Mountains impossible to climb

Around the time the construction of Space Mountain in the Magic Kingdom of the Walt Disney Corporation in Florida began in 1971—an attempt to repeat the success of the Californian Matterhorn—the American artist Robert Smithson imagined the realization of an “underground cinema.” Located in a cave, an abandoned mine or in a post-industrial site, this cinema unlike any other should have occupied the interior space of a large underground cavity. Towards the Development of a Cinema Cavern or the Movie Goer as Spelunker represents, in a way of thinking typical for Smithson, the synthesis between the science fiction of the time, popularized and staged, among others, in Walt Disney theme parks, and mythical places such as Plato’s cave. The “cinematic atopia” envisioned by the artist wanted to put an end to the “immobilization of the body” typical of the spectator’s situation in the cinema, as well as to a receptive state close to “coma.” The experience in the cave intended, on the contrary, to awaken people sitting on rocks, to transpose them to another time-space, far from certainties and canonical habits. Such a device would have worked, if implemented, with an effect similar to that of the sequences offered in Disney’s theme park, while nevertheless questioning the certainties of the usual psychological comfort zone and shaking the viewer from top to bottom (Smithson considered “any art form dangerous both mentally and physically”).1

The rocky and secluded setting of the Cinema Cavern is reminiscent of the structure of several other works, actually realized or only imagined by Smithson. What they have in common is, even at first glance, the frequent recourse to the artificial mountain. Whether it is Broken Circle / Spiral Hill, Asphalt Spiral, 1,000 Tons of Asphalt, Map of Broken Glass, Gravel Mirrors, Mirror Strata, Island Project, Museum of the Void, and so on—all of these objects, which are otherwise not easy to define, vary the theme of mound, heap, mass layered or filled with debris. They accumulate various materials, glass, asphalt, crystals, earth or rocks, with a clear relationship to geology, archaeology, or history, i.e. to an understanding of the physical world as a reality produced over a long period of time.

Smithson has a predilection for this complex shape, without ever opting for an archetypal symbol or an element that would pass as his brand image. What characterizes his works is “an attempt to move away from a specific object. My objects are constantly moving to a different area. They cannot be isolated since they are on the run.” 2 The mountain form as he conceives it is neither