Jan Avgikos on Barbara T. Smith
In 1971, when she was a graduate scholar on the College of California, Irvine, Barbara T. Smith created Holy Squash Ceremony, a durational efficiency for the campus artwork gallery that prolonged to an adjoining fountain pool. The inspiration for the piece was a cocktail party she had just lately hosted, conceived as a strategy to deliver collectively her new artwork buddies and older acquaintances she had recognized throughout her earlier life as a Nineteen Fifties housewife. On the menu for her particular night was a dish she constituted of the flesh of a giant Hubbard squash, which she served in its hollowed-out husk. She felt that the entire meal was great and that the event was particularly stunning as a result of it fostered a way of neighborhood. And the extra she thought of it, the extra she started to see the squash as one thing “sacred.” Again within the studio, with the cucurbit carcass in tow, she had the thought to commemorate the occasion and the sense of transformation she had skilled.
Smith used the unique gourd husk as a mildew to make the cast-resin sculpture Holy Squash, 1971, a 150-pound ovoid (some would possibly name it “womb-like”), barely purple and translucent, that she left tough and unpolished. She deemed it a reverential topic worthy of worship and deliberate a consecration efficiency for it. After a really informal “baptism” in a fountain pool—snippets of which have been filmed—the work was put in within the gallery. Over the course of eight days, Smith and a bunch of members celebrated a “mass” by consuming plenty of cooked squash, petting their newly sanctified relic, dancing rhythmically round it, and who is aware of what else. Sporadic video documentation provides us random entry to the unstructured, improvised, and ludic qualities of this observance. A lot later, the artist acknowledged that, though it was all a bit humorous, the ceremonial facet of the efficiency was genuine and that, in actual fact, it turned a sort of faith for her.
Holy Squash Ceremony occurred early in Smith’s profession, however a dedication to religious development by means of artwork was already paramount. Metaphysical transformation—through meals, nurturing, and the therapeutic facet of formality—continued to be a core precept of her observe at the same time as her pursuits, grounded in private expertise, expanded to incorporate tantric vitality, feminine need, and sexuality. Whether or not conjuring the forces of nature or orchestrating an interplay between the physique and the universe, she carried out her durational performances with solemnity and ritual. For her, as she as soon as put it, “the ceremonial second” wasn’t about theater; it was about “going to the supply of issues the place you don’t have any concept what’s going to occur.”
In “Holy Squash,” Smith’s third exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery, the aforementioned video accompanied an set up that includes the eponymous resin vegetable, its embellished reliquary, and different artifacts, together with dried flowers, an altar, and a scepter. As well as, luggage of manufacturing supplies containing wadded-up packing and dusty plastic drop cloths, in addition to a stack of broken sheets of Styrofoam, are provided, maybe as proof of the processes that introduced the relic into being. None of it’s particularly visually charming, however that’s clearly inappropriate. These classic objects, with all their rawness and imperfections, have the ability to stimulate our curiosity about their specific pasts and their roles within the artist’s quest for enlightenment. Just like the contents of a time capsule, they ship us hurtling again into the ur-history of an artwork tradition that flowered within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s in Southern California, when experimental poststudio practices, New Age theology, and the will to be one with nature ushered in a bounty of Aquarian awakenings. A brand new period of creativity and freedom was unfolding, and Smith was one among its pioneers.
It should have been onerous to conjure up an genuine religious expertise in a pristine white-walled gallery. Fifty years later, that course of is an much more tough proposition. Smith’s work is presently being collected, archived, and historicized, because it deserves to be. But mainstream artwork dialogue was by no means her factor. She was rather more involved along with her personal inside development and the seek for a way of wholeness—an elevated stage of consciousness. That’s the feminism that seemingly few need or know what to do with. However at ninety-one years previous, Smith continues to be tenaciously considering and making, and her artwork—unusual, humorous, good, and soulful—is a part of a unprecedented and tough legacy that refuses to fade away.
— Jan Avgikos
