A Sedimentation of theMind: Earth Projects

The earth's surface and the figments of themind have a way of disintegrating into discreteregions of art. Various agents, both fictional andreal, somehow trade places with each other-one cannot avoid muddy thinking when it comesto earth projects, or what I will call" "abstractgeology." One's mind and the earth are in aconstant· state of erosion, mental rivers wearaway abstract banks, brain waves underminecliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones ofunknowing, and conceptual crystallizationsbreak apart into deposits of gritty reason. Vastmoving faculties occur in this geologicalmiasma, and they move in the most physicalway. This movement seems motionless, yet itcrushes the landscape of logic under glacialreveries. This slow flowage makesone consciousof the turbidity of thinking. Slump, debris slides,avalanches all take place within the crackinglimits of the brain. The entire body is pulled into

.' .

The Bangor Quarry. Slate site in an uncontainedcondition before being contained in a Non-Siteby Robert Smithson. (Photo: Virginia Dwan.)

the cerebral sediment, where particles andfragments make themselves known as solidconsciousness. A bleached and fractured worldsurrounds the artist. To organize this mess ofcorrosion into patterns,; grids, and subdivisionsis an esthetic process that has scarcely beentouched.

The manifestations of technology are at timesless "extensions" of man (Marshall McLuhan'santhropomorphism), than they are aggregates ofelements. Even the most advanced tools andmachines are made of the raw matter of theearth. Today's highly refined technological toolsare not much different in this respect from thoseof the caveman. Most of the better artists preferprocesses that have not been idealized, or differ-entiated into "objective" meanings. Commonshovels, awkward looking excavating devices,what Michael Heizer calls "dumb tools," picks,pitchforks, the machine used by suburban con-tractors, grim tractors that have the clumsinessof armored dinosaurs •. and plows that simplypush dirt around. Machines like Benjamin Holt'ssteam tractor (invented in 1885)--"lt crawls overmud like a caterpillar." Digging engines andother crawlers that can travel over rough terrainand steep grades. Drills and explosives that can

Robert Smithson, Non-Site (Slate from Bangor,Pa.), 1968.

produce shafts and earthquakes. Geometrical" trenches could be dug" with the help of the

"ripper"-steel toothed rakes mounted on trac-tors. With such equipment construction takes onthe look of destruction; perhaps that's why cer- .tain architects hate bulldozers and steamshovels:""They seem to ~urn the terrain into un-finished cities of organized wreckage. A sense ofchaotic planning engulfs site after site. Subdivi-sions are made-but to what purpose? Buildingtakes on a singular wildness as loaders scoopand dragsoil all over the place. Excavations formshapeless mounds of debris, ,miniature lal1d-slides of dust, mud, sand and gravel. Dumptrucks spill soil into an infinity of heaps. Thedipper of the giant mining power shovel is 25feet high and digs 140cu. yds. (250tons) in onebite. Theseprocesses of heavy construction havea devastating kind of primordial grandeur, andare in many ways more astonishing than thefinished project-be it a road or a building. Theactual disruption of the earth's crust is at timesvery compelling, and seems to confirm Heracli-

"tus's Fragment 124, "The most beautiful world. is like "a heap of rubble tossed down in confu-

sion." The tools of art have too long been con-fined to "the studio/' The city gives the illusion

Robert Smithson, Non-Site (Mica from Portland,Conn.) 1968. "

that earth does not exist. Heizer calls his earthprojects "The alternative to the absolute citysystem."

Recently, in Vancouver, lain Baxter put on anexhibition of Piles that were located at differentpoints in the city; h~ also helpedln the presenta-tion of a Portfolio of Piles. Dumping and pouringbecome - interesting techniques. Carl Andre's"grave site"-a tiny pile of sand, was displayedunder a stairway at the Museum of Contempo-rary Crafts last year. Andre, unlike Baxter, ismore concerned with the elemental in things.Andre's pife hasno anthropomorphic overtones;he gives it a clarity that avoids the idea oftemporal space.A serenification takes place.Den-nis Oppenheim has also considered the "pile";-"the basic components of concrete and gypsum'... devoid of manual organization." Some ofOppenheim's proposals suggest desert physio-graphy-mesas, buttes, mushroom mounds, andother "deflations" (the removal of materialfrom beach and other land surfaces by windaction). My own Tar Pool and Gravel Pit (1966)proposal makesone conscious ofthe primal ooze.A molten substance is poured into a square sinkthat is surrounded by another square sink ofcoarse gravel. The ta.r cools and flattens into a

Buckwheat Mineral Dump. Rocksite in an uncon-tained condition before being contained inNon-Site #3 by Robert Smithson. (Photo: 'NancyHolt).

