Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson

Episode Transcript
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Suzaan Boettger (00:06):
Historically, you have to look what else is
happening in their life. Whatelse happened in Smithson?

Greg Lindquist (00:12):
Do we owe the world complete transparency
professor. My work deals withthe issues of ecology through
landscape painting andinstallation, also issues of

(00:35):
environmental justice. But myinterest in earthworks has been
pretty long term, the lastprobably twenty years or so. And
so I encountered Suzanne'sseminal work on earthworks quite
a while before we werecolleagues at Bergen Community
College for about a decade.Also, I'm really interested in
Smithson's reclamation projectsof mines that were unrealized

(00:57):
and the relationship that theyhad with my father's work as a
marine biologist creatingartificial reefs out of boxcars
to create habitats for fish torepopulate during the
depopulation of fish in thenineteen eighties and early
nineteen nineties.
So I'm thrilled to be here withyou, Suzanne, and talk about
this book and also be one of thefirst people to talk about the

(01:17):
book. And I'm just wanna saycongratulations on this book and
all of your hard work to get itout there.

Well, let me just say thank you, Greg, for
interrogating me for being withme on this conversation. I know
we met, I was just thinking wemet decades ago at the Rubin
Museum at a meeting of theAmerican section of the
International Association of ArtCritics where, you know, you
tapped my shoulder behind me andsaid, hey, you're the author of

(01:49):
Earthworks, aren't you? And Iwas, you know, woah, So glad to
be recognized. Let's be friends.

Yeah. And then you generously came out to
Governors Island and saw thepainting installation I did that
Omar Lopez Jahud curated into NoOne is an Island that was with
Melissa Levin at LMCC space outthere. And we had a great
conversation about the HudsonRiver School and Thanatopsis and
Earthworks.

Yeah. So okay. So I am a long standing, I have
to say, arts critic. First inSan Francisco Bay Area. I was
born in Berkeley and, wrote forall sorts of publications, was
the Artforum correspondent for afew years.
Then I moved to New York for mydoctorate, continued to write

(02:38):
for Artforum Art Art in America,various other places, became a
professor at Bergen CommunityCollege, and then got interested
in extending my work on Smithsoninto this book, which in the
course of it became, verybiographical. And in the course
of it, I discovered things Ididn't even had no idea I would

(03:00):
discover. I mean, it's news tome too that I'm fascinated
myself. I mean, it's not as if Iset out to write X, Y, and Z. I
discovered X, Y, and Z in theact of, researching and writing
it.
And then I was able to retireand had to be able to finish
this book. So, glad to see itwill soon be in my and

(03:22):
everyone's hands.

I also forgot that probably our previous
collaboration was when youcontributed to the Social
Ecology's editorial at theBrooklyn Rail in 2015, where I
did an editorial about therelationship between art and
ecology, especially thesociological dimension of
ecology. And you wrote a greatpiece. I think you had just come
from Venice.

Oh, oh, that's right. I mean, one of my
interests for years has been therelation environmental
degradation and and now climatechange. So that's a whole
another area I've worked on fora great, many years, but in the
last few have diverted from thatbecause I wanted to, get this
material out and look in thismaterial about Smithson.

And that's definitely something I'd like to
bring up, this question aboutSmithson's relationship to
environmentalism because you'vespent so much time with his
writing and with his work, doyou find definitive evidence to
support that if he would havekept working, that he would have
somehow aligned himself with themainstream environmental

(04:29):
movements that were kind ofpicking up steam as he
tragically died at 35.

Well, yes and no. You know, he ridiculed the
environmentalists.

Exactly.

Because he was against idealism. He He was
against romanticism of nature.What he saw was not springtime.
What he saw in nature was barrenwinter. What he saw was, not the
dynamism of volcanoes exploding,but the destruction of volcanoes

(05:03):
exploding.

Can I just interject for one moment?
Because you're absolutely right.And in, like, tour of the
monuments of Pasaic, New Jersey,we just read it a few days ago
in my Pratt art since thesixties class, and a student
pointed out the same thing thatcareful readers point out is for
all of his rejection ofidealization of the landscape
through some mode likeromanticism, you know, that he

(05:24):
would find probably retardere.He romanticized the industrial
scape. Would you agree withthat?

No. I don't I don't I don't think he
romanticized it. I think he feltan affiliation with it.

Mhmm.

I mean, he said the fundamental property of
steel is rust. That isn'tromanticizing it. And even in
his trip through hisunacknowledged birthplace,
Passaic, he was derogatory aboutPassaic as a kind of emotionally
empty place. And of course, heended up with the sandbox as a

(06:03):
grave. I mean, he was definitelydrawn to it.
I mean, he wrote in his SpiralJetty essay how he took pleasure
in the rusting old abandoned,oil refinery and extraction
mechanics that were abandonedthere. One could think, as your

(06:24):
student did, that because hewrote about it, he was drawn to
it. Well, maybe we could say hewas drawn to it, but he was
inversely drawn to it.

Well, what about the camera cuts in Spiral Jetty
where it cuts back and forthbetween the earth moving
machinery and the dinosaurs?Would you say that's a
romanticization of theindustrial through the
prehistoric or the geological?

No. Because and listeners of this can find my
article on Smithson's relationto dinosaurs on the Burlington
Contemporary website. He'slikening the Earth movement
equipment to dinosaurs becausedinosaurs are a dead but extinct

(07:09):
species, beings, which are stillalive in imagination, which is
like a very important person tohis early life. Dead, but still
alive in memory or alive inthoughts. And that likening
links the Spiral Jetty to thatperson, I mean, and to that

(07:33):
experience.
One could see externally, andmaybe he even wanted it to be
seen that way, that he washeroizing the earthmoving as
grunting dinosaurs. Butbiographically, those dinosaurs,
which he pictured pretty muchthroughout his artistic life,

(07:54):
had a personal symbolism thatwas not related to industry,
except in its degradation. Well,let's start

with, your relationship with Smithson. I
mean, you talk about in thegratitudes chapter about that it
seems like pivotal moment whenyou received the collected
writings of Smithson, theoriginal version that was
designed by Solowitt and editedby Nancy Holt, in your mailbox
in 1979, which is a kind offunny date because that's the
year I was born. And and thenyou talked about giving a

(08:26):
lecture. But when did you firstdiscover his work? And what was
your reaction, if you can recallit?

Well, first of all, absolute awe at the radiant
image by Gianfranco Giorgione ofthe spiral j that were all over.
I was a TA for Peter Sells, theoriginally German emigre from
Munich who was the expert onGerman Expressionism. Okay. And

(08:55):
he was giving a course ontwentieth century sculpture. So
I was one of the TAs in this bigstadium seating in which, we
had, you know, discussionsections.
And then he, being who he he wasand who we are, he told his
cadre of TAs that we each shouldgive a lecture. And okay, what
should I give a lecture on?Well, I just flipped open books

(09:17):
and there it was. So first ofall, there was the visual
attraction. But then when Ibegan to read Smithson, which
was then before that collectedwritings arrived, so, you know,
so I had to I go went to the,art forum where he'd done most
of it and other art magazines.
I'll be when I began to readhim, I think I grooved with the

(09:42):
focus on mortality. He foundmyriad metaphors for
mournfulness, mortality,metaphysical, existence. I had
recently experienced asignificant, death of someone
close to me. And this I Irelated. I would both related

(10:06):
and I was curious.
Where did this come from? As Isay in my prologue to this this
book, alright, it wasfashionable to call museums
tombs, to think that, societywas radically changing, and the
youth culture of the babyboomers of which I was one, he
wasn't. He was too early forthat, but, okay, are going to

(10:29):
push away all the, signs of theestablishment convention and
make something reborn. Okay.Culturally reborn.
Fine. But of that milieu,Smithson was the, only one to
actively, creatively meditate ondeath so much that it had to be

(10:51):
more than a social reason, hadto be a personal reason. That's
what I was interested in.

The title, The Passions of Robert Smithson, I
think you you addressed this inthe introduction, but I thought
maybe to pique your readers'interest, maybe you could just
talk a little bit about themultilayered, multivalent nature
of that term. What what are wereyou referring to by passions?

Well, the I think socially, or
linguistically most directparallel that I'm riffing on is
the passion of Christ. So thatshould key the reader. There
there should be some littleglimmer that we're making an
analogy between the passion ofChrist and the passions of

(11:39):
Robert Smithson. We have areligious artist here, but who
an artist who also win was thepassions of Christ. The passions
of Christ, even though we think,you know, we can have passion,
love, we can think passion as apositive characteristic,
positive expression.
The passions of Christ were inhis death. So the other

(12:00):
subliminal illusion is to agony.Smithson is experiencing
passions of, it's not onlyrelated to Christ, but it's also
related to pain and agony. Butthen we change it from passion
of Christ or passion of topassions because I didn't want

(12:21):
the book just to be I mean, it'snot just about his religious
devotion or ambiguities. It alsoalludes to passion in the other
sense, you know, sexual passion.
And then of course, the passionfor making art, to stand in for
the characteristics of RobertSmithson, who approached things

(12:44):
more expressively thanconceptually as he has been
designated, and as he wanted tobe designated, to hide his
emotional passions and keep themprivate.

And that's an interesting question in kind of
the decoding of what you've donehere. You know, it raises the
question, do you believe he wasself conscious about leaving
historical record of thesehidden narratives, of these
coded narratives?

I do. If I can decode them simply by using what
I call investigative arthistory, I think he he shifts
continually between disguise anddisclose, disclose and disguise.
I mean, there are large areaswhere there's no disclosing

(13:37):
because, in my belief, he usedcryptology. And with cryptology,
you need to know the key. Thereare many works, like there's a
painting Buried Angel.
Buried Angel has threeinteresting aspects. It has an

(13:57):
underground angel with fullwings out, and it has a deep
kind of cutaway of underground.In that deep cutaway are a
number of letters that don'tmake words, and numbers that go
like from one to nine or variousother numbers, and they're

(14:20):
really confounding. I mean, someof them I have added up, as in
numerology. They don't reallyadd up to anything significant.
That is one of the one of theimages that I think will never
be completely revealed.

Will Shorts couldn't crack it?

Will Shorts sends me to the American
Cryptogram, Association, whichdid crack something else. But
I'm hoping I'm hoping that thisstudy will inspire a graduate
student who has a degree incomputer science or something
also. A graduate studentcomputer scientist becoming,
becoming an art historian totake up some of these,

(15:01):
mysterious. Okay. But in thatburied angel okay.
So we have the underground angelwith the full wings that this
shows that the angel is notdead, but he's underground. He
can't be seen. Okay. Then wehave all those letters and
numbers that are undecipherable.And then we have the volcanic
channel that has these kind ofbulbous forms at the end that

(15:23):
look like a scrotum and a and aphallus that's spewing pink
flume.

Could he be, like, pimples too? I mean, you
know, he was, like he had anacneed face. Right? Have you
thought about that?

The face has nothing to do. The face, we
could say, is his ownmanifestation of the passions of
Christ because it's bloody. Youknow? It's bloody because
everyone, who I talked to whoknew him, the first thing they
said is Smithson was tall,gangly, and he had bloody pocked
cheeks because he would scratchhis acne. And and, of course, he

(16:01):
he objected to Alice Neelpainting that, and and he told
Alice he he objected to AliceNeel, not only painting with
kind of vivid strokes his redcheeks, but she put it against
green, which being its opposite,you know, its compliment on the

(16:21):
color wheel brings out the red.
So when she went to his studio,then later, she said, Bob, you
objected to my painting yourcheeks bloody red as they really
were, but look at all this bloodin these paintings. These
paintings of Christ only, Christonly in the crucifixion. The

(16:42):
crucifixion and the Via DellaRosa. His paintings are not
religious. They're not Christscenes.
They're only Christologicaldeath scenes. It's much more
easy to sanitize them as, oh,they're religious. Well, if
they're religious, fine. But theonly ex extent ones are of
Christ. He has one Saint Michaeland one little drawing of a

(17:07):
Madonna.

Where does his relationship with Christian
symbolism come from?

Was he an altar boy? I couldn't find that out.

And he was Catholic. Right?

