the ideas of physics in terms of loss of energy (entropy). 263 The formal logic of Smithson's early crystallography, apart from any preconceived scientific content, relates to his mirror art and gallery documentation in an abstract way.264 If we define a crystal as a solid bounded by symmetrically grouped surfaces, which have definite relationship to a set of imaginary lines called axes, then we have a clue into his magic. Every surface is within full view, which makes inside and outside equally important. The separate parts of the crystal are held together by tension and balance, both of which add to its static space-time existence. You observed them at work in null time. From your description of what they were about, it seems apparent that they were erecting a transfer portal linking the null level with its corresponding aspect of normal entropy - in other words, with the normal continuum. –Keith Laumer, The Other Side of Time
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As A.J. Ayer has pointed out, not only do we communicate what is true, but also what is false. Often the false has a greater "reality" than the true. Therefore, it seems that all information, and that includes anything that is visible, has its entropic side. Falseness, as an ultimate, is inextricably a part of entropy, and this falseness is devoid of implications but is not an “off” state. (see: http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/entropy_and.htm)
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Another artist-writer I want to mention is Cy Twombly. Cy Twombly arrived in Manhattan in 1950 while the New York School painting of Pollock and de Kooning was in full swing. Upon Robert Rauschenberg’s encouragement, Twombly joined him for the 1951–1952 sessions at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina – as I mentioned among the influential teachers present at this time were Charles Olson, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. They focused attention on calligraphic gesture and word/image relationships resulting in work that was more syncretic, less spontaneously automatist as that of Jackson Pollock. Works such as Twombly’s Min-Oe (1951) bear evidence of the poet Olson’s interests in the roots of writing in ancient cultures and condensed glyphic forms. For eight months spanning 1952–1953 Twombly and Rauschenberg travelled through Europe and north Africa, joined for a while by the writer Paul Bowles. Upon returning to New York, Rauschenberg set up the Fulton Street studio that Twombly sometimes shared. Basic signs and letters begin to appear. In 1957, Twombly left again for Italy, where he would remain for the most part, though making frequent trips, including many to the States. He established a studio in Rome overlooking the Colosseum and wrote a short statement for the Italian art journal L’Esperienza moderna, which was to remain the sole published reflection on his own work until 2000, when he was interviewed by David Sylvester. In the statement, Twombly describes his process: “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate – it is the sensation of its own realisation.” Works from this era bear out the description. In Arcadia, for example, it is as though he taps into the nervous system, harnessing an alert state of tension, letting it come through in abrupt bursts at a level where it is generally inhibited by the body’s higher functions, registering its insistent throb in stuttering, jittery, whiplash lines. His move to Italy also afforded him ready access to the Mediterranean repository of classical ruin and reference. In works such as Olympia, words and names – “Roma”, “Amor” – emerge out of a network of marks. In 1959 Twombly executed some of the most spare works of his career, among them the 24 drawings that comprise Poems to the Sea, done on the coast of Italy at Sperlonga. What order of poems, punctuated with numerals and question marks, are these? The sea is reduced to horizon line and word, scribblings and veils of paint against the stark white of paper. A persistent compulsion is invoked in the viewer, the desire to read what is there, but not fully manifest in the artist’s scrawled script. Two words in these drawings emerge into legibility, “time” and “Sappho”, as if washed up on the beach alongside sudden, subtle gem-flashes of colour – blue, orange-yellow, pink – gleaming all the more because of their discretion. In these pages, meaning is endlessly frustrated and pursued. It settles only in the distance, figured perhaps by the horizon lines that move across the top of each of the drawings – in fact, simply grey or blue lines made with a straight edge, but suggesting seascapes at the vanishing point. The flat planes of sea and page have been collapsed. Writing comes in waves, rolling funnels of cursive script, crossed out, erased, enfoamed in satiny greyish-white paint. The signs are given as nascent forms, as gestural indications of “the hand’s becoming”, as Roland Barthes so aptly phrased it. (Barthes 1985: 162) Beginning in 1975, Twombly had been working towards increasingly integrated combinations of text and image; of lines – both written and drawn – and colour. The repeated returns to the rich resources of classical mythology have remained the complications of his work. He employs myth as yet another form in conjunction with painting, drawing and writing. He sometimes suggests myth’s first seminal stirring, letting only hermetic fragments come to the surface as names from the past: Hero and Leander, Orpheus, Bacchus. At other times he offers a full-blown line or verse burdened with all of its cultural and poetic associations like a tree overripe with fruit. Roberto Calasso has written of the Greek myths: “All the powers of the cult of gods have migrated into a single, immobile and solitary act: that of reading.” Twombly’s caveat, however, would be that the gods’ powers lie not in a single act, but in the mobilisation of the space between reading and seeing. And as Rosalind Kraus so eloquently writes in her article “Cy was here; Cy's up” for Artforum (1994), “The performative is found in its purest form in those of Twombly's paintings that function as dedications: To Valery, To Tatlin. The performative is a modality of language where meaning is identified with the very performance of the statement--as in "I arrest you," "I pronounce you man and wife," "I promise," "I swear," "I toast." It is thus a linguistic operation in which reference is suspended in favor of action: not meaning something, but doing something.” (Krauss 1994: Artforum. Retrieved from: http://www.cytwombly.info/)