Places describes a pivotal event in the life of avant-garde artist and architect Tony Smith in The Highway Not Taken: Tony Smith and the SuburbanSublime:
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One dark night in 1951, Smith found himself in a car with three students from the Cooper Union riding down the not-yet-opened New Jersey Turnpike. They made the illicit trip from the Meadowlands (Exit 16) to New Brunswick (Exit 9), with no street lamps, lane markers or guard rails, relying only on their headlights and the industrial glow of North Jersey.
In a now-famous Artforum interview conducted 15 years later, Smith described the drive as a revelation. To his mind, it seemed to challenge the conventional categories of artistic practice and raised questions about the division between art and everyday events. “The road and much of the landscape was artificial,” he said, “and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art.” That reality could not be described, Smith said; it was something one had to “experience.”
This is bullshit!
Roger, spending your time wisely, I see.
To claim artistry had any part in the conception and building of the NJ turnpike is a stretch beyond comprehension.
Conceived in the 1950’s it was essentially part of a military defense system first start in 1940 by the Arroyo Seco freeway in California.
How this can be related to house building artists is papering over the irrational war making panic (still prevalent today) of the cold war (that I lived thru and remember only too well).
Bullshit . . . confirmed!
Thanqu Adam:
What I gather from the piece is that yes, to Smith it wasn’t “art” in the traditional sense but a new form of heretofore unknown experience, that of the high speed open road in a private automobile, not a train.That liberating experience felt by millions of people was certainly influential in shaping cities and regions worldwide for a number of decades. An era which, one hopes, is slowly coming to an end. (Massey Bridge excepted!)
What an interstate highway is depends on how you tell the story! Here’s one for the road.
The Cyborg Syndrome
We came down the coast of North America in our canoes. We lived in the space between the sky, the sea, and the land. In those days hundreds of years ago food was plentiful and available for the harvesting. Mother earth was our home and we were happy, we sang songs and told our stories to the children.
One day aliens entered our world with their machines. It was as if they came from another planet. They couldn’t live without their machines. So we began to think of them as the cyborg people. They were part human and part machine. Everywhere that the cyborg people went they brought devastation to our world.
It could be we thought as time went on that the machines were controlling the people. In time the machines became too numerous to count, they were everywhere and they became the economy of the land, they demanded ever more resources and energy, and finally they began to change the climate.
Some of the cyborgs became alarmed and called for measures to protect the environment. Some thought that they could improve the designs, that they could invent new sources of energy for the machines. They all thought they could have their cake and eat it too. No one wanted to live like the canoe people.
At about this time we began hearing stories from the north and the south about the melting ice caps. Scientists began talking about big changes on the way, with predictions that the sea level could rise by 220 feet just as it had done 65 million years ago. It seemed to us that the machines were terra forming the planet. This would not be good for the cyborg people since most of them lived in coastal cities, but machines do not have feelings for anything, they are inorganic systems, they don’t care about consequences.
We have been struggling to make sense of all these things. Maybe the cyborgs will become all machine and not human at all, maybe this is just an evolutionary pathway to the stars. We know that the cyborgs have walked on the moon, we know that they are they are trying to go to Mars. We are wondering if Mars is where they belong. We have heard that many of them have volunteered to go there.
As for ourselves, there will always be space between the sky, the land, and the sea, and no matter how high the sea rises we will have our canoes.