ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connection between mysticism, metafiction and science fiction in Smithson's work. The chapter aims to reveal the parallels between Smithson's early iconic art, which mediated between the worldly and the divine, and his subsequent nonsites, which mediated between human discourse and the land. The tension between materiality and mediation is an essential aspect of Smithson's nonsites, and this chapter reimagines them in the context of the negative dialectics of apophatic mysticism. Apophasis is a theological discourse rooted in the idea that human language is incapable of knowing or representing the divine, and this chapter explores how Smithson's art draws upon this idea to deconstruct anthropocentric ways of experiencing the natural world. The role of language in Smithson's practice is central, and fiction will be analyzed as a critical and creative method that enabled the artist to denaturalize nature. In his art, Smithson claimed that, “The true fiction [that] eradicates the false reality,” and this chapter considers how it might do so. The fiction of Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov will be considered at length, and their apophatic and metafictional strategies will be used to speculatively reimagine the meaning of Smithson's work “The Monuments of Passaic.”