Michael Heizer, Compression Line, 1968, un-painted plywood, 16' long, 6" surface opening,24" depth, 24" base (underground). EI MirageDry lake, Mohave Desert, California.

sticky level deposit. This carbonaceous sedimentbrings to mind a tertiary world of petroleum,asphalts, ozokerite, and bituminous agglomer-ations.

Primary EnvelopmentAt the low levels of consciousness the artist

experiences undifferentiated or unboundedmethods of procedure that break with the fo-cused limits of rational technique. Here tools areundifferentiated from the material they operateon, or they. seem to sink back into their primor~dial condition. Robert Morris fArtforum, April,1968) sees the paint brush vanish into Pollock's,,1stick," and the stick dissol~e into "poured

" paint" from a container used by Morris louis.What then is one to do with the container? Thisentropy of technique leaves one with an emptylimit, or no limit at all. All differentiated technol-ogy becomes meaningless to the artist whoknows this state. "What the Nominalists call thegrit in the machine," says T. E.Hulme in Cinders,"1 call the fundame'ntal element of the machine."The rational critic of art cannot risk this aban-

donment into "oceanic" undifferentiation, he canonly deal with the limits that come after thisplunge into such a world of non-containment.

At this point I must return to what I think is animportant issue, namely Tony Smith's ~'carride"on the "unfinished turnpike." "This drive was arevealing experience. The road and much of thelandscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't becalled a work of art." (Talking with Tony Smith bySamuel Wagstaff Jr., Artforum, December 1966.)He is talking about a sensation, not the finishedwork of art; this doesn't imply that he is anti-art.Smith is describing the state of hiS'mind in the"primary process" of making contact with mat-ter. This process"is called by Anton Ehrenzweig"dedifferentiation," and it involves a suspended .question regarding "Iimitlessness" (Freud's no-tion of the "oceanic") that goes back to Civiliza-tion and Its Discontents. Michael Fried's shock at

. Smith's experiences shows that the critic's senseof limit cannot risk the rhythm of de-differentiation that swings between "oceanic"fragmentation . and strong determinants.Ehrenzweig says that in modern art this rhythmis "somewhat onesided"-toward the oceanic.Allan Kaprow's thinking is a good example-"Most humans, it seems, still put up fencesaround their acts and thoughts-" (Artforum,June, 1968.) Fried thinks he knows who has the"finest" fences around their art. Fried claims herejects the "infinite," but this is Fried writing inArtforum, February 1967 on Morris louis, "Thedazzling blankness of the untouched canvas atonce repluses and engulfs the eye, like an infiniteabyss, the abyss that opens up behind the leastmark that we make on a flat surface, or wouldopen up if innumerable conventions both of artand practical life did not restrict the conse-quences of our act within narrow bounds." The"innumerable conventions" do not exist for cer-tain artists who do exist within a physical"abyss." Most critics cannot endure the suspen-sion of boundaries between what Ehrenzweigcalls the "self and the non-self." They are apt todismiss Malevich's Non Objective World aspoetic debris, or only refer to the "abyss" as arational metaphor "within narrow bounds." Theartist who is physically engulfed tries to giveevidence of this experience through a limited(mapped) revision of the original unboundedstate. I agree with Fried that limits are not part ofthe primary process that Tony Smith was talkingabout. There is different experience before thephysical abyss than before the mapped revision.Nevertheless, the quality of Fried's fear (dread) is

high, but his experience of the abyss is low-aweak metaphor-"like an infinite abyss."

The bins or containers of my Non-Sites gatherin the fragments that are experienced in thephysical abyss of raw matter. The tools oftechnology become a part of the Earth's geologyas they S'ink back into their original state. Ma-chines like dinosaurs must return to dust or rust.One might say a "de-architecturing" takes placebefore the artist sets his limits outside the studioor the room.

Better Homes and IndustriesGreat sprays of greenery make the Lambertlive-in room an oasis atop a cliff dwelling. Ina corner, lighted by skylights and spotlights,"Hard Red, " an oil by Jack Bush, all plantingby Lambert Landscape Company.

