newer have auestl Nauman’s concrete pieces were cast from Both Smithson and Nauman, in fact, were feinatl disceminating role of mieror reflections once the #2 ™ center (of identity, of self) is suspended: in Naumans HM [No.1 (1966); for example, its not only impossible fo 18 0 ‘which i the*eal” pair of hands ancl which sits mero further we have no way of reassembling into a bod sensory feds that are signified. Trying to imagine 2 8 el tion corresponding to what we sce—the tiring of MSE —