“Robert Smithson’s photo-essay “Strata” was published in 1970, the same year Anderson’s recycling symbol was released. 1970 also witnessed the inaugural Earth Day, which consecrated an ecological movement that had been building over the decade. Smithson’s own Earth Art during the 60s and into the 70s was similarly concerned with pollution, land reclamation and ecology, though his interests led him always to contemplate the Earth’s matter on an extremely wide time-scale.

“A book is a paper strata,” Smithson says, stringing snippet-like descriptions of distant times together with mentions of x-rays, stereoscopes and dioramas in museum displays, emphasizing the latter’s near-obsolescence so as to project the reader into the museum’s (and the text’s) entropic future. The canny paratactic construction of “Strata,” telegraphic in style and lacking conjunctions and transitions, links past, present and future through verbal abutments and layerings that connect as much as they disjoin. The point bears repeating, as Smithson’s ecological consciousness emphasizes the mind’s distance from the matter it contemplates, a distance given dynamic form in his dialectic of site and non-site, a conjoining disjunction that both bridges the gap between museum and natural site yet defies synthesis in opening the dialectic onto entropic processes in both space and time.

Sea butterflies fall into a nameless ocean. Plaster restorations collecting dust in the Museum of Natural History. The tracks of trilobites harden into fossils. Accumulations of waste on the sea bottoms. Jelly-fish baking under the sun. Digestive systems shown in diagrams. … A tendency to amorphousness….”

Image and text reproduced from https://johnculbert.wordpress.com/tag/strata-a-photogeographic-fiction/ (accessed 11/11/23)