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ings and a story of wide-eyed fascination with the mysterious ruins of ancient Mayan culture, not unlike something we could find today in National Geographic. Warping Stephens' pic turesque voyage into the psychedelic haze of the sixties, Smithson's spin on the Maya is a cloudy adventure where real ity and fiction are blurred in the humid air of the jungle's green abyss. Smithson's post-LSD laced ramble through the Yucatan (you can imagine his favorite Black Sabbath album playing in the background) turns mundane tourism into surreal reverie. While dri ving down the highway from Merida, the hal luci nation-cum-artwork of the "Incidents of Mirror Travel" story comes to crashing synthesis, reveal ing Smithson's attitude toward his adventure. The Aztec god of the night sky, Tezcatl ipoca, the "smoking mirror," speaks to Smithson, directly through the rearview mirror of his car. "All those guidebooks are of no use," Smithson wrote in the article. "You must travel at random. Like the first Mayans, you risk getting lost in the thickets, but that is the only way to make art." Smithson's intention was not to make traveling an art. Following Tezcatlipoca's direc tive, he managed to do something that is per haps more rare. Smithson's mirror-travel in the Yucatan brought him into intimate contact with an Indian world-view. One could call it the Indian cosmology, an infin itely expanding field of con nections that joins the life of the individual to the grand cycles of the earth and cosmos. The whole mirror-travel venture was a way for 'him to pull himself out of his European mind and preju dices and move toward the natural entropies of time and nature, however chaotic they might be. Smithson associated this method of viewing with the contemporary Yucatan Indian, people whose downtrodden appearance seemed to him quite distant from their imperial forebearers, but who, in actual ity, possess an understanding beyond their humble surroundings. He understood that the Maya were not only the dead builders of pyramids, but also the living producers of the contem porary culture existing alongside the ruins. In this Indian culture he found immediacy, the ability to live in a present that linked them back to their ancient Mayan civil ization and provided a sensation al experience to parallel his mirror-travel. Able to see beyond the obviously decayed, Third World state of much of the current Indian environment, Smithson found his inspiration in a decrepit roadside tourist motel near the ruins of the ancient city of Palenque. According to Smithson's pictures and descriptions, the 'Hotel Palenque, known to this day as the tourist site's "hippie hotel," was a treasure equivalent in its artistry to the Mayan pyramids and sepulchers lying across the field in the ancient city. Smithson's description of the place, given in a lecture to a group of architecture students at �he University of Utah in 1972, seems ridiculous at first. The students laughed nervously at Smithson's deadpan fasci nation with a broken concrete wall, a pile of bricks, an abandoned disco complete with a dance floor but no roof and a dinky lobby pool with a few pathetic turtles swimming about. The students chor tled at his every comment on the baffling simplicity of it all. There is an elliptical answer that Smithson points to in 'his closing statement talking about a door haphazardly placed along one of the destroyed walls. "This is sort of the door. At first you notice right at the back that it's green, right? There's not really much you can say about it, I mean it's just a green door. We've all seen green doors at one time in our lives. It gives out a sense of uni versality that way, a sense of kind of global cohesion. The door probably opens to nowhere and clos es on nowhere, so that we leave the Hotel Palenque with this closed door and return to the University of Utah." Just as Alice steps through the mirror glass, we step through the green door into this brief interlude in a nowhere land created by a traveler to nowhere. If only briefly, Smithson's art also reflects the voyage taken when we leave the routine of our mundane existence and participate in something ineffable yet always close at hand. We are relieved, if only briefly, of the routine of our mechanized everyday life. Smithson's work can be found in Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel by Gary Shapiro (University of California Press); Robert Smithson: Photo Works by Robert A. Sobieszek, (University of New Mexico Press); and Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Col/ages, Writings by Eugenie Tsai, (Columbia University Press). . Photo: Estate of Robert Smithson, courtesy John Weber Gallery, NY