::: HYDROCARBON RUNDOWN :::"Contamination" Project ::: Gasworks Arts Park, Melbourne, Australia, October, 2007 :::

Part of the “Contamination” project at Gasworks Arts Park, Hydrocarbon Rundown referenced Robert Smithson’s iconic 1969 work “Asphalt Rundown”, a key work in which Smithson orchestrated a truck full of asphalt to tip its load down a degraded quarry slope near Rome. Its documentation shows a moment of dynamic poise, a “readymade” of modern industrial machinery, landscape and material in a dialectic moment of impending entropy. In the replicated work asphalt is replaced by brown coal; coincidentally the truck used is a 1969 model. Smithson regarded the artist as being complicit in ecological destruction, referring to the artist as a “geologic agent”. His approach to environmentalism was ambivalent. “The view of the earth polluting itself out is a death fear” he noted. The (non) aesthetics of global warming, peak oil and the slew of other impending eco-catastrophes have yet to be fully defined but Smithson’s work is seminal in its scale, form, and Nietzshcian ambivalence.

link: Loy Yang open-cut coal mine