smithson

SMITHSON: Initially- well, when I was nineteen- the impact was Newman, Pollock,Dubuffet, Rauschenberg, de Kooning; even Alan Davie who I had seen I think at the Viviano Gallery; the whole New York School of painting. I felt very much at home with that when I was in my late teens, but when I rejected it in favor of a more traditional approach. And this lasted from maybe 11960 to1963. 
CUMMINGS: Why do you think you rejected those things?
SMITHSON: I just felt that -they really didn't understand, first of all, anthropomorphism, which had constantly been lurking in Pollock and de Kooning. I always felt that a problem. I always thought it was somehow seething underneath all those masses of paint. And even Newman in his later work still referred to a certain kind of Judeo-Christian value. I wasn't that much interested in a sort of Bauhaus formalist view. I was interested in this kind of archetypal gut situation that was based on primordial needs and the unconscious depths. And the real breakthrough came once I was able to overcome this lurking pagan religious anthropomorphism. I was able to get into crystalline structures in terms of structures of matter and that sort of thing. 
CUMMINGS: What precipitated that transition, do you think?
SMITHSON: Well, I just felt that Europe had exhausted its culture. I suppose my first inklings of a more Marxists view began to arise, rather than my trying to reestablish traditional art work in terms of the Eliot-Pound-Wyndham Lewis situation. I just felt there was a certain naivete in the American painters-good as they were.
CUMMINGS: Did you get interested in Marxism?
SMITHSON: No. It was just sort of flicker. I mean began to become more concerned with the structure of matter itself, in crystalline structures. The crystalline structures gradually grew into mapping structures.
CUMMINGS: In a visual way, or in a conceptual way?
SMITHSON: Visual, because I gave up painting around 1963 and began to work plastics in kind of crystalline way. And I began to develop structures based on a particular concern with the elements of material itself. But this was essentially abstract and devoid of any kind of mythological content.
CUMMINGS: There was no figurative overtone to it.
SMITHSON: No, I had completely gotten rid of that problem. I felt that Jackson Pollock never really understood that, and although I admire him still, I still think that that was something that was always eating him up inside.
CUMMINGS: But it's interesting because there is a development away from traditional kinds of imagery and yet an involvement with natural materials…
SMITHSON: Well, I would say that begins to surface in 1965-66. That's when I really began to get into that, and when I consider my emergence as a conscious artist. Prior to that my struggle was to get into another realm. In 1964, 1965, 1966 I met people who were more compatible with my view. I met Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd. At that time we showed at the Daniels Gallery; I believe it was in 1965. I was doing crystalline type works and my early interest in geology and earth sciences began to assert itself over the whole cultural overlay of Europe. I had gotten that our of my system.
CUMMINGS: Out of chaos comes…
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, out of the defunct, I think, class culture of Europe I developed something that was intrinsically my own and rooted to my own experience in America.
CUMMINGS: Have you been back to Europe since that?
SMITHSON: Yes, I have been back to Europe. I did Broken Circle - Spiral Hill in Holland in 1971. I consider it a major piece.


JULY 19, 1972
CUMMINGS: Would you like to say something about your visit with William - Carlos Williams?
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, this took place I think in either 1958 or 1959. William Carlos Williams was going to do an Introduction for Irving Layton's book of poems. So I went out to Rutherford with Irving Layton. It wasn't for an interview, he was in pretty bad shape at that time, he was kind of palsied. But he was rather interesting - Once he found out that we weren't going to be doing any articles, he was pretty open. Sophie Williams was there too. He said that he enjoyed meeting artists more than writers.
CUMMINGS: Ob, really? Why?
SMITHSON: He just found them more interesting to talk to.
CUMMINGS: Contrast, maybe.
SMITHSON: As it turned out, he had a whole collection of paintings by Marsden Hartely, Demuth, Ben Shahn; and also paintings by Hart Crane's boy friend, which I thought was interesting. He bought them -
CUMMINGS: I can't remember who that was.
SMITHSON: I can't remember his name either. He talked about Ezra Pound, which I thought was interesting apropos of all the controversy about Ezra Pound. And it turned out that when Pound was giving his broadcasts in Italy he said something to the effect that "Old Doc Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey will understand what I mean." So the very next day the FBI descended on Williams' house and he had to explain that he wasn't involved in that kind of political attitude. He went on to talk about the other poets, but he seemed somewhat estranged from them. Let me see what else. Oh, he didn't seem to have much liking for T.S. Eliot. And he said he remembers Hart Crane inviting him over to New York for all his fairy parties; that sort of thing. And what else? - well, he showed us all these paintings. There was painting that somehow reminded me of a painting by Duchamp. Demuth did like two dogs running around sniffing each other's asses. He talked a lot about Allen Ginsberg coming out at all hours of the night, and having to spring poets out there. Allen Ginsberg comes from Paterson, New Jersey. I guess the Paterson area is where I had a lot of my contact with quarries and I think that is somewhat embedded in my psyche. As a kid I sued to go and prowl around all those quarries. And of course, they figured strongly inPaterson. When I read the poems I was interested in that, especially this one part of Paterson where it showed all the strata levels under Paterson. Sort of proto-conceptual art, you might say. Later on I wrote an article forArtforum on Passaic which is a city on the Passaic River south of Paterson. In a way I think it reflects that whole area. Williams did have a sense of that kind of New Jersey landscape.
CUMMINGS: Was he amused at the idea that you were one of his children in a sense?
SMITHSON: Oh, yes, he said he remembered me, he remembered the Smithsons. He was amused at that actually, yes… There are certain things that I know I'm forgetting. But it was a kind of exciting thing for me at that time. And what else? Where were we?


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