The first biography of Robert Smithson, Inside the Spiraldeepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Author Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story with great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language. This biographical analysis offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. Here, Suzaan Boettger is joined in conversation with Greg Lindquist.
Suzaan Boettger is a scholar, arts journalist, and critic based in New York City. She is author of Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson and Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties.
Greg Lindquist is an artist, writer, and professor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
The first biography of Robert Smithson, Inside the Spiraldeepens understanding of his art by addressing the potent forces in his life that were shrouded by his success, including his suppressed early history as a painter; his affiliation with Christianity, astrology