"Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than in representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present. This kind of time has little or no space; it is stationary and without movement, it is going nowhere, it is anti-Newtonian, as well as being instant, and is against the wheels of the time-clock."
“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life."
Peter Halley, Two Cells with Conduit & Underground Chamber, 1983
August Kekulé discovered the shape of the benzene ring after having a dream of a snake biting its own tail. The ouroboros. A timeless cycle in service of time. New monuments against time. Time with no more space. "Small and quiet time voices auto-tune complaint." The time of the lonely monolith. The age of the ouroboros-qua-petroleum. Aromatic single take.
Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigerator Parts I & II, 2010
A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, in The Writings of Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt ed., 1979
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1973
