Imaginary transports: using architectural elements that seem to refer to history, Ned Smyth's public sculpture evokes a golden age that never was - On Site

Art in America, April, 2002 by Tom Mcdonough

Something of the enigmatic nature of all his public commissions comes through as well in Smyth's recent body of gallery work, the "Icons of Life" series (1992-99). The relation between the two is most apparent in "Dialogues," an installation consisting of cast concrete slabs on which various objects and beings confront one another in absurd mutual lack of recognition. A polar bear roars menacingly at a massive light bulb (Bear and Bulb); a curious monkey stares at one of Smyth's signature dumbbell-columns (Perception); a baby stretches out his arms to a giant bottle of milk (Ken Reaches Out). In all, scale is manipulated and incongruous juxtapositions are proposed in a spirit of playful surrealism. The historical nostalgia of Smyth's sited sculpture is absent here, but the "Icons" retain a sense of a hopeless longing for connection which the architectural ensembles objectify. His tiny figures respond to the outsize, mysterious apparitions before them with the same exacerbated bewilderment displayed by visitors confronted with his cryptic public works. They are places in the same sense that the theatrical stage is: a realm for fantasy, an escape from the everyday, an artifice to be enjoyed and puzzled over in a world more generally given to homogenization and standardized spaces.

(1.) "Richard Serra's Urban Sculpture: Interview with Douglas Crimp" (1980), in Richard Serra, Writings and Interviews, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 127.

(2.) For a description of this exhibition, see David Bourdon, "Paradise Regained," Village Voice, Sept. 26, 1977, p. 73.

(3.) Corinne Robins, "Late Decorative: Art, Artifact, and the Ersatz," Arts, September 1980, p. 151.

(4.) Ada Louise Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion, New York, New Press, 1997, p. 41.

(5.) Douglas Blau, "Ned Smyth at Holly Solomon," Art in America, March 1983, p. 151.

(6.) Moore first articulated this desire in the middle 1960s; see his influential article, "You Have to Pay for the Public Life," Perspecta, 1965, pp. 57-65.

Tom McDonough is an art critic and assistant professor of art history at Binghamton University, New York. During 2000-01 he was a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.