Chalk Mirror Displacement

Robert Smithson's Chalk Mirror Displacement (1969) was designed as a temporary work of art that was specific to the site, a chalk pit in England. The work consists of 8 long, rectangular mirrors that are set on their longer sides. They all touch at the center, and are fanned out to form a circle. They are all placed at about an equal distance from each other. The shape resembles a star, a flower, or the sections of an orange. The mirrors are held up by a pile of chalk rocks and gravel. The rocks are all different sizes and are not placed in a particular order, just in a heap that is roughly leveled off at the top. The rocks are all different sizes, and the mirrors are inserted into the pile. The mirrors are almost covered by the rocks at the center of the circle, but at least one-fourth to one-third of each mirror sticks out beyond the pile of rocks. Smithson built the work near the edge of a chalk pit. The mirrors must have reflected the chalk pit and the area around it, as well as lighting up the chalk with reflected light. The reflected light would change during the day, and the piece would look very different depending on the time of day, the weather conditions, and the viewer's distance from it.

Robert Smithson created different kinds of artworks in the late 1960s and the early 1970s and Chalk Mirror Displacement resembles them in various ways. In Spiral Jetty (April 1970), Smithson made a spiral shaped road running from the shore of the Great Salt Lake i

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ed large stone pieces in them. In one piece, called Displaced-Replaced Mass (1969), for example, he took three solid granite boulders (from 32 to 68 tons) from the High Sierras mountains and transported them down to the desert where he placed them in the rectangles he had prepared. This geometrical cutting and moving of objects from one site to another resembles Smithson's work more than some of the other site-specific art works do. Both artists were interested in the supposedly permanent changes that human beings could make by imposing their presence on the landscape, rather than just setting an object in it. This is the major difference between Smithson and the other site-specific artists. The works by de Maria, Holt, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude all seem to enjoy the world and the landscapes they are placed in. They do not seem to be bothered by the problems of decay and time passing in the same way that Smithson is. The view of the stars, lightning, or the hills of California and Japan do take into consideration the fact that the world changes. But they do not seem to force the viewer to look at this as a frightening thing. Holt said that the setting of her sculpture "evokes a sense of being on this planet, rotatin

Category: Arts - C