Among Robert Smithson's lesser-known works are three outdoor tree installations - dead stumps, actually, that he found and 'planted' upside-down in various locations in 1969. Third Upside-Down Tree was erected that spring in Yaxchilan, Mexico on the Yucatan peninsula while the artist was photographing a series of nine 'mirror displacements' to which the tree ended up becoming a sort of pendant.

The photographs document the displacement of the landscape (through its absorption and reflection) by twelve square mirrors inserted into the soil or foliage in loose grid formations. Because Smithson gathered up the mirrors and moved them to each successive site - they were objects as well as subjects of displacement - the photographs document the existence of now absent referents. He underscored this point in an essay accompanying the photographs entitled 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan', which was published in the September 1969 issue of Artforum. Inverting the traditional relationship between the artwork and its reproduction (the images do not simply document absent artworks but are an integral part of what is actually a text-based work), the essay describes the mirrors' itinerary in detail. It is by now commonplace to discuss the strate=es employed in this work within the context of a broad range of conceptual practices that staged what has been described as an 'escape attempt' from the museum-gallery nexus during the 1960s.¹ Sam Durant's reintroduction of these Smithsonian referents -the trees and the mirrors - into the space of the gallery in a recent work not only harks back to those strate=es but also re-engages them in a new way.

Durant's installation Upside Down: Pastoral Scene (2002) consists of twelve simulated tree stumps made of painted fibreglass with real roots and branches grafted onto them, each of which is placed upside-down on top of a large, square mirror so that it is re-inverted, or righted, in its reflected image below. Cradled in each tree's roots is a pair of speakers, which collectively play a selection of about two dozen songs written or performed by African-American musicians ranging from Donal Fox's 'Dialectics for Two Grand Pianos' to John Lee Hooker's 'Blues for Abraham Lincoln' to Elaine Brown's 'Assassination' to Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit', from whose lyrics the work's subtitle was taken. The arrangement of the twelve mirror/tree pairs mimics the grid configurations of the Yucatan mirror displacements; moreover, just as Smithson suggested that his inverted trees could be connected by 'lines drawn on a map', the sound emitted by these artificial stumps takes on a graphic quality since it doesn't play on all the speakers at once but shifts from one set to another, sometimes in linear shapes (spirals, circles and Xs, for instance).² On the site where he planted the third upside-down tree, Smithson placed the mirrors of his Seventh Mirror Displacement in the branches of what he described as a 'tentacled' tree, 'a giant vegetable squid inverted in the ground'.³ A metaphor that served to compound the organic nature of the tree, the slightly menacing-sounding tentacles stood in sharp contrast to the inert roots of the upturned stump even as they mirrored each other formally - a disparity that is echoed in Durant's integration of the organic roots with the inorganic stumps. And, just as Smithson's 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel' signalled a refusal of the institutional frame of the gallery, Pastoral Scene interrogates the social and political framework that now circumscribes it.

In this ambitious installation Durant takes up a number of the concerns that have been central to his work for the past decade. His interest in Smithson is longstanding and much of his work of the late 1990s might be characterised as a reading, in the Barthesian sense, of Smithsonian mythology. Published in 1957, Roland Barthes's Mythologies anthologised a series of articles written over the course of the previous two years analysing a diverse array of objects and forms of mass consumption - from wrestling to detergents to photography exhibitions - in an effort to reveal the mechanism by which historically and culturally determined meanings come to be 'what-goes-without-saying', naturalised through what Barthes called mythical speech. In a 1971 coda to this account, which was even more explicitly indebted to Marx, Barthes argued that myth was 'something socially determined, a "reflection"', and, moreover, this reflection was inverted: 'myth consists in overturning culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological, the historical into the "natural".'⁴ In this later essay Barthes both looked back to his early work as a reader of cultural mythologies and forward to a moment when the analysis and dismantling of myth that he had initiated would be superseded by the destruction of the sign itself. '[T]he problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative,' he wrote, 'but to fissure the very representation of meaning.'⁵ In other words, the aspiration to reveal the ideological underpinnings of cultural sign systems should be succeeded by the more comprehensive project of disrupting systems of signification - and, by extension, the social systems in which they operate - themselves.