He was absolutely Catholic. He was
baptized twenty one days afterhe was born. Let me tell you a
story about doing research. Thenumber '38 became significant.
His birth year.
I was taking a train from PennStation to Princeton to attend a

(17:39):
conference on art and ecology.American artists in the
nineteenth century response toenvironmental problems. Alright.
And when I got the train ticketat Penn Station and the last
numbers were 38, I thought, thismust have something to do with

(18:01):
Smithson, but he was absolutelynot interested environmentalism,
political environmentalism. Heridiculed it.
He was not interested in ecologyper se. Okay. What's this about
Smithson? Okay. When I got toPrinceton and I had a hotel
because the conference was twodays, as soon as I got into my

(18:22):
room, I got a phone call.
Oh, miss Betker, this isTheodore from remember you
called the church whereSmithson, attended? I have for
you the dates of his baptism,first communion, and
confirmation. You think, woah.There it is. That's the '38.

Wow. So so wait. He would be 84 if he were alive
today. Is that right?

Yeah. I guess so if we can count. And I just
got an email from a wonderfulpoet still living in Soho who
was, Smithson's army buddy inthe fall of nineteen fifty six.
There are a few peers stillalive.

No. I was just trying to get a sense of how old
he would be now because, youknow, as as artists who die
young, they're immortalizedforever young. I mean, it's a
kind of strange thing to thinkabout, you know, because I know
Rackstraw quite well, and I'mjust imagining what Smithson
would be like at 84.

Some people think he would have been become
a filmmaker.

But what about but what else is land
reclamation? Like, the minereclamation, you know, like, I
mean, I think we've talked aboutthis in passing over the years
because a lot of artists that Iknow, of my generation point to
that as proof that he would havebecome environmentally driven.
But I think you may have correctme if I'm wrong. You might have

(19:51):
pragmatically re corrected meand said, no. I mean, he was
trying to make money.
You know? Like, this was anattempt to get the companies to
pay him to make an earthwork.Right?

That's what I say. Yes. You have to look at
people historically. You have tolook what else is happening in
their life. What else happenedin Smithson?
His patron, his what I think himis his another one of his
mothers, the good mother whofunded him, exhibited him,
traveled with him. I know shedidn't sleep with him. She that

(20:24):
was one of the artists shedidn't sleep with. Virginia Dwan
had just closed her gallery. Andwhat was he making?
He wasn't really making muchgallery work that was sellable.
I mean, there's a limitedattraction to triangular bins
with rocks in them. So he hopedthe mining companies, in

(20:49):
Colorado and the West would fundhis redo of depleted mines. The
issue here, Greg, which I havediscussed or disagreed with in
terms of my art historicalcolleagues, is the identity or
the description of whatreclamation entails.

Exactly. And I think that that term is a moving
goal post in 2023. Wouldn't youagree?

Well, it's not moving now because I think
people in the last even twentyyears think that reclamation is
ecological. It's getting intothe earth and reclaiming
whatever healthful soil they cando. I mean, it's it's material

(21:38):
ecological reclamation. But thatis not what it was for him. For
him, it was aestheticreclamation.
His proposals, oh, he'd have alittle ground cover. But his
proposals was to make sculpture,arched arcing sculpture out of
earth on top of the bowls of,ravaged mine sites. And people

(22:02):
would, you know, come do it theway they do with the Spiral
Jetty to see this phenomenalsight. But what he did not
include in his plans was, whatare they gonna do when they get
there beyond looking at it? It'snot social reclamation either.

Yeah. I mean so I think if I remember correctly,
didn't he pitch it to thecompanies as a beautification?
Like, that would be theirinterest in him doing this?

Yes. Beautification and also, I mean,
some acclaim to the companiesfor reviving visually their
disused mining sites.

Yes. Yeah. And and that's the interesting thing
about reclamation because Ithink in 2023, it implies this,
like, dimension of corporateresponsibility, which, I mean,
we can pivot and talk aboutgreenwashing and all of that
stuff. But to just pivot alittle bit here, there's a lot
of material in this book thatprecedes that. And I wanna talk
about that in terms of the wayin which it was cut out, and

(23:05):
then just why it's important tothe understanding of what
follows.
Maybe we could agree, and Imean, if not I'm not mistaken
the way I wrote this, this isyour perspective, that you could
arguably say his legacy beginswith Earthworks in 1966 at the
age 28. And this is still prettyyoung considering, you know, the
average life expectancy, andthis is less than ten years of

(23:27):
of a working life. When he diesat 35, this is an extremely
short period of time. Maybe, youknow, we could look at, like,
other modernists like Seurat, Imean, that had, like, maybe
around the same time. But Ithink he even had more working
time.
But why do you feel it's sounnecessary to, as you say,
unearth his pre Earthworks?Like, how do these pieces inform

(23:47):
his mature works?

Both Thomas Crow in his essay for the
02/2004 MOCA Museum ofContemporary Art catalog and
myself say that, and others haverecognized this, that the early
and the late work are linked.And in between was, let me
describe this in terms of threephases. The first phase I

(24:13):
discovered he actually had anexhibition in the summer of
fifty six, after he graduatedfrom high school and he was away
in the South at his armyreserves. So he had he had nine
exhibitions of painting between'56 and '62. Of those, four of

(24:35):
them were solo shows.
Now the official chronology thatNancy Holt provided, she was
probably uninformed. Okay. Soinstead of nine and four,
there's four and two.

How could she be uninformed? Weren't they, like,
high school sweethearts?

No. No. No. They were not high school
sweethearts.

Okay. But they knew each other in high school.
Right?

They were sweethearts in middle school.

In middle school. Okay. But they didn't
know each other in high schooland, like, right after?

I think they were estranged in high school.
They they had little to do witheach other. I think that is why
well, I don't know what no. No.This is another thing.
I mean, she did not want to tellme where she went to high
school.

Right. She kind of distanced that relationship.
Right? I think you had told methis before.

Yeah. Yes. It may have been because Smithson
was exploring a homosexualidentity. It may have been
Someone who went to high schoolwith them at that time believes
that could be so. There's apicture in the book of them at
14.
They are standing very close toeach other. They are obviously I

(25:45):
mean, I don't think at 14 theywere lovers, but, you know, who
knows? But they were a couple.Okay? They were not a couple in
high school.
Both of their high schoolyearbook pictures are in the
book, and it shows his has oneword, general. Hers, the first
one they list is majorette.Maybe that's why she didn't want

(26:05):
me to know that where she wentto high school. The second one,
get this, is National HonorSociety.