-Caption under a photograph!House and Garden, July 1968

In Art in America, Sept.-Oct. 1966, there is aPortrait of Anthony Caro, with photographs ofhis sculpture in settings and landscapes thatsuggest English gar.dening. One 'work, PrimaLuce 1966, painted yellow, matches the yellowdaffodils peeking out behind it, and it sits on awell cut lawn. I know, the sculptor prefers to seehis art indoors, but the fact that this work endedup where it did is no excuse for thoughtlessnessabout installation. The more compelling artiststoday are concerned with "place" or "site"-Smith, de Maria, Andre, Heizer, Oppenheim,Huebler-to name a few. Somehow, Caro's workpicks up its surroundings, and gives one a senseof a contrived, but tamed, "wildness" thatechoes to the tradition of English gardening.

Around 1720 the English invented the antifor-·mal garden as protest against the French formalgarden. The French use of geometric forms wasrejected as something "unnatural." This seems

· to relate to today's debate between so-called"formalism" and "anti-formalism." The traces ofweak naturalism cling to the background ofCaro's Prima Luce. A leftover Arcadia with flow-ery overtones gives the sculpture the look ofsome industrial ruin. The brightly painted sur-

·faces cheerfully seemto avoid any suggestion ofthe "romantic ruin," but they are on closer in-vestigation related to just that. Caro's industrialruins, or- concatenations of steel and alumi-num may be viewed as Kantian "things-in-themselves," or be placed into some syntax

Michael Heizer, Two-stage liner buried in earthand snow, Sierra Mountains, near Reno, 1967.

based on So and So's theories, but at this point Iwill leave those notions to the keepers of "mod-ernity." The English consciousness of art hasalways been best displayed in its "landscapegardens." "Sculpture" was used more to gener-ate a set of conditions.

Clement Greenberg's notion of "the land-scape" reveals itself with shades of T. S. Eliot inan article, Poetry of Vision (Artforum, April 1968).Here "Anglicizing tastes" are evoked in his de-scriptions of the Irish landscape. "The ruinedcastles and abbeys," says Greenberg, "thatstrew the beautiful countryside are gray anddim,': shows he takes "pleasure in ruins." At anyrate, the "pastoral," it seems, is outmoded. Thegardens of history are being replaced by sites oftime.

Memory traces of tranquil gardens as "idealnature"-jejune Edens that suggest an ide;:!ofbanal "quality"-persist in popular magazineslike House Beautiful and Better Homes and Gar-dens. A kind of watered down Victorianism, anelegant notion of industrialism in the woods; all

this brings to mind some kind of wasted charm.The decadence of "interior decoration" is full ofappeals to "countrY manners" and liberal-democratic notions of gentry. Many art maga-zines have gorgeous photographs of artificialindustrial ruins (sculpture) on their pages. The."gloomy" ruins of aristocracy are transformedinto the "happy" ruins of the humanist. Couldone say that art degenerates as it approachesgardening?* These "garden-traces" seem part oftime and not history, they seem to be involv~d inthe dissolution of "progress." It was John-Ruskinwho spoke of the "dreadful Hammers" of thegeologists, as they destroyed the classical order.The landscape reels back into the millions andmillions of years of "geologic time."

- From Steel to Rust

As "technology" and "industry" began to be-come an ideology in the New York Art World inthe .late '50s and early '60s, the private studionotions of "craft" collapsed. The products ofindustry and technology began to have an ap-peal to the artist who wanted to work like a "steelwelder" or a "laboratory technician.'.' This valua-tion of the material products of heavy industry,first developed by David Smith and later byAnthony Caro, led to a fetish for steel and alumi-num as a medium (painted or unpainted).Molded steel and cast aluminum are machinemanufactured, and as a result they bear--thestamp of technological ideology. Steel is ahard,tough metal, suggesting the permanence oftechnological values. It is composed of iron al-loyed with various small percentages of carbon;steel may be alloyed with other metals, nickel,chromium, etc., to produce specific propertiessuch as hardness and resistance to rusting. Yet,the more I think about steel itself, devoid of thetechnological refinements, the more rust be-comes the fundamental property of steel. Rustitself is a reddish brown or reddish 'yellow coat-ing that often appears on "steel sculpture," andis caused by oxidation (an interesting non-technological condition), as during exposure toair or moisture; it consists almost entirely offerric oxide, Fe20aand ferric hydroxide, Fe(OH)a.In the technological mind rust evokes a fear ofdisuse, inactivity, entropy, and ruin. Why steel isvalued over rust is a technological value, not anartistic one.