Acutely interested in the issues with which Barthes was dealing, Smithson spoke the same language of fissures and disruptions: 'The names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other, because at the bottom of both the material and the print is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures. Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures.'6 Smithson was especially preoccupied with the materiality of language as he initiated his own reading of a number of aesthetic and cultural myths. His work did not engage with popular culture, however, but with the aestheticisation of nature and the institutionalisation of culture maintained by the museum and gallery system - that is, with theoretical and discursive aspects of the mythological rather than specific instances of mythical speech. Smithson himself is now considered a mythic figure by many artists of Durant's generation, and, by virtue of this status, has become mythologised in Barthes's sense, since the connoted meanings that have accrued to the Smithsonian sign have become naturalised in a way that makes the task of historicising his work diƒcult. In addition, by the 1980s, in the context of an increasingly reactionary social and cultural climate, a general nostalgia for the 1960s as a period of radical social and political engagement had become firmly entrenched in the popular imagination, contributing to the mythologisation of that era itself. In several works of the late 1990s Durant connected Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) - the structure whose entropic decline he accelerated by dumping truckloads of earth onto it - to contemporaneous pop-cultural events and music: the Woodstock and Altamont concerts, the Rolling Stones song 'Gimme Shelter', and Neil Young's 'Ohio', which memorialised the student killings at Kent State University where the woodshed was located. Moving further along this metonymic chain, Durant introduced the figure of Kurt Cobain, who quoted the lyrics of a Neil Young song in his 1994 suicide note. Through a sequence of associative connections, these works link the present to the past by first linking events of the late 1960s and early 70s that have been treated as though their histories were separate, and then connecting these events to subsequent uses or readings of them. Smithson's earthworks and non-sites were conceived to counter the discourse of modernism; in the wake of that critique, Durant has responded not only to the absence of a dominant discourse but to the resulting atomisation of discourse.

When Durant turned to the upside-down trees several years ago, he had already worked extensively with the woodshed, Smithson's pours of the late 1960s, and other mirror works. Reflection and inversion were certainly leitmotifs of the earlier work, but the fact that the trees are not obvious signifiers for Smithson - they are not iconic images like the woodshed - signals a shift in his concerns. Smithson still figures prominently in this work, but the focus here is not on his mythologisation or that of the pop-cultural figures of that era. In 2001 Durant exhibited a single tree along with several other new works, including a large light box with vinyl lettering adhered to it that read 'Like, Man, I'm Tired (of Waiting)', which was accompanied by what he refers to as an 'index': a drawing made after the photograph from which this text was taken. The texts of these illuminated signs (there are a total of twelve in a variety of colours) are appropriated from hand-lettered signs pictured in photographs of demonstrations and protest marches that took place throughout the US during the 1960s. The words and phrases don't refer to the specific events or issues that engendered the protests, most of which are related to the civil rights, and women's movements; instead, they read like mild exhortations, aphorisms, or simply declarative statements. In spite of the fact that they might seem only tangentially related, the trees and the signs can be seen to represent different approaches to the same problem - namely, how to address the issues that mythical speech raises for our understanding not only of the past but also of the present.

