An american original: best known for his pioneering "Anthology of American Folk Music," artist and mystic polymath Harry Smith was the subject of a recent two-day symposium at the Getty Institute - Report From Los Angeles

Cult figure Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a suitably idiosyncratic, 20th-century Renaissance man, working as an abstract film-maker, painter, musicologist, anthropologist, theoretician, self-mythologizer and connoisseur of arcana. His most important achievement, "The Anthology of American Folk Music," a three-volume, six-LP compilation of '20s and '30s recordings released in 1952 (and reissued as a CD set by Smithsonian Folkways in 1997), did nothing less than change the course of popular music and remains a quirky yet defining touchstone of American culture. Both his handpainted abstract films of the '40s and his later animations made from cutout engravings have solid reputations as key works of American avant-garde cinema. Colleague of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Jonas Mekas, Jordan Belson and Percy Heath, inspiration to Bruce Conner, Bob Dylan, Beck and hordes of others, he is a certifiable underground legend.

Smith's overall significance, however, is difficult to assess, since so many of his art works, films, collections and writings are lost, unfinished or remain to be unearthed. Two recently published volumes of interviews with the fiercely original, erratic artist and those who knew him have added considerably to knowledge and to conjecture about Smith. (1) The posthumous release of Volume Four of the Anthology (Revenant Records, 2000) nearly 50 years after its compiling has sparked an upsurge of interest, highlighted by a two-day symposium in Los Angeles with related screenings and concerts sponsored by the Getty Research Institute.

The symposium--the brainchild of Getty Institute director Thomas Crow and one expression of the theme for the 2000-01 Getty scholar program, "Reproductions and Originals"--sought to synthesize the wide-ranging achievements of this eccentric postmodernist avant la lettre. Bringing together colleagues of the artist and diverse scholars and writers, including P. Adams Sitney, Annette Michelson, Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, the symposium seemed an unlikely venture for the Getty, yet one perhaps not surprising for the author of Modern Art in the Common Culture. A child of the '60s, Crow clearly feels a generational accord with the Anthology and its implications for popular music. His theoretical approach to Smith's offbeat enterprises turned out to be an apt one, particularly with respect to the Anthology. The methodology of this extraordinarily artful compendium of widely divergent song styles and themes fascinatingly presages a variety of postmodern practices such as appropriation, systematizing and DJ sequencing.

The Anthology was culled from Smith's massive 78-rpm record collection of traditional songs originally recorded (as he wrote in the idiosyncratic 28-page illustrated booklet that accompanied the set) "between 1927, when electronic recording made possible accurate music reproduction, and 1932, when the Depression halted folk music sales." (2) In three double-LP sets--"Ballads," "Social Music" and "Songs"--Smith mixed a wide variety of mostly rural music, juxtaposing country blues, Cajun instrumentals, English-derived ballads, hillbilly warbles, topical novelty songs, and Southern gospel hymns and shouts.

The commercial intentions of the original 78s suited Smith's interest in music made for regional constituencies rather than recorded by ethno-musicologists. He chose the Depression as a cutoff date, believing that soon after the economy rekindled, performances became tainted by the homogenizing tastes of the burgeoning movie and recording industries. (3) Smith's preference for unique, quirky performances--for what he called "exotic music"--directed attention to the music's primal roots. The extensive discography and bibliography in the Anthology booklet trace the folk origins of each of the 84 songs; its alphabetical index also catalogues the songs' common themes and references, such as "Dreams mentioned on record" (4 entries), "Law mentioned on record" (13 entries) and "Death mentioned on record" (26 entries). Like a field anthropologist, Smith provides data and case studies ripe for cultural theory.

Smith's unusual conceptual take seems to have been motivated by a firm belief in what might today be called "deep structure." He sought formal correspondences among different mediums as a means of tapping into more profound levels of significance. For example, according to Smith, the lines and shapes of many of his geometric paintings and drawings correspond stroke-for-stroke to the rhythm changes in bebop compositions by Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. (4) His first three short films (Films 1-3, 1946-49) are animated so that the movements of geometric forms are in sync with the rhythms of songs recorded during a 1947 performance by Gillespie's band in Paris. (5) Although Smith's efforts relate to a long-standing filmic tradition combining music and abstract imagery, he developed his own techniques for hand-painting, staining and batiking abstract images frame by frame. His forms are in a much rougher visual style than the nonrepresentational shapes in films by, say, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger or the Disney studio. Smith's red and green trapezoids, dyed plaids and painted orbs move with a syncopated choreography like funky, liberated Sol LeWitt permutations.