You're talking about Holt.

Yeah. For Holt. That that was the the value
then. Major rep first is formajor accomplishment, then
National Honor Society.

So wait. What was general? Was that in the,
like, army reserves, like ROTCor something?

No. No. General was, like, not college prep,
just whatever it takes tograduate. And okay. So the first
phase goes up to about 1964.
His art life, you know,obviously he was making art
before he graduated from highschool, but he started showing
in '56, okay, up to about 1964.And then he transitions from

(26:54):
expressionistic painter tocerebral sculptor and published
essayist. He was writing before,but he didn't seem to seek
publication of those essays inthe early sixties. Alright. So
then he was a a sculptor ofinterior gallery works, until

(27:16):
the Spiral Jenny, which was1970.
Okay. It's 6465, He was doinggallery sculptures, and then he
catapulted himself via VirginiaDwan, who funded this, the
gallerist and the patron. Andthen so then the last three
years, he was a earthworker. Orhe I mean, he was an earthworker

(27:38):
before, but he didn't reallymake anything large until, let's
say, '69. He starts doing thepours down the Roman hill
hillside.
So then at the end, he'sstarting to transition out of,
well, he's still in Earthworks,but he's trying, he's trying to
transition out of privatelyfunded by patrons, namely Dwan.

(27:59):
And Doug Christmas, the galleryowner on the West Coast, funded
the, film, the Spiral Jetty. Andhe was trying to get into more
publicly funded or corporatefunded visual reclamations of
mining sites. But he reallycouldn't do public art because
he wasn't making work that wouldwithstand the elements. You

(28:22):
know, they would degrade in theelements.
The he wasn't making work out ofsteel or even wood, what a
material, you know, he so hecouldn't apply. And besides his
public art, you know, wouldrequire a very long process of
of evaluation. He he neededmoney.

So how do these pieces inform his mature works?

Well, first of all, they have references to
astrology and alchemy. Andthey're basically expressive
works. They're emotionallyexpressive. They're
autobiographical works. Andthen, okay, along the way, he

(29:03):
makes works in even in hissculptures that can be read as I
read them as expressive as muchas conceptual.
I mean, like his work Plungewith a series of, blocks put
together that are very tiny atone end of the series, very
large at the other. Well,Plunge? What's Plunge call up?

(29:26):
Plunge sounds, you know,violent. First, you know, you're
plunging the toilet or you'replunging into the water.
I mean, it sounds dangerous andviolent. There's this emotional
affiliation with, again, risk.

These are the works that are, like, they're
painted steel. Right? Yeah. Andand are they are they in
perspective so they graduallydecrease in scale or in size,
like a perspectival recession?

Exactly. They either decrease or increase
depending on which end you lookat them.

Right. So these are like Smithson inflected
Judds in a way.

No. They were all they were all working with
geometric forms.

But they are serial like minimalism. Can we
agree on that?

Definitely. Definitely. But they're not
really serial because serial isidentical.

Exactly. They're sequential.

John did not title anything with such
emotionally resonant words.

Of course. But, like, this brings a larger
question, Suzanne, that, like,did he know how to read the wind
of art world trends?

Well, of course, he did.

Because it seems like he just was, like, coasting
into the Earthworks by readingthe room, so to speak. I mean,
it makes me think about whatSheldahl said about the Smithson
during like, when he saw theretrospective in 02/2005. He
said, was Smithson abullshitter? Yeah. He was.
I mean, and, like, I I always,like, am ambivalent about that
description. Because if you readthe writing, it's pretty

(30:53):
esoteric, in places. Then youkind of, like, decode it like
you're doing and and analyze itand look at the metaphor, and
there's definite anchors. Sowhat do you think?

I have a whole section on how he deliberately
transitioned. I'm looking at theshape of time. Okay. George
Kupler remarks on the history ofthings in that book is a recipe
for artistic success. I mean,success by an artist.
This is what you do withSmithson. You look at the thing

(31:27):
he quotes in the actual originaltext, and then you look what's
around it. You think, woah.What's on the next page from
what he quoted is a statementabout basically how to become
famous. And Smithson'stransition from painter to

(31:48):
sculpture was absolutely careerdriven.

It sounds pretty manufactured as well.

By the mid sixties, who was painting? Andy
Warhol and the pop artist, butSmithson did not have the
mentality, the spirit to do popart. He tried it, but it's it's
not his spirit. Okay.

Well, I mean, he also rejected painting in a
similar way that Judd rejectedpainting.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They all they
because where?
Because painting had gotten downto ground zero. I mean, it had
gotten down to Reinhardt's BlackFields, or had gotten completely
full of Pollock's splatters. Sowhen you have the two ends being

(32:31):
filled, people then moved intosculpture because it was a place
that had room for innovation. Sothey all just say, oh,
painting's done. It was done atthat point.
And as a matter of fact, there'sso many people still doing
abstract expressionism or earlyyou think can't you think of
something new?

Well, I mean, that that flame does not get
extinguished very quickly.

If a critic says that, you think, oh, you're
just after novelty. No. I'm notafter novelty. I'm after an
experience that's new to me.

Which is interesting because I just read
this morning the Bois chapter onthe morning of painting in
painting as model, and he talksabout novelty as a driving
factor of painting inrelationship to the market and
capitalism and all that stuff.

Well, I think it's a driving factor of all
art, all contemporary art.

Of course. And so some of the things, you know,
this death of painting thingthat comes over and over and
over again, I mean, you know,like, you see every artist,
like, inhabit it in some way orconfront it.

But you just you just had an interesting
painting on view I saw lastmonth.

Yep. Thank you for that, shout out. Can we talk
more about the relationship ofthree things here, Suzanne? And
I know you you wanna have yourreveals. So anyone who's
listening, you need to read thebook to get the details.
Suzanne explicitly instructed menot to reveal anything. But can
we just talk broadly about therelationship between his early

(34:05):
loss, which we can leave it inthat generalized category, his
sexuality, which, you know,like, I'm still just so
interested that, like, Smithsonwas showing at 18. I mean,
that's so unusual in so manyways, you know, even now.

