HOTEL PALENQUE ROBERT SMITHSON PDF
Hotel Palenque is a / artwork by U.S. artist Robert Smithson ( ). Initially existing as a series of 31 color transparency. Hotel Palenque, a slideshow of Robert Smithson’s photographs, reveals an unfinished hotel on the Mayan architectural site of Palenque, in Hotel Palenque: Robert Smithson: Books –
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It just happens to be there, and its hotrl gives it a certain ambience, a certain frisson, a kind of meaning that it might not otherwise have. Evidently they wanted a swimming pool at one time and they built this swimming pool but actually, when you come to a place like this nobody wants to swim.
Mexico proofed to be a great ground for those kinds of studies. Time and material are – to a large extend – still understood as a cyclical or wave-like process, both symbolized by the snake. Smithsons original presentation can be seen on ubuweb. His presentation at the architectural faculty of the University of Utah became iconic: The lecture presentation has since been exhibited as an audio-visual art work in its own right, with the sequence of images synched to an audio recording of the artist’s talk.
Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque | Harrell Fletcher
Here is not way that you can possibly figure it out. I am going ot show you the place where I stayed. Once again I had found myself in the footsteps of Smithson. The importance of Hotel Palenque is generally related to Smithson’s ongoing concern with processes of entropyand his overarching project to recontextualize cultural or man-made elements within expanded, sometimes geological, timescales.
Smithson’s interest in the semi-ruined state of the hotel has been related to his broader concern with entropic disintegration, and his focus on peripheral sites such as quarries and industrial infrastructure, evidenced in works such as the photo essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, NJ” in which the artist first coined the term ‘ruins in reverse.
This latter incarnation of the work was purchased by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in Smithson saw it as a contemporary example for the mayan perception of material and time.
Everything was bursting from vital energy: The logic of the whole place is just impossible to fathem. Nature thinks in circles. That already had happened twice in my practice. And palenqu bridge between the second floors of two houses: Agriculture has to produce more than you can eat right away. Every 52 years they destroyed and burned their housed and material belongings not the temples and made everything new. While in Mexico, the party stayed at the Hotel Palenque, a partially constructed cinder-block hotel building in the town of Palenque, aimed at travelers and tourists visiting the nearby Mayan ruins.
As Neville Wakefield observes:. The architectural mass of the ancient Mayan ruins for which Palenque is famous was all but ignored: Since the work began to be shown again as a tape-slide installation in the ‘s, Hotel Palenque has gained something of a cult status [27] among artists and curators, inspiring ‘pilgrimages’ to the site of the hotel and the production gotel new artworks. Smithson’s ‘Hotel Palenque’ “, greg.
In appropriating the Hotel as artwork, Smithson enacts a perceptual shift, somewhat similar to his elevation of the industrial fixtures of New Jersey to the status of ‘Monuments’.
Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque
Anyhow it seems to lead towards something, but there is no point in trying to figure out what it is leading to. And so we too might surmise that the mortar of some unbuilt future is also the dust of an equally distant past, but in the end, and perhaps most satisfyingly, it is just a pile of cement-there to be dug for its cementness.
And this looks like a threshold, but beyond there is nothing to step into, no door and no house. After I resigned from the travel agency called Ganahl class, I went on a post graduate vagabonds programe to deepen my comparative studies of material and time.
That was approximately a human lifetime.
The colder the winter, the more you have to plan ahead in the summer. Small more or less walkable paths meander through the thicket of the forest, giving way to weird and fantastic buildings in all kind of conditions. Some accomodate permanent residents who are mostly archeologists working on the nearby archeological site.
Smtihson seems like subject and object relations are not only blurred here, but reversed: I shot a little video of the guy who was just painting over the hotel sign in this very moment.
He notes how the work was one of the last holdings of the Smithson Estate when it was sold to the Guggenheim inalongside nine slides from the artist’s Mirror Displacements series which were also never exhibited as standalone works in the artist’s lifetime. Palenque is the site of one of the most famous maya temples, but I am not going to show you that archeologigal site.
Smithson came to Palenque in with Nancy Holt and an art dealer friend to mingle on the paths of the old mayan gods and found them more vividly incorporated in the hotel he was staying in, than in the ancient archeological mayan site. The architecture is as vegetal as the plants are architectural. Who had the idea for this floor painting? Before leaving, Millar deposited the roll of film in one of the hotel’s safety deposit boxes and later exhibited the key, alongside the receipt for the box, as part of the exhibition ‘Sleeper,’ in Edinburgh in Who knows on what fluid carried this person away who ;alenque left the clothes there.
Its rich variety of ancient cultures continues to be present in the thickest urban jungle like Mexico City, as well as in more or less remote places where nature has not yet lost its force, the one than seems palenqhe and obscene to us. Cheating gravity, Smithson gently mocked the flat-earth school of exegesis. The entropic forces acting on the Hotel spread to the artist’s language and deflect any sense of rational forward momentum to the lecture.
Privacy policy About Archiwik Disclaimers. Hotel Palenque by Robert Smithson. I rented a studio and stayed for a year. Italicized parts are quotes from Robert Smithsons original speech, everything else by Ulrike Buck.
The simplicity and elegance of this structure with one roofed floor is striking.
Palenque actually used to be called the city of the snake. A thought that came up on my frequent sociological talks with Mexico City cab drivers who kept asking me basic questions about European economy and politics, was, how the history of western productivity and infrastructure is rooted in the seasonal climate.