Page 23 - Studio International - October1973

artifice and natural growth. autonomous system. metaphysics of constant metamorphosis.
Allen Kaprow discusses Schmidt's work in This system does not simply comprise Impermanent and vacillating, cultivating
his book 'Assemblage, Environments and artifacts, but as covering a sizeable area of discords until they modulate into harmonies,
Happenings' in terms of the principle of forested land in the Catskills, it literally Schmidt's work might be said to dramatize the
extension, whereby the creator starts not from a encompasses a good many natural objects. Live Heraclitean notion that the world runs on the
closed situation (filling in an area of canvas trees, for example, help support the house, and principle of change. It is ironical to note that
delimited by a frame, or else building up his grasses and mosses grow on or about the Heraclitus posited fire as the supreme agent of
sculpture or assemblage no further than the assemblages. Man and nature function here in metamorphosis, for, after the participation of
physical limits of the room in which it will be collaboration. Surface diversity is coaxed into the other elements, it was this one that finally
exhibited), but from a totally open one, where coherent unity either by a touch of cheap paint accomplished the cycle of growth: a few years
the work is inseparable from the space in which or tar, or else by the process of weathering: ago, the House was destroyed by a great fire —
it is already 'exhibited', the space which it, and Schmidt's own gestures of welcome consistently though this has not stopped Schmidt from
its creator, inhabit. Work and work-space both overlap with the interventions of rain, wind asserting continuity amid flux by picking up
expand without hindrance as the process and sun. again from where the fire left off, even if at his
develops; though neighbours eventually began Resistant to the very concept of final present age he can scarcely hope to replace the
to complain, it could be said that for years completion, Schmidt's environment is an work of a lifetime. q
Schmidt had 'all the room in the world'. eloquent articulation of what Kaprow terms the ROGER CARDINAL
In the opening pages of la Pensée Sauvage',
Claude Levi-Strauss makes some interesting (Opposite page) Schmidt's house, built of
rough timber overlaid with old glass frames, on
remarks about the bricoleur as a creator in Ohayo Mountain. In the course of thirty years
constant dialogue with his work, always Schmidt dug rooms into the cliff and linked
interrogating the pattern of relations he has them with walkways and interior corridors,
established at any given moment in order to creating a labyrinth of about 35 interconnected
grottoes which he filled with selected junk —
integrate the new element into what has gone coathangers, twigs, stuffed birds, old lamps —
before. The bricoleur's work thus sustains a often arranging these in niches to form elaborate
private shrines that could be illuminated.
polyphonic texture of past choices and present
(Left) Garden below the house with vegetation
possibilities.
Clarence Schmidt's house and garden are not, (Centre left) Roof garden, with hub-caps,
timber saw, slats from venetian blinds,
of course, an example of utilitarian bricolage, mirrors, table legs, bird boxes, fire guards,
whereby discarded pieces of machinery are tin cans, exhibited as if in a museum.
revived by their insertion into a new machine Elsewhere Schmidt installs iron bedsteads,
egg beaters, faceless clocks, flowerpots, plastic
improvised for a particular purpose. If toys and wrecked cars. This proliferation of
Schmidt's work is a machine, it is as useless as waste matter rarely suggests the recovery of a
those of Tinguely. Its sole function is to expand, private past; the intention seems rather to be
to make an impersonal statement about the
and it does this by steadily assimilating objects continuity of the things that men discard.
defined by society as redundant and Even when the bedstead begins to rust, the
revalorizing them when they join its rust will live as a component of the scheme.
(Below) Close-up of head with broken mirror
(Bottom left) Garden below house with foil
wrappings. Following the destruction of his
house, Schmidt lives in a rough hut in the
woods below the mountain. He works at
wrapping things, particularly living branches,
in sparkling aluminium foil. Recently he
wrapped a whole thicket in foil

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