INTERVIEW

PAUL CUMMINGS: You were born in New Jersey?
ROBERT SMITHSON: Yes, in Passaic, New Jersey.
CUMMINGS: Did you come from a big family?
SMITHSON: No, I'm an only child.
CUMMINGS: So many artists I have been interviewing lately have been an only child. Did you grow up there, go to school there?
SMITHSON: I was born in Passaic and lived there for a short time, then we moved to Rutherford, New Jersey. William Carlos Williams was actually my baby doctor in Rutherford. We lived there until I was about nine and then we moved to Clifton, New Jersey. I guess around that time I had an inclination toward being an artist. 
CUMMINGS: Were you making drawings? 
SMITHSON: Oh yes, I was working in that area even back in the early phases in Rutherford. I was also very interested at that in natural history. In Clifton my father built what you could call a kind of suburban basement museum for me to display all my fossils and shells, and I was involved with collecting insects and…
CUMMINGS: Where did these shells come from?
SMITHSON: Oh, different places. We traveled a lot at that time. Right after the war in 1946 when we went out West I was about eight years old. It was an impressionable period. I started to get involved in collecting at that time. But basically I was pretty much unto myself in being interested in field naturalist things, looking for insects, rocks and whatever.
CUMMINGS: Did you have books around that were involved with these topics?
SMITHSON: Yes. And I went to the Museum of Natural History. When I was about seven I did very large paper constructions of dinosaurs which in a way, I suppose, relate right up to the present in terms of the film I made on The Spiral Jetty - the prehistoric motif runs throughout the film. So in a funny way I guess there is not that much difference between what I am now and my childhood. I really had a problem with school. I mean, there was no real understanding of where I was at, and I didn't know where I was at that time.
CUNMINGS: Did you like primary school or high school?
SMITHSON: No, I didn't. I grew rather hostile to school, actually, I started going to the Art Students League. I won a scholarship. In my last year of high school I managed to go only half way. I was just very put off by the whole way art was taught.
CUMMINGS: Really? In what way?
SMITHSON: Well, my high school teacher would come up with statements like - I remember this one quite vividly - that the only people who become artists are cripples and women.
CUMMINGS: This was a high school art teacher? What was their problem?
SMITHSON: Well, They seemed to have all kinds of problems. Everything was kind of restricted. There was no comprehension of any kind, no creative attitude. It was mostly rote - a very unimaginative teaching staff, constricted and departmentalized. At that point I didn't have any self-realization, so really couldn't tell, except that the Art Students League did offer me a chance to at least come in contact with other people. I made a lost of friends with people in the High School of Music and Art in New York.
CUMMINGS: Did you go to that school?
SMITHSON: No, but I had a lot of friends from there, and we had a sketch class together. Every Saturday in the last two years of high school I went to Isaac Osier's studio. We used to sketch each other and we'd talk about art and go to museums. And that was a very important thing for me, getting out of that kind of stifling suburban atmosphere where there was just nothing. 
CUMMINGS: How did you get the scholarship to the League?
SMITHSON: I applied for that. I did a series of woodcuts, rather large woodcuts. I remember one of them was called Teenagers on 42nd Street. It was done in a kind of German Expressionist style. I was about sixteen when I did that. 
CUMMINGS: Did you have art books and things at home?
SMITHSON: Yes. I kept coming into New York and buying art books. I was pursuing it on my own. 
CUMMINGS: Did you go to museums and galleries?
SMITHSON: Yes. The first museum show I saw at the Museum of Modern Art was The Fauves' exhibition. I was about sixteen. I had that attitude. And then I went back to Clifton High School and tried to present those ideas but they didn't quite jell.
CUMMINGS: Were you interested in other classes in school?
SMITHSON: Well, I was somewhat interested in writing, although at that time I had a sort of writer's block, you know, I couldn't quite get it together. I had a good oral sense; I liked to talk. I remember giving a talk, I think in my sophomore year in high school, on The War of Worlds, the H.G. Wells thing. And I gave a talk on the proposed Guggenheim Museum. Things like that interested me. But I found those things that interested me really didn't coincide with school, so I became more and more disenchanted and more and more confused.
CUMMINGS: You had no instructor in any class who picked up on any of those things?
SMITHSON: No. It was all very hostile and cramped, and it just alienated me more and more to the point where I grew rather hostile to the whole public school situation. In a very, very definite way I wanted nothing to do with high school, and I had no intention of going to college. 
CUMMINGS: What about the writing? When did that start?
