The radically “impure” character of Glue Pour is characteristic of the multidisciplinary American artist’s work as a whole, which deliberately straddles (and sometimes crosses) the line between sublime and kitsch. This mixed pedigree is equally descriptive of his visits to Vancouver in late 1969 through early 1970 in preparation for Glue Pour and the infamously unrealized earthwork Island of Broken Glass. Where one might expect a narrative of one-way influence—the precocious American master leaving his mark on an underdeveloped art scene—in reality, the story is more convoluted, and strange.

Smithson was obsessed by the paradoxes of history, and the artist’s approach to time as a process whose violence, like Humpty Dumpty’s fall, can never be undone resonated powerfully with Dikeakos. “Glue Pour, for Smithson, was to be a study in erosional aesthetics,” he observes. “As it was happening there must have been ideas and thoughts realized, like the multiple identities that occur in a fluid state of past to present time.” Raiding the field of geology in search of metaphors with which to think through the possibility of history conceived as a material substance predisposed to irrevocable decay, the time-travelling artist was given to thinking in pairs. Like parallel strata exposed by excavation, Smithson’s art and ideas always risked colliding with themselves...