"The mirror itself is not subject to duration, because it is an ongoing abstraction that is always available and timeless. The reflections, on the other hand, are fleeting instances that evade measure. Space is the remains, or corpse, of time, it has dimensions. 'Objects' are 'sham space,' the excrement of thought and language. . . . Objects are phantoms of the mind, as false as angels" (Robert Smithson, "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in The Yucatan,"122).
This "on-going abstraction" of the mirrors is the perpetual engine of a vast identity machine--creating whole abstract selves, albeit fleetingly, that mask a more fragmentary reality. What is not seen--the other side of the mirror, the back of the head, the mirror without the human gaze--may be something like Lacan's object a. The object a can be defined as that partial, fragmentary thing that is left out of the subject's self-representation, but which paradoxically marks the Real of the subject's desire. Smithson's play with mirrors, however, does not seek an impossible unity with pre-subjective plenitude, but rather organizes an "incident"--which can mean a durational event, but also the oblique perception afforded by the "incidence" of light on mirrors. Tricking the mind into perceiving what is normally blocked by human objective perception, pre-subjective plenitude turns the corner onto science-fictional void, the primal past onto the impossible future. The true experience of duration can only be surmised in a fiction in which humans do not exist. And yet, we feel that duration is our very nature, that we are creatures of time, even though our psychic compositions only allow us to grasp the remains of time (space, object, image).