SMITHSON: That started in 1965 - 1966. But it was a self-taught situation. After about five years of thrashing around on my own, I started to pull my thoughts together and was able to begin writing. Since then, I guess I've written about twenty articles.
CUMMINGS: Do you find it augments your work? Or is it separate from it? 
SMITHSON: Well, it comes out of my sensibility - it comes out of my own observation. It sort of parallels my actual art involvement. The two coincide; one informs the other.
CUMMINGS: How did you find the art scene in the fifties?
SMITHSON: That was a very crucial time. Everything was very repressed and stupid; there was no art context as we know it now. There weren't any galleries to speak of (when I was sixteen or seventeen). I was very much encouraged by Frederica Beer-Monti who ran the Artists Gallery. She was an Austrian woman of the circle of Kokoschka and that crowd, and she had been painted by a lot of those people. She was very encouraging.
CUMMINGS: How did you meet her?
SMITHSON: I took my woodcuts to the gallery. It was run by Hugh Stix and his wife who were very encouraging. It was a non-profit gallery. I would have discussions there with Owen Ratchliff, who was sort of the director. I would say that in a way they gave me an opportunity to work for myself.
CUMMINGS: You had a show with them at one point?
SMITHSON: I had a show with them. I was the youngest artist to ever show there. And I felt - well, you know, if I can show at age nineteen, keep on going. I've always been kind of unreachable, I guess, especially at that point. I met other people, - I was friendly with the son of Meyer Levin, Joe Levin, who went to Music and Art High School. I remember Meyer Levin saying that I was the type of person that couldn't go to school, that I would either make it very big or else go crazy.
CUMMINGS: Nice alternatives. How did you like that Art Students League? What did you do there?
SMITHSON: It gave me an opportunity to meet younger people and others who were sort of sympathetic to my outlook. There wasn't anybody in Clifton who I was close to except for one person-Danny Donahue. He got interested in art, but eventually he did go crazy and was killed in a motorcycle and just … I mean it was a very difficult time, I think, for people to find themselves.
CUMMINGS: That was in the fifties?
SMITHSON: In the fifties, yes, This was, I'd say, around 1956-57. I spent a short period-six months-in the Army.
CUMMINGS: Were you drafted? Or did you join?
SMITHSON: No, I joined. Actually I joined with Danny Donahue, Joe Levin, and Charlie Hasloff. Charlie is a poet from Dusseldorf. Both Danny and Joe were excluded and that left Charlie and me. The reason I joined was because it was a special plan; it was a kind of art group called Special Services.
CUMMINGS: Oh, really! What was that? 
SMITHSON: Well, strangely enough, John Cassavetes was in this group. And Miles Kruger, who is an expert on nostalgia.
CUMMINGS: Oh,yes! The Amercian musical stage.
SMITHSON: Right, You know him?
CUMMINGS: Oh, for years! Yes.
SMITHSON: Well, in a way he was responsible for cueing me into the situation. So it turned out that I went to Fort Knox, went through basic training, spent some unhappy hours in clerk-typist's school, and then ended up as sort of artist-in-residence at Fort Knox. I did watercolors of local Army installations for the mess hall. It was a very confusing period. Another important relationship I had was with a poet named Alan Brilliant. I stayed at his place up on Park Avenue and 96th Street, in the El Bario area. He was involved with publishing poet. I met him through Joe Levin.
CUMMINGS: Was Miles with you all through this military period?
SMITHSON: I spent a few times with Miles at the Rienzi Cafe down in the village were we had discussions. That sort of thing. I don't know him that well. I think this was around 1956. I mean that was an interesting period for me. I'm trying to put it together right now.
CUMMINGS: What about the poet though- Brilliant?
SMITHSON: Brilliant married a novelist , Teo Savory, moved out to California, and became a little magazine publisher-The Unicorn Press. In that group I met Hubert Selby, who wrote Last Exit to Brookelyn, Franz Kline, a lot of people from Black Mountain. That was an important thing.
CUMMINGS: At the Cedar Bar.
SMITHSON: At the Cedar Bar. Carl Andre said one time that that was where he got his education. In a way I kind of agree with him.
CUMMINGS: A lot of people did.
SMITHSON: I think it was a kind of meeting place for people who were sort of struggling to figure out who they were and where they were going. 
CUMMINGS: The late fifties was also sort of the heyday of the Tenth Street galleries.
