Robert Smithson
The works of many of these artists celebrate what Flavin calls "inactive history" or what the physicist calls "entropy" or "energy-drain." They bring to mind the Ice Age rather than the Golden Age, and would most likely confirm Vladimir Nabokov's observation that, "The future is but the obsolete in reverse."
"It is not only the relation of absensce to death, but also the absence of death, which is keenly felt in surveillance recordings. What I do want to suggest is that in the relatively degraded field of surveillance, as opposed to the 'high arts' of literature and documentary making, the appearances and absences of death, precisely because they are not associated with meaning, because they do not attempt to deal with the subject, impact upon us in ways which higher minded efforts do not. The nature of the aporia of death as revealed under surveillance is that, however close we come to it, however many times we rewind, we do not meet death-as-thing, but find that, in the missing of something, a death has happened." (McGrath 125-126).
ReplyDeleteTotal visibility and nothing to see.
- Bryn