Entropic steps: Rocks, ruins, and increase in John Ruskin, Robert Smithson, and Per Kirkeby

Abstract

John Ruskin, Robert Smithson, and Per Kirkeby share a predilection for the incremental and additive; for getting purchase on the close-packed particulars of the material world. Their itemising, accenting, and aggregating of data tends towards the excessive and the manic. The plenitude they labour to possess and process sometimes becomes an unmanageable too-much, a tumbling chaos, or an endless entropic sprawl. For all their attraction to complex languages of organisation—to geological, morphological, symbolic and philosophical systems as patterns of information—Ruskin, Smithson, and Kirkeby, in their different ways, have a strong sense of the provisional, hypothetical nature of all system building. They recognise that their categories and classifications are subject to the same crumbling and erosion as a bank of clay, or soft sedimentary rock.