Process makes a world. What Robert Smithson calls “dialectic,” by contrast, takes place at the level of meaning. You can do more with signs than you can with earth. But signs can get away from you. 

Smithson and Vertov show process for the opposite reason Charles Olson does: Olson wants to recover primordiality, they want to introduce contingency and entropy—conditions of freedom. Freedom doesn’t come from knowing the beginning but from not knowing the end.

What does Smithson mean by “dialectic”? “Dialectics could be viewed as the relationship between the shell and the ocean,” (371).





Another answer might point to language in which “nothing is isolated from the whole. [ . . . ] No particular meaning can remain absolute or ideal for very long. Dialectics is not only the ideational formula of the thesis—antithesis—synthesis forever sealed in the mind, but an on-going development,” (371). This “not only” seems to me crucial, for there are abundant instances of ongoingness without the presence of an “ideational formula” in the arts of the sixties and seventies—indeed, this was the avowed aim of many of those artists. Dialectic must involve some sense of mutually-redefining oppositions, and of redefinition as a process: “Natural forces, like human nature,” Smithson continues, “never fit our ideas, philosophies, religions, etc. [ . . . ] Nature is not subject to our systems,” (371).

The process is untranscendable.





Ann Reynolds’s Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere shows how Smithson applied the insights of 1970s minimalism to our experience of everyday looking. She traces the development of Smithson’s Alogon sculptures beginning with a series of notebook sketches of stepped forms and receding planes made using one-point perspective. These anticipate the sculptures themselves, works which, in effect, take these exercises in perspective and render them in three dimensions. If to make a drawing is to distort a three-dimensional object into two dimensions, the Alogons distort those drawings back into three dimensions. As Reynolds writes, the transformation is “not a smooth one,” because the “built versions” of the notebook drawings

are not tied to illusionistic conventions for rendering three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional surface or to a particular space or spatial arrangement . . . the individual units in each multiple-unit work can be arranged either in decreasing or increasing order by size so that together they articulate the spatial projection or recession of the notebook sketches regardless of their specific spatial surroundings. (19)

The “built versions,” in other words, build the errors inherent in perspectival drawing and seeing. You can't translate the object back into the drawing and get the same drawing.






Reynolds approaches the Alogons as a demystification of two-dimensional illusionistic space, a uniquely subtle one of many of its time. Leslie Scalapino enacts a parallel demystification of literary space and literary representation. But their critical approaches are met, in each case, by the fact of their embodiment in the working process. When Smithson explores a site, when Scalapino takes up the vertiginous position from which it’s possible to see how phenomena appear to unfold, when Dziga Vertov enters a “whirlpool of colliding visible phenomena,” the art in each case emerges out of the place, and the artist’s embodiment in it. For Vertov, “film” is everything that takes place from when he picks up the camera to when the audience files out of the theater. It is an event the entirety of which takes place in the world, and specifically in the polis, rather than in an atelier: there is never any question of going “back” to the public square because, to Vertov’s mind, and more importantly to his practice as a filmmaker, he has never left it.

Let us say that dialectical thinking recognizes that one does not go “back.” For Heraclitus, you can’t step in the same river twice because the river is flowing and because you yourself are aging. Yes, but also: you changed the river when you stepped in it the first time. Once you’ve acted on matter, once you’ve disturbed the site, it’s never the same again: and, as Smithson, Vertov, and Scalapino recognize, only in the body can we bear such responsibility.






In the widely-accepted art-historical narrative, the image presses up more and more insistently on the picture plane until it spills over into action painting, happenings, and the rest.

Reynolds shows how Smithson, unlike most or all of his peers, intuited that, because space represented in two dimensions using perspective is not simply or unproblematically two-dimensional, perhaps our existence in three-dimensional space is likewise not simply or unproblematically three-dimensional.

Reynolds: “The placement of a three-dimensionalized version of a convention used to render illusions of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface into a three-dimensional space makes no sense. The work and the space don’t fit, and the resulting struggle to reconcile the two over time produces a palpable ‘energy-drain,’” (27-28). Something is always lost in translation.

