ABSTRACT
Through a contrast of matter ripped from the earth and illusion sustained in the play of light on reflective surfaces, the late-1960s Mirror Displacement sculptures of Robert Smithson brought a discourse of ephemerality and absence to the museum. The act was implicitly subversive, since the imperative of preservation, with its connotations of permanence, had long defined the museum's mission and drawn an encircling, insulating barrier around certain classes of objects. In the late 1960s, the gestalt-like works of the Minimalists had come to orient themselves from their very moment of creation towards the space within this barrier, to the stillness of the museum, to inertia. As Smithson (1970 p. 111) observed of these objects, “They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages.”
