Hotel Palenque: entropic power of laughter-hotel
We know that in 1969 Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and a friend of his wife, Virginia Dwan has spent time in a place in the jungle of Chiapas in southern Mexico. In this room creates a lesson for students of architecture at the University of Utah, which later, in 1972, Smithson read to accompany a series of 31 photographs taken by him too.
What is clear is how the passengers were able to move from the East Coast of the United States, traveling thousands of miles of concrete under the endless sky of the western deserts spread way mirror, in a lost and hidden by vegetation and l ' humidity, near the ruins of the Mayan city of Palenque.
Beyond the paths and stages peyote lost some of his countrymen, who belonged to Beat Generation, is suspected of Smithson and his companions a sincere interest in the understanding of Mayan culture and their vision of the world that is worth the trip , living room and a strange decision to stay at the half built hostel with a huge announcement: Hotel Palenque.
"We live, says the author of" Spiral Jetty in structures, and are surrounded by frames of reference, but nature has dismantled and returned to a state where you no longer have integrity. " Hence perhaps the dilapidated hotel, and the interest and obsession with Sm
ithson's going to retrace his staff, the risk of getting lost in its architecture, "dismantled", explaining its structure and make the pass incomplete, very risky, but without which his artistic career may be incomplete.
Smithson admits right away that, despite all their efforts, the hotel "is an impossible place to understand." Hotel Palenque is a building located on a standoff between the building and ruin: "A sort of Mexican geological wonder created by man." Impossible to know when it started to build, but even harder to know when it's over, or will one day: "The whole hotel is intertwined and re-weave. It's like a big set of watermarks that revolves around him."
Carried by the powerful energy of the jungle again, which led him to spend long hours in deep meditation, she confessed: "I feel that the hotel was built in the same spirit in which the Maya built their temples. It encourages its listeners "I hope that the Hotel Palenque alojéis to understand how the Maya are still under construction. The structure retains the intricate and somewhat terrifying to be found in a typical Mayan temple, especially in the variety Uxmal, which are very, very baroque ... is called Maya, and is characterized by interlocking fronts filled meandering spirals shapes carved into the rock is very beautiful. "
Always fascinated by the same inertia of the spiral, Smithson below with a pinch of humor: "There is something in this country, the widespread violence hidden in the landscape itself. Many artists and writers have been destroyed, and returned to Mexico. E ' happened to Hart Crane to return from Mexico, that jumped to the stern of a ship above the propeller and was made pedacitos1. We must be careful when visiting this country to avoid being affected by this senseless violence is so dangerous that it hidden in every inch of land. "
Smithson architectural rescue homeless columns, the corridors aimlessly, cement, beams, bricks, blacksmiths, and all construction materials piled up everywhere, the gap filled with plaster, the tower and the spiral staircase of the building and plaza are also part of the puzzle. Everything in the hotel seems to result from an accident or willing to sacrifice even the ballroom and the pool of empty desert with its suspension bridge and the bar at the bottom of the crypt. Suddenly breaking the signs with which he leans his life: a chair, a door, a banana, sad in a garden with rocks, a staircase and a pond with turtles, but the testimony of this, Smithson, who took the photographs and wrote a commentary for each, and then desarquitecturizada architecture "that no-place, a perfect analogy of mechanical entropy, which allows a twist more, and one that manages to draw the line from the operation of physical laws to the Mayan cosmic vision the construction of contemporary culture and ruin, and it appears one of the first conclusions of the conference: "The downfall is the secret soul of the whole building.
In an exercise of direct observation, Smithson exemplifies the dislocation of meaning, the work of demolition of the space-time. New type of spiral vision: one that links the image of the window was suspended, which is impossible to see from the safety of an interior, but from the eroded and bare maintains a continuous connection with the hotel door, and the Smithson conference ends and opens the shutter which gives the thought, reflection on the lim
its and the phase: A view from inside the door of Palenque Hotel opens the way to the conference room.
At that point half way between memory and forgetting, I remember reading that irony is a sterile manner, while the humor may be a little 'more fertile in the construction of an effective speech. The humor is perceived by some at the conference reiterated the thesis Smithson called entropic verbalization: laughter and power. "The order and disorder of the fourth dimension could vary between laughter and the crystal structure as a mechanism for limited speculation," it appears that pre-Hispanic cultures knew this, just look out any anthropological museum and see the shelves countless figurines are many different positions, but never lost her smile of stone, the suspect himself appeared on the face of those who moved and incredulous that day formed the crowded auditorium.