SMITHSON: That's right. I knew a lot of people involved in that. Although I had had this show at the Artists Gallery, I was somewhat unsatisfied. The show was reviewed in Art News by Irving Sandler, but I just didn't feel satisfied. Strangely enough, the work sort of grew out of Barnett Newman; I was using stripes and then gradually Introduced pieces of paper over the stripes. The stripes then sort of got into a kind of archetypal imagistic period utilizing images similar, I guess, to Pollock's She-Wolf Period and Dubuffet and certain mythological religious archetypes.
CUMMINGS: Well, that's something like the images in the show in Rome then-right?
SMITHSON: Yes. That comes out of that period. Charles Alan offered to put me in a show in his gallery in New York. And the reason I got the show in Rome was because of the painting called Quicksand. It's an abstraction done with gouache. I think Charles Alan still owns it. It was fundamentally abstract, sort of olives and yellow and pieces of paper stapled onto it; it had a kind of incoherent landscape look to it. 
CUMMINGS: Did you know Newman's work? Were you intrigued by that kind of thing?
SMITHSON: Yes I did see Newman's work. But emotionally I wasn't -I mean I responded to it, but this latent imagery was still in me, a kind of anthropomorphism; and, you see, I was also concerned with Dubuffet and de Kooning in terms of that kind of submerged…
CUMMINGS: Where had you seen Dubuffet? Because he was not shown that much here.
SMITHSON: Oh, I think he had a lot of things in the Museum of Modern Art. And I'd seen books. I think he was being shown at one of the galleries. I can't remember exactly which one. I'am pretty sure I saw things of his in the Museum of Modern Art. I was around twenty at this time.
CUMMINGS: As long as we're talking about galleries and museums, which galleries interested you most? Do you remember the ones that you went to in those days?You've mentioned Charles Alan and the Artists Gallery.
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, a lot of the galleries hadn't opened yet. I was very much intrigued by Dick Bellamy's gallery-the Hansa Gallery. When I was still going to the Art Students League I used to drop around the corner to see Dick Bellamy. He was very encouraging. Also in the late fifties I moved to Montgomery Street; there I was living about three blocks from Dick Bellamy. He was the first one to invite me to an actual opening. I believe it was an Allan Kaprow opening at the Hansa Gallery. At the time I was trying to put together a book of art and poetry with Allan Graham (Which never manifested itself) so Dick had suggested that I go to see these new young artists Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg. I remember having seen their work at The Jewish Museum in a small show. And also in this book I wanted to include comic strips. I was especially interested in the early issues of Mad magazine-"Man Out of Control". Then there was an artist who was interesting, somebody who had a kind of somewhat psychopathic approach to art; his name was Joseph Winter and he was showing at the Artists Gallery; I wanted to include him. I also met Allen Ginsberg sand Jack Kerouac at that time. I met lots of people through Dick Bellamy. Let me see what else. I worked at the Eighth Street Bookshop too.
CUMMINGS: Oh, really? When was that?
SMITHSON: I would say in 1958, I think right about that period, give or take a year.
CUMMINGS: To kind of go back a bit, who did you study with at the League?
SMITHSON: Oh, John Groth, who was an illustrator.
CUMMINGS: How did you select him?
SMITHSON: Well, you see, I could only go on Fridays. I also studied with somebody named Bove during the week. But I just selected him - he had a sort of loose way of drawing and I was interested in drawing. In the early years of high school I had ideas of being an illustrator of some sort. 
CUMMINGS: Making it a useful paying career.
SMITHSON: Yes. But John Groth was worthwhile teacher and he had a good sense of composition. I always did my work at my home. I did sketching from models and things at the League, but basically I did all my work at home. I worked in caseins. I still have some of those works from that period.
CUMMINGS: How did your family like this development?
SMITHSON: They didn't like it. 
CUMMINGS: There was no encouragement? 
SMITHSON: Well, you know, they just didn't see it as a paying enterprise. They saw it as a rather questionable occupation, Bohemian, you know, that sort of thing. Although my great-grandfather was a rather well-known artist around the turn of the century. He did interior plaster work in all the major municipal buildings in New York: the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan; he did the entire subway system. 
CUMMINGS: What was his name?
SMITHSON: His name was Charles Smithson. Well, of course since then all the work has been torn out of the subways. I guess it was of the period that Lewis Mumford called "The Brown Decade"; you know, that kind of work. There was an article written about him in an old journal from around 1900. He was also involved in sort of public art. My grandfather worked with him for a while, but then the unions came in and that sort of craft work went out and prefab work came in. Then the Depression wiped out my great-grandfather and my grandfather who was sort of a poet actually -
CUMMINGS: What was his name?