But perhaps the double-binds of perspective might, somehow, yield double-freedoms in real space; perhaps the a-logic of the Alogons will reveal a parallel a-logic in three-dimensional space. And perhaps we will find that whatever is meant by “double-freedom,” multiplicity or duplicity, is an important characteristic of reality.

We are not looking at the landscape, but neither are we straightforwardly in the landscape in a way that's derived from ways of looking-at.

We are creatures who look.






In “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” his hymn to Central Park, Smithson, viewing a portfolio of photographs showing the construction of the park, notes that the images call to mind the documentary montages of Dziga Vertov: they “disclose a succession of changing land masses within the park’s limits. The notion of the park as a static entity is called into question,” Smithson writes, “by the camera's eye.” Vertov, working in the brief period of hope and idealism in the early Soviet era, was interested in showing how cameras worked. Vertov saw himself and his fellow film-workers as part of the larger working class and therefore of the success of the Revolution: the cameraman, writes Jay Leda in Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (1983), “is made a heroic participant in the currents of Soviet life.”

I am the Cine-Eye. I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from human immobility. I am in constant motion . . .

In the early years of the Soviet experiment Vertov invented a kind of documentary cinema in which part of what is documented is the camera and the filmmaking process itself. In itself this is nothing new: much of the earliest cinema drew viewers because of the magical nature of the process, rather than the content of a cinematic text. But Vertov cannot be said to break the fourth wall because (in contrast to Eisenstein) he is not starting from a theatrical paradigm; similarly, his editing is not “fractured” because there was never any whole. On the contrary, because he is not starting from a theatrical paradigm, any shot and any cut are (in principle) valid, no matter how odd—“nutty,” as Stan Brakhage called them—since that oddness has meaning only in relation to the mimetic norm.

In “Through Theater to Cinema,” Eisenstein identifies his work as set designer for a 1923 production of Alexander Ostrovsky’s Enough Simplicity in Every Sage as the beginning of his filmmaking career. He recounts how he “trespassed” on the director’s job by taking the climactic prizefight, which was supposed to happen offstage, into the center of the auditorium “to recreate the same circumstances under which a real boxing match takes place,” (7). While the other scenes, Eisenstein recounts, were acted by “worker-actors” working in the Stanislavsky method (which draws on the actor’s own emotional experience outside of their role), Eisenstein’s fight scene “employed realistic, even textural, means—real fighting, bodies crashing to the ring floor, panting, the shine of sweat on torsos, and finally, the unforgettable smacking of gloves against taut skin and strained muscles,” (7). Remarkable as the fight scene may have been, however, it remains in the realm of the theatrical. As Eisenstein describes it, “I had struck new ore, an actual-materialistic element in the theater,” (7). In Eisenstein’s mind, cinema exists in theater; he even suggests that the “actual-material” called “cinema” is produced by the activities and pressures of the theater the way plants are compressed, over millions of years, into coal. Cinema therefore concedes enormous creative authority to the theater.

Vertov, by contrast, insists on a cinema independent of theater, in much the same way Artaud insisted on a theater independent of literature. At the beginning of Man with a Movie Camera, before any images have appeared, he proclaims that his film is made “without the help of intertitles, without the help of a story, without the help of theater,” and mentions a second time that the film embodies cinema’s “absolute separation from the language of theater and literature.”

The distinction between the two directors is made clear by their own theoretical writings. Eisenstein states at the opening of the essay:

In the early 1920s we all came to the Soviet cinema as something not yet existent. We came upon no ready-built city; there were no squares, no streets laid out; not even little crooked lanes and blind alleys, such as we may find in the cinemetropolis of our day. (3)

Eisenstein’s metaphorical cinemetropolis takes shape in his mind in a very cinematic way: the unpeopled cityscape calls to mind René Clair’s Paris Qui Dort, which Vertov greatly admired. But Eisenstein is interested in the immediacy of the two fighters, their sweaty torsos, the taut and strained muscles, whereas the energy in Vertov is atmospheric, and the atmosphere is one of revolutionary exhilaration:

We leave the film studio for life, for that whirlpool of colliding visible phenomena, where everything is real, where people, tramways, motorcycles, and trains meet and part, where each bus follows its route, where cars scurry about their business, where smiles, tears, deaths, and taxes do not obey the director’s megaphone.
            With your camera you enter the whirlpool of life, and life goes on.

Vertov’s “cinemetropolis” is already full of people, already full of action: the city is not antecedent to the film, there was never a bare stage. One could go so far as to say that in Vertov, film creates the city, a truly “actual-material” cinemetropolis.






Scalapino: “I intended this work to be the repetition of historically real events the writing of which punches a hole in reality,” (26). One can imagine Smithson’s non-site pieces, which arrange rocks from a specific site into minimalist polygons, punch two holes in reality: one at the site, one at the non-site, the absence of the rocks and their presence.

There is something about the desire to use active, even violent—punching a hole—means to affect a reversal (real/non-real; site/non-site). Vertov’s abrupt and unlikely cuts show some of this desire. Smithson used backhoes and bulldozers to cut the earth.

“Open” poetics emphasizes receptivity. Inasmuch as poetry is understood to come from, as Robin Blaser says, “outside,” receptivity is the most important quality a poet or artist can have. But poetry can also (and without contradiction) be understood as work, in the thermodynamic sense, and, as Reynolds notes, the spatial inconsistencies in the Alogons “expose the amount of entropy inherent to this chosen system of representation in its culturally-specific context, the white box of the art gallery,” (27).

Vertov, Smithson, and Scalapino stand out for their willingness to intervene, to manipulate reality: not just hold a mirror up to nature but act in and on nature. No lip service is paid to “negative capability.” Only the dialectical character of what arises from these interventions distinguishes what they do from magic.

The inessential comes to the rescue of the essential. The inessential reclaims the essential.






“Aeolotropic” is made from αἰόλος, swift and changeable, and the familiar “tropic,” turning. It puts us in the realm of Aeolus, the god of the winds. The word appears in 1865 (the same year as the word entropy, in fact) to make a contrast with isotropic properties or phenomena, which have the same value regardless of direction. One might imagine the serial poem as it begins in Stevens’s Harmonium—e.g., “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—with its heavy Roman numerals riveting many of the poems to the page, each equal to the next (inasmuch as the number proceed one-by-one regardless of the length of each numbered section), as isotropic. Scalapino’s poem, then, is to be understood as the opposite of that—perhaps something like this sequence of intertitles from Vertov’s Kino-Glaz (1924):

56. Kino-Eye about a Chinese magician 

57. Gui Yuan works for his bread

58. Behold

59. Observe, observe, the whole hand

60. Observe the hand, observe the hole

61. Nothing—nothing

62. Now, make one live mouse

We’re accustomed to thinking of the signal inventions of modernism, such as cubism and the tone-row, as ascribing equal value to all phenomena. But in fact Picasso’s shards of space and Schoenberg’s tones don’t have the same value: if they did, art would become pure repetition. There are in fact twelve different tones and an infinity of different shapes in space. Scalapino seems to have recognized that the desire underwriting the invention of cubism and the tone row is to be understood as a desire to ascribe equal values a priori to any object or phenomenon. But why should art concern itself with the a priori and not with the encounter itself? So once you’ve done that—indeed, to this way of thinking, it is the whole point of doing that—you must recognize that what you’re looking at does change depending on how value is understood and from where it’s measured, and that those Roman numerals of Stevens convey a false sense of stability.

Unemployed though when I heard someone use an obscene word the other day

he didn’t look as if he were in another world

and so I’m worried

especially in this sultry weather. (Considering 75)

In Autobiography (2003) Scalapino writes about this sentence: “a sentence in it (and poems throughout) linked by the word ‘though’ is both phrases qualifying the other though logically this isn’t occurring—‘to recur’ and ‘that there isn't relation ever’ is ‘qualifying’,” (34). What may seem mere idiosyncrasy, or an arbitrary and perverse intervention in the language, in fact represents a significant paradigm-shift. Consider the parallel with Edward Lorenz, the meteorologist-mathematician who discovered chaos theory. Lorenz’s discovery depended on the difference between linear and nonlinear mathematical relationships. In Chaos, James Gleick explains that “Linear relationships are easy to think about: the more the merrier,” (23). Most poets think in linear terms. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, for instance, sets up a comparison between the young man the poem addresses and the summer’s day: the loveliness of the summer’s day exists in direct proportion to the young man’s youth. You can extrapolate from this relationship a kind of polynomial equation equal to life with x-intercepts at birth and death. In Scalapino’s terms, however, youth would qualify beauty: she is interested in reciprocal, rather than linear, relationships, in “both sides qualifying the other.” Gleick uses the example of a hockey puck to describe this kind of nonlinear relationship: the speed of the puck increases friction, but, paradoxically, the friction slows the puck down. Indeed, if one were to attempt to reduce Scalapino’s work down to a single formula, one could do worse than: nonlinearity is to physics as paradox is to rhetoric. So, Gleick continues, “that twisted changeability makes nonlinearity hard to calculate, but it also creates rich kinds of behavior that never occur in linear systems,” (24). The same kind of “twisted changeability”—aelotropicality—the back-and-forth of a reciprocal relationship over time—accounts for both the difficulty but also the richness of Scalapino’s writing.

Part of this richness is Scalapino’s diction. Word-choices that are unusual relative to a (real or imagined) norm of American speech are a hallmark of the late twentieth century. John Ashbery, for instance, combines vocabularies and high and low registers of diction in unexpected ways. But in a world in which subjects proceed aeolotropically through tilting probabilities, “high” and “low” are no longer fixed quantities. Because we have jettisoned any “calculability” along with linear relationships, because there is no longer a “high” or “low,” she recognizes that it’s now legitimate, in principle, to choose a word, or accept a word, from any register. So where even Shakespeare is stuck with his famous but bland summer’s day, Scalapino is free to choose “sultry weather,” not because it forms an ironic juxtaposition or a stylish verbal touch, but because, on the contrary, the understanding that would underpin such irony does not hold. The same is true of This eating and walking at the same time is associated all right: “is associated” calls to mind the probabilistic language of medicine and the social sciences; the “this,” as well as the “all right,” here, come from an exaggerated rural dialect. So where Ashbery is cool, Scalapino is delirious, and where an Ashbery title like “Fuckin' Sarcophagi” is funny-haha, Scalapino’s juxtapositions are more often funny-peculiar, because where Ashbery’s presumes a more stable sense of his relationship to other people, Scalapino’s work, especially this poem, is characterized by its sense of the opacity of human relationships: “I am not interested in talking to anyone” (71); “knowing someone who has already died / it didn't help me to enter a public building today” (74); “Ate and wanted to talk to these people, though they were thinking it / was / weakness / in me all this time” (83); etc.

In the Romantic, in the Existentialist, paradigms, this alienation is a challenge the poet must overcome; but for Scalapino, alienation frees one. Structurally, rather than psychologically.






Another part of Scalapino’s richness is her use of repetition. The quote from Autobiography above, in which Scalapino qualifies that “‘'to recur’ and ‘that there isn’t relation ever’ is ‘qualifying’” (34), calls to mind the statement of Schoenberg’s that John Cage liked to quote, that there is never anything other than repetition and variation. You can repeat yourself, or you can not repeat yourself: this is your freedom.

Words cluster around events, then echo, seemingly at random, later in the poem.

To observe how repetition functions in Scalapino, I’ve tracked the appearance and reappearance of a few of the words in that they were at the beach—aelotropic series. The poem is thirty-six pages long. On (almost) every page, there are brief paragraphs, sometimes separated by a horizontal bar, a bullet, or a large white space. Frequently, especially at the beginning of the series, a paragraph is followed by a parenthesized paragraph that appears to comment on the scene above it. In this they resemble the italicized sections of William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell. These “comment” sections tend to produce repetition as they perform their analytic function.

Here is the first page of the poem:

Playing ball—so it’s like paradise, not because it’s in the past, we’re on a field; we are creamed by the girls who get together on the other team. They’re nubile, but in age they’re thirteen or so—so they’re strong.

(No one knows each other, aligning according to race as it happens, the color of the girls, and our being creamed in the foreground—as part of its being that—the net is behind us).

            —

A microcosm, but it’s of girls—who were far down on the field, in another situation of playing ball—so it was an instance of the main world though they’re nubile but are in age thirteen or so.

My being creamed in the foreground—so it’s outside of that—by a girl who runs into me, I returned to the gym. (17)

I tracked “playing ball” through the poem. “Playing ball” appears four times: twice above; once on page 20:

Attending a funeral—it’s contemporary in time, not being in itself depressed; taking a ridiculous aspect—birds that sing loudly in the chapel where the funeral service is being held. The birds are mechanical—so it’s being creamed.

(Like in the earlier episode of playing ball. Our being creamed in the foreground of the field by the other girls).

and once on page twenty-one: “A boy who was actually at the funeral—so it’s inverted—was later playing ball, really occurring.” So, the first instance of “playing ball” opens the ludic space of the poem; the second differentiates this “situation” from another taking place in “microcosm” and “far down on the field”; the third looks back at the first, “earlier episode,” in which the girls are “creamed” (indeed the likeness consists in their having been “creamed”); and the fourth notices, in another scene, a boy, who was at that particular funeral (“the funeral”), in yet another “situation of playing ball,” this one differentiated from the first two in terms of time.
            This cluster of instances of “playing ball” takes place in the first five pages of the poem; there are no instances in the ensuing twenty-nine. But each of those nodes is an intersection of other phrases that are coursing through the poem. Take “paradise.” The first instance is at the opening and expresses a relationship of likeness: “Playing ball—so it’s like paradise.” The phrase recurs almost immediately, on the next page:

A man—I was immature in age—was a stowaway so not having been active, taken from the ship we’re on in a row boat.

(A sailor had fallen out of the row boat then, was embarrassed. So it’s like paradise—the embarrassment, therefore it’s depressed—seen by his waving at us as the other sailors are coming to him). (18)

So embarrassment links “playing ball” on the previous page to the clumsy sailor on this one because embarrassment—presumably, the feeling of being “creamed”—is “like paradise.”

            It’s typical for words to cluster around an event and then recur seemingly at random later in the poem. “Paradise” is such a word. After occurring twice on the first two pages of the poem, it recurs twice more: once on page thirty-nine, “Alcohol not enabling someone to be in paradise, being what he was saying / / therefore inverted”; and once on page forty-one:

which is their wanting to take the money I might have on me

two muggers—though they were not together—who both followed me for a time aware of each other and that I see them. I was walking quickly with my suitcase which would mean to them that I’d just arrived in the city, it’s crowded with passers-by (so not enabling someone to be in paradise—is regardless of the money I might have on me).

Both of the later recurrences are framed in negative terms: while playing ball and watching the sailor fall out of the rowboat were “like paradise,” being drunk and moving through dangerous crowds do not “enable” one to be in paradise. So “paradise” links four dramatically different contexts and relates them across the literary space the series creates.
            The dimensions of this space can become quite complex indeed. In the poem’s final moments, there is a dramatic scene in which Scalapino, as a child, is arriving on a passenger ship in a port at which stevedores—longshoremen—are striking. Here are the poem’s final three pages:

my being fairly immature in age—we dock, there are lines of stevedores, men coming onto the ship—we can’t get off in that port, it’s the port’s authority, because a few people on the ship had become sick

but the stevedores can (51)

—making jokes

was making fun of the lawyer, our both being fairly immature in age—though I didn’t realize it

          

  *

We’re—the lawyer and I—in the car, I had made the jokes before this, he’s gotten beer

but we hadn’t opened it yet; he backed into a tree, driving away from the grocery

           

 *

The thought that there is no riot—isn’t going to be any

is connected to the stevedores (52)

There is no riot—associated with the stevedores—the man to whom I sold my car, he’d taken me for a drive in the hills deciding on it, had driven it recklessly

he’s trying to frighten me so I’ll give him the car—which I do, though I realize it (53)

We first encounter the stevedores on page twenty-eight:

Stevedores—I’m immature in age—who are now made to live away from their families to work, the division is by color; they’re allowed to form unions but not act—so it’s evanescent.

(Because it’s inactive—not just in the situation itself. Or in their later not coming to the docks—so they were striking, regardless of them being fired which occurs then). (28)

 
Turn back to the passage I quoted from page 18: “A man . . . was a stowaway . . . taken from the ship we’re on in a row boat”; “A sailor had fallen out of the row boat then, was embarrassed.” It turns out the word stevedore comes from the Spanish estivar, to stow cargo. Stevedore and stowaway are not the same thing, but they come from the same word and, more interestingly, together they form a subject-object dichotomy: one stows the cargo, one is the cargo. (One thinks of Walter Benjamin’s sex worker who is both seller and sold—here too we feel the shadow of the transatlantic slave trade.) The words are too specific to be a coincidence. But the way the scenes are described, the “stowaway” on page 28 can’t be one of the “stevedores” on pages 51-53, because he is on the boat, while they are in the port. They are two different people in two different scenes linked by etymology and, crucially, by Scalapino’s perspective from a docking ship in both cases.

A microcosm, but it’s of girls—who were far down on the field, in another situation of playing ball—so it was an instance of the main world though we’re nubile but in age we're thirteen or so.  (17)

There is a microcosm, but it doesn’t correspond to an elevated macrocosm. There are no choirs of angels or Neoplatonic special effects; the microcosm is just “of girls.” The gnosis that reveals macrocosm in microcosm, like the figurative capacity of the logos that elevates the mind from one level of allegory to the next, does not work the way it’s supposed to: it keeps returning to the scene of the girls playing ball. For the same reason the scene is not an example of “the main world,” but precisely an “instance” of it: it can be, but it cannot stand for. “Main,” from the Scandinavian word-hoard, having to do with power, strength, preeminence. And for Scalapino, what's “main”? Where is power? It is the mundane, the at-hand.
            Scalapino investigates perspective in much the same way she does metaphysics. She also, of course, sends us back to the experiments in Smithson’s Alogon works which projected the ambiguities and contradictions of perspective on a two-dimensional surface into three dimensions. Scalapino’s poem is full of notations that refer to position in space in perspectival terms:

(No one knows each other, aligning according to race as it happens, the color of the girls, and our being creamed in the foreground—as part of its being that—the net is behind us).  (17)

As if in a flash the speaker grasps at perspectival terms as a means of locating herself. But perspectival orientation—“our being creamed in the foreground”—almost immediately yields to three-dimensional space: “the net is behind us.” (One cannot but think of the net of syntax Scalapino weaves and unweaves over her subject.) Note how well Reynolds’s description of walking around the Alogon sculptures fits with Scalapino’s writing:

The more he or she moves around the work, the more the viewer is subject to the contradictions between the work and the space it occupies. Any logical relationship between the space and the work that might have been granted from one position in the room dissolves into a series of disconnected views  . . . [.] As a result, the unfolding of time and of space seem to split apart. The passage of time becomes an experience that is separate from and offers no guarantee of a cumulative experience of space. (26)

Scalapino’s poetry finds ways to connect those “disconnected views” that honor their disconnectedness by means of multivalent conjunctions and the other strategies. And so while, for Reynolds, the dissolution of this series leads to “increasing perceptual disorder,” Scalapino finds a poetics—therefore a freedom—there (26).







Works Cited

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Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Trans. Jay Leda. New York: Harcourt, 1969.

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Jay Leda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Ann Reynolds, Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

Leslie Scalapino, Considering how exaggerated music is. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982.
—. How Phenomena Appear to Unfold. New York: Litmus Press, 2011.
—. that they were at the beach—aelotropic series. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985.
—. Zither & Autobiography. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.

Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings. Ed Jack Flam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Dziga, Vertov. Kino-Eye. Ed Anette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.