By excluding technological processes from themaking of art, we began to discover other proc-

Robert Smithson, for A Non-Site below.· Aerialphotograph/map, 1968.

Robert Smithson, A Non-Site (indoor earthwork),blue painted aluminum with sand, 12x65~x65~", 1968.

essesof a more fundamental order. The break-up or fragmentation of matter makesone awareof the sub-strata of the Earth before it is overlyrefined by industry into sheet metal, extrudedI-beams, aluminum channels, tubes, wire, pipe,cold-rolled steel, iron bars, etc. I have oftenthought ;;lbout non-resistant processes thatwould involve the actual sedimentation of matteror what I called "Pulverizations" back in 1966.Oxidation, hydration, carbonatization,and solu-tion (the major processes of rock and mineraldisintegration) are four methods that could be

.-turned toward the making of art..The smeltingprocess that goes into the making of steel andother alloys separates "impurities" from an-orig-inal ore, and extracts metal in order to make amore "ideal" product. Burnt-out ore or slag-likerust is as basic and primary as the materialsmelted from it. Technological ideology has nosense of time other than. its immediate "supplyand demand," and its laboratories function asblinders to the rest of the world. like the refined"paints" of the studio, the refined "metals" ·ofthe laboratory exist within an "ideal system."Such enclosed "pure" systems make it impossi-ble to perceive any other kinds of processesother than the ones of differentiated technology.

Refinement of matter from one state toanother does not mean that so-called "im-purities" of sediment are "bad"-the earth isbuilt on sedimentation and disruption. A refine-ment based on all the matter that has beendiscarded by the technological ideal seems to betaking place. The coarse swathes of tar on TonySmith's plywood mock-ups are no more or lessrefined than the burnished or painted steel ofDavid Smith. Tony Smith's surfaces displaymore of a sense of the "prehistoric world" that isnot reduced to ideals and pure gestalts. The factremains that the mind and things of certainartists are not "unities," but things in a state ofarrested disruption. One might object to "hol-low" volumes in favor of "solid materials," butno materials are solid, they all contain cavernsand fissures. Solids are particles built up around

- flux, they are objective illusions s_upporting grit,a collection of surfaces ready to be cracked. Allchaos is put into the dark inside of the art. Byrefusing "technological miracles" the artist be-gins to know the corroded moments, the car-boniferous states of thought, the shrinkage ofmental mud, in the geologic chaos-in the strataof esthetic consciousness. The refuse betweenmind and matter is a mine of information.

The Dislocation of Craft-AndFall of the Studio

Plato's Timaeus shows the demiurge or theartist creating a model order, with his eyesfixedon a non-visual order of Ideas, and seeking togive the purest representation of them. The"classical" notion of the artist copying a perfectmental model has been shown to be an error.The modern artist in his "studio," working out anabstract grammar within the limits of his "craft,"is trapped in but another snare. When the fis-sures between mind and matter multiply into aninfinity of gaps;the studio begins to crumble andfall like The House of Usher, so that mind andmatter get endlessly confounded. Deliverancefrom the confines of the studio frees the artist toa degree from the snares of craft and the bond-age of creativity. Such a condition exists with-out any appeal to "nature." Sadism is the endproduCt of nature, when it is based on -thebiomorphic order of rational creation. The artistis fe~ered by this order, if he believes himself.tobe creative, and this allows for his servitudewhich is designed by the vile laws of Culture.Ourculture has lost its sense of death, so it cart killboth mentally and physically, thinking all thetime that it is establishing the most creativeorder possible.

The Dying LanguageThe namesof minerals and the minerals them-

selves do not differ from each other, becauseatthe bottom of both the material and the print isthe beginning of an abysmal number of fissures.Words and rocks contain a language that followsa syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at anywordlong enough and you will see it open up into aseries of faults, into a terrain of particles eachcontaining its own void. This discomforting lan-guage of fragmentation offers no easy gestaltsolution; the certainties of didactic discourse arehurled into the. erosion of the poetic principle.Poetry being forever lost must submit to its ownvacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustionrather than creation. Poetry is always a dyinglanguage but never a dead language.

