The desert is an object of speculative desire in modern art and thought. As a space where images and representations are broken, it facilitates a far-reaching critique of representation. This is at the heart of modernism's wasteland aesthetics. For modernism, the desert, wasteland or Wüste was not just the image of a world in pieces but the site of a breaking of likenesses. Eliot's vacant lots were first of all a means of transgressing aesthetic laws and embracing the terrain vague of decoded space. In his Suprematist manifesto, the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich called for a ‘non-objectivist’ art by which the objects of the phenomenal world would be nullified in a release of pure feeling and an impoverishment of perception: ‘No more “likenesses of reality”, no idealistic images – nothing but a desert!’ His famous painting of a white square on a white background expresses the strange coexistence of impoverishment and intensity, as if the smallest degree of difference could function to liberate a new subjectivity beyond the representational consciousness that correlates it with an object. This is what I have tentatively termed a hypersubject. In the late 1960s, Robert Smithson referenced Malevich's desert in his own attempts to articulate a new conception of space by means of the entropic landscapes that he saw embodied in the monumental sculptures of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, the glass boxes of Park Avenue architecture, and New Jersey's suburban wastelands. Smithson, along with his contemporaries Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria, set out for the deserts of California, Nevada and Utah to construct their site-specific art in the arid landscape. The goal was not simply to move beyond the gallery space or artist's studio but beyond what Smithson called ‘the biological metaphor’, the aesthetic tendency, as he saw it, to model all being on the organic processes of life, growth, degradation and death. As with the Desert Fathers of late antiquity, the desert was a space in which both nature and polis could be eliminated in favour of a third term beyond the organic. As Smithson writes,