It's Art, But Is It Photography? Robert Smithson's - Uturn.org

B: That weird place of dualities where, as
Smithson put it, spacemen meet a dinosaur
in a Jurassic swamp on Mars—or
something like that. Smithson’s penchant
for collage also led him to conflate various
pages he culled from popular magazines
into an atemporal composite of
overlapping images and texts. A species
of postmodernist appropriation avant la
lettre.
A: You might also include English Pop
artist Richard Hamilton’s collages in that
category.
B: Ah, good point. Say, you mentioned
DeLillo. Are you a fan of his?
A: White Noise is my favorite contemporary
novel. [Places his arms
akimbo.]
B: Mine too.
A: I’m always copping from DeLillo. I
started reading him after I found out our
department’s chairman adored him. So I
read him and started citing him during
departmental meetings; especially, after I
kept hearing the phrase ‘waning funding
mechanisms’ repeated over and over.
That’s how I eventually got my promotion
to full prof. After a while, I found I was
hooked. Read everything DeLillo wrote.
[With a proud glow to his face.] Now I
think like him, talk like some of his characters.
B: It’s a postmodern thing, huh?
A: Can’t help myself. It’s in the air we
breathe. By the way, to get back to our
topic, photo historian Robert Sobieszek, in
Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different,
So Appealing? (collage, 1956) Richard Hamilton
Magazine Page (Helena Rubenstein) (1969) Robert Heinecken
Hugunin/4