Smithson's elaborate and ambitious project for the Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, (1969) art exhibit involved a number of Nonsite sculptures - Mirror Displacements - which he created in one of the galleries of the museum, each comprising mirrors and rock salt amassed from the nearby Cayuga Salt Mine. He also made a Subsite-Sub-Nonsite piece that related a work installed "underground," that is, in a stone closet in the museum's basement, with a Subsite above ground at the Cayuga Salt Works' quarry. Connecting the Subsite to the gallery was third element, a Mirror Trail, which mapped the placement of eight mirrors along a path that Smithson had laid out to link the art in the institution in Ithaca with the outdoor locations beyond the city. Modest photographs of the mirrors in situ accompanied this map.
On one wall of the gallery, he exhibited the Ithaca Mirror Trail piece together with small photographs of mirrors in the mine shaft.
On the floor, Smithson installed a group of sculptures variously composed from mirrors and salt crystals.
Photography was relegated from the status of crucial indexical (shift from context to context) witness to that of documentary supplement, while mirror reflection now assumed a vital place. Henceforth, when he employed photography in his art, Smithson would question the image's capacity to convey anything beyond a sense of temporal absence or loss: it had become, in short, equivalent to the mirror reflection , a lacuna in perception's modalities.
*Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, George Baker et al., University of California Press, 2005
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