Page 43 - Studio International - June 1970

This year Richard Smith said 'Very little of voids where maybe there should be solids. wrote in the ninth Duino Elegy 'Are we
advertising, a root interest in painting to '65, However, this shouldn't be seen as a scientific perhaps here just for saying : House, Bridge ...'
directly hits me any more. In a way there is preoccupation. Smith's work is emotional, etc., among other things he knew what
the same style for every message and very sensual, non-mathematical, it constitutes a comfort there is in identification.
little has formal interest.' Yet he couldn't particular experience. He is concerned first of Smith is not concerned with the high fantastic,
resist making Clairol Wall in 1967. all with painting pictures, he has never been though fantasy is important, but with some-
`The association was too strong for me not to interested in perfecting systems. Though, thing more insidious : the swing between
identify, not to absorb. The advertisement making use of science and technology is reality and non-reality, a traversing of planes
was a woman's head photographed fractured obviously something he likes the idea of: true and metaphorical, real and imagined.
in mirrors at different angles. In each mirror McLuhan gave insights into the possibilities Having the painting in actual space suggests a
her hair was a minimally different colour: of communication systems; Smith clearly beginning and an end in reality.
ice, peach, champagne—all these colours they doesn't actively dislike the logistic organiza- What tautly stretched canvas will do revealed
have for blondes. But it was the same woman tion involved in working with shaped can- itself as he went along. It wasn't something he
looking in the mirror, so it links up tremen- vases; he is now considered employing a paint set himself to find out about. When the first
dously with the kind of thing I was doing in chemist to make up a paint suited to his needs. 3D paintings started as simple boxes he had
the picture. You were seeing the same double The references outside the paintings were to no idea of the possibilities the medium con-
square but it was being altered by gradually some extent expressly used because they were tained. Early surfaces were animated mostly
folding it away.' outside the context of fine art. They do relate by the painted figuration, shapes conditioned
Though preoccupations are now primarily to some degree to a sociological reaction by having to make a number of designs for
formal and abstract, this is not to say that the against antiquated hierarchies and criteria in stretchers at one go.
early paintings were based on entirely dif- contemporary attitudes to art. But mainly Smith was aware that practical things like size
ferent concerns. There is the same inventive they were there in 'an effort to bring a fresh and difficulties of stretching canvas were to a
perspective, the same interest in close-up, the sensibility to making paintings and an ex- certain extent conditioning the kind of shapes
same double-takes, the same disguising of the tended sensibility in looking at paintings.' he was making, and he used two juxtaposed
image. Indeed paintings slipped from being It's interesting in this respect that although he canvases in Gift Wrap, 1963. The idea of but-
2D to being 3D without Smith's taking much is committed to abstract painting, the artists ting a number of units together and using
notice. He was too involved with intensifying Smith seems closest to in many ways are their edges as drawing in the picture didn't
a play of illusion with the package as the concerned with figurative rather than abs- materialize until 1966-7: 'The shape is
most convenient pivot image. By 1964-5 tract art: Oldenburg, Hockney, Hamilton. drawing, where canvas joins canvas a line,
formal problems were more or less self- There is a common concern with the conven- where canvas joins wall an edge'.
supporting. The package had become a box, tions and metaphors of painting, with the This kind of figuration can be used to give an
nothing to do with advertising, which could forces of illusion and metamorphosis. The impression of false perspective, on the diagonal
be bent apart, added to, changed physically. parallel with Oldenburg is perhaps the most in Parking Lot, a movement inwards in Plum
Dissatisfied with his previous source material, notable. Objects and shapes of everyday ex- Meridian, 1968. Here the joins of the sections
Smith set about working with the abstract istence are made to seem not what they are: hold together the surface structure in a way as
potential of the rectangular module alone, the box or typewriter crumpled or twisted. important as the uprights in Pollock's Blue
projecting into it the ways of seeing he had For the one a banana may be an obelisk, for Poles. Smith's liking for a form of grid structure
been concerned with before. He developed a the other a cigarette packet Mont Blanc. in paintings goes back a long way—in the mid-
more softened organic view of the form, Re-Place, 1963, one of the few free-standing fifties he was putting an abstract-expressionist
reduced the number of colours, stopped using paintings Smith has done, and one he com- technique over Manhattan from the air, a
deep stereoscopic focus (conceived in depth, pared to furniture, has a kind of hallucinatory little earlier a two-inch brushstroke close to
the early boxes appear to be drawn, rather perspective similar to Oldenburg's Bedroom de Stael over blow-ups of beach scenes.
than to exist in space), began connecting the Ensemble done at about the same time. (Olden- The particular kind of taut stretching in Plum
painting more closely with the wall and also burg: 'Sculpture equals furniture'.) Smith Meridian first appeared in 1965. The stretcher
began working in series of linked but separate also did a painting called Piano, 1963, which has a curved extension, usually at the bottom
variants on the rectangle. The result is a more suggests a staggered pile of boxes, one called edge, which supports the canvas outwards.
compressed and potent impact, less obviously Landfall, 1964, which is like a chest of drawers. Smith has described it as 'a side profile, a
discursive, equally if not more suggestive. A box with a foot becomes a Sphinx. section'. He has tended to treat freedom from
The excitement of widespread pop activity in Both Smith and Oldenburg are involved with the proscenium arch of the conventional paint-
the early sixties somewhat overbalanced the the larger-than-life, with the more-real-than- ing as freedom as much in theory as than in
view of Smith's painting on the side of the real. Their work gains in force through dis- fact and one of the basic things about his
thing depicted—tissue, cigarettes—rather than orientation. Re-orientated we are less sure of achievement is that he has broadened the
the means or multiplicity of messages. Though what we see and live with. In the early sixties range of possibilities rather than landing the
he did try to right this in Trailer: Notes Smith often painted small hand-held objects spectator anywhere unusual. Plum Meridian is
Additional to a Film (1963), which began 'I on a big scale. Out of context or in close-up still in a sense based on the painting as peep
paint about communication'. The impact of the scale of things is especially ambiguous : 'Is show. Suggestions of space are largely illusory
photographic and cinematographic tech- it a pill or a boulder? a realization that it after the initial push into actuality.
niques, billboard and Cinemascope scale, the could be both alters the spectator's reading of A frontal plane remains in the form of the
falsity of printed sources which revealed the the painting'. You can't use the typewriter or blue stripe at the base. There is a feeling that
mechanics of communication, the whole wear the shirt on wheels. Similarly by bringing the canvas is being exposed by cutting away
ambiguous business of seeing— these were what what is specifically a painting into the spec- behind it. The idea of dense colour created in
seem to have interested him most. Recog- tator's space, Smith retains the essential false- layers seems to be physically extended. Like
nition of the original functions of forms gives ness of the picture. At the same time he alters the feathery upper layer of brushstrokes in one
another layer of appreciation to the paintings, our conception of our basically rectangular of the lush ad. paintings of '61 the blue hem
but the images are deliberately clouded by surroundings, he heightens awareness of our of this huge trapezium suggests an imaginary
shadows, painterly tricks, off-register colour, amazingly feeble visual and tactile sensitivity. bloom on the plum splendour, the vestige of
drips, edges where there are none, suggestion When Rilke (so much admired in the fifties) an invisible top coat, a shifting front curtain.