"I’m sort of a private person and my life isn’t
so much about my social relationships to people. It’s
more about looking at what people have made. Appreciating
people through what they have made..."
"We were a little bit like The Addams Family. We
lived in this big house and there was a gravestone with
our name in front of the house."
"I have this belief that everything has this mobility,
this possibility for mobility in it and that nothing is
fixed."
"I think art is like that...making things to protect
yourself. I always say my art’s like my army in the
world."
"I’m just a curious person and I’m trying
to get an education in my slow way."
"...It’s like you’re a faithful servant.
I make this meditation or give myself to this work."
Everything we use in our daily
lives are these forms that have these deep, long histories
to them. Those are special things to pay attention to. It’s
important to pay attention. Like I was saying when we were
talking about beauty, I think you are supposed to have a beautiful
environment in your private life. But sometimes, in art, maybe
it is like Richard Tuttle was saying, that it’s important
to make things ugly also. It’s always about shifting
the possibilities of what can be beautiful.
One's self is always shifting in relationship to beauty and
you always have to be able to incorporate yourself or your
new self into life. Like your skin starts hanging off your
arms and stuff, and then you have to think, well that’s
really beautiful too. It just isn’t beautiful in a way
that I knew it was beautiful before. [...]
You always have to be shifting what your idea of beauty is
to make your life wonderful. I think in your private life
you’re supposed to make it like a paradise garden. Like
Islamic paradise gardens where you’re to make heaven
on earth. Earth is to be a representation
of our vision of heaven. That's why you’re supposed to
be attentive to your environment in your private life, and
then in the social realm and in nature and everything. Your
private life is a place where you have some possibilities
that are not determined by economics but just determined by
paying attention, by being attentive. I use my house as a
studio,
so you know most of the time it’s just a wreck. It’s
like a domestic house that’s then has a studio on top
of it and, you know, I don’t really care. And I’m
really lucky to have a housekeeper. It knocks the damage back
a little bit. But in my fantasy life everything is very clean
and orderly in order for it to be beautiful.
The most important thing for me is looking at objects. Looking
at things that people have made. I’m sort of a private
person and my life isn’t so much about my social relationships
to people. It’s more about looking at what people have
made. Appreciating people through what they have made, or
what they do, or something like that rather than having too
much interaction with people. So I need to go look at things
all the time. Having things is just about looking at them
and then I don’t have to be so attached to them for endless
quantities of time. Maybe you see something once and then
it resonates in your mind for long periods of time afterwards,
for years sometimes. My suffering is that I see that there
are these really great forms. They’re holy in a way,
like they have this really incredible power about them. And
all I can do is recognize it. My ego wants to be able to make
one also. I want to be able to make something in that tradition.
But it’s really difficult...it’s totally different.
Designing—that's
an absolutely different way of working. To will something
or to want something into the world rather than just, you
know, the listening version. It has to be a collaboration
between listening and your own interest and access to making
something. You have to have all those things in place.
ART:21:
So printmaking is one area where
you listen but you also make...
SMITH:
Well you have to. It's like a
physical devotion or dedication. You have to just be stubborn
and persevere until you get it right. That’s why I like
printmaking or working in sculpture. It’s a generous
way of working in the sense that you can go forwards and backwards.
You can make a mark or, like with drawing, you can make a
mark and then you can erase it. And then you can make it again,
and erase it, and make it, and erase it. You can do it fifty
billion times till you get it some way.
I just made a print now and it’s the first time I drew
like a "real person" in a print. And it was because
I had been drawing these dead animals and then I thought,
well I can move up the chain and draw a person. And it was
really difficult. My assistant said, "Oh it looks really
great," in the beginning, and I was saying that maybe
what I was ending up with didn’t have as much art in
it or something. I want that pleasure of struggle. That’s
the really the fun part of just being left alone. Lots of
times I watch television. I don’t watch it so much as
I listen to it. It’s like a meditation. It’s just
clears my brain and I stop thinking about whatever I’m
thinking about and then I’m just free and I sit and work.
