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Impure Thoughts: The Art Of Sam Durant - Brief Article
ArtForum, April, 2000 by James Meyer
Durant traces the penetration of an entropic logic throughout the culture; in this way his practice also recalls Smithson's. The first meaning of entropy for Smithson is that described by the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that it is the nature of matter to break down, to come to a state of rest. Yet entropy was as much a cultural metaphor for Smithson as a physical process, denoting the perversion of high culture by kitsch, for example. Among the artists engaged in the current "Smithson revival," it is Durant who most identifies with the camp or "pop" Smithson--the Smithson who hung out in the back room at Max's with Warhol, who in the 1966 essay "Entropy and the New Monuments" celebrated bad horror films and the sleazy movie palaces of Forty-second Street. Durant's series of drawings after works by Smithson include captions with entropic or scatological themes. Mirrored, reversed, and bizarrely juxtaposed, the texts connect the high-art practices of postminimalism and earthworks to low or popula r culture. A rendition of Smithson's Glue Pour, 1969, a tin of sticky glue trickling down a hill with the caption "sugar covered how come you taste so good horizontal '69," juxtaposes a well-known demonstration of entropy as a horizontal state of equilibrium with a line from "Brown Sugar," the Stones's grotesque paean to the charms of black girls and heroin. A famous shot of Partially Buried Woodshed appears with the vulgarly literal "Gimme Shelter" or the scatological titles from the 1972. Rolling Stones album Exile on Main Street ("Turd on the Run," "Stop Breaking Down," and "Let It Loose"), bearing out Smithson's notion of entropy as a pervasive cultural logic.
Durant's Smithson is not only an artist whose work is about entropy. As Durant implies, Smithson himself has become an entropic figure--an emblem of the collapse of countercultural ambitions during the '60s and early '70S. His untimely death in 1973 identifies him with the "death culture" of those years, in which the names Eva Hesse, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix also figure. Durant's drawings of Smithson are depictions of the construction "Robert Smithson" that has taken on mythic proportions in the last decade. As Durant suggests, Smithson's death is inextricably linked with present-day fantasies of the '60s. Here is a portrait of the artist with the caption "Altamont 1969." Here is a combined image of Smithson and the Rolling Stones with a line lifted from a Neil Young song: "It's better to burn out than fade away." (The model extends to the present; this line was reportedly quoted in the suicide note of Kurt Cobain, who also appears in Durant's "Smithson" constructions. ) Here is a photograph of a miniature, brand-new Woodshed draped with models in period bell-bottoms and T-shirts, whose supine bodies mimic the contours of the dirt dumped on the shed by Smithson until its central beam cracked (initiating the shed's breakdown). Their bodies also recall period images of the four antiwar protesters killed at Kent State shortly after Smithson completed Woodshed on the campus, who themselves entered the collective imagination as the martyrs of the Neil Young ballad "Ohio."