With the illuminated signs, Durant shifted his attention from the connections between the pop-cultural, art historical and political and social events of the 1960s to focus more closely on the politics of that period. But the fact that most of the protests Durant cites concern struggles for self-determination by constituencies that don't include him is probably not lost on most viewers, which raises the question of what sanctions his appropriation of these cultural artefacts - and whose interests it serves. What Durant confronts in recontexualising these texts is precisely the fact that, as Barthes put it, 'the fundamental character of the mythical concept is to be appropriated'.⁷ Although they certainly attest to the character of the events that transpired during that decade, the photographs from which Durant has taken the texts have also contributed to the cultural construction, or myth of 'the 1960s' that frames our current conception of that period. Mythical speech does not hide or displace literal meaning but turns it (the original sign) into the signifier of a second order of signification. As Barthes said, describing the myth of wine in France: 'wine is objectively good, and at the same time, the goodness of wine is a myth: here is the aporia.'⁸ Arguably Durant doesn't appropriate the original speech act; rather, he appropriates the mythical speech that is parasitic upon it. Reading the recontextualised phrases back through the documents that have been integral to the construction and perpetuation of this myth, Durant reads myth against the grain - its grain - by allegorising the process of mythologisation.

Barthes wrote in Mythologies that 'the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth'.⁹ Later, he argued that mythologies would be succeeded by an 'idiolectology' whose 'operational concepts would no longer be sign, signifier, signified and connotation but citation, reference, stereotype'.¹⁰ In other words, as mythologies become more diffuse, their reach more encompassing, they are transformed into generalised references or stereotypes; and these are the terms that Durant's project addresses. The commercial signage Durant uses to recontextualise the phrases of the protest signs alludes to the idea that it is the reification of the sign of radicality that accounts for the mythologisation of the 1960s. With myth so entrenched, it becomes more difficult to recognise the persistence, and in some cases the intensification, of many of the problems of that era.¹¹ What the signs reveal is that mythical speech, especially when, in its more generalised form, it appears to displace history, has consequences for the present. This would become the real focus of Pastoral Scene, but the upside-down trees require more scrutiny because their relationship to both appropriation and mythical speech is more complex.

In Pastoral Scene Durant's choices of the selections included in what he refers to as a 'musical narrative' were governed in large part by the fact that they dealt with the issue of race. He returned to his earlier practice of connecting cultural artefacts from different time periods, but this collection doesn't belong to a synchronic field, like the one containing the protest signs, which itself has been mythologised. Unlike the earlier juxtapositions, this music is culled specifically from African-American culture, which means that even though Durant's strategy hasn't changed, his position in relation to his source material has. The impetus for this shift was, at least in part, a work he completed in 2000 that dealt with the origins of Southern Rock in which the underlying racism of its lyrics and tropes (in particular the confederate flag) was foregrounded. That work, Proposal for Monument in Friendship Park, Jacksonville, Florida, was itself related to the slightly earlier Proposal for Monument at Altamont Raceway, Tracy, CA (1999), which addressed the same issue in the Rolling Stones 1971 song 'Brown Sugar'. The narrative that Durant constructs in Pastoral Scene is neither chronological nor linear; interconnecting music of different genres and time periods, it is thematic. Themes involving a vertical axis, particularly those referring to heaven and hell or earth and sky, are intertwined with others relating to integration, racism and the state, and dissent. In Durant's earlier installations two or three songs, sometimes played in reverse but always simultaneously, produced a kind of sonic entropy. By contrast, the recontextualisation of the musical selections in Pastoral Scene produces a complex network of political, social and cultural themes, raising the question of how their historical meanings have become 'what-goes-without-saying'. However, both because of the fact that Durant cites its lyrics in the work's title and because of the imagery of the poem from which it derives, Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' becomes the central axis of Pastoral Scene, organising the reading of the work in spite of its apparent lack of hierarchy.

