拍品專文
In September 1968 Smithson published an essay in Artforum entitled Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan, a complex text mixing travelogue, mythology and description of works that he had made. At the end of the essay he discussed the mythical island of Atlantis, and added a footnote to describe a project he was to undertake in New Jersey:
On a site in Loveladies, Long Beach Island, New Jersey a map of tons of clear broken glass will follow Mr. Scott-Elliot's map of Atlantis... Outside in the open air the glass map under the cycles of the sun radiates brightness without electric technology. Light is separable from color and form. It is a shimmering collapse of decreated sharpness, poised on broken points showing the degrees of reflected incandescence... The light of exploding magma on the sun is cast on to Atlantis, and ends in a cold luminosity... Like the glass, the rays are shattered, broken bits of energy, no stronger than moonbeams... A luciferous incest of light particles flashes into a brittle mass... The sheets of glass leaning against each other allow the sunny flickers to slide down into hidden fractures of hidden shadow. The map is a series of "upheavals" and "collapses"--a strata of unstable fragments is arrested by the friction of stability. (Quoted in ed. N. Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York, 1979, p. 103)
The Map of Glass was created in Loveladies in 1969 for a group exhibition sponsored by the Long Beach Island Foundation and was reconstructed in 1975 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In the present drawing, as in related ones, it is also shown as an island off the coast of Africa. The island-drawing here details the production of the glass shape and its reflective character; the drawing for the spiralling film of the island shot from a helicopter adumbrates the last works of Smithson's short career.
On a site in Loveladies, Long Beach Island, New Jersey a map of tons of clear broken glass will follow Mr. Scott-Elliot's map of Atlantis... Outside in the open air the glass map under the cycles of the sun radiates brightness without electric technology. Light is separable from color and form. It is a shimmering collapse of decreated sharpness, poised on broken points showing the degrees of reflected incandescence... The light of exploding magma on the sun is cast on to Atlantis, and ends in a cold luminosity... Like the glass, the rays are shattered, broken bits of energy, no stronger than moonbeams... A luciferous incest of light particles flashes into a brittle mass... The sheets of glass leaning against each other allow the sunny flickers to slide down into hidden fractures of hidden shadow. The map is a series of "upheavals" and "collapses"--a strata of unstable fragments is arrested by the friction of stability. (Quoted in ed. N. Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York, 1979, p. 103)
The Map of Glass was created in Loveladies in 1969 for a group exhibition sponsored by the Long Beach Island Foundation and was reconstructed in 1975 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In the present drawing, as in related ones, it is also shown as an island off the coast of Africa. The island-drawing here details the production of the glass shape and its reflective character; the drawing for the spiralling film of the island shot from a helicopter adumbrates the last works of Smithson's short career.