Abstract
This essay positions Robert Smithson's 1969 Artforum article “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” within the American travel narrative tradition. Smithson intended his trip to be an “anti-expedition” to John Lloyd Stephens's antebelleum travels to Yucatán, and his project performs sophisticated, multilayered inversions of Stephen's nineteenth-century ethnocentrism. But Smithson, informed partly by 1960s-style primitivism, indirectly perpetuated many of Stephens's attitudes. The essay will focus on Smithson's transformation of a stereotypical Latin American “indifference” into a template for his own methods of “dedifferentiation” and for his own scrupulously indifferent response to the political upheavals of the late 1960s.
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