That was a minor show. I mean

I know. But doesn't it speak to his
ambition? I mean, like, he justwas, like, chomping at the bits
for recognition and for dialogueand all of that stuff. But the
three categories are early loss,sexuality, and Christian
symbolism. Because they're sucha weird mixture, but maybe not
because I know that you havesome ideas about that.

First of all, the Christian symbolism was
about, as I've said, dying,death. And that relates to this
loss that he was born out of,okay, that but that he, his
parents carried with them andthus he learned, here's a term,
he learned melancholy. Hebecause he didn't directly

(35:05):
experience it. All this will beexplained. But so the Christian
symbolism is either aboutsomeone else's bloody death or
himself feeling crucified.
Himself feeling crucifiedbecause of what he wasn't. This
is a little oblique, but we needto let people have the joy of
discovery themselves.

Well, but let me just say something. Like, you
have these reproductions and youreference, like, the Isenheim
Altar piece, right, which as weknow from teaching intro to art
or the survey of class, we knowthat that's about skin diseases,
right, which is reallyinteresting considering, you
know, some of the things likeacne and all that stuff. But
also, is it possible and I mean,I don't wanna play

(35:48):
psychoanalyst, you know,

for, you

know, for someone who's dead, but couldn't
the Christian symbolism of thecrucifixions, you know, like,
you know, the flayed angel, likethe open wing angel that you
were talking about, and so onand so forth. Couldn't there be
a way of rehearsing the lossover and over again through his

(36:11):
work and somehow processing it?

Of course, Greg. You're absolutely right.
Of course. It's not quiterehearsing it, but it's like
trying to process it.

Yeah. But he's also intellectualizing it, which
is really curious. Like, where'sthe emotionality in it? I guess
the expressiveness of thepainting? I mean, what do you
think?

Oh, well, now, yes. And then when he
transitions into a sculptor, hefinds an intellectual correlate
in entropy.

Yeah.

And so entropy is like Christ. Everything will
degrade.

The child in the sandbox. Humpty Dumpty. You
know, like, those were his twofamous examples of it. Right?

Yes. Yes. Yes. But you could say you you caught
on to this, to somethingsignificant. Obsession, trying
to deal with this, trying toresolve it, trying to extricate
it from under his skin.
Why? Because it was notsufficiently dealt with. Why is
he doing this as a a youngadult? This problem came out of

(37:15):
a family situation becauseobviously his parents didn't
resolve it.

Yeah.

So in the in this situation, often they put
it upon the child to be thecarrier of grief. So the parents
obviously didn't resolve itbecause if they resolved it in
the family, he wouldn't have tocontinually obsess about it.

Okay. Carter Radcliffe, if you're listening
to this, I apologize if I'm notsupposed to tell the story, but
you told it to me withouttelling me not to tell anyone.
But we talked about this,Suzanne. Like, remember at the
rail meeting, like, in 02/1212,or '13, I believe I met Carter
Radcliffe. And we were talkingabout Smithson.

(37:56):
Somehow that came up. And hetold me this story that I don't
know how he knew. It was, like,maybe gossip or something that
Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, andRuth Kligman had a menage a
trois. I've thought a lot aboutthis and it's come up as I've
been reading your book. For me,you know, Ruth Kligman was such
a storied person and also thelocus of many relationships in

(38:23):
the art world, including JacksonPollock?

Well, she was Jackson Pollock's girlfriend at
the time of his death. His wife,Lee Krasner, was traveling in
Europe because they haddifficulties. And he, was dating
Ruth Kligman, and she was in thecar along with her own
girlfriend when Pollock had a,accident, which killed him and

(38:50):
the girlfriend, but not RuthKligman. So then she told me
that thereafter, when she wentto Max's Kansas City bar and
restaurant, all the guys wantedto, assume the position of
Jackson Pollock in bed inrelation to her.

Exactly. I think you may have even told me this,
or that was my conjecture. Butbut to have it said straight
from the source is is even moreremarkable and uncanny. Wouldn't
you agree?

Yes. But I don't think she acknowledged to
me actually getting in bed withSmithson.

Okay.

Because, of course, that's what I wanted to
know.

What about the essay Spiral Jetty? What about
his obsession with Pollock init?

I I think Pollock having died in the
summer after Smithson graduatedfrom high school

Mhmm.

Was a another person dead to him. I think
Pollock thereby became anotheror a surrogate or another stand
in for the person the otherperson that he had lost.

So, like, a lost doppelganger or something.

Or Yes. Yes. Yes.

Interesting. That's a really interesting
theory.

Howard Juncker wrote an article on, Smithson
and Pollock. I gave a lecture atthe Pollock Krasner House in the
summer of my, PhD graduation,1998, on Pollock and Smithson's
relation to obsession withPollock. Because you're right,
it's significant that he callsup Pollock at the Spiral Jetty.

This raises a lot of interesting questions. Do
we owe the world completetransparency to our lives as
artists, and how do you drawthat line as to what's invasive?
There's a lot of writing ofpersonal mythologies here that
you've found ways around withNancy Holt's restructuring and
editing of the narrative. Andalso, I think we talked about

(40:56):
how, like, there were essaysthat were left out of that
second collected writings,right, that, you felt were
important?

No. No. No. No. No.
I don't think any were left outof Lam's.

Okay.

I think they didn't know of them. But there
were paragraphs excised from theones they printed. But Greg,
this is an important pointyou're raising as you an artist.
It's not that we want to knowyour or the artist's private
lives. But if you make art withpink penises or a penis that is

(41:35):
called vile flower, or doexquisitely detailed drawings of
highly sexualized men, then Iwanna know to understand the
art.
Where's this coming from? Andit's the art I wanna understand.
And if I need to understand youto understand the art, well

(41:56):
then, you know, we look to you,your life. But it's not so much
directly you. It's like we'reart historians.
This is like with Jasper Johns.If you put it out there in the
art, then it's fair game forviewers to look at and speculate
about. You know, what JasperJohns did is refuse, like in his

(42:19):
MoMA retrospective, refuseessayists to refer to him as
homosexual. But then there's theissue that the difficulty of
knowing, I mean, what was NancyHolt's relation to this?