SMITHSON: His name was Samuel Smithson. Incidentally, there was somebody at Columbia who claimed that all the Smithsons were related to the founder of the Smithsonian Institution, as a matter of fact. 
CUMMINGS: Well, you see how small the world is.
SMITHSON: But I don't know about that.
CUMMINGS: It's only two hundred years ago.
SMITHSON: Well, he had no offspring. I don't know - I never could understand it but this man whose name is I.M.Smithson is working at Columbia on all of the Smithsons, and how they're related to the Smithsonian one. As a matter of fact, he called me up as a result of the flyer from the Artists Gallery which one of the students gave him. But I never heard anything more about that.
CUMMINGS: He may well be up there digging away somewhere.
SMITHSON: Right. My father worked for Auro-lite. I do remember some interesting things that he used to bring home - like films - where they had all these car parts sort of automated, you know, like marching spark plugs and marching carburetors and that of thing. It's very vivid in my mind. Later on he went into real estate and finally into mortgage and banking work. He just never had the artistic view. On my mother's side I'm Middle European of diverse origins, I suppose mainly Slavic.
CUMMINGS: Well, what happened? You had this exhibition at the Artists Gallery. Did that help your parents' interest in your work?
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, they came to see it and try to understand what their son was getting into. They've always been sympathetic. I mean they're really pretty good to me - I had a brother who died before I was born. My father did take me on trips. Actually, no looking back on it, he did have real sense of a kind of, you know, American idea of the landscape, but in an American way; I mean he loved to travel. He hitchhiked around the country, rode the rails and everything when he was younger; he sort of had a feeling for scenic beauty, but couldn't understand modern art. 
CUMMINGS: He liked Bierstadt paintings.
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, that sort of thing.
CUMMINGS: How much of the country have you traveled around? I know you've been here, there, and everywhere. 
SMITHSON: I sort of concentrated on it in my childhood and adolescence. Well, my first major trip was when I was eight years old and my father and mother took me around the entire United States. Right after World War II we traveled across the Pennsylvania Turnpike out through the Black Hills and the Badlands, through Yellowstone, up into the Redwood forests, then down the Coast, and then over to the Grand Canyon. I was eight years old and it made a big impression on me. I used to give little post card shows. I remember I'd set up a little booth and cut a hole in it and put post cards up into the slot and show all the kinds these post cards.
CUMMINGS: Oh. The post cards you picked up on your travels?
SMITHSON: Yes. And then on my mother's side it's obscure. Her maiden name was Duke from Austria, that area. Her father was a wheelmaker. 
CUMMINGS: Then there's a strong craft tradition behind you- using materials and making objects.
SMITHSON: Yes. I guess there is something to that.
CUMMINGS: Let's see, you went to the Brooklyn Museum School at one point?
SMITHSON: Yes, I got a scholarship there too. I went there on Saturdays, but I didn't go there too long. It was kind of far to go there. I went to life classes with Isaac Soyer again; well, mainly we used to gather at his place. His studio was up near Central Park. We'd do sketching. I think I went there for may beabout three months.
CUMMINGS: How was the Brooklyn Museum? Did you like that?
SMITHSON: No. I can't say that. I really responded that much. I think the strongest impact on me was the Museum of Natural History. My father took me there when I was around seven. I remember he took me first to the Metropolitan which I found kind of dull. I was very interested in natural history.
CUMMINGS: All the animals and things.
SMITHSON: Yes. 
CUMMINGS: Did they have the panoramas then? I don't remember…
SMITHSON: Oh, yes. I mean it was just the whole spectacle, the whole thing- the dinosaurs made a tremendous impression on me. I think this initial impact is still in my psyche. We used to go the Museum of Natural History all the time.
CUMMINGS: That was your museum rather than the art museum?
SMITHSON: Yes.
CUMMINGS: Were your parents interested in that, or was it because you were interested?
SMITHSON: Yes-well, my father liked it. My father sort of liked the dioramas and things of that sort, because of the painstaking reality. Looking back on that, I think he took me to the Metropolitan thinking that was the Museum of Natural History- I could be wrong but I think I remember his saying: Oh, well, we can go to an interesting museum now. For me it was much more interesting. Then from that point on I just got more and more interested in natural history. At one point I thought of becoming either a field naturalist or a zoologist.
CUMMINGS: Did you go to college anywhere?
SMITHSON: No.
CUMMINGS: I didn't think you did. So what happened then? When did you move to New York? 
