hal foster rosalind krauss yve-alain bois benjamin h. d. buchloh david joselit third edition with 884 illustrations, 579 in colour art SINCE 1900 modernism antimodernism postmodernism @ Thames & Hudsonfist published essays, “Entropy and the New Monu- 5), Robert Smithson singles out a passage from a ‘exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s painting, written Judd, notes Smithson, “speaks of ‘alot of visible Golonial stores, lobbies, most houses, most aluminium, and plastic with leather texture, the ood, the cute and modern patterns inside jets and “Near the super highway surrounding the city” discount centers and cut-rate stores with their (On the inside of suck places are maze-likecoun- of neatly stacked merchandise; rank on rank it sumer oblivion. The lugubrious complexity of s has brought to art a new consciousness of the he dull But this very vapidity and dullness is what ofthe moregifed artists. eds to the analysis of what he calls “hyper- ‘of Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, and Judd providing one of the earliest and still nents of Minimalism. have been among the early supporters of y come as a surprise—his short articles on the out of a “simulacral” reading of Pop develops later about Warhol—but only n mistakenly read, against the intent ‘mere continuation of early geometrical hson, still in his twenties, was able to grasp 8 foe 180 «f Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Robert Smithson marks " as a generative concept of artistic practice in the late sixties. conducted a few months before his death, was entitled “Entropy Made Visible") Formulated in the nineteenth century inthe field of thermodynamics (it isthe second foundational principle of that Science), the law of entropy predicts the inevitable extinction of ‘energy in any given system, the dissolution of any organization into a state of disorder and indifferentiation. It asserts the inexorable and irreversible implosion of any kind of hierarchical oder into a terminal sameness Smithson’s example for entropy is very close to the first one given by scientists, which had to do with the temperature of water: "Picturein your mind's eye the sandbox divided in hal with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a chile and have him run hundreds of times clockwise inthe box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grays after that we have him run anticlockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division buta greater degree of grayness and an increase of entropy.” ‘The concept of entropy had fascinated many people since its inception, especially because the example chosen by Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), one ofits creators, was the fact that the solar system ‘would inevitably cool down (this understandably fed the mille narian and cosmic pessimism of many books written at the end of the nineteenth century). Very early on—and Smithson directly borrowed from ths tradition—the law of entropy was applied both, ‘to language (the way words empty out when they become clichés) and to the displacement of use-value by exchange-value in an economy of mass production. The final book of the nineteenth- century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet, 0 of Smithson’s favorites, already merged these two lines of enquiry ‘recounting the growth of the entropic shadow being cast on our Tives and our thought under the condition of capitalism. Repetition, (oF goods on the marketplace, of words and images in the mela) is profoundly entropic; it is from this discovery that the theory of information would emerge in the late forties,a mathematical model ‘of communication according to which the conte: Gnverse proportion to its probability —Kennedy’s assassination was ‘world event, uti the rule were for every American president to be Ailled in order to end his term, it would have had no more content ‘than dusk or daven and would have barely made the headin But while for Flaubert and his peers our entropic f defining characteristic of modernity —was sheer doom, Smithson of any fact isin ‘Smithson and entropy 119672 6961-096a 8 reread the very inexorability of this process as the promise of @ definitive critique of man and his pretenses. It was not only the pathos of Abstract Expressionism (long become suspect) that was rendered irrele int once the entropic logic was followed to the end, but also the modernist struggle against arbitrariness in art (the purported elimination, in each art, of any convention that was not “essential” to it), a notion that had turned increasingly dogmatic in the writings of Clement Greenberg. Entropy is for Smithson the ultimate in what the structuralists term “motivated,” ‘or nonarbitrary. Since itis the only universal condition of all things and beings, there is nothing arbitrary about entropy. It wasin order to manifest just this pervasive nature of entropy that soon after the ‘© 1969 exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form,” and perhaps as a rebuttal of the emphasis on form in its ttle, Smithson conceived of ‘= Asphalt Rundown [1] as a reading of Pollock’s drip process and its gravitational pull as profoundly entropic. Writing in “Entropy and the New Monuments” that Minimalist art had climinated “time as decay.” Smithson indicated his disenchantment with the movement as failing to push into the domain of entropy: “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future,” he wrote. But what if one were to connect the future with the distant past—what if posthistory (time after the demise of man) were nothing but the mirror image of prehistory? Smithson’s childlike fascination with dinosaurs and fossils stemmed from his essentially antihumanist conception of history as a cumulative succession of disasters, Time as decay thus became one of his strongest concerns and with it the necessity ‘of creating not merely “new” monuments, but “antimonuments’ monuments tothe wane of all monuments Tin fact one did not even need to create such artifacts, the world sas already full of them. This is what Smithson discovered when, in September 1967, with his Instamatic camera hung from his shoulder just like a tourist in Rome ("Has Passaic replaced Rome as the Eternal City?” he asked), he revisited his small, industrial frome town. The result, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey is a mock travelogue documenting various “monu- ments” to decay (the last of them being the sandbox mentioned above), particularly construction sites that Smithson saw as facto ties of ruins in reverse”: “this is the opposite of the'romantic ruin’ ‘because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but athe rise into ruin before they ae built” Everything, whatever its past, even before it has any past, i geared inthe end toward the Tome equal state—which also means that there is no justifiable “center, no possible hierarchy In short, what might at fist seem a dire prospect—the fact that man, though he offen chooses to {ignore it, has created for himself universe without quality-“