In June or July of 1968, the artist Robert Smithson journeyed to one of the Western Deserts. It was possibly the Mohave, though it might have been somewhere else, perhaps that more metaphorical place known to others as the desert of the real. There, in the spirit of artist and geologist, tourist and rock-hound, he gathered together the detritus of what he had seen and returned it to New York City, where, he laid it in the corner of a clean whitish space and invited its consideration. In keeping with the way in which he understood our way of relating to the world, the objects collected referred to the territory from which they had come only through its depletion. Art in this respect may be nothing more then theft by another name. But, Smithson's chunks of rock, chalk and salt were removed from landscapes composed of the same, and so, with the wily guile of a man who spent considerable time in stoned reflection, he realized that in all probability they would not be missed. After all, it wasn't as if they were the Elgin Marbles. In fact within the context of the undifferentiated desert they were nothing at all. But while the desert may not have missed the rocks, the artwork clearly missed the desert, and Smithson removed them precisely to show us both what had been there, and what now could no longer be seen. Non-sites by virtue of displacement they were also non-sights caught in the blind of negated vision.

Not everyone was convinced by Smithson's sleight of hand and thought, but, in words and works he made a good case for things being not exactly as they appear. A few decades later, Richard Prince expressed a similar sentiment when he scrawled the phrase "From where I stand I don't exactly see things from where I stand" across the face of an image of no particular distinction. Which says only that in the upstate of things, getting your rocks off may be something that tells us more about words than it does about rocks, even as the landscape being described may be composed of both. Like Prince's garages, Smithson's rocks also came with words, heaped and otherwise. They were to become features in a featureless landscape, a landscape in which sign and substance are sustained in various states of graphic disconnect. And so, if we are to read what we see, Smithson;s geological accumulations refer to the desert as clearly and unverifiably as John McCracken's fetish finishes refer to the presence of aliens, Clive Barker's Dartboard refers to the beer-belly arithmetic of British pubs, Kippenberger's cannon refers to the gnomic sexualized vernacular of garden furniture, John Dogg's boxed tire refers to Donald Judd's square-wheel approach road to American landscape and Chris Burden's treatise on the ownership of a big Mack truck can be said to refer to the hubris of the Western world's love affair with the art of fossil fuels, be they refined or crude.

Which is to say that what Smithson did was make a fuck-up of folk. He took the connective tradition of the road and made of it an impossible bridge. It becomes a place where narrative freezes and luxury comes to smell of degradation. Here, the iconography of the fallen empire is carved in foreign teak and delivered on the platter of wage-labor relations. The eagles of freedom have landed and taken a shit in formalist sculpture's clean back yard: the bats have fled the belfry leaving the guano of the gothic nocturne far behind. Even the narratives traditionally attached to time-based media seem mostly lost, caught like one of Jack Goldstein's paintings in the spectacular moment, or looped in the endlessly reconstructed simile of an original beat played to a different drum. Other landscapes take other beatings: witness the formal picturesque of Versailles kicked to slow death as the auto-focus attempts to gain traction on a steadily shattering field of vision, or the chocolate sweet demise of gestural abstraction screened across images of race riots and civil rights movements so deeply burned into the historical retina as to have become the vacant lots of some as yet unfulfilled past. Once political and magnificent, these things are reduced to 'points of interest', or the banal litter of roadside landmarks.

Here, politics is the trickle down of twenty-first century commerce. An unheeded sign, it is the fake impression of progress impressed on the landscape like the bullet-hole trophies of governmental polices formed at the intersection of voodoo economics and gangsta lifestyle. It can be found in the graphic collapse of the bar-code and the vertical signature of global commerce, banished by affluence to the sleeping bags of the city and woven in and out of the paradoxical accretions of individualism and mass rebellion that are darkened lyrics of the youth market's song. This is politics as the unwelcome embarrassment that trickles down our legs and tells us that truly, we should have stayed in tonight. Or perhaps it's the oil-conditioned nightmare that drips sublime history from the Freidrich casing. Either way the signs are not always easy to read. The parade of artist covers may tell us that behind every good woman lies a good hairdresser, or simply that behind every promise of achievement is a chain of suspect politics and the leer of reflections that melt as quickly as footprints in the snow.

These are the pictures we show of ourselves to others while waiting for the lights to change. They span the gaps in knowledge as much as they do those in our lives. They provide the means to think ahead in a landscape of broken connections. "Bridge Freezes Before Road" is the story of an accident waiting to happen. Signposting the way are images and objects--bullets, cannonballs, gnomes and frontier militia, drugs, bugs and hugs--that makr the entropic trail of the living and the dead. It might be that God has at last removed his blessing from the USA. Or it might be simply that there has always been beauty to be found in degradation, and pleasure in confusion. And this changes everything.



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