Little Salon: Sampler (Nonexistence), 2002

I set Sampler (Nonexistence) in the Little Salon, a rococo, rather femme room full of mirrors, decorative objects, and painted panels, so that Robert Smithson’s incipiently macho sentiments would appear beneath Boucher’s boudoir painting Car of Venus. The Boucher painting has been said to convert “the grand compositional effects of Titian and Rubens into a confection of daydreams.” Cupids cascade and cavort on pink and white cotton-candy clouds above my copy of Smithson’s lightning drawing.

Photograph by Yoav Horesh