Robert Smithson on Duchamp

See Smithson (not digging Duchamp, Johns, LeWitt, and others... in our Road Trip reader, Moira Roth's very good interview, 1973): "[Duchamp has] taken kind of an aristocratic stance and given it more of a sordid edge. Also this influence pervades Robert Morris' work to a great extent. I would call it Duchampitis. In other words, there's no viable dialectic in his work because he's trading on the alienated object and conferring on this object a special kind of mystification. Johns does this too, in combination with painting. Duchamp has rejected painting but Johns gives it a little something else. It's a complete denial, I think, of the work process. It's very mechanical too. I think it has a lot to do with Pop art. But it has to do with transcending the readymade--like, in a sense, Jim Rosenquist is transcending billboards, Andy Warhol is transcending canned goods, Jim Dine is transcending tools that you buy in hardware stores. His influence is quite pervasive on that level. What I'm saying is that this offers a kind of veneration of manufactured goods. Then he might give a certain poetic reading--let's say of the shovel--in order to mystify it more."