Journalism in the guise of art criticism fearsthe disruption of language, so it resorts to being"educational" and "historical." Art critics aregenerally poets who have betrayed their art, andinstead have tried to turn art 'into a matter ofreasoned discourse, and, occasionally, when

Walter de Maria, Half Mile Long Drawing, chalk, 2parallel lines, 12 feet apart, April, 1968, MohaveDesert, California. .

Robert Smithson, Pulverizations, photostat,1966.

their "truth" breaks down, they resort to a poeticquote. Wittgenstein has shown us what can hap-pen when language is "idealized," and that it ishopeless to try to fit language into some abso-lute logic, whereby everythinif objective can be-tested. We have to fabricate our rules as we goalong the avalanches of language and over theterraces of criticism.

Poe'sNarrative of A. Gordon Pym seems to meexcellent art criticism and prototype for rigorous"non-site" investigations. "Nothing worth men-tioni.ng occurred during the next twenty-fourhours except that, in examining the ground tothe eastward third chasm, we found two triangu-lar holes of great depth, and also with blackgranite sides." His descriptions of chasms andholes seem to verge on proposals for"earthwords." The·shapes of ttte chasms them-selves become "verbal roots" that spell out thedifference between darkness and light. Poe endshis mental maze with the sentence-"I havegraven it within the hills and my vengeance uponthe dust within the rock."

The Climate of SightThe climate of sight changes from wet to dry

and from dry to wet according toone's mentalweather. The prevailing conditions of one'spsyche affect how he views art. We have alreadyheard much about "cool" or "hot" art, but notmuch about "wet" and "dry" art. The viewer, behe an artist or a critic, is subject to a climatologyofthe brain and eye. The wet mind enjoys "poolsand stains" of paint. "Paint" itselfappears to be akind .of liquefaction. Such wet eyes love to lookon melting, dissolving, soaking surfaces thatgive the illusion at times of tending toward agaseousness, atomization or fogginess. Thiswatery syntax is at times related to the "canvassupport." . .

The world disintegrates around me.-Yvonne Rainer

By Palm Desert springs often run dry.-Van Dyke Parks,

Song CycleThe following is a proposal for those who have

leaky minds. It could be thought of as The Mindof Mud, or in later stages, The Mind of Clay.

THE MUD POOL PROJECT1. Dig up 100 ft. sq. area of earth with a

pitchfork. .2. Get'local fire department to fill the area with

water. A fire hose may be used for thispurpose.

3. The area will be finished when it turns tomud.

4. Let it dry under the sun until it turns to clay.5. Repeat process at will.

When dried under the sun's rays for a sufficientlylong time, mud and clay shrink and crack in anetwork of fissures which enclose polygonalareas.

-Fredric H. Lahee,Field Geology

The artist or critic with a dank brain is bound toend up appreciating anything that suggests sat-uration, a kind of watery effect, an overall seep-age, discharges that submerge pereeptions in anonrush of dripping observation. They a'regrate-ful for an art that evokes general liquid states,and disdain the desiccation of fluidity. They prizeanything that looks drenched, be it canvas orsteel. Depreciation of aridity means that onewould prefer to see art in a dewy greensetting-say the hills of Vermont, rather than thePainted Desert.

Aristotle believed that heat combined withdryness resulted in fire: where else could thisfeeling take place. than in a desert or inMalevich's head? "No more 'likenesses of reai-ity: no idealistic images, nothing but a desert!",says Malevich in The Non-Objective World. WaI-ter DeMaria and Michael Heizer have actuallyworked in the Southwestern deserts. SaysHeizer, in some scattered notes, "Earth linersinstalled in Sierras, and down on desert floor inCarson-Reno area." The desert is less "nature"than a concept, a place that swallows up bound-aries. When the artist goes to the desert heenriches his absence and burns off the water(paint) on his brain. The slush of the city evapo-rates from the artist's mind as he installs his art.Heizer's "dry lakes" become mental maps thatcontain the vacancy of Thanatos. A conscious-ness of the desert operates between craving andsatiety.