Right. And I believe you did indicate at some
point that Nancy Holt had toldyou that she was working a day
job. Smithson was not working.And I guess, you know, that's a
whole another question I waswondering about. I was like, how
did he live?
How did he pay to live? Was he atrust a fun kid, or did he have
an inheritance? But you told methat he would go out all night,

(42:54):
I think, to S and M bondageclubs and come back early in the
morning as Nancy was getting upto go to work for her editing
job at a scientific publicationor something like that. Am I am
I fabricating this, or is thisis this true?

You're, smooshing two things together
incorrectly.

Okay.

She told me, oh, Smithson had the metabolism
of Hummingbird. He was alwaysactive, and he would work during
the day, and he'd go togalleries, and then he'd go to
Max's Kansas City at night, andI couldn't keep up with him. I
went home, went to bed, and thenext morning he told me what

(43:36):
happened. And that quote is inthe book. But I'm I don't know
what happened.
I don't know what it is he toldher that had happened. I mean,
so I I mean, on the one hand,there's her not only being
involved up to a certain point.On the other hand, there's
suggestions of his activities,but I don't know how the two

(43:58):
mesh. You know, another person Iquote in the book said that
whenever he was with Smithson,Smithson wanted to go to leather
bars. And Nancy said, as I hadoh, when I asked her about this,
oh, Smithson was a voyeur.
He only went five or six times.I mean, she but Nancy Holt

(44:20):
believed that Smithson was atourist in those places. Maybe
he was. But if you're a tourist,you don't have to go five or six
times to see it.

So if Smithson was bisexual, how does that
change our view of his artworkin your opinion?

It doesn't.

Yeah. I mean, this is the essentialist
question that gets batted aroundin 2023 a lot, that somehow your
identity has to be reflected inthe subject matter of your work.

Well, let me take that back. I can't say it
doesn't. Why is the erect thickstem with the exploding petals a
painting miraculously andastonishingly recently acquired

(45:07):
by the Guggenheim Museum titledVile Flower. What's vile about
this flower? Knowing that he hadthis ambiguous, ambiguous to us,
relationship to same sexsexuality, we might think that

(45:27):
this exploding penis is vilebecause it is a temptation that
he does not want to succumb to.

Yeah. I mean, he's ambivalent and also maybe
self flagellating. I mean, ifyou wanna go back to Christian
mythology. Right? Yeah.
It's really interesting. I mean,like, so let me ask the question
of the elephant in the roomhere, Suzanne, and I don't agree
with this, but I have to ask it.Is to the people that, as you
mentioned, will will say thatyou outed Smithson, how would

(45:59):
you respond?

I'd say, don't blame the messenger. I mean,
look, the paintings are there.

Right. Right. I what

I did out is the paintings.

Which have been suppressed.

Yes. Which has been suppressed.

Do you think that's the reason why they've
been suppressed? Or what are thereasons?

Yes. I think it was also that Smithson wanted to
be known as a intellectual, who,you know, who devised this, and
promoted this idea of entropyand, sites and non sites and
these these esoteric new formsof art. He did not want to be
known as someone who paintedexploding penises, which he did,

(46:44):
you know, at least, twice. Andthen renamed a painting of
another penis that's more likea, lingam, dark sister. The
penis is female.

How does one discuss sexuality from a
specific time period? Becausethe language of that time
doesn't necessarily reflect ourlanguage in our present moment.
Right? And I think that youmentioned that you you consulted
with David Getsy about this.

No. No. Jonathan Jonathan Katz.

Jonathan Katz. Okay. But, you know, the the
question of, like, intersexversus transgender, for example.
I mean, it's just one that comesto mind and

Well, this this is a interesting, issue for art
historians.

Right. So how do you address that?

When you're talking about historical art, do
you use the terms contemporaryto you or contemporary to them?
You know, I mean, because todaywe would call such a person
queer, and then they would callsuch a person gay. But now we
think that gay implies abifurcation, either straight or

(48:00):
you're gay. Whereas queersuggests more of a spectrum
that's, I think, more accurateto people.

It's a very amorphous term right now. Well,
I mean, it's an interestingquestion because, like, I know
that the discourse on LouiseNevelson is struggling with this
right now of, like, youngerwriters who are saying that she
was queer. And people who knewher and did biographies of her
said, absolutely not. Like, I'veI've talked to her when she was
living, talked to her friends inwriting the biography. You know?

(48:30):
So, I mean, the these ideas of,like, how do you talk about
that? It seems like a quagmire.

It isn't really a quagmire because what you have
to introduce, and which I did,is the social political context.
And in the mid twentiethcentury, post World War II, is
known historically by scholarsof historical homosexuality,

(48:58):
which I learned by reading them,was a period of really extreme
homophobia. Because startingwith the US government did not
want to hire anyone who might begay because they thought the
communists could blackmail theminto giving up, US secrets. You
know, Newsweek wrote an article,Homosexuality, pity or punish?

(49:23):
What?
So in the context of LouiseNevelson and Smithson and so
many others, they needed to bein the closet.

Well, what about how this maps on the Roman
Catholicism and their positionon homosexuality?

Well, of course, that's the other thing.
I mean, for Smithson, that's thequagmire. How can you be a
devout Catholic and gay? Youcan't. That's another reason the
flower is vile.

So it just seems like a layer upon layer of
suppression, repression, andthen unearthing.

Well, yeah. I see. My feeling is basically
sympathy for Smithson, what hefelt he had to disguise in order
to be successful, to be asuccess. I was talking to a
couple of young guys at anopening the other night. They
don't realize the freedoms, thepersonal freedoms they enjoy, at

(50:17):
least in New York City.
New York State did not make sexbetween consenting adults of the
same sex legal until 1980.

Let me just add to that that if I'm not
mistaken, there are sodomy lawsstill in effect in North
Carolina. They're not enforced,but they're still on the books.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, you wannatalk about repression.

The secret's in. I have a I have a picture in
the book of the pecatum muntum,the secret sin, the book that
Smithson had from the firstedition, first US edition, 1958.
He I mean, he was quite aware ofthe problem as, I mean, as
another book he had, he hadtitled The Problem of

(51:02):
Homosexuality in Modern Society.He was personally aware of this,
I think.

