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Monday, August 1, 2016
Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission
(link)
In "Entropy and the new Monuments" Smithson's term "hyper-prosaism" for Morris, Flavin, LeWitt, and Judd described his artistic cohorts' inadequacy in the grand scales of time and entropy, the culturally catatonic monuments in human "progression." The bracing absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones, which Bacher recurringly recalls with invocations of cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, synecdoches of stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. Bacher never as deeply ironic or hurt as Smithson seemed by the crushing juxtaposition, the monuments themselves invoke already this loss.
See too: Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz