Dismembering Harry Smith

Though many of the scholars offered caveats to avoid hagiography, Smith clearly saw his whole life as a work of art, weaving the components together so that they couldn’t be quartered without leaving tendrils of connective tissue trailing. Larger and more comprehensive surveys and symposia are being planned even now -- Smith‘s extant paintings and graphic work, for instance, have never been collected and displayed -- but as budgets grow, so does specialization. The GRI conference may have been the best shot we’ll have for another 50 years to sew together this thrift-store Osiris and pump enough juice to get him up and staggering again. It‘s all well and good for scholars to say, “We have to focus on specific details, one can’t possibly comprehend the whole,” because that‘s how academics operate and how we got this far. Perhaps the most important lesson of Harry Smith’s art is that you can think about and work with the whole, but you have to be willing to pay a price. Smith is at least as important a cultural figure as John Cage, but where Cage chose to dwell in the polite and lucrative glow of high cultural Importance, Smith operated more like a mole in the ground. And the labyrinthine tunnel system with which he honeycombed the mountainous canon of American culture is just beginning to be mapped.#