How does that map onto his library? Because I
know that you went through andprovided a selected list of the
library.

Well, the the library is absolutely
illuminating because it showshis concerns by the books he
bought and, and retained. Thelibrary cataloguing was made
upon his death. I mean, itactually shows two things. It
shows what his interests were,not only the problem of

(51:36):
homosexuality in modern society,but the early Christian
teachings of Saint Jerome. Hehad many books on the early
fathers of Catholicism,Christianity, and their sayings,
their writings.
He had many books on saints. Soit shows that he had them. And

(51:56):
the other thing it shows is thatNancy Holt was aware of them
because she commissioned thecatalog and published it or
allowed it to be published in acouple of books. In those
catalogs where it was publishedas a con in contrast to mine,
these books were mushed intovery vague groups where you

(52:18):
wouldn't find them as easily.

Is this the one that Alex Obero did for one of
the museum monographs?

Well, he wrote on the library, but and the lie
yeah. The library was in thatcatalog that he wrote on, which
I also have an essay in, the02/2004 MOCA catalog. I mean,
this whole thing brings up theprobable difficulty that Nancy
Holt must have experienced. Imean, if she did, you know, but

(52:47):
she, like Lee Krasner, the widowof Pollock, flourished after his
death, after their theirhusband's violent deaths. So
Nancy Holt made her sun tunnels.
She, made major public artworks.She,

grew. What were her attitudes towards having to
be kind of the caretaker of hislegacy at the same time that she
was engaged in her own practice?

Well, I think she was ambivalent. It was kind
of ambivalent to me because shewould tell me what a burden it
is. It was, you know, there wereconstantly people like me asking
her for copyright permission. Imean, for my Earthworks book.
But she did have artist rightsor a contract with artist rights

(53:37):
organization to get payment forthat.

But she wouldn't delegate this to someone else?

Well, not no. It was both a burden, but it was
also a source of income and asource of attention as the
widow. I mean, as as the,controller so that they did, you
know, the, floating island pieceon the barge at the time when
that 02/2004 show came to theWhitney. I mean, it was a it was

(54:05):
a great source of attention toher, as well as a great source
of burden distracting her fromher own work. And she wanted to
control what got displayed.
The surveys subject to herapproval were sanitized.

Mhmm. In what ways?

In that they had very few paintings of
relatively innocuous subjectmatter.

Okay. This is an impossible question to answer,
but I just have to ask it. SoI'm just gonna use it as an
example. Like, I was inWilmington last week, for my
father's scholarship dinner, andI met with one of his colleagues
who is still on faculty. And myfather collected over 23,000
fish specimen and created acollection.

(54:50):
He was curator of fish. TheMuseum of Natural History tried
to get that collection as soonas my dad finished it. And my
dad said to Dave Webster, hiscolleague, before he died, do
not let them get it. You have topromise me. Do not let them get
it.
There are all these thingsabout, like, how do you how do
you have someone's legacy? Howdoes a person do that? And, of

(55:12):
course, Smithson died tragicallyyoung and unexpected, and, you
know, it wasn't after a longillness or it wasn't after, you
know, old age. So I'm justwondering, because it sounds
like Holt and Smithson were suchdifferent people, and they
thought so differently. I mean,I think about the East Coast
West Coast video and how theykind of crossed their

(55:35):
identities, you know, like, orinterchange their identities.
Right? And I just wonder,Suzanne, I mean, when you're
saying this, like, how muchpossibility and this is a huge
question. How much possibilityand you seem to suggest it.
Maybe you've already answeredthis question. But how much
possibility did Holt totallymisread his intentions if he

(55:57):
would have wanted his legacy togo a certain way?
Because it seems like a lot ofthese things that you've told me
over the years and that you'retelling me now and that you have
in your book are more in theself interest of Holt and Holt's
narrative and Holt's perceptionof Smithson. Like, we don't
know. He can't speak forhimself. So, of course, this is
com this is a complicatedquestion.

I actually I'm a little confused. I don't know
what you mean about in the selfinterest of Holt.

Well, that she's telling the story she wants to
tell. It's not necessarily thestory that he wants to tell. Oh.
It's not like his perception ofwho he was as an artist. Maybe
he wanted all that stuff to beshown eventually.
You have arguments that he veryself consciously, as you say,
transitioned from painter tosculptor, sculptor to earthwork

(56:43):
creator. I don't know if that'sa sculpture or not. We could
debate that. But, but you knowwhat I'm saying? Because it's
like, if you look at Holt'swork, she kind of used being the
gatekeeper to her ownprofessional advantage in some
way.
It's unavoidable for her to havedone so. Right? Right. So what
do you think? I mean, do youthink this is Holt's?

(57:04):
Because you said sanitized too.I mean, so implies that this was
an edit. This was a consciousconstruction of that personal
mythology of Robert Smithson,big capital r, big capital s,
rather than Bob Smithson. Youknow what I mean?

I know what you mean, but I think she was
carrying out his desires tosuppress his early work and his
agonies. It may have been theway she managed his legacy may
have been contrary to who hereally was, but it wasn't

(57:40):
contrary to what he wanted. Hecreated a persona of an
intellectual. Of course, what Iargue in the book is that in the
earthworks, basically the threebig earthworks in the Great Salt
Lake and in Yemen, TheNetherlands and in Amarillo, he

(58:01):
was returning, and this is whatTom Crow said also, he's
returning to the use of symbols,even I'm saying even alchemical
symbols of the early work. Thisis one thing that's amazed me.
I mean, there's several thingsabout amazed me about my
colleagues. How, for instance,just to throw in something, for

(58:22):
instance, Smithson would drop inphrases in Latin in his early
writings, and nobody translatedthem. No analyst translated
them. Don't you wanna know whatwhat he's talking about? And
then also there has been almostno discussion of the spiral as a

(58:46):
mystical symbol and of thebroken circle in Netherlands as
being a yin yang symbol, or thelast work being Absol in
Ouroboros, you know, a snake ordragon biting its tail.
Here and there, the people havedropped us in who I cite, like

(59:07):
Joseph Maciek, early onidentified it as such. Art
history has not been open orreceptive to analyzing work as
mystical symbolic. There's beenthe onslaught of, you know, art
as language, as deconstruction,or as, you know, linguistic
construction. So this book isalso, I'm hoping, opening up a

(59:33):
new territory of how to talkabout art. You can include
biography.
You can include religion. Youcan include alchemical symbols
as legit. And speaking of which,in that East Coast, West Coast,
as I say, Nancy Holt andSmithson were absolutely playing
themselves. It appeared thatthey were playing opposites, but

(59:55):
Nancy Holt was theadministrator. She played the
conceptual intellectual artistin that conversation, that
parodic conversation.
She was the actual the householdadministrator, the keeper of the
calendar, the keeper of thefinancial books, the
photographer, the driver,allowed him to, you know, float

(01:00:18):
with his ideas.