SMITHSON: I moved to New York in 1957, right after I got out of the Army. Then I hitchhiked all around the country. I went out West and visited the Hopi Indian Reservation and found that very exciting. Quite by chance, I was privileged to see a rain dance at Oraibi. I guess I was about eighteen or nineteen.
CUMMINGS: Had you been to the Museum of the American Indian ever?
SMITHSON: No. 
CUMMINGS: You hadn't? So it was a new experience.
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, you see, again, I knew about Gallup, New Mexico. I knew about and made a special point of going to Canyon de Chelly. I had seen photographs of that. I hiked the length of Canyon the Chelly at that point and slept out. It was the period of the beat generation. When I got back, On the Road was out, and all those people were around, you know, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, both of whom I met. And Hubert Selby, I knew him rather well; I used to visit him out in Brooklyn and we listened to jazz and that sort of thing. He was strange person. I mean there was something weird about him. In fact he billed himself as an Eisenhower Republican, lived in a highrise. He had lung trouble, I think he had only a quarter of a lung left or something. At one point he tried to commit suicide. I don't know - it just got very bad. He was trying to get his book published at that time. The way I met him - I was sitting at a table at the Cedar Bar, I had read a chapter from his book and I praised it to, I think it was Jonathan Williams of the Black Mountain Press. It just happened that Hubert was sitting there (Cubby as he was called) and - well, of course he was taken with the fact that somebody liked his story that much.
CUMMINGS: How did you find the Cedar? Was that just through wandering around the Village?
SMITHSON: How did I find the Cedar? No, I think people just sort of gravitated to it. Tenth Street was very active. I can't remember exactly how I discovered it. But I think perhaps, again through Dick Bellamy or Miles Forst, Dody Muller, people like that, you know. I knew Edward Avedisian to at that time. And Dick Baker who worked for Grove Press and became a Zen monk. 
CUMMINGS: You never showed in Tenth Street, did you, in any of those galleries?
SMITHSON: No. By that time, I was even more confused, I mean I had a certain initial kind of intuitive talent in terms of sizing up the situation and being influenced. But I had to work my way out of that. It took me three years. And then I was exposed to Europe through my show at the George Lester Gallery in Rome which had a tremendous impact on me. 
CUMMINGS: How did that happen?
SMITHSON: As I said, he offered me a show on the basis of that painting Quicksand that was shown at the Alan Gallery. At that time I really wasn't interested in doing abstractions. I was actually interested in religion, you know, and archetypal things, I guess interested in Europe and understanding the relationship of…
CUMMINGS: Did you go to Europe then?
SMITHSON: Yes, I went to Europe in 1961. I was in Rome for about three months. And I visited Siena. I was very interested in the Byzantine. As a result I remember wandering around through these old baroque churches and going through these labyrinthine vaults. At the same time I was reading people liking William Burroughs. It all seemed to coincide in a curious kind of way.
CUMMINGS: What other things were you reading besides Burroughs? 
SMITHSON: T.S.Eliot then had a big influence on me, of course, after going to Rome. So I had to wrestle with that particular problem of tradition and Anglo- Catholicism, the whole number. And then I was getting to know Nancy- we met in New York in 1959…
CUMMINGS: What was it like being a young American in Rome and having a show?
SMITHSON: It was very exciting to me. I was very interested in Rome itself. I just felt I wanted to be a part of that situation, or wanted to understand it. 
CUMMINGS: In what way? What were the qualities?
SMITHSON: I wanted to understand the roots of- I guess you could call it Western civilization really, and how religion had influenced art. 
CUMMINGS: What got you interested or involved in religion at that point? I find that interesting in the context of the people you knew, because it wasn't generally something they were all that interested in.
SMITHSON: Well, I was reading people- like I read Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, T.S,Eliot , and Ezra Pound. There was a sense of European history that was very prevalent. Also I was very influenced by Wyndham Lewis.
CUMMINGS: Oh, really? But Pound is not particularly involved with…
SMITHSON: Well, he was interested in a kind of notion of what Western art grew out of and what happened to it. I mean it was a way of discovering the history of Western art in terms of the Renaissance and what preceded it, especially the Byzantine.
CUMMINGS: Well, you mean the ritual and the ideas and all those things?
SMITHSON: Yes, and I think a kind of Jungian involvement - like Jackson Pollock's interest in archetypal structures. I was just kind of interested in the facade of Catholicism.
CUMMINGS: But were you interested in Jung or Freud particularly?
