Matter of laughs

Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments.” First published in the June 1966 issue of Artforum:

The Park Place Group (Mark di Suvero, Dean Fleming, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenort, Anthony Magar, Tamara Melcher, Forrest Myers, Ed Ruda, and Leo Valledor) exists in a space-time monastic order, where they research a cosmos modeled after Einstein. They have also permuted the “models” of R. Buckminster Fuller’s “vectoral” geometry in the most astounding manner.

Fuller was told by certain scientists that the fourth dimension was “ha-ha,” in other words, that it is laughter. … Laughter is in a sense of kind of entropic “verbalization.” How could artists translate this verbal entropy, that is “ha-ha,” into “solid-models”? Some of the Park Place artists seem seem to be researching this “curious” condition. The order and disorder of the fourth dimension could be set between laughter and crystal-structural, as a device for unlimited speculation.

Let us now define the different type of Generalized Laughter, according to the six main crystal systems: the ordinary laugh is cubic or square (Isometric), the chuckle is a triangle or pyramid (Tetragonal), the giggle is a hexagon or rhomboid (Hexagonal), the titter is prismatic (Orthorhombic), the snicker is oblique (Monoclinic), the guffaw is asymmetric (Triclinic). To be sure this definition only scratches the surface, but I think it will do for the present. If we apply this “ha-ha-crystal” concept to the monumental models being produced by some of the artists in the Park Place group, we might begin to understand the fourth-dimensional nature of their work. From here on in, we must not think of Laughter as a laughing matter, but rather as the “matter-of-laughs.”

Solid-state hilarity, as manifest through the “ha-ha-crystal” concept, appears in a patently anthropomorphic way in Alice in Wonderland, as the Cheshire Cat. Says Alice to the Cat, “you make one quite giddy!” This anthropomorphic element has much in common with impure-purist art. The “grin without a cat” indicates “laugh-matter and/or anti-matter,” not to mention something approaching a solid giddiness. Giddiness of this sort is reflected in Myers’ plastic contraptions. Myers sets hard titter against soft snickers, and puts hard guffaws onto soft giggles. A fit of silliness becomes a rhomboid, a high-pitched discharge of mirth becomes prismatic, a happy outburst becomes a cube, and so forth.