Went to the Whitney with my mom. One thing it’s got over the Modern is the lack of crowds. The Smithson show struck me as rather scanty compared to the one I saw there in the ‘80s, at least in terms of sculptural installations. More space is given to drawings, and especially to early work. The curatorial interest in essentially adolescent work is typical of today’s art world, but it does provide some useful insight into Smithson’s psychology. The irony is that Smithson represents an era that sought to expunge personal psychology from art, and his “classic” work certainly sublimated the psycho-sexual concerns of his early stuff. Even so, his mix of haute-philosophical jargon, pop sci-fi, “real” science, and sheer grandiosity serves as a signpost for the paintings in the Remote Viewing show. To me he makes a better lead-in to Steve DiBenedetto, Matthew Ritchie and the younger artists in the show than do Caroll Dunham and Terry Winters, the slightly older painters enlisted by the curators as ancestors of today’s messy hallucinogenic abstraction.
The real strong point of the Smithson show is the availability of the films, now looping continually in the galleries, instead of being removed to the theater at scheduled times. We saw all of Spiral Jetty and Mono Lake. The Mono Lake film is rather crude, but essentially lays out the format that Spiral Jetty would follow. The Jetty film is also primitive by today’s standards, but it holds up on many levels, and is the best single entry point for anyone wanting to find out about Smithson. A must-see.
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The real strong point of the Smithson show is the availability of the films, now looping continually in the galleries, instead of being removed to the theater at scheduled times. We saw all of Spiral Jetty and Mono Lake. The Mono Lake film is rather crude, but essentially lays out the format that Spiral Jetty would follow. The Jetty film is also primitive by today’s standards, but it holds up on many levels, and is the best single entry point for anyone wanting to find out about Smithson. A must-see.
- alex 7-25-2005 4:27 pm