Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/24995
•• • I ror Ie It's just the same throlJg!l the glass only things go the other way. Let's pretend there's a way of getting through it SOMEHOW. Let's pretend the glass has got all hot and soft so we c�n get through it. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away just like bright silvery mist. In another moment ALICE was tl1rough the glass and jumped lightly down from the other side into the looking glass room.-Lewis Carroll through a door: on one side the first minute, crpssing the divide into the other the next. And the distance is not so important. Alice needed only a quick hop and she was off through the mirror into the other world. Hallucinations, distorted perceptions, altered awareness and occasionally states resembling psychosis are sometimes as easy to reach as stepping . Alice's adventures were as much a psychological phantasm as they were actual trips into some out-there unknown. The mirror tells us that much. Looking at the reflection of reality in the mirror, Alice sees it start to melt and distort into a blurred opacity with no fixed points. The mirror swallows her up in what is nothing more than her own mind warped into another state of consciousness, a different world. But what if the mirror kept on moving? What happens when the mirror jumps first? If it jumped in front of you, as if it were traveling, what kind of . trip would that be? No need to ask Alice. In 1969, noted American artist Robert Smithson took off on a long series of travels using mirrors as a way of creating a mov ing unreality in the places he happened to be. Mirror-travel, as he called it, involved setting up mirror displacements: a series of mirrors set in snow banks, beaches, river gull ies, caves-anywhere that held revelatory potential. Through the mirror's ability to transform spatial situations, Smithson was able to liter ally reflect off his impressions and sensations of these places. These large, square mirrors put everything around them in focus and made the act of looking a charged experience by showing the visual quality of the environments that we travel so far and wide to see. Going from the Adirondacks of New York to Captiva Island, Florida, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the open heaths around Stonehenge in England, Smithson introduced mirrors as a deliberate play on the visual panorama that is such an intrinsic element of traveling. No longer a passive receiver of sensory experience, Smithson took to the task of a.ctive intervention in the travel act. For many, the reason we trav el is to escape our famil iar surroundings, to go and SEE a new world. We want to find a new way of viewing the world as a way to gain perspective on our existing ci rcumstances. In 'Smithson's case his desire was to push this envelope further-not only to head into the unknown, but once there, to start playing around with his experience of it, thereby becoming a dynamic participant in his perception of the environment. Like Alice, Smithson would use mirrors to access this new kind of adventure, a quasi-psychedelic voyage into a world of exterior perception and interior reflection. Of Smithson's travels, his summer 1969 trip to the Yucatan stands out from the rest of his exploits that year because of its radical fusion of his mir ror travel ideas with the ancient traditions of the Mayan culture of eastern Mexico. Having immersed himself in the poetics of Mayan myth before landing in the Yucatan, Smithson started a dialogue with the Indian gods that he found sti ll alive in the Mexican landscape, discussing art and life and other matters pertaining to his now distant existence in New York's art world with the likes of the blood soaked Mayan serpent-god Coatlicue. Smithson ironically borrows his title from John L. Stephens' Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, a popular nineteenth-century American tourist account complete with snapshot-like engrav-