Cayuga Salt Mine Site
This was the first interior underground site that I did, the one in the salt mine. There you have an amorphous room situation, an interior that’s completely free. There’s no right angles forming a rectilinear thing. So I’m adding the rectilinear focal point that sort of spills over into the fringes of the non-descript amorphousness. Then it’s all contained when you shoot the photograph so you have that dialectic in that. On a topographical earth surface you don’t have that kind of enclosure. There’s a sort of rhythm between containment and scattering. It’s a fundamental process that Anton Ehrenzweig has gone into, I think his views are very pertinent in that he talks about this in terms of containment or scattering.
An artist in a sense does not differentiate experience into objects. Everything is a field or maze, and you get that maze, serially, in the salt mine in that one goes from point to point. The seriality bifurcates. Some paths go somewhere, some don’t. You just follow and what you’re left with is like a network or a series of points, and then these points can then be built in conceptual structures.
The non-site situation doesn’t look like the mine. It’s abstract. The piece I did here utilizes the same dialectic of the site/non-site, except the one controlling element is the mirror which in a sense is deployed differently. There’s an element of shoring and supporting and pressures. The material becomes the container. In other non-sites, the container was rigid, the material amorphous. In this case, the container is amorphous, the mirror is the rigid thing. It’s a variation on the theme of the dialectic of the site/non-site.
I’m using a mirror because the mirror in a sense is both the physical mirror and the reflection: the mirror as a concept and abstraction; then the mirror as a fact within the mirror of the concept. So that’s a departure from the other kind of contained, scattering idea. But still the bi-polar unity between the two places is kept. Here the site/non-site becomes encompassed by mirror as a concept- mirroring, the mirror being a dialectic.
The mirror is a displacement, as an abstraction absorbing, reflecting the site in a very physical way. It’s an addition to the site. But I don’t leave the mirrors there. I pick them up. It’s slightly different from the site/non-site thing. Still in my mind it hasn’t completely disclosed itself. There’s still an implicit aspect to it. It’s another level of process that I’m exploring. A different method of containment.
The route to the site is very indeterminate. It’s important because it’s an abyss between the abstraction and the site; a kind of oblivion. You could go there on a highway, but a highway to the site is really an abstraction because you don’t really have contact with the earth. A trail is more of a physical thing. These are all variables, indeterminate elements which will attempt to determine the route from the museum to the mine. I’ll designate points on a line and stabilize the chaos between the two points. Like stepping stones. If I take somebody on a tour of the site, I just show them where I removed things. Not didactic, but dialectic.
Oblivion to me is a state when you’re not conscious of the time or space you are in. You’re oblivious to its limitations. Places without meaning, a kind of absent or pointless vanishing point.
There’s no order outside the order of the material.
I don’t think you can escape the primacy of the rectangle. I always see myself thrown back to the rectangle. That’s where my things don’t offer any kind of freedom in terms of endless visitas or infinite possibilities. There’s no exit, no road to utopia, no great beyond in terms of exhibition space. I see it as inevitability; of going toward the fringes, towards the broken, the entropic. But even that has limits.
Every single perception is essentially determinate. It isn’t a question of form or anti-form. It’s a limitation. I’m not all that interested in the problems of form and anti-form, but in limits and how these limits destroy themselves and disappear.
It’s not a matter of what I’d like to do, but how things result. There are strict limits, but they never stop until you do.
By Robert Smithson
From Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings