This mingling of past and present is of course filtered by my own sensibility. In viewing the end product, the reconstruction of these threads may be difficult, or even impossible without a key. Like the original inscriptions, the new texts don’t always give up their meaning without some effort. In fact, a few are exercises in willful obscurity: for example, a dedication to Flavius became "Flaubert’s Idea." This cryptic phrase refers to a conversation that Robert Smithson supposedly had with Dennis Oppenheim in the late 1960s, in which Smithson made repeated use of the term "Flaubert’s idea" as a kind of shorthand for l’art pour l’art, a concept defended by Flaubert in the 1850s, and described by Smithson elsewhere as "Flaubert’s idea that art is the pursuit of the useless."

While the juxtaposition of Flaubert, Flavius, and an ephemeral dialogue that took place during the heyday of conceptual art is interesting in itself – and there is some irony in Flavius’s granite text being digitally dematerialized and stripped of its site à la Smithson – what fascinates me is how little manipulation was necessary to nudge the original text into this new incarnation, and that, as a gesture, this can occur at all.