The synthesis of SmithsonËs dialectic is found in his earthworks: "I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are [. . .] Nature is never finished."¹⁷ He knew this process from cultures throughout time as well as from nature: the layering of history and the stratification of the earth. While he accepted the effects that would later lead to disintegration as nature moved toward a gradual equilibrium·"collaborating with entropy"¹⁸·Smithson began by containing a part of the world within geometry and calling it art. "I donËt think you can escape the primacy of the rectangle. I always see myself thrown back to the rectangle. I see it as an inevitability; of going toward the fringes, towards the broken, the entropic."¹⁹ Helio Oiticica, too, at this time attempted to give structure to things of the world with his Bólides, placing a frame or box around nature and the everyday to simultaneously give it form and make it actual, and bring it into the idea of the aesthetic and make it transcendental.

1964 Untitled. Mirrored geometric structures describe crystal forms. 1968 Nonsite (Palisades- Edgewater, New Jersey). Smithson joins a minimalist aluminum box (of equal slats and spaces on two sides) to a street map and a conceptual statement describing the source location and the object as a work of art. The tension of precariously balanced rocks contained within the box evokes the chaos of an avalanche. Mono Lake nonsite. An enigmatic landscape, an elusive map "that tells you how to get nowhere"²⁰ based on a salt lake in Northern California, a lake erased by entropy, a site of chaos. "ThatËs why I like it, because in a sense the whole site tends to evaporate."²¹ Its outlying area, the site of an inactive volcano, is covered with fine grains of pumice and cinders. On the map it is a margin, a frame: what surrounds and defines that which no longer exists inside. Mirror displacement (Cayuga salt mine project). The dialectic is between the mine/outside and the gallery/inside, but unlike other nonsites, the container/contained relationship is reversed. As the artist noted, usually the container is rigid and the material amorphous and chaotic; here the container (salt) is amorphous and the contained element (mirrors) is rigid. Yet, in fact, the reverse is true, if we consider what we do not see as well as what we do: salt has a regular molecular structure, while the composition of the glass in the mirror is amorphous. Smithson continues and compounds a dialectical rhythm between containment and chaos. 1969 Incidents of mirror travel in the Yucatan. The site is reflected in the mirror; the mirror contains and frames a fragment of the site. Mirrors displace reality: "The mirror is a displacement, as an abstraction absorbing, reflecting the site in a very physical way."²² The photograph captures the site and yet the substance of this work is the absence of matter and nothing of this work exists on site. The mirror·as a physical entity and a reflection·is the dialectic.

Drawings record the dialectical journey. 1970 Island project. Ancient cultures like ancient landscapes have been eroded, consumed over time by change. From PiranesiËs Carceri dËInvenzioni, 18th-century visionary evocations of Roman prisons depicting a world in chaos and ruin, Smithson absorbed images into his own art. 1971 Spiral hill takes up this same imagery and brings it to a site, a location in Emmen, Holland, formed by entropic forces after the last ice age that resulted in a wide array of diverse terrain in a single locale which was further eroded by the presence of a sand quarry. A Piranesian white path spirals up to the center on top of a black archetypal form of a hill. This is in opposition to the flat, light-colored sand and centrifugal image surrounded by water of its companion piece, Broken circle. 1973 Bingham copper mining pit·Utah reclamation project. The centrifugal/centripetal opposition of forces is again created, this time by a wheel motif, spinning out to the terraced outlines or pushing in from the surrounding tiers. Fantasy is replaced by reality. The site is a three-mile-wide and mile-deep hole left in the ground as a result of mining. Smithson planned to bring all the circular lines of the strip cuts into a single pattern, an abstraction that would also be a land reclamation project. Entropy is temporarily halted and chaos contained.

Like Gordon Matta-Clark, ultimately Smithson aimed for his art to have a socially constructive as well as aesthetic function. "The artist must come out of the isolation of the galleries and museums and provide a concrete consciousness for the present as it really exists, and not simply present abstractions or utopias. Art should not be considered as merely a luxury, but should work within the processes of actual production and reclamation."²³ By the time his career and life were prematurely cut short, Smithson had made clear his ambition to bring order to the chaos of industrial sites in the landscape. Addressing these sites of accelerated entropy, he sought to create from the earth geometric, abstract forms of a natural order·an art to contain chaos.