You will probably be able to see yourself in this mirror about as well as the faces in Water’s Self Portrait #3, which is to say, not at all.

I know, it’s embarrassing to use your selfie camera to check your hair when there’s a mirror. right. there. It might useful if you’re really really tall, like huge, and you need to shave your neckbeard in the middle of the museum. It’s stuck in some sand at 45°, so all you can see is maybe some of the ceiling, but you could also see the ceiling by looking up so...

In general minimalists hate usefulness, but also Smithson was really more of a scientist that didn’t trust science than a decorator. This is like one of those posters that you present at a conference about your experiments, a map of the experiment result itself. Smithson spent time driving around southern Mexico, calling the horizon lazy, conquistadors dumb (valid), and speaking about himself in the third person. While he was doing all of that he was also sticking series of mirrors all over the place: the beach, an ash field, a quarry, a butterfly swarm, in a bushes and various trees, a river bank, so many places. He writes about seeing these things as if they just happened, like he didn’t just put them there. His research also included such rigorous protocol as flipping rocks over, comparing pigs to tourists, and flying in planes with broken windows. He overhears Time and the Earth goddess having a conversation about having no present, about existence without needing to exist. “Must ‘blue’ mean something?” Ah yes, science.

Dear colleagues, instead of a traditional poster, I’m presenting you with a pile of stolen sand and a stolen (“stolen”) mirror to illustrate exactly what time, space, and objecthood in a postcolonial Yucatan is like.

Ok so not only is this mirror useless as a mirror, it’s also negatively helpful for quantitatively understanding anything. But you might get a sense, if you let the sand spread out or the gallery floor grow a mind-jungle, of what time feels like. Will the mirror also turn into sand? What does sand turn into later, does it turn into time? Do you mind if I just, lay on the floor for a minute? Am I sand? Should we make NASA do science like this?