From the first of the nine displacements in Robert Smithson’s widely-known photo-travelogue ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan’ (1969) the earth is cut into with a mirror resulting in an in-mixing of earth and sky and a subsequent series of displacements, contaminations and abyssal configurations of opposing elements. This enacted Smithson’s understanding of photography as entropy, which he conceptualised, following Georges Bataille, as the sacrifice of ground and matter. Contemporary artist Taryn Simon has similarly employed the notion of entropy to describe her major, rigorously systematic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2008-2011). Consisting of portraiture and evidentiary photographs, the eighteen chapters chart the lives of globally-dispersed individuals and their families as they intersect in adversity with their historical and political circumstances.
Simon’s concept of entropy will be explained through Smithson’s by focusing on Bataille’s ideas and their interpretation by the political philosopher Étienne Balibar and his concept of borders and the other scene of violence, which Jean-Luc Nancy has contended are inherent to the grounding of the image. It will be argued that Simon’s project is significant because it acknowledges the multiplication and ambivalence of borders under globalisation, their intimate role in identity-formation and political subjection, and the relative assumption of the modern nation-state as co-extensive with territory.
This paper therefore seeks to draw out the theoretical elements of the concept of ground in an artistic questioning that ranges from a cut into the earth to a subtle examination of the geo-political nature of borders beyond territory.