Mono Lake Site / Mono Lake Nonsite
  • ephemera
  • offset-printed
  • accordion
  • color
  • 1.9 x 87.4 cm. unfolded ; 1.9 x 11 cm. folded
  • [2] pp. (when unfolded)
  • edition size unknown
  • unsigned and unnumbered

Mono Lake Site / Mono Lake Nonsite

Robert Smithson

Mono Lake Site / Mono Lake Nonsite

description

Exhibition announcement published in conjunction with show held February 1 - February 27, 1969. Object takes the form of a long folded strip with a map on recto beginning at Mono Lake, California, and terminating at New York City, with exhibition data printed on the verso.

"From the outset, certain situationist tactics must be granted: that an urgent correlation is admitted to exist between the real geography of, say, a mountainside in New Jersey, the 'Site,' and the accumulation of stones quarried in this mountain and exhibited in gallery, the 'Non-site.' This relevance is predicated of course on the scientistic links afforded by the map and the scale rule (although the scale is often violated in terms of sampling accumulated in the troughs.) In the 'Non-site,' Smithson, it seems to me plays with the inherited / syntax of Dadaistic permutables. 'Large scale becomes small,' Smithson writes. 'Small scale becomes large. A point on a map expands to the size of a land mass. A land mass contracts to a point.' …" — from Robert Pincus-Witten's review of the show at Dwan, published in Artforum (April 1969).

references

No. 427 in Extra Art : A Survey of Artists' Ephemera 1960 - 1999" by Steven Leiber, Ralph Rugoff, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Todd Alden, Ted Purves. San Francisco / Santa Monica, CA : California College of Arts and Crafts [CCAC] / Smart Art Press, 2001, pp. 42-43, 115.
New York, NY: Dwan Gallery,
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$500.00
Condition:  Fine. Pristine copy, folded as issued.
[Object # 23390]