The centrality of 'Strange Fruit' is reinforced by the fact that the ironic - and chilling - contrast between the bucolic setting and the violent act of lynching in the song's 'pastoral scene of the gallant South' (evoked by the juxtaposition of the 'scent of magnolia' and the 'sudden smell of burning flesh', for instance) is linked to another kind of pastoral scene in this work. Michel Foucault suggested the following as one way, among others, to narrate the history of what he called the 'critical attitude': '[T]he Christian pastoral, or the Christian church inasmuch as it acted in a precisely and specifically pastoral way, developed this idea ... that each individual whatever his age or status, from the beginning to the end of his life and in his every action, had to be governed and had to let himself be governed, that is to say directed towards his salvation, by someone to whom he was bound by a total, meticulous, detailed relationship of obedience.'¹² With its secularisation in the sixteenth century, this 'art of governing' could no longer be dissociated from the question of 'how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them'.¹³ Durant's narrative is shot through with themes relating to both religious and secular manifestations of this 'pastoral scene', with the songs' juxtaposition acting to subvert the hierarchies inherent in these systems: Ice Cube's 'I Wanna Kill Sam' plays through Leontyne Price's rendition of 'America the Beautiful', for instance. Similarly, beginning with allusions to the sacred and the profane in Robert Johnson's 'Crossroad Blues' and Mahalia Jackson's a capella rendition of Duke Ellington's 'Come Sunday', the narrative ends by juxtaposing John Coltrane's 'Ascension' and Pharoah Sanders's 'Black Unity' with selections that include Funkadelic's 'Wars of Armageddon' and Curtis Mayfield's 'Underground' and '(Don't Worry) If there's a Hell Below We're All Gonna Go'. While these metaphors reinforce the emphasis on the vertical axis, the influence of both Eastern and Western religions on Coltrane's free jazz and Funkadelic's parody of the heaven/hell axis in 'Maggot Brain' ('For I knew I had to rise above it all/Or drown in my own shit') serve to de-centre this hierarchy.

The musical narrative is also replete with references to the Black Panther Party, which are not so much allusive as archival. For example, Durant includes Nina Simone's 'Mississippi Goddam', which became a kind of anthem of the civil rights era, and was played at the funeral of George Jackson, Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party; the Coup ('Piss on your Grave') is an Oakland-based hip-hop band whose members are social activists and became acquainted with former Panther members, including David Hilliard, once the party's Chief of Staff; Sister Sledge's 'We Are Family' was produced by Nile Rodgers (also famously of the 1970s band Chic), who was a member of the Panther party in New York; and, in the most direct reference, Elaine Brown was the leader of the party from 1974 to 1977 and her recording of 'Assassination', which is about the murder of prominent party members Bunchy Carter and John Huggins at UCLA in 1969, was produced by the Panthers themselves. Durant's focus on the Panthers appears to be double-edged: this black nationalist group was well-known for its alliances with white leftist groups (for instance, the Peace and Freedom Party); and, like Smithson and the Rolling Stones, the Panthers are also mythologised figures of the 1960s, although this myth is more controversial because of the political and social impact of their activities.¹⁴ Including songs that both appropriate the myth uncritically (Public Enemy's 'Fear of a Black Planet') and seek to problematise it (The Coup's 'Piss on Your Grave'), Durant does not attempt to reconcile them but to bring myth into direct confrontation with some of its real effects. Funkadelic's 'Wars of Armageddon', one of the final songs in the narrative, unapologetically parodies the Panthers' slogan 'All Power to the People' with a mantra that starts with the lines: 'More power to the people/More pussy to the power/More pussy to the people...'. Through the songs' juxtaposition and allegorisation Durant proposes a kind of counter-narrative that is not intended to 'right' or even rewrite the mythologised history of the events and figures cited in them but instead to produce a counter-myth.

