I found some videos on Youtube about Robert Smithson. I haven’t been convinced so far on his ideas on entropy, but I found Trevor Paglen’s talk mentioning George Kubler (see his talk at https://www.artforum.com/print/197308/a-talk-with-george-kubler-37980) and Bergsen (check spelling and who they are) and their views on Time, Duration, History and Art fascinating. e.g. “duration can not be measured by the ticking of a clock, duration can only be known through intuition and through images that can never be complete”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEhrE0TQRV0
Another video, called Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson – in the series ‘Great Art Explained https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQv3YqHisZc gives some nice pictures, but has that common and incomplete definition of entropy (energy is not mentioned). Good images though.
Yet another video called ‘Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty’ bySmartHistory. A better video, but same entropy view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrbNsHs7ptE
A video by the Centre Pompidou called ‘Robert Smithson – Art & Ecologie’ is brief, but very well made and had a lot of interesting points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgEG8q8EpY0 The point that caught my attention for its possible relevance to my 70s work was that salt crystals can ‘grow’ in spirals. My experimental work at Brock University had the aim of growing gold crystals on to NaCl (common salt) crystals! The salt crystals were the seed on which the gold vapour would condense on and crystallise. I could make such crystals, but they were not suitable for use in the subsequent experiments I was doing. ( We wanted to use very well-formed crystals with all the atoms sitting on their regular lattice positions. Unfortunately the NaCl lattice and the gold lattice had different sizes, so at the interface between Gold and NaCl, there was a lattice mismatch which caused atom displacement from the lattice. I went on to produce very ordered gold crystals using other techniques).
I’m reading Robert Smithson: Time Crystals at the moment too. It’s a catalogue of several projects.
