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"Like the movies and the movie houses, "printed matter" plays an entropic role. Maps, charts, advertisements, art books, science books, money, architectural plans, math books, graphs, diagrams, newspapers, comics, booklets and pamphlets from industrial companies are all treated the same. Judd has a labyrinthine collection of "printed matter", some of which he "looks" at rather than reads. By this means he might take a math equation, and by sight, translate it into a metal progression of structured intervals ... Judd's sensibility encompasses geology and mineralogy. He has an excellent collection of geologic maps which he scans from time to time, not for their intended content, but for their exquisite structural precision. ('Entropy and the New Monuments', Robert Smithson,1966, p18)

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Minus Twelve


1. USELESSNESS

1. Zone of standard modules.
2. Monoliths without color.
3. An ever narrowing field of approximation known as the Method of Exhaustion.
4. The circumscribed cube.

2. ENTROPY

1. Equal units approaching divisibility.
2. Something inconsistent with common experience or having contradictory qualities.
3. Hollow, blocks in windowless room.
4. Militant laziness.

3. ABSENCE

1. Postulates of nominalism.
2. Idleness at the North Pole.
3. Exclusion of space.
4. Real things become mental vacancies.

4. INACCESSIBILITY

1. Gray walls and glass floors.
2. Domain of the Dinosaurs.
3. Toward an aesthetics of disappointment.
4. No doors.

5. EMPTINESS

1. A flying tomb disguised as an airplane.
2. Some plans for logical stupefactions.
3. The case of the "missing-link."
4. False theorems and grand mistakes.

6. INERTIA

1. Memory of a dismantled parallelepiped.
2. The humorous dimensions of time.
3. A refutation of the End of Endlessness.
4. Zeno's Second Paradox (infinite regression against movement)

7. FUTILITY

1. Dogma against value.
2. Collapses into five sec
3. To go from one extreme to another.
4. Put everything into doubt.

8. BLINDNESS

1. Two binocular holes that appear endlessly.
2. Invisible orbs
3. Abolished sight.
4. The splitting of the vanishing point.

9. STILLNESS

1. Sinking back into echoes.
2. Extinguished by reflections.
3. Obsolete ideas to be promulgated (teratologies and other marvels).
4. Cold storage.

10. EQUIVALENCE

1. Refusal to privilege one sign over another.
2. Different types of sameness.
3. Odd objections to uncertain symmetries in regular systems.
4. Any declaration of unity results in two things.

11. DISLOCATION

1. Deluging the deluge.
2. The Great Plug.
3. The Winter Solstice of 4000 B.C. (a temporal dementia).
4. Toward innumerable futures.

12. FORGETFULNESS

1. Aluminum cities on a lead planet.
2. The Museum of the Void.
3. A compact mass in a dim passageway (an anti-object).
4. A series of sightings down escarpments.


(from Robert Smithson: 'The Collected Writings' ed. Jack Flam)

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I bought the 'Collected Writings' a while ago and shelved it for a rainy day. Yesterday was certainly rainy and - surprise, surprise - down comes this book.

In fact, it wasn't such a coincidence. Who better to help me think about structures and matter and poetry than Robert Smithson? For me he exists at an interesting 'node' uniting New York Minimalism, Land Art, J.G. Ballard, Beckett, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (see 'Minus Twelve' above), Clark Coolidge ('The Crystal Text'), Deleuze and Guattari (the sheer range and dynamic of his thinking).