Jackson Pollock's art tends toward a torrentialsense of materia; that makes his -paintings looklike splashes of marine sediments. Deposits ofpaint cause layers and crusts that suggest noth-ing "formal" but rather a physical metaphorwithout realism or naturalism. Full Fathom FiVebecomes a Sargasso Sea, a dense lagoon ofpigment, a logical state of an oceanic mind.Pollock's introduction of pebbles into his privatetopographies suggests an interest il'l'geologicalartifices. The rational idea of "painting" begins

to disintegrate and decompose into so manysedimentary concepts. Both Yves Klein and JeanDubuffet hinted at global or topographicsedimentary notions in their works-both.worked with ashes and cinders. Says Dubuffet,regarding the North and South P61es,"The rev-olution of a being on its axis, reminiscent of adervish, suggests fatiguing, wasted effort; it isnot a pleasant idea to consider and seems in-stead the provisional solution, until a better onecomes along, of despair." A sense ofthe Earth asa map undergoing disruption leads the artist tothe realization that nothing is. certain or formal.Language itself becomes mountains of symbolicdebris. Klein's IKB globes betray a sense offutility-a collapsed logic. G. E. M. Anscombewriting on "Negation" in An Introduction toWittgenstein's Tractatus says, "But it is clearthen an all-white or all-black globe is not a map."It is also clear thafKlein's all blue globe is not amap, rather it is an anti-map, a negation of"creatiorf' and the "creator" that is supposed to

. be in the artist's "self."

The Wreck of Former BoundariesThe strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum.

Embedded in the sediment is a text that containslimits and boundaries which -evade the rationalorder, and social structures which confine art. In ,order to read the rocks we must become con-scious of geologic time, and of the layers ofprehistoric material that is entombed in theEarth's crust. When one scans the ruined sites ofprehistory one seesa heap of wrecked maps thatupsets our present art historical limits. A rubbleof logic confronts the viewer as he looks into thelevels of the sedimentations. The abstract gridscontaining the raw matter are observed as some-thing incomplete, broken and shattered.

In June, 1968, my wife, Nancy, Virginia Dwan,Dan Graham and I visited the slate quarries inBangor-Pen Angyl, Pennsylvania. -Banks of sus-pended slate hung over a greenish-blue pond atthe bottom of a deep quarry. All boundaries anddistinctiOfls lost their meaning in this ocean ofslate and collapsed all notions of gestalt unity.The present fell forward and backward into atumult· of "de-differentiation," to use AntonEhrenzweig's word for entropy. It was as thoughone was at the bottom of a petrified sea andgazing on countless stratographic horizons thathad fallen into endless directions of steepness ..Syncline '.(downward) and anticline (upwardfoutcroppings and the asymmetrical cave-ins

caused minor swoon~ and vertigos. The brittle-ness of the site seemed to swarm around one,causing a sense of displacement. I collected acanvas bag full of siate chips for a small Non-Site.

Yet, if art is art it must have limits. How can·one COlJJainthis "oceanic" site? I have developedthe Non-Site, which in a physical way containsthe disruption of the site. The container is in asense a fragment itself, something that could becalled a three-dimensional map. Without appealto "gestalts" or "anti-form," it actually exists as a

. fragment of a greater framentation. It is a three-dimensional perspective that h'as broken. awayfrom the whole, while containing the lack of itsown containment. There are no mysteries inthese vestiges, no traces of an end or· a begin-ning.

Cracking Perspectives and Gritin the Vanishing Point

Parallactic perspectives have introduced them-selves into the new earth-projects in a waythat is physical and three-dimensional. This kindof convergence subverts gestalt surfaces andturns 'sites into vast illusions. The ground be-comes a map.

The map of my Non-Site #1 (an indoorearthwork) has six vanishing points that losethemselves in a pre-existent earth mound that isat the center of a hexagonal airfield in the PineBarren Plains in South New Jersey. Six runwaysradiate around a central axis. These runwaysanchor my 31 subdivisions. The actual Non-Siteis made up of 31 metal containers of painted bluealuminum, each containing sand from the actualsite.

De Maria's parallel chalk lines are 12feet apartand run a half a mile along the Dry Lake of EIMirage in the Mojave Desert.The dry mud underthese lines is cracking into an infinite variety ofpolygons, mainlysix~sided. Under the beatingsun shrinkage is constantly going on causingirregular outlines. Rapid drying causes widelyspaced cracks, while slow drying causes closelyspaced cracks. (See E. M. Kindle's Some FactorsAffecting the Development of Mud Cracks,Jour.Geol. Vol. 25,1917, p. 136).De Maria's-lines makeone conscious of a weakening cohesion thatspreads out in all directions. Nevada is a goodplace for the person who wants to study cracks.

