Smithsontag

The monument is the marker that stands, that stands in for something else. It holds a place with a crystalline perlocutionary desire. This desire is to imprint a stilling, a melancholy gape, and a desire that this stilling should be iterative, self perpetuating. We can claim that monuments desire.

Smithson is excited by the first structure that meets his criteria, that feels wrong and romantic enough to be a distraction from the deadlands. He pulls the buzzer-cord and gets off at the corner of Union Avenue and River Drive. The sunlight is so bright that it makes him squint, and framed collapsing into a narrow band by his eyelids he processes the whole thing into cinemascope. The whole landscape has always already been an image, whited out.

Now when he speaks he speaks only of the image of the wooden boarded bridge, footsteps re-emerge like shutter clicks, dragging the time of a journey back into the image set about replacing itself slowly as an image, a series of images. The photograph itself does not concern itself particularly with the landscape - it is documentary, it is the least of the document, the least of the structure slinking away beneath the text that replaces the beams, the river it spans, unseen, sand boxes in the distance. What is an archive but a dead thing, arranged, picked over?




Sound creeps in - there is debris rattling in a pipe. There is an incidental language bubbling in the space just beyond the city proper.

We stand in a sea of afters, twisted into shape.