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

Fraught with haunted visions and stories of primal violence, the Anthology lives up to the mythic framework Smith provided for it. Songs feature gratuitous murders, deep-seated jealousies, self-destructive passions, sexual boasts and oddball confessions. The Anthology's booklet offers Smith's descriptions of the songs' narratives written as deadpan headlines (presaging the titling mode of Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings"). The plot of the 13th-century ballad "Fatal Flower Garden," for example, is boiled down to "GAUDY WOMAN LURES CHILD FROM PLAYFELLOWS; STABS HIM AS VICTIM DICTATES MESSAGE TO PARENTS." The story line for a raucous variation on "Froggie Went A'Courting" reads "ZOOLOGIC MISCEGENY ACHIEVED IN MOUSE FROG NUPTUALS, RELATIVES APPROVE."

Smith's thematic sequencing downplayed differences among genres and ethnic groups. In fact, the booklet's commentary on the 84 songs completely avoids mention of the performers' race. Smith mischievously reported in a 1968 interview that it took years before fans discovered that blues performer Mississippi John Hurt was not white. Mixing grim goings-on and boundless silliness, the Anthology as a whole conjures an American past of stubborn individuality, eccentric humor and unpredictable violence, insisting at the height of the bland Eisenhower era that, as Marcus put it, "against every assurance to the contrary, America was itself a mystery." (9)

Smith's work stands beside D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) and William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain (1925) as an impassioned, darkly lyrical portrait of the national psyche, weaving its themes of betrayal, economic obsolescence and sexual longing into a kind of uberlied. The Anthology can also be seen today as an epic work of appropriation. Following his personal notions about the American spirit and style, Smith subtly sequenced an extraordinary selection of songs, a unique document worthy of close examination in its own right and on its own terms. As a parting shot, the Anthology's booklet features a quotation from the American jurist, Judge Learned Hand, on the topic of plagiarism. For readers today, the statement gives Smith's conceptual enterprise an appropriately proto-Borgesian, proto-postmodern spin:

If by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose a new Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," he would be an "author," and if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats.

The daunting breadth of Smith's endeavors stymies any simple attempt at synthesis. The symposium demonstrated that difficulty with eight talks, each of which addressed a thin slice of the Smith pie. Film historian William Moritz cleared away some of Smith's self-made legend as an autodidact by chronicling Smith's work with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 1946-47 "Art and Cinema" program, which involved encounters with California experimental filmmakers Fischinger, Kenneth Anger and the Whitney brothers. Princeton professor P. Adams Sitney, cofounder of New York's Anthology Film Archives, compared Smith's animations to the magic-laden short films of film pioneer Georges Melies. Literary scholar Stephen Fredman traced Smith's affinities with poets Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, emphasizing their shared interests in rhythmic sequencing, collage and esoteric lore. Marcus augmented his previous writings on Smith, focusing attention on the Anthology's performers as "strange people telling strange stories," who are themselves even greater enigmas than Harry Smith.