Pastoral Scene not only appeals to more than one sense by linking an acoustic narrative with a visual grid of mirrors and trees, it can also be seen as a figure for language itself - or, more specifically, its double articulation - owing to its interconnection of a temporal and a spatial axis. (And it was, of course, the emblem of the tree that Ferdinand de Saussure used to explain the components of the linguistic sign.) Vertical and horizontal axes are present within the visual and aural components themselves: the horizontal plane of each mirror intersects with the vertical tree trunk (or trunks if one counts the reflection) and the metonymic succession of songs is countered by the songs' metaphoric allusions to various kinds of vertical axes ranging from the opposition of heaven and hell to the tree and the lynched body. By placing the upside-down trees on top of the mirrors, Durant contrives to fuse Smithson's dead stumps and tentacled trees (here they become one and the same), while at the same time re-inverting the nature/culture hierarchy implied by the amalgamation of the organic roots and the inorganic trunks. Reflected in the mirrors, the truncated stumps are not only righted but transformed into whole trees with roots growing out of the base of the trunk and limbs out of the top. Smithson's upended stumps were both a wry comment on his own artistic process and a literal mirror for the tree in which heplaced the mirrors of the Seventh Mirror Displacement. As in his earlier installations, Durant sets up a sequence of associations in Pastoral Scene that starts with Smithson's tree and moves along the metonymic or horizontal axis, linking it to other symbolic trees - the family tree and the tree of knowledge, for instance, both of which are incorporated thematically into the musical narrative. At the same time, the songs in the narrative mimic the mirror/tree pairs by moving back and forth between a theme and its inversion (or thesis and antithesis). 'Branching out' and 'rootedness', as well as inversion, might be seen to figure Durant's project in the same way that Smithson's upside-down trees reflected his. But instead of Smithson's emphasis on the materiality of language, a strategy aimed at challenging the progressive history of the modernist narrative, Durant focuses on the fragmentation of discourse that has characterised postmodernism. This becomes clear as the metonymic associations seem to come to a halt when the spectator is confronted by Holiday's song. The disquiet that the inclusion of 'Strange Fruit' in this work might cause is due, I would argue, to its categorical resistance to appropriation. By foregrounding this particular song, Durant stages, or frames, its resistance in order to pose his own appropriation as a problem. Why this recalcitrance when 'Strange Fruit' has been covered by no fewer than three dozen artists (and probably many, many more) ranging from Josh White and Sidney Bechet shortly after Holiday started performing it in 1939 to Nina Simone, Archie Shepp, and Carmen McRae in the 1960s to UB40, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Tori Amos, and Sting in the 1980s and 90s? Durant doesn't cover the song; rather, he uncovers it, using it as a vehicle, in turn, for uncovering the problem raised by its unassimilability. The sacred and the profane, a key pair of terms in Pastoral Scene's narrative, are not only formally but also thematically linked to 'Strange Fruit'. Although they echo the vertical axis figured by the tree in the song, these terms also allude to a kind of social space to which access is restricted and whose use is regulated by ritual. The motto of the Café Society, the club in Greenwich Village where Holiday first began performing 'Strange Fruit', was 'the wrong place for the Right people'.¹⁵ Catering to a progressive audience, Café Society was one of the only integrated clubs in New York in 1939 and thus a politically significant place to introduce the song, whose nightly performances quickly became its main attraction. In a 1970 lecture titled 'The Discourse on Language', Foucault discussed the production of discourse, arguing that 'in a society such as our own we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and familiar of these concerns what is prohibited. We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything.'¹⁶ The prohibition that governed Holiday's speech had to do with the fact that 'we are not free to say just anything'; Durant's is connected to the understanding that 'not just anyone may speak of just anything'. The subject position Durant assumes in Pastoral Scene could therefore be described as 'the right place for the Wrong people'. However, the incommensurability of the risks involved in Holiday's and Durant's respective transgressions is, finally, what is brought to bear in this work.

Appropriating African-American music, and 'Strange Fruit' in particular, Durant risks what Craig Owens, quoting Gilles Deleuze, called 'the indignity of speaking for others'.¹⁷ The problems this raises are not negligible. But, by taking this risk, Durant points to the limits of what one might call 'discourse specificity'. According to Michael Fried, the modernist art object was identified - and was only identifiable as such - by its discipline, or, to use Fried's terminology, its 'medium specificity'. Postmodernism did away with this strict need to classify the object, instead requiring the categorisation of its multiple subject positions. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recognises the endgame this entails: '[W]hile we insist on the development of new aesthetic systems and new institutional constructs that account for the complexity of our experience, it's important not to fall into the racist trap of thinking that one has to be black to write about black culture.'¹⁸ For Durant, it's not a matter of speaking for others but of them at all, which is what makes his defiance not only problematic but a problematic of Pastoral Scene itself. Identified with the vertical axis, which is echoed in (or between) many of the songs, 'Strange Fruit' is set against the horizontal axis of the musical narrative. This song's resistance to appropriation therefore produces a kind of sonic gestalt against the background of a comparatively undifferentiated field (which includes what Durant refers to as 'smashed medleys'). In this way, Durant juxtaposes two different modalities of counter-myth: the narrative's parodic or allegorical de-centrings and 'Strange Fruit's unassimilability. However, like the upside-down stumps, 'Strange Fruit's resistance is mirrored - and therefore inverted - in Pastoral Scene, uncovering the broader implications of this counter-myth.