It's also because lots of the work that I’m doing is
just labor. One second you have an idea to make things and
then you have to actually do them, and that takes hours and
hours of time to do it. A lot of it’s just like scratching
on things or smoothening it. It’s not that interesting.
A lot of it is just labor. But the labor part to me makes
me feel free. I enjoy that the most.
ART:21:
That reminds me of a picture
of you and your sisters sitting around a table making models
for your father's sculptures.
SMITH:
I definitely didn’t have
the same love when I was a child doing labor for my father.
But I realize how much I got from it afterwards. He would
give us these lectures. We’d be like six or seven years
old and you’d make the slightest mistake of asking a
question about how something worked and then you’d get
a five hour lecture about how to use a slide rule. Maybe for
about two or three days you could remember how to use a slide
rule. And after that it just went right out...
It was obviously things that he was thinking about and that
he was interested in, like maps. I remember there was a certain
point where someone had invented how to make a map with three
colors and so we’d do that. Or he would [have] us paint
words on wood and put them all over the house. We’d do
all these things, which at the time I was sort of semi-half
involved with and then also trying to get out of it.
When I think of my childhood it was all spent helping my father.
We’d do yard work and then we’d help him with his
sculpture. Other kids would go out to day camp or whatever
people did and we’d be there dividing twigs. He’d
make us divide twigs into different sizes of twigs. You know,
just endless, endless, endless, endless things. He’d
save all the boxes or he’d save all the newspapers and
stuff. At the time I was always the one who tried to get out
of it the most. But at the same time I see how it’s really
beneficial to me in my life now. I’m always moving the
furniture around, always from one place to another, and I
think, well, I grew up doing this. I have this belief that
everything has this mobility, this possibility for mobility
in it and that nothing is fixed. Working, and the things that
I hated the most as a child, are what I appreciate the most
as an adult now. I see that really formed my personality.
It’s funny.
We were a little bit like The Addams Family. We lived in this
big house and there was a gravestone with our name in front
of the house. We had this enormous sculpture in the back of
the house. And we were really unpopular and the kids would
say I was a witch. And my father had a beard and a Porsche
and we were really mortified, embarrassed you know that he
had a car like that and didn’t have a big woody station
wagon. He had a beard and we would beg my mother to have him
drop us off a block before school so we wouldn’t be seen
with a father with a beard. And then, in the sixties, all
of a sudden it was really cool and popular. All the boys liked
to be around us because my father had a beard and was an artist.
So then it worked to my advantage...all of it. But before
that it wasn’t so much fun, always being the weirdos.
But you know, I am the weirdo now. I grew up in a kind of
morbid household and now I'm a morbid adult and it suits me
just fine.
ART:21:
Whose gravestone was it in front
of your house?
SMITH:
I think one of my father’s
brothers nipped it from a graveyard. It just said “Smith”
on it. In fact, one whole part of our house was all my father’s
parents' clothing, all from the late 1800s. He was born in
1912, so it was all this beautiful Victorian stuff. And teeth,
people’s dentures. His parents died within a short time
when he was young. And I think one aunt came and took all
the furniture away and all the things that nobody wanted like
letters and things that were just put in the attic. We’d
go in there and it was this whole room full of things from
the turn of the century. Shortly after, maybe up 'til the
’20s or ’30s, it was all death, death everywhere.
I liked it a lot.
ART:21:
Is that where some of this storytelling
comes from in your work?
SMITH:
I don't know; I'm not sure.
In my family there was always a kind of morbidity. My father
would always say that it’s Irish Catholic to be morbid,
or the Irish are morbid people. When I was little I had lived
in a part of the house where no one else lived. It was a wing.
My father’s parents made fire hydrants, the prototypical
American fire hydrant. It’s all A.P. Smith Manufacturing.
