BRAINSTORMS: A Wonderful Confusion
Joe Smith likes an element of instability in his art.
Whether he’s stacking bottles high up on glass plates and around the floor—risking shattering them—or fitting wooden blocks into a precarious construction from the top down—defying gravity—the associate professor of art says the attention that kind of daring work commands is essential.
“Standing next to glass makes people nervous—it makes me nervous,” says Smith, whose work with varied materials has been exhibited across the country. “That [emotion] affects me, so I think it’s important. Attentiveness is important to achieve.”
Often referred to as a sculptor, Smith, who came to MHC in 1996, says that collage, especially the work of German Modernist Kurt Schwitters, has been formative in his development as an artist. Schwitters made collages and compositions from everyday objects such as stamps, train tickets, and cigarettes, and embraced the sensibility that anything in life is available as an art medium. That excited Smith, who worked for years as a carpenter and in construction.
“[Collage] is not just about painting or 3D or sculpture or film,” said Smith. “It opened everything up. We now have a tremendous confusion … working [and] it’s a wonderful confusion.”
Students might disagree. Smith says some find such an open-ended creative process both freeing and burdensome, when it comes to making decisions. Still, his primary goal is to have students shed their preconceived notions of what, exactly, art is, so he gives them “exploratory assignments, [that involve] different ways of making a drawing or a sculpture, [to shake] their ideas about what it takes to make art.”
When Smith sets about creating a new work of his own, he considers how broadly varied materials might fit together to create space and evoke emotions and atmosphere. He’ll use just about anything in that process: furniture he finds in dumpsters, tree limbs pruned and donated by campus arborists, metal culled from steelyards, rear-view mirrors collected from vehicles, recycled storm windows, raw and processed wood.
“It’s about using things that we in our culture use, as they’re meant to be used—or not,” he explains. He is less interested in craft and the facile manipulation of material than in its imaginative use to create form, reflect light, and invite people “to slow down and look at something closely.”
But they shouldn’t look too soon. Smith’s latest work-in-progress is hidden in a tarp pinched together with clothespins, the artist fearful that material and concept in the preliminary stages of development may be too fragile to withstand an outsider’s scrutiny. After that, who can say? —M.H.B.
Photo by Paul Schnaittacher
