Grave rave

ArtForum, Nov, 1998 by Jean-Pierre Criqui

It's a virtual truism that a life's work is inevitably destined to incompletion and unfulfillment, but in Tony Smith's case, the cliche could not be more apt. Hence the inherent difficulty in any attempt to offer what the French call a "rue d'ensemble": where Smith is concerned, the very notion of an ensemble - an oeuvre, a body of work - appears problematic and ambiguous, and despite a few obvious constants in terms of formal thought and cultural reference, it is not at all certain that Smith himself would have ever imagined gathering together his various drawings, paintings, sculptures (finished, in model form, or presented on a smaller scale than envisioned), and sketches and photographs of buildings. A clandestine painter as well as an architect who willingly abandoned the idea of practicing, Smith did not even gain recognition as a sculptor until he was more than fifty; he did not, in short, have a "career" in the sense of the strategy, the planning, that the word might imply. The cast of mind revealed in statements concerning his lack of interest in sketches in the service of his projects, and the consequential necessity of working in three dimensions from the outset ("I don't have any sense of how a piece is going to turn [out], or even flit is going to turn out, until the end"), applies to his path more generally as well, suggesting that, whatever the medium or genre, his journey was literally a groping exploration - the way one might feel one's way in the dark - of a few major motifs that held him in their sway, and his rediscovery, free from any agenda, of a few sensations and a few objects.

That's why if one wants to understand what is really at stake in Smith's work, it's helpful to pay attention to his remarks about a childhood spent in isolation due to a youthful bout with tuberculosis, about his fascination with things as apparently anodyne as the big black stove that dominated his room, about his subsequent experience of various sites and situations that might fall under the category of the sublime - in short, everything that exceeds art and can therefore only cause an artist to despair (regardless of the ways in which such experiences might enable the art). His nighttime drive on the uncompleted New Jersey Turnpike, famously described to Sam Wagstaff in 1966, is not at all a kind of garnish meant to lend a dash of drama or grandeur a posteriori to Smith's enterprise, but rather constitutes a genuine epiphany: a furtive moment of truth, the arrested and inevitable partial image whose materialization the works propose - "First we feel, then we fall," as Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake (words the artist could quote from memory). Similar epiphanic moments, similarly linked to night and to blackness, can be attributed to certain other artists. I am thinking in particular of two with whom Smith might be said to share affinities. In Architecture, Essai sur l'art (a treatise written in the second half of the eighteenth century that remained unpublished during his lifetime), the revolutionary architect Boullee recounts how, out in the country one night, he found himself immersed in a profound, enveloping blackness pierced by only a few pale glimmers ("Nature, in mourning, seemed to offer itself to my gaze"). In characteristic manner, he draws a lesson from the experience concerning the look appropriate to funerary monuments. ("It does not seem possible to me to conceive of anything sadder than a monument composed of a flat surface, bare and stripped, made of a material that absorbs the light, absolutely devoid of details and whose decoration is formed by a tableau of shadows outlined by still darker shadows.") The other example is that of Giacometti, and the childhood memory he relates in "Hier, sables mouvants" ["Yesterday, shifting sands"], published in 1933 in Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution: the unexpected encounter with a large black stone in the shape of a narrow pyramid that immediately appeared to him "as a live being, hostile, threatening," and which he could not help but approach with the feeling of surrendering to "something reprehensible, secret, louche." The following year, the sculptor would produce what might be considered a sort of paradoxical equivalent of this fateful object: Le Cube, a monolith with thirteen sides that he claimed was in reality, for him, a head.

There is more kinship here with Tony Smith's sensibility than in all the supposedly self-referential and asymbolic "specific objects" that Minimalism would engender during the '60s. For all their morphological similarity to the work Donald Judd was producing at the time, sculptures such as Black Box or Die (with its potentially polysemic title), closed in on themselves, opposed to any transparency or reflectiveness, clearly possess a funerary dimension: six feet wide, Die is the abstract and unheimlich image of an unknown, absent dead person (during a lecture, Smith would point out: "The cube you see doesn't represent so much a space to live in as an actual person"). But the piece is also the negative of the "white cube," a sort of refutation of the will to total legibility and literalness that often go hand in hand with the modern art gallery. There is no taboo on metaphor in Smith, and in this sense, Robert Smithson, led by his baroque taste for allegory to inject a large dose of science fiction into Minimalism with the goal of detecting "new monuments," no doubt approached, at least in part, the spirit that presided over his elder's works. Without silencing it, the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective does muffle this spirit. One gets little sense, for instance, of the excessiveness - the hubris, to use the title of one of his sculptures - that must have nourished all of Smith's activity. Black Box and Die, in particular, lose a good deal of their auratic presence, exhibited as they are along with The Elevens Are Up and a number of paintings, in a gallery whose largest wall, of floor-to-ceiling glass, contributes both disagreeable back-lighting and a distracting view. Of course, the effect of total alterity achieved when the works are seen in isolation, or, especially as Smith preferred them to be, outside, in faint, almost crepuscular light, is virtually impossible to fully replicate given the constraints of the exhibition space.