Landscape of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatán

• Autores: Jennifer Lewis Roberts
• Localización: Art bulletin, ISSN 0004-3079, Vol. 82, Nº 3, 2000, págs. 544-567
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay positions Robert Smithson’s 1969 Artforum article "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" within the American travel narrative tradition. Smithson intended his trip to be an "anti-expedition" to John Lloyd Stephens’s antebelleum travels to Yucatán, and his project performs sophisticated, multilayered inversions of Stephens’s nineteenth-century ethnocentrism. But Smithson, informed partly by 1960s-style primitivism, indirectly perpetuated many of Stephens’s attitudes. The essay will focus on Smithson’s transformation of a stereotypical Latin American "indifference" into a template for his own methods of "dedifferentiation" and for his own scrupulously indifferent response to the political upheavals of the late 1960s.