art smith: modernism’s master
Let me sneak you a peek into the amazement and excitement I felt when I discovered the work of Art Smith earlier today. I had been thinking about the best way to make a necklace, a poetry necklace, and looked at several websites to see what others have done in the hand-made, on-a-budget category. Perhaps it is my own ignorance in necklace construction but very little of what I saw impressed me. Again, I am not well-versed in the subject so I do not want to say too much other than I am a little tired of the same stringy loop full of the same colored beads purchased at cheap on-line stores. That got me thinking about other fashions, like steampunk, which seems to consist of the backside of watches and coiled springs. I am sure it speaks to someone, somewhere. I even flirted with retro Sputnik art, but the less I talk about that the better.
Then I stumbled upon Art Smith and everything changed.
You see, in 2009 there is this belief among certain art critics that we are in-between art movements. These are men and women for whom anything older than 30 seconds is cast aside with a shrug unless they choose to plunder eras gone by and call their work “retro” which is just a fancy word meaning stealing.
However, what such a claim would have to prove is that the greatest art movement of the 20th Century, Modernism, is a pale memory today; the issues its artists raised having been solved a long time ago. This is nonsense. Why we will never escape from Modernism's influence is that the 1940s witnessed the most horrific acts humans had ever committed; the Holocaust, the invention of the nuclear bomb, global war on such a massive scale we have yet to recover from it.
Everything we use today comes directly from these events — our technology, our art — not to mention our terror of nuclear war, of genocide, is still very much alive which is why everything that came after Modernism, all those academics who claimed Modernism was dead and we should move onto more important things (Post-Modernism in all its glory) remains a joke; they are like children thinking if they just ignore their parents their parents will go away.
Which is why Art Smith's work amazes me.
He was working in the 1940s and 50s and took everything that made Modernism fascinating and set it down before us. The architectured curve of the spine. The bone-like structures fanning out at the end. The atomic nuclei running the length of the veins. Here is all our history spread out like musical notes, like anatomy; the primitive and the space-age living together in a harmonious mix. Beatniks, steampunk, science fiction — everything you might think of as edgy or counter-culture or radical could not have existed if there was no Art Smith. Let me say that again, without this man here there would be no future, not the way we see it today. And just because you don't recognize that isn't Smith's fault or Modernism's, it just means you are a tad lazy when it comes to your own history.
After all, here is the future we are living right now laid out forty-seven years ago for us in a metal boa.