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

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Michael Duncan

Smith stated that he amassed his collections of heterogeneous objects--such as paper airplanes, Ukrainian painted eggs and string figures drawn from a surprising variety of global cultures (6)--in order to study and catalogue their structural variations. They also provided subject matter for his work. In the short film Seminole Patchwork Quilt (1965-66), for example, shots featuring the geometric designs of Smith's quilt collection are edited in rapid rhythms that demonstrate the inventive range of the rectangular motifs.

In a segment of his unfinished late film Mahagonny, a 1970-80 project based on the themes and rhythms of Kurt Weill's opera that was screened at the Getty, images of string figures are interspersed with complementary patterned footage of mirrored, kaleidoscopic street scenes and landscapes. Smith was clearly fascinated with the conflation of abstract geometry and mythic narrative evident in the string figures, which engender a suggestive context for the manipulated shots of everyday life.

An early interest in anthropology fueled Smith's fascination with cross-cultural pollination. By 1943, as a precocious researcher in Bellingham, Wash., Smith had made recordings of the Lummi, Native Americans of the Puget Sound region, and catalogued their dialects in a phonetic alphabet learned from the University of Washington's fledgling anthropology department. (7) He later enrolled for a brief time at the University of California at Berkeley, taking a few courses before embarking on his career of independent thinking, collecting and pontificating.

Smith's interest in analytic anthropology, however, melded with his ingrained faith in metaphysics. His father, a watchman for the Pacific American Fisheries, and mother, a teacher on the Lummi Indian reservation, were both theosophists who shared their interest in mysticism with their son. Smith grew to be well read in arcane philosophy and became a follower of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the notorious writer and charismatic leader of OTO, a cult devoted to the practice of magic and esoteric ritual.

The systematizing principles of alchemy further infused Smith's thinking. The record jackets of the Anthology feature an etching from a 17th-century compendium on mysticism by the British Rosicrucian Robert Fludd that depicts the hand of God tuning the "Celestial Monochord," the protean, single-string instrument said to have been invented by Pythagoras to unite harmonically the elements of earth, air, fire and water. In Fludd's schema, an overlaid diagram charts the instrument's musical scale, while concentric spheres outline various components of creation and spiritual energy.

Smith provided this stunningly grandiose context for the odd, plainspoken performances brought together on his records. As Greil Marcus puts it in "The Old, Weird America," the central chapter of his book, Invisible Republic, "Printed over the filaments of the etching and its crepuscular Latin explanations were record titles and the names of the blues singers, hillbilly musicians, and gospel chanters Smith was bringing together for the first time. It was as if they had something to do with each other: as if Pythagoras, Fludd, and the likes of Jilson Setters, Ramblin' Thomas, the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, and Smith himself were calling on the same gods." (8)