His angle was The End. A rollicking disquisition on Minimalism’s debt to science fiction, B-movies, and the second law of thermodynamics, Robert Smithson’s Artforum debut, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” linked the so-called primary structures of artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol Dewitt to entropy, that universal force of decay, which erodes everything into an all-engulfing sameness. “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future,” Smithson wrote. Cynical, sure, but his essay glimmers with strange
Suzaan Boettger’s long awaited Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson constitutes an epitome of probing inquiry into a major artist’s “life and work,” as many old biographies said.
DURING THE FIRST DECADE of Artforum, two comments appeared in its pages that have long troubled me. They occur in well-known interviews, the first with Tony Smith, published in December 1966, the second with Eva Hesse, published in May 1970, and in each case the artist associates Minimalism with Nazism. Although no explanations are given, the connections are not meant as condemnations on the contrary. So what relationships are intimated?1“Talking with Tony Smith” was occasioned by two shows curated by Samuel Wagstaff Jr., who “culled” the six-page interview “from a summer and fall” of conversations.