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Robert Smithson's Chalk Mirror Displacement

ment 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 in Utah. The jetty was made out of salt, rocks, mud, and water from the place where it was built. Like Chalk Mirror Displacement, this work was made of materials from the site, and it was temporary. Almost nobody ever "saw the work in actuality before it was destroyed by the natural fluctuations of the lake."

Another kind of work by Smithson was his series called Nonsites that he made beginning in 1967. These were made up of photographs of places, taken from the air, that were hung on the wall near bins of rocks or dirt from the actual site. He presented two versions of the place--site and Nonsite (the gallery or museum where the piece was kept). The idea was "subtraction (from the site) versus addition (from the 'Nonsite')." In the Nonsites, Smithson rearranged the pieces of the site in geometrical boxes. In Chalk Mirror Displacement the material from the site is rearranged by putting it in a pile (after it had already been dug out of the earth) and is duplicated (like in the Nonsites' photographs) by the reflections in the mirror.

The third kind of artwork that Smithson did at this time is the "mirror and salt pieces" and Fineberg shows one called Rock Salt and Mirror Square (1969). In this piece, a shallow, square, closed box made of mirrors is surrounded by piled up rock salt. The rock salt is in different sizes--from very small pieces like powder to larger rocks. There are also rocks and salt scattered on the mirror top of the box. This piece is temporar

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Robert Smithson's Chalk Mirror Displacement. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:05, April 27, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1705015.html