Greg Lindquist (01:00:19):
Yeah. I mean, just to back up the spiral for a
second, like, didn't the symbolcome from the idea of a stairway
to heaven

Suzaan Boettger (01:00:27):
I never heard that.

In terms of magic and the Kabbalah?

Look, I mean, the spiral can go down. Hemor
spoke about it to Dennis Wheeleras descending than ascending.

To the the myth of Atlantis. Right?

Yeah. Or or just descending into hell. And
you know it goes leftward fromthe shore. Mhmm. Anticlockwise.
Yeah. Counter. It's goingbackward in time to what he
called his unicellularbeginning.

Yeah. Again, loss.

That's something we'd all like to do
sometimes. Go back and startover.

Regression. Yeah. In some ways, let me just
say maybe in closing as we'regetting to the end of our time
together, I'm really shockedthat this is the first
biography. Why hasn't there beenone until now? And I know that
you've been working on this forquite a while.
Look at all the otherbiographies that have come out

(01:01:26):
in the last ten years. There arefigures that many are more
recent than Smithson.

You mean the deaths are more recent?

Yeah. Exactly.

The time span between the death and the
biography is shorter.

Correct. But, I mean, we're talking about, you
know, over forty years. I'm socurious to see how people react
to this who have thought thatthey knew Smithson. You know?

No one is more curious than me.

Yeah. Yeah. So can you just speak to, like, why
hasn't it been? Is it all theseissues we've been talking about
about, like, the poisednarrative versus, like, more of
the raw narrative or authenticnarrative? I hate that word, but
I don't know what other word isto use here.

Well, Harold Rosenberg I'm reading from a
footnote, an endnote. As HaroldRosenberg, the famous art critic
of the forties, fifties,sixties, observed about the
position of the artist's widow,quote, she controls the entirety

(01:02:34):
of her dead husband's unsoldproduction, giving her economic
power. But also, she is theofficial source of the artist's
life story, as well as of hisprivate interpretation of that
story. This is Harold Rosenbergin The Art Establishment, which

(01:02:55):
he published in Esquire,01/01/1965. Well, Nancy Holt
personifies that, the artist'swidow who controls both the
economic power and the officialsource of the artist's life
story as well as his privateinterpretation of that story.

(01:03:17):
Fortunately, the Holt SmithsonFoundation is more progressive
in its ideas of what the publicneeds to know. That's the
reason. Nancy Holt died in, Ithink February 2014. This is
like I remember when I publishedmy Earthworks book, and I feel

(01:03:40):
the same way now. You don't wantto come out of that tunnel that
you're in obsessing.
The other aspect is I'm stillrunning into people who give me
new information. Yeah. I justmet someone two nights ago who
told me that the painter EdRuscha titled a work 28 Gas

(01:04:06):
Stations in reference to the 14Stations of the Cross times two,
and Ed Ruscha is a secretCatholic. What?

That is so weird.

But I'd known that boy, I would have put in
because Smithson doesn't workusing the 14 stations of the
cross.

Yeah. You know, it's so interesting because, you
know, like, you talk about theoccult in this book. And then I
thought about, like, thatdimension in his record
collection, which I know thatyou don't have in your
collection, but you had BlackSabbath records. It's so weird
to think about that. You know?

Yeah. I couldn't even get into the
record collection. Oh.

Well, it overlapped my parents' record
collection quite a bit. Andduring the pandemic, I got back
into vinyl and, like, I got mymom's collection. I got my
aunt's collection. And, like,that's a whole another dimension
of cultural things that doesn'treally get talked about with
art, but I so appreciate thatbeing part of that.

He does quote Dion, you know, as an use a use
a line from a Dion song as anepigraph.

Interesting. Where is that? Do you remember?

That's, I think, in the Lamentations of a
Paroxximal artist. Oh, oh, whichreminds me. When Nancy Holt
speaks about Smithson having ametabolism of a hummingbird, the
latent content of that is he hadmanic energy. I mean, he's kind

(01:05:41):
of classically bipolar,depressive and manic. He
produced about 50 paintings inone month.
How do I know this? I know thisbecause he wrote his dealer in,
Rome that he has been turningout paintings to bring to Rome
to exhibit.

Well, one only needs to watch East Coast, West
Coast to get a sense of thatmonomaniacal, like, mania that
you're talking about. But that'sreally interesting because it
kinda points towards and here'sanother teaser trailer for the
circumstances under which hedied. That mania that you're
speaking to, what you would youagree with that?

Absolutely. Oh, well, that's what observers with
him at the time described,having a kind of manic
excitement about making thiswork. Greg, it's been so
marvelous talking with youbecause you're informed about
Smithson. You have ideas and youyou throw them out there, and

(01:06:39):
we've I've thoroughly enjoyedthis conversation.

I would second that, Suzanne. I always love
talking to you about thisbecause I always learn a lot,
and it was such a pleasuretalking to you about your book.
I hope that everyone reads itand that it gets the dues that
it deserves. So thanks forhaving this conversation. I
really enjoyed it.

My pleasure. And all I can say is to folks
out there, one of my blurbscalls it a monumental
achievement. Woah. By apsychoanalytic arch historian,
Jonathan Feinberg, on the backcover of the book. Woah.
Okay.

Narrator (01:07:24):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book Inside theSpiral, The Passions of Robert
Smithson is available fromUniversity of Minnesota Press.
Thank you for listening.

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