THERE'S THERE THERE: Gregory Smith's Sculpture

John R. Stomberg, Ph.D
Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director
Hood Museum of Art
Dartmouth College
Hanover, N.H.

December 2012

Apologies to Gertrude Stein, but Gregory Smith's sculptures bring to mind the opposite of her famous observation that "there's no there there." Stein, who visited her native California in her middle years, referred specifically to the discovery that her childhood home had vanished. Since then the quote has come to be used in a somewhat derogatory manner to suggest vapidity. To me, Smith's childhood, young adulthood, and his middle years are all present (if obliquely) in the sculptures and the work is strong, rich, forceful, and challenging. For these reasons, I would like to insist that indeed, there's there aplenty in his work.

Smith uses pieces of metal—neither a whole product as it would come from the foundry nor found objects with their former identity intact. He avoids materials with the potential for specific meaning derived from past use. It is usually generic pipe, rod, or sheet metal. We see copper pipe, but not a drain pipe; steel rods, but not rebar; sheet metal, but not the remains of an automobile door. From these he fabricates abstract tableaux. His materials are referentially open-ended but not entirely without a past.

Smith is a welder. His process involves heat and stamina. There is something very primordial about welding—it brings to mind the great elemental physical forces of earth that allow us to change water to steam and stone ore to liquid. His work requires skill, strength, and experience all of which he down plays in the works which appear to be a dance of forms in space. Despite the great energies that are brought to bear on these works, they appear gentle, natural, even light.

The autobiographical component is, of course, not direct but rather inferred. How, in non-objective sculpture would I suggest that Smith is doing this? First, while his titles are not abundantly meaningful they are also not meaningless. They offer little in the way of particular information, but they do evoke a certain poetic quality that suggests a way into the work. The Liar, Padrone, Shuteye, A Day At the Beach, Showing My Age. None of these titles tell a specific story, but they do point toward story-telling as an appropriate interpretative approach.

Smith also uses allusion throughout his work. Like a master story teller, nothing is ever what it seems. The tale is an accumulation of observations. Each individual sculptural element in his work—each section of pipe or wire—operates as a vignette in a longer tale. The bends, dents, and twists on these elements become the incidents that enrich the tale, but in his sculptures we have the responsibility of completing the story. The elements are bold and strong, crippled and fractured, perfect, deformed, straight, crooked. We respond to these forms with emotions that veer in different directions, echoing the experience of listening to a good poem. Looking at Smith's work, we take an emotional journey that he maps for us without identifying the specific locations through which we pass.

While all art is time-based on some level—that is, it is impossible to actually comprehend anything instantaneously—some artists manage to make the time it takes to engage with their art part of the work. Smith does this. There's a lyrical quality in the work that takes its time, meandering around before getting to the point. We apprehend each element in succession: not necessarily in the same order each time nor even in the order in which the work was assembled. We move our way through the gathered parts and construct a whole as we go. We mimic the artist's process. We imagine the story of the work's creation and in so doing participate in the creation of the work's story. Smith's story and ours.