Cable Factory 20

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Lytle Shaw. Cable Factory 20. Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos, 1999. The artist Robert Smithson would often make site-selections, in which he would photograph large-scale industrial project. In sort of inverse entropy, the finished construction would eclipse the non-utilitarian abstract artistic aspect of dam, for example: [The Pine Flat Dam] is seen as functionless wall. When it functions as dam it will cease being work of art and become utility.1 Another important idea for Smithson was the non-site, which designated an abstraction from fixed geological site, whether it be piece made for gallery space, or his famous Spiral Jetty. Smithson attempted, through his artistic endeavors, to bring together the dialectic of site and non-site. Although the non-site designates the site, the site itself is open and really unconfined and constantly being changed. And then the thing was to bring these two things together.2 Smithson's work questioned the gallery and museum as spaces in which to confine sites. Lytle Shaw, in his first full-length book, Cable Factory 20, borrows from Smithson, using the page as place to entangle the site/non-site dialectic. As physical object, the book is quite beautiful. Each page is either bordered or taken entirely over by black and white images: blurred blownup maps, topographical details, photos of Smithson, pieces of text, photographs of electronic devices, dated illustrations of dinosaurs. Many of the images are borrowed from the Writings of Robert Smithson, and indeed the format is reminiscent of an article in that book titled Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space. There, Smithson borders blocks of text with thick black lines, outside of which, along the margins of the page, are footnotes and images. In Shaw's book, the interplay between text and image calls to mind positive and negative images placed side by side. Shaw also urbanizes Duncan's creation of fields, or spaces within which to test out and ideas. The unadorned whiteness upon which the text of the poems is placed is striking in its absence of image, as if the letters were pixels abstracted from the stark, black images next to, above, and below them. This visual display gives the book physicality that the author can both utilize and implicitly criticize. Letters man the (14), Shaw writes; and later, a landfill of mined language (41). The mind and the man mine the land and fill it in with language; Shaw attends to the details of human-manipulated earth to get us to pay attention to that very obvious interaction, to how we use lattice-work of words to sign the world we've already manipulated. He casts disconsolate gaze upon the inhuman energies of humans to make things mean, and, indeed, to force the world into human formations. A refreshingly sly O'Hara-like humor jogs throughout, grounding the book's ideas in humanist voice, as opposed to the now ubiquitous strained irony of so much contemporary poetry. Lines such as Students had loved these specimens (39), tomatoes poised for expression (80), and what wilderness doesn't look (just little) like theme park? (99) show Shaw looking dry-eyed at strange facts, fully engaging us in these cabinets of wonder. This is reminiscent of the weird humor of cave tours-the human tendency to analogize things into recognizable shapes (like the bacon and eggs formation, the scooby-doo formation, the holy family formation of tours I have been on). …