27 with sheets of plastic in her series Luz (Light) (1967–69, fig. 2), which included architectural columns or wall-size cascades of layered polyurethane, a quintessential twentieth-century material. Amaral’s interest in plastic stemmed from her desire to explore its versatility in textile form and to induce the peculiar brilliant light that bounced off its surface. The artist Robert Smithson spoke about the postwar generational shift toward synthetic materials and its conceptual implications in his essay “Entropy and New Monuments” from 1966: “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. Instead of being made of natural materials, such as marble, granite, or other kinds of rock, the new monuments are made of artificial materials, plastic, chrome, and electric light. They are not built for the ages, but rather against the ages.” 7 In the decades since the Luz series was initially created, the cultural reading of the material has shifted from the miraculous to utilitarian to dystopic. The dominant abundance of plastic and the enthusiasm for its innovation in the early twentieth century evolved into an environmental crisis because of its slow rate of decomposition; the material carries with it the politics of the time. Today, the surface of these large-scale works feels like the trap of Narcissus, an invention by a humanity so impressed with itself it did not realize it was look- ing at its own self-destruction. 8 Figure 2 Installation view of Ideas in Polietileno at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá, 1969.