In an attempt to reinforce her identification with the song, Holiday herself contributed to its mythologisation by claiming that she had partly written it or had it written for her.¹⁹ Already metaphorical, what Barthes might call the lyrics' 'protesticity' was naturalised, accounting for the ease with which the song has since been covered - a term that takes on a certain irony in this context. Mythical speech, as Barthes explains, is interpellant speech: 'Myth has an imperative, buttonholing character: stemming from an historical concept, directly springing from contingency ... it is I whom it has come to seek. It is turned towards me, I am subjected to its intentional force, it summons me to receive its expansive ambiguity.'²⁰ As a result, it becomes a kind of frozen speech, made to appear neutral or innocent through naturalisation. 'The appropriation of the concept,' Barthes writes, 'is suddenly driven away once more by the literalness of the meaning. This is a kind of arrest, in both the physical and the legal sense of the term ... On the surface of language something has stopped moving.'²¹ Frozen on the surface of language, mythical speech is stripped of a subject (or, more precisely, the subject is subjected by myth) and, therefore, of agency.²² This is what has happened with the mythologisation of the song 'Strange Fruit', whose literal meaning (which, as a metaphor, is already a metalanguage) has been turned into a signifier that can be appropriated. On the other hand, the mythologisation of 'Strange Fruit' as an historical event (what Foucault would call a 'statement in the enunciative field') means that it has come to stand for agency itself: a speech act uttered from a subject position that Durant can only 'occupy' through appropriation. And the naturalisation of this culturally constructed subject position makes it, in turn, mythologised - and is the myth that Pastoral Scene seeks to challenge.

Smithson and his peers countered what they perceived as an increasing centralisation of power within the art world's critical apparatus (and its alignment with the political and social power structure outside the gallery) with various strategies for decentring it.23 And yet, while they were successful in contesting a discourse that had begun to seem not only inadequate but oppressive by the late 1960s, the atomisation of discourse that resulted has not, finally, succeeded in amending this situation. In response, Durant's re-placement of Smithson's mirrors and trees within the space of the gallery might be seen as an attempt to effect a decentring not of the modernist subject (that was the project of postmodernism) but of the postmodernist subject position. I would argue that Pastoral Scene aspires to engage the viewer in a manner similar to Brecht's epic theater, which, as Walter Benjamin put it, was 'less concerned with filling the public with feelings, even seditious ones, than with alienating it in an enduring manner ... from the conditions in which it lives.'²⁴ The question this work leaves open is how one is alienated from these conditions - and whether it's possible to establish critical distance in relation to myth at all. Durant's appropriation of 'Strange Fruit' runs the very real risk of going too far, of, in a sense, outdistancing criticality. But, as Barthes concluded, the task is 'no longer simply to upend (or right) the mythical message ... but rather to change the object itself'.²⁵ And Pastoral Scene argues for the need to make a space for that change.

I'd like to thank Howard Singerman for discussing this essay with me at length and for his helpful suggestions on the text. Paola Morsiani, José Lerma, Hilary Wilder and Stephanie Martz also made incisive comments on an earlier draft for which I'm grateful. I'm also indebted to Sam Durant for taking the time to answer innumerable questions and for several illuminating conversations about the work.

— Mary Leclère