Heizer's Compression Line is made by theearth pressing against the sides of two parallellengths of plywood, so that they converge into

\

two facing sunken perspectives. The earth sur-rounding this double perspective is composed of"hardpan" (a hard impervious sediment thatdoes not become plastic, but can be shattered byexplosives). A drainage layer exists under theentire work. ...-:

The Value of Time. For too long the artist has been estranged from

his own "time." Critics, by focusing on the "artobject," deprive the artist of any existence in theworld of both mind and matter. The mentalprocess of the artist which takes place in time isdisowned, so that a commodity value can bemaintained by asystem independent of the artist.Art, in this sense, is considered "timeless" or aproduct of "no time at all"; this becomes aconvenient way to exploit the artist out of hisrightful claim to his temporal processes. Thearguments for the contention that time is unrealis a fiction of language, and not of the material oftime or art. Criticism, dependent on rationalillusions, appeals to a society that values onlycommodity type art separated from the artist'smind. By separating art from the "primary pro-cess," the artist is cheated in more ways thanone. Separate "things," "forms," "objects,""shapes," etc., with beginnings and endings aremere convenient fictions: there is only an uncer-tain disintegrating order that transcends thelimits of rational separations. The fictionserected in the eroding time stream are apt to beswamped at any moment. The brain itself re-sembles an eroded rock from which ideas andideals leak.

When a thing is seen through the conscious-nessof temporality, it is changed into somethingthat is nothing. This all-engulfing sense providesthe mental ground for the object, so that it ceasesbeing a mere object and becomes art. The objectgets to be less and less but exists as somethingclearer. Every object, if it is art, is charged withthe rush of time even though it is static, but allthis depends on the viewer. Not everybody seesthe art in the same way, only an artist viewingartknows the ecstasy or dread, and this viewingtakes place in time. A great artist can make art bysimply casting a glance. A set of glances could beas solid as any thing or place, but the societycontinues to cheat the artist out of his "art oflooking," by only valuing "art objects." The exis-tence of the artist in time is worth as much asthefinished p~oduct. Any critic who devalues thetime of the ·artist is the enemy of art and the

Dennis Oppenheim, Earth Proposal for GallerySpace, 1968.

artist. The stronger and clearer the artist's view.of time the more he will resent any slander onthis domain. By desecrating this domain, certaincritics defraud the work and mind of the artist.Artists with a weak .view of time are easily de-ceived by this victimizing kind of criticism, anqare seduced into some trivial history. An artist isenslaved by time, only if the time is controlled bysomeone or something other than himself. Thedeeper an artist sinks into the time stream themore it becomes oblivion; because of this, hemust remain close to the temporal surfaces.Many would like to forget time altogether, be-cause it conceals the "death principle" (everyauthentic artist knows this). Floating in this tem-poral river are the remnants of art history, yet the"present" cannot support the cultures of Europe,or even the archaic or primitive civilizations; itmust instead explore the pre- and post-historic

Base Side Panel Frame (glass -broken). (FromEdward Ruscha's Royal Road Test.) -

mind; it must go into the places where remotefutures meet remote pasts. .

• The sinister in a primitive sense seems to have its origin inwhat could be called "quality gardens" (Paradise). Dreadfulthings seem to have happened in those haif-forgottenEdens. Why does the Garden of Delights suggest somethingperverse? Torture gardens. Deer Park. The Grottos ofTiberius. Gardens of Virtue are somehow always "Iost". Adegraded paradise is perhaps worse than a degraded hell.America abounds in banal heavens • .in vapid "happy-hunting grounds," and in "natural" hells like Death ValleyNational Monument or The Devil's Playground. The public"sculpture garden" for the most part is an outdoor "room,"that in time becomes a limbo of modern isms. Too muchthinking about "gardens" leads to perplexity and agitation.Gardens like the levels of criticism bring one to the brink ofchaos. This footnote is turning into a dizzying maze, full oftenuous paths and innumerable riddles. The abysmal prob-lem of gardens somehow involves a fall from somewhere orsomething. The certainty of the absolute garden will neverbe regained.