Smithson

Question 1: In the article “Entropy and the New Monuments”, Smithson talked about Laughter as the fourth dimension to art. He described it to be “a kind of entropic verbilization”. What exactly does he mean by this? Is laughter a symbol here? Or is laughter suggested to be a hidden key to the fourth dimension like the example used of “The Annotated Alice”? Why is the crystal system used to represent laughter and how does it become “a device for unlimited speculation”?

Question 2: In the dialogue about museum with Allan Kaprow, Smithson commented on how he disliked the categorization of art. He said that “Now all these categories are splintering into more and more categories. You have about forty different kinds of formalism and about a hundred different kinds of expressionism.” (48) This reminds us of Krauss’s discussion of the sculpture in the expanded field and how Krauss found a need for categories such as axiomatic structures, “both landscape and non-landscape” and such. It seems as is Smithson is answering to Krauss’s complicated diagram. What I’m confused about is what point Smithson is trying to make by saying “I never saw an exciting space. I don’t know what a space is.”(49)