The complex career of the American artist Tony Smith (1912-1980) spans over forty years across wide-ranging media, forms and disciplines that include sculpture, architecture, painting, drawing, teaching and writing.  This volume, one of two (the other dedicated to Smith’s architecture), consists of five entries by diverse contributors who explore varying modernist perspectives of the artist and his era.  Together, the texts accompany publication of the Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné:  Sculpture, which will also be accompanied by a second volume on architecture, that will document the entirety of Smith’s artistic output.  Unlike the catalogue raisonné, these interpretive essays and reproductions of original artworks present innovative multi-dimensional approaches to his work.  Written and created by art historians, curators and fellow artists, their innovative analyses and projects contemplate areas of Smith’s oeuvre not previously examined. In doing so, the collection may be read as a type of formal accompaniment to Smith’s conceptual and visual structures in its challenge to ingrained ideologies surrounding non-objective modernist abstraction. Mario Gooden’s “In-Between Reason:  The Liminalities of Tony Smith’s Architecture and Sculpture” highlights aspects of Smith’s architectural and sculptural practice that center on “liminality” as the nearness, closeness, and “in-betweeness” or uncertainty of measured relationships, and “topology” as the mathematics of surfaces informed by Euclidean geometry and line/plane relationships.  Rooted in mathematical epistemology, Gooden scrutinizes the fixed hexagonal and polyhedral patterns of Smith’s architectural designs in terms of indeterminate, liminal formal relationships evoked in Smith’s 1943 manifesto “The Pattern of Organic Life in America.” Here Smith identified organic life with the law of growth, a form of spiral and dynamic equilibrium introduced in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917).  As a philosophical position, Gooden further relates the pentagonal geometry of Smith’s sketches for the Fred Olson Sr. House(1951, unconstructed) to the symmetry of growth in humans and plants described in Jay Hambridge’s Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (known to Smith), a structural system based on cell aggregates similar to flower petals around a stem.  At the same time other areas of the Olson House plan anticipate perceptions of Smith’s sculptural practice seen in such works as Moondog (1964), Smoke (1967) and Smug (1973) that are characterized by complex, ambiguous interrelationships, measurements, angles and proportions such as to defy binaries and boundaries.  For Smith, such effects occupy a liminal space of consciousness, unconsciousness and speculation described as “presence” – an idea Smith introduced in a 1966 interview—such as to be apprehended intuitively against reason. 

Saim Demircan’s “Between the Backyard and the Magazine:  Tony Smith in Vogue,” examines the impact of mass-media on Smith’s early career, wherein publications and exhibition documentation increasingly came to be considered metrics of artistic merit.  Reflecting art’s expansion beyond the walls of galleries and museums, this essay looks at art’s extensions into the public domain through modes of reproduction and publication, especially via lifestyle magazines such as Vogue that highlight aspects of modernism aligned with trending fashion, advertising, and promotion.  Marked by a 1964 exhibition Black, White and Grey curated by Sam Wagstaff (1921-1987) considered the first major show of artists associated with Minimalism, works on display announced a rejection of Abstract Expressionism championed in painting by such artists as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko.  Such pairings of art and fashion exposed art world tensions triggered by Clement Greenberg’s formalist doctrine of Modernism, announced in Art and Culture (1961) which espoused a theory of essentialist reduction and literal non-illusionistic truth to materials, while at the same time representing a paradoxical reduction of exclusionary high art status to mass media consumerism.  Art/fashion juxtapositions defiantly paired stylishly garbed figures with seeming props of abstract sculpture in ways that inverted scale, context and cultural relationships while positioning the New York School vis-à-vis French haute couture.  Other inversions featured “models” attired in “formal” wear—terms rife with artworld subtext—in couplings of high art and grand elegance whose   connotations of parody posit another iteration of art world wordplay.  Such inferences point to animate and inanimate subjects whose simplified contours conceal superficial, conflicting purposes.  

Judith Barry’s “New Piece:  Elective Geometries” transforms Smith’s geometric masses into a type of 3-D flipbook to be viewed both forward and backward in ways that similarly encode institutional critique as an art object existing entirely within a larger system of power and relations.  Adopting an anti-monumental, dematerialized, anti-iconic position, the title “New Piece” alerts viewers to a work which kinetically defies the relative stasis of New York School abstraction.  This opposition is further marked by the New Piece’s participatory, progressive, collaborative and distinctly feminine identification. 

