Robert Smithson, in his conceptualization of abstract art, specifically works against this tendency of re-facializing (or here anthropomorphizing) the absolute. It’s a tendency that goes back to the origins of hermetic philosophy, which finds ways to mirror the microcosm in the macrocosm and vice-versa. For Smithson, abstract-expressionism—the art-world index of a heroic struggle with the absolute—blocks the experience of space and infinity, and instead foregrounds the individual, the biological, and the humanly expressive.
“There is nothing abstract about deKooning or Pollock. To locate them in a formalist system is simply a critical mutation based on a misunderstanding of metaphor—namely, the biological extended into the spatial. . . . [A]nthopomorphizing of space is aesthetically a ‘pathetic fallacy’ and is in no way abstract.”
— Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinites and the Waning of Space,” fns 11 & 15