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