Fissures

Brian Dillon, 2008
(Page 4 of 6)

Footprint at Harper Rd. Photograph by Marcus Leith, London. Image courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London

The mature crystal, on this reading, is obdurate, inviolable, self-identical – even its secondary growths or ramifications are merely decorative adjuncts to the achieved core.

But the crystal is also – and here we get closer again to the logic of Hiorns’s process – an image of expansion, growth and transformation: it ceaselessly replicates itself and encrusts any surface that it touches. This sense of the crystal as at once efflorescent and ruinous is at work in a number of texts (and artworks) by Robert Smithson: notably his essay ‘The Crystal Land’, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1966. Exploring the ex-urban wastelands of his native New Jersey, Smithson comments: ‘the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny chrome diners to glass windows of shopping centres, a sense of the crystalline prevails.’ In the company of Donald Judd, his wife Julie and Smithson’s wife Nancy Holt, he descends into Great Notch Quarry:

Cracked, broken, shattered; the walls threatened to come crashing down. Fragmentation, corrosion, decomposition, disintegration, rock creep debris, slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence. The grey sky seemed to swallow up the heaps around us. Fractures and faults spilled forth sediment, crushed conglomerates, eroded debris and sandstone. It was an arid region, bleached and dry. An infinity of surfaces spread in every direction. A chaos of cracks surrounded us.’

Smithson’s crystal land is essentially a ruin, but a ruin that points as much to the dissolution of the future as to the persistence of the past. The crystal no longer stands for the future perfectibility of the soul or of society, but is evidence and allegory for the shivering apart of all such utopian visions. The desiccated earth is inseparable from the crystalline products of contemporary technology, the New Jersey shop-fronts are wavering mirages over mounds of rubble. Smithson describes this dialectical landscape precisely in terms of the fate of the architecture of the late 1960s. In his 1967 Artforum essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, he had already written of a ‘zero panorama’ that ‘seemed to contain ruins in reverse’,

... that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scène suggests the discredited idea of time and many other ‘out of date’ things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the ‘big events’ of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past – just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass.

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