SMITHSON: Yes, I was at that time.
CUMMINGS: You read their writings and things?
SMITHSON: Yes.
CUMMINGS: Did you ever go into analysis?
SMITHSON: No.
CUMMINGS: How did you find that those activities worked for you? Did they answer questions for you? Or did they just pose new ones?
SMITHSON: I think I got to understand, let's say, the mainspring of what European art was rooted in prior to the growth of Modernism. And it was very important for me to understand that. And once I understood that I could understand Modernism and I could make my own moves. I would say that I began to function as a conscious artist around 1964-65 I think I started doing works then that were mature. I would say that prior to the 1964-65 period I was in a kind of groping, investigating period.
CUMMINGS: I'm curious about the show at the George Lester Gallery.
SMITHSON: The three paintings which were probably the best, were sort of semi-abstractions based on a rough grid- one was called. The Inferno, another was called Purgatory, another was called Paradise.
CUMMINGS: Dante-esque.
SMITHSON: It was Dante-esque, but- it was a rough irregular grid type painting with sort of fragments of faces and things embedded in this grid. Other things were kind of iconic, tending toward a kind of Byzantine relationship. I was also very much interested in the theories of T.E. Hulme; as I said, that whole circle, that whole prewar circle of Modernism. 
CUMMINGS: What artists were you interested in at that point?
SMITHSON: I really wasn't- I was really interested in the past at that point.
CUMMINGS: It was an interest in modern literature and old art?
SMITHSON: Initially- well, when I was nineteen- the impact was Newman, Pollock,Dubuffet, Rauschenberg, de Kooning; even Alan Davie who I had seen I think at the Viviano Gallery; the whole New York School of painting. I felt very much at home with that when I was in my late teens, but when I rejected it in favor of a more traditional approach. And this lasted from maybe 11960 to1963. 
CUMMINGS: Why do you think you rejected those things?
SMITHSON: I just felt that -they really didn't understand, first of all, anthropomorphism, which had constantly been lurking in Pollock and de Kooning. I always felt that a problem. I always thought it was somehow seething underneath all those masses of paint. And even Newman in his later work still referred to a certain kind of Judeo-Christian value. I wasn't that much interested in a sort of Bauhaus formalist view. I was interested in this kind of archetypal gut situation that was based on primordial needs and the unconscious depths. And the real breakthrough came once I was able to overcome this lurking pagan religious anthropomorphism. I was able to get into crystalline structures in terms of structures of matter and that sort of thing. 
CUMMINGS: What precipitated that transition, do you think?
SMITHSON: Well, I just felt that Europe had exhausted its culture. I suppose my first inklings of a more Marxists view began to arise, rather than my trying to reestablish traditional art work in terms of the Eliot-Pound-Wyndham Lewis situation. I just felt there was a certain naivete in the American painters-good as they were.
CUMMINGS: Did you get interested in Marxism?
SMITHSON: No. It was just sort of flicker. I mean began to become more concerned with the structure of matter itself, in crystalline structures. The crystalline structures gradually grew into mapping structures.
CUMMINGS: In a visual way, or in a conceptual way?
SMITHSON: Visual, because I gave up painting around 1963 and began to work plastics in kind of crystalline way. And I began to develop structures based on a particular concern with the elements of material itself. But this was essentially abstract and devoid of any kind of mythological content.
CUMMINGS: There was no figurative overtone to it.
SMITHSON: No, I had completely gotten rid of that problem. I felt that Jackson Pollock never really understood that, and although I admire him still, I still think that that was something that was always eating him up inside.
CUMMINGS: But it's interesting because there is a development away from traditional kinds of imagery and yet an involvement with natural materials…
SMITHSON: Well, I would say that begins to surface in 1965-66. That's when I really began to get into that, and when I consider my emergence as a conscious artist. Prior to that my struggle was to get into another realm. In 1964, 1965, 1966 I met people who were more compatible with my view. I met Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd. At that time we showed at the Daniels Gallery; I believe it was in 1965. I was doing crystalline type works and my early interest in geology and earth sciences began to assert itself over the whole cultural overlay of Europe. I had gotten that our of my system.
CUMMINGS: Out of chaos comes…
SMITHSON: Yes. Well, out of the defunct, I think, class culture of Europe I developed something that was intrinsically my own and rooted to my own experience in America.
CUMMINGS: Have you been back to Europe since that?
SMITHSON: Yes, I have been back to Europe. I did Broken Circle - Spiral Hill in Holland in 1971. I consider it a major piece.