And he had about five brothers and one sister, so he built
a gymnasium for the boys so that they wouldn’t ruin the
house. And then that sister lived above the gym in this private
wing of her own. And so I lived there. In the room I had a
skull. My father had a skull of someone for drawing, you know
for art. And then I put a picture of Charlie Manson (when
he was on the cover of "Look" or "Life"
magazine, one of those) on the skull and I’d go, "You
can’t get me!" Every time I’d walk in the room.
I’d always go, "You can’t get me Charlie Manson!"
And I must have been pretty old by then. I guess it was 1967
or something like that. [...]
I always think that somebody’s going to get murdered
or something like that when the phone rings. I used to be—not
so much in this house, in my old house—afraid to come
home because I thought somebody would have died. And that
building, something always did happen the second I walked
in the building. Nobody died, but the fire department would
come immediately and say you have to clean out your hallways
in 24 hours or something bad was going to happen. Now it’s
much less than when I was a kid. It was like I expected death
all the time, any second. Everything was going to die and
disappear all the time. Now it’s less. Now it’s
much less.
Now half my family is dead, so I’m getting used to it.
You kind of realize that it’s okay. You know it’s
perfectly okay, people dying. It’s the most normal thing
in the world. But as a kid I didn’t really like it. My
work now is much, much less preoccupied with death than it
was. When I first started making things about the body, for
probably the first five years or so it was all about death.
My father died, so I was trying to think about why it was
okay being dead. When people are dying I have to always remember
that I’m not dying. I’ll see that you can sort of
start taking on, not the same symptoms of it, but you act
as if you’re leaving too. But you’re not leaving,
you’re perfectly fine, everything’s perfectly fine.
I think you don’t want to separate from them.
I’m much less that way. Now I get to have other interests.
For me, when I first made work it was much more about survival.
I really had to protect myself and to survive, maybe to survive
myself and protect myself to survive myself. When I was about
40, then I started being able to make work about what was
interesting to me. And then my work became much weirder and
personally egocentric. I always think I never would have an
art career if I had started now. But I've got to have a much
wider world other than just surviving. I would say I still
have a very deep necessity in my work and a deep necessity
for self expression, and then a deep necessity to make this
mediated stuff in between me and the world. But it’s
much freer now.
I think art is like that: making things to protect yourself.
I always say my art’s like my army in the world. That’s
how you make a lot of it. You store it up and hoard it and
get it like your army—strong—to protect you. It’s
this thing that you put out in the world that’s the most
exposing thing that you can show about yourself. It’s
the most exposed you can be, but it’s mediated. It’s
like a doll that is a space between you and the world. You’re
very protected because you can always go, "Oh that’s
the work." Lots of times like when I was younger I would
talk about my work and I’d talk about very personally
why I made it, because it comes just out of ordinary everyday
life interests or something like that. But if someone would
call you on it, it was if they knew you. And I would always
go, "Oh no, that’s different!" You can’t
make an assumption of knowing me privately. I retain and hold
my privacy to myself. I like that, that you can have this
very exposed version in public. It’s a little bit like
having a transitional object or something that functions in
an intermediary space.
ART:21:
Do you think morbidity and the
more personal pieces you are doing now are like two different
strands running through your work?
SMITH:
No I wouldn’t. In terms
of strands I would say that basically I’m just a curious
person and I’m trying to get an education in my slow
way. I practically flunked out of school. I went to an unaccredited
high school. I went to a trade school for baking afterwards
because I had this idea I was going to be an Irish washerwoman
otherwise and I better figure out something. And so I went
to trade school for baking and then I thought that wasn’t
really that much fun because it was just industrial baking.
[...]
Basically I think art has all these other elements, but it’s
just a way to have the opportunity to think about things.
I don’t have a place I’m trying to make it go, I’m
not trying to control it at all. Sometimes it’s more
interesting to other people and sometimes it’s not. It’s
like standing in the wind and letting it pull you whatever
direction it wants to go. Some stuff is really direct. Things
start telling you what you’re supposed to pay attention
to. It really just comes in you and tells you, "Pay attention
to this and make this." I have lots of times where my
work just said, "Make it like this." And then it’s
like you’re a faithful servant. I make this meditation
or give myself to this work.
