"It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism
and art have gone well together because both believe in
the physical manifest-ation of the spiritual world..."
"It was very difficult for me to learn how to read.
And so I just had to learn from looking at things."
"There aren’t commemorative sculptures for witches
in Europe. There was a tremendous amount of killing and
there’s little commemoration of that."
"I’m very attached to needing a proof of something,
a proof that there has been a change. Not just to think
about it in my mind but to have a physical manifestation
of that change."
Learning by Looking: Witches,
Catholicism, and Buddhist Art
ART:21:
You seem to have a very interesting
approach to process,
of letting a work evolve at it's own speed.
SMITH:
It’s sort of nice, making
something and then nothing comes immediately. That’s
how it is a lot of times. You make something and nothing happens
with it for years and then all of a sudden it can happen.
That’s nice. That’s great.
I think the thing about making things is that you have a proof.
You have some proof every day that something has been accomplished,
that something’s different. If you can make something
as that proof it has a lot of power. You have a lot of power
if you can just take your energy. But you know, I’m also
happy if somebody else comes and does something on the house
to fix it up. I think, well something happened today. I realize
that I’m very attached to needing a proof of something,
a proof that there has been a change. Not just to think about
it in my mind but to have a physical manifestation of that
change. It’s like accumulating things. You know it’s
kind of nutty. I’ll go out and I notice always when I
go out I come home with things. I try to curb it, the tendency.
But I think it’s okay today because something came in
the mail. That was like some proof of my accomplishment.
ART:21:
A mark of your existence in this
world?
SMITH:
Yes, it really is. It’s
a physical proof that everything’s okay for a minute.
ART:21:
Does that has something to do
with being raised Catholic?
SMITH:
It’s one of my loose theories
that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both
believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world,
that it’s through the physical world that you have spiritual
life, that you have to be here physically in a body. You have
all this interaction with objects, with rosaries and medals.
It believes in the physical world. It’s a ‘thing’
culture.
It’s also about storytelling in that sense, about reiterating
over and over and over again these mythological
stories about saints and other deities that can come and intervene
for you on your behalf. All the saints have attributes that
are attached to them and you recognize them through their
iconography.
And it’s about transcendence and transmigration, something
moving always from one state to another. And art is in a sense
like a proof: it’s something that moves from your insides
into the physical world, and at the same time it’s just
a representation
of your insides. It doesn’t rob you of your insides and
it’s always different, but in a different form from your
spirit.
ART:21:
Have you read a lot in that area?
SMITH:
I read a little bit.
ART:21:
Information that floats into
your consciousness comes from wandering around the world,
or how?
SMITH:
When I was in school I was a
very poor reader. It was very difficult for me to learn how
to read. And so I just had to learn from looking at things.
So I pay a lot of attention to things or I listen to things
or I listen to what people say. I like Bob Dylan’s line,
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows.” Because he’s talking in a specific
cultural connotation. But it’s true, you have to live
to know what is happening in your neighborhood and in your
realm of consciousness. What you’re thinking isn’t
particularly unique to what other people are thinking. That’s
why you can recognize things from two thousand years ago because
it’s not radically different. How you’re thinking
about them might have slight variations, but basically everybody
has a body and they experience in them very differently, but
physiologically there are certain things happening and so
it’s no wonder that people think about lots of the same
things.
I like learning through observation. I’m very stubborn
in it too. It gets in my way a lot because I won’t believe
things. I won’t believe lots of things that people tell
me until I can see it myself somehow. But being observant
is a good way to learn about things. And once you do know
about one thing physically, at a certain point it’s easy
to translate it then into other mediums and quickly understand
it. Like if you have enough information in your body from
doing something, you can then move it around. Like I can sew
well if I need to, or I can do ceramics. I can do different
things just from having enough physical experience.
ART:21:
Let's talk about the women on
the pyres.
SMITH:
The women—I put them together
because they have a physical relationship to one another.
The women on pyres came from a photograph. I bought in an
anonymous collection of photographs from someone’s notebook
in the late 1890’s, from Lyon. And it’s like early
collage
work. From Victorian times when people started having access
to cameras and started making these collages. And this person
made these incredibly wonderful collages, chopping this woman’s
head off and then her decapitated head sort of rolling around.
And then he also made these wonderful ones of a woman kneeling
on a pillow and then he collages that with a pyre, these women
on pyres.
And I was asked to be in a competition last year, or two years
ago, for an outdoor sculpture. And I spent a lot of time trying
to do it but I wasn’t good at doing it. And I decided
that I didn’t want to make public sculpture that was
of other people’s agendas. I couldn’t do that. I
can only do things that come from my necessity. And so then
I thought I wanted to make these women on pyres, like these
commemoratives
for witches. I was making at the time drawings of drowned
witches, of them floating with their hair in the water. And
I thought these women on pyres, that I wanted to make these
sculptures and that they should be in all these towns in Europe,
like in each town.
There aren’t commemorative sculptures for witches in
Europe. There was a tremendous amount of killing and there’s
little commemoration of that. And so, so no one has needed
it in their town yet, but [LAUGHS], but you know, I just make
them anyway. Their arms are out like Christ, saying "Why
have you forsaken me?" I had originally made some where
the pyres were out of metal, but then I just bought wood for
it.
ART:21:
And the Bodhisattva figures you've
been collecting...is there a story behind those?
SMITH:
I like Kuan-yin because she is
a Bodhisattva of compassion. And compassion is something that
we’re supposed to think about a lot in our daily lives.
There are relationships between her and the Virgin Mary In
her iconography. The religions are all influencing one another.
So there’s times when she starts showing up with a child
or being like the benevolent mother. They say this is influenced
by the Virgin Mary.
I’m a big Virgin Mary fan. I was raised Catholic. Lots
of my work refers to the Virgin Mary and I've made a lot of
pieces kind of manipulating her around different ways from
my own perverse interests. Kuan-yin is a similar character
in that she represents this open compassion that envelopes
you but then also that you can look at as a model for your
behavior in the world. Besides all that I really like the
representation of her and the scale of the house or altar
sculpture. Church sculpture is something that’s very
influential to me. It has lots of decorative elements. It
has the serene faces where they’re looking down on you
always. There’s interesting things about the proportions.
Often the heads are much larger than the bodies, which is
something I’m always interested in. Gauguin made great
sculptures. I guess you’ve seen Tahitian models for figurative
sculptures where the head is about three times the size of
the rest of the body. And if you think about it, Alice from
"Alice in Wonderland" has that where the head’s
very enlarged. In lots of the Kuan-yins the heads are much
larger than the bodies proportionately.
The Kuan-yins tell me to pay attention. That’s my new
excuse for everything. It tells me to pay attention and I
just do. They say pierce me with your eyes. I went and saw
one the other day and then it said, pierce me with your eyes.
I like that because your not sure whether it’s telling
you to look at it or you’re telling it to look at you.
Like darsham, like being blessed. Like wanting a blessing
in Catholic Church. You go touch the feet of the saint or
something because you want a blessing from them. It's important
to stay in the gaze of what's important to be thinking about.