Jenni Sorkin’s “’Leap Romantically’:  Tony Smith at Home,” looks at Smith’s influence on the artistic career of his daughter Kiki Smith through materials and processes suggestive of the fragility and malleability of the human body.  These qualities in his daughter’s practice encode a new feminine direction, at once formless and ephemeral compared to her father’s geometric formalism while similarly anthropomorphic in its conceptual affinities.  Of particular interest is the fact that wasp nest aspects of Kiki Smith’s oeuvre relate to characteristics identified with Tony Smith’s Bat Cave (1969, never fabricated) which was initially conceived as part of LACMA’s Art and Technology Program (1967-71).  The program introduced an innovative collaboration between artists and technologically driven companies engaged in such industries as electronics, aerospace, and early computer technology. 

Yann Chateigné Tytelman’s “Tony Smith’s Negative Infinities: From Black Holes to Blind Spots,” positions Smith’s work in relation to contemporaries Joachim Koester (b. 1962, Denmark), Mai-Thu Perret (b, 1976, Switzerland), and Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, United States) whose contemporary production references Smith’s importance beyond the ideological confines of the 1960s. Koester, a Copenhagen-based artist explores esoteric aspects of Smith’s sculpture, especially Die (1962) inspired in part by Smith’s oft recounted account of a nighttime journey on the New Jersey turnpike whose dark, enigmatic resonance permeates Koester’s silver print The Magic Mirror of John Dee (2006) as “…a way of seeing that does not rely on the eyes.”  Mai-Thu Perret’s series of sculptures shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008-9 reinterprets Smith’s tetrahedral sections as random sculptural forms covered by mirrors that discretely de-materialize the objects within its walled interior as a reflective environment.   Displayed in rooms covered in wallpaper with decorative motifs that quote Smith’s crystalline formations, they offer a subtle, fragmented, socially complicated commentary on Smithian formalism.  The American artist Cauleen Smith’s engagement with Afrofuturism and other forms of feminist and Black activist production includes a Mexico City installation My Caldera (2022-23) in which a video shows various stages of volcanic life, intensity and explosions into the sky.  In ways comparable to perceptions of Tony Smith’s Moondog (1964) in Washington, D.C., it is intended to be experienced  from within, less seen than sensed as a “presence,” not unlike, Tytelman observes, Tony Smith’s recollection of his father’s experience of music in total darkness, for he was blind. 

The American conceptual artist Tom Burr’s (b. 1967, United States) “Contained Correspondence,” presents an original photo-collage that reflects Burr’s ongoing, provocative, often inscrutable engagement with Tony Smith’s corpus, including such ideas as “the inextricable bonds between bodies and architectural space” (Voorhies) identified with Barr’s Hinged Figures (2019, MATRIX 182, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut).  Its fleeting photographic imagery conveys sensations of planarity, partiality, suspension, surface and depth. Material constructs include pipe fittings, piers, scaffolds and pavements, painted brick walls and stained wood planking, radiators and air conditioning units.  Amid views of museum installations are photographic layouts and windowpanes, pillared columns and temple fronts. But there are also textures, colors, the fabrics of suit jackets, striped collars and knotted neckties, as well as beards, chests, shoulders and lapels.  These elements form alternating geometric patterns with handwritten texts of varying font size, personal and impersonal, inserted amid the radically cropped photographic imagery.  This is a tour de force suggestive of the depth and breadth and extension of Tony Smith’s influence. 

As a highly original accompaniment to the release of Tony Smith’s catalog raisonné, this work goes far in substantiating Smith’s conceptual influence upon modern and contemporary art, one that upends the charge of objecthood, and theatricality levelled by Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood in 1967.  In ways that replicate spatial and experiential engagement with Smith’s freestanding artworks, this collection circumvents many of the established theoretical foundations of modernist historiography in favor of new visions that open out Smith’s significance to ideas that continue to evolve and have yet to be contemplated.  Seen together, the essays and comparative artworks offer perspectives at times oblique, ironic, and metaphoric on Smith’s canonical work that contest ingrained, subsequently refuted ideologies of mid-twentieth century American abstraction.  As such they present insightful perspectives on diverse, parallel modernisms and approaches to art of the modern era in the expanded field.