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"a jejune experiment for proving entropy. Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided 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 grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.
"Of course, if we filmed such an experiment we could prove the reversibility of eternity by showing the film backwards, but then sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost and enter the state of irreversibility. Somehow this suggests that the cinema offers an illusive or temporary escape from physical dissolution. The false immortality of the film gives the viewer an illusion of control over eternity—but “the superstars” are fading." -Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"
Smithson's angst, placing art within the grand scales of cosmic time. This was his hurt. Casting art as mere symbolic regaining control if not return sandboxes to "order." (Smithson obviously believed in confronting geologic time with erections against it, casting spells in landscape.) Besides the fact that Smithson sounds a little bit like a cop here, the grand scales of his cynicism surpasses thinking about comfort, likely because he himself had it, and was rewarded for his soft chair from which to think about things bigger than, because thinking "big" was important then. The disinterested and "grand" aesthetic.
See too:
Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission,
Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street
