monument

 

a process of dismantling, or decomposition, “ruins in reverse”

http://www.robertsmithson.com/photoworks/monument-passaic_300.htm

http://gd1studio2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/smithson-monuments-of-passaic.pdf

He laughed softly. I know. There's no way out. Not through the Barrier. Maybe that isn't what I want, after all. But this--this-' He stared at the Monument. 'It seems all wrong sometimes. I just can't explain it. It's the whole city. It makes me feel haywire. Then I get these flashes-'
-Henry Kuttner, Jesting Pilot

Today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.”  ― Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins it) reverse, that is-all the new construction that
would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the "romantic ruin" because the buildings don't fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other "out of date" things. But the suburbs exist without a rational past and without the "big events" of history. Oh, maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of curios, but no past-just what passes for a future. A Utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass, and a place where the Passaic Concrete Plant (253 River Drive) does a good business in STONE, BITUMINOUS, SAND, and CEMENT.

 

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A dingzihu – or 'nail house' – is a home where the owner refuses to accept compensation from a property developer for its demolition.


I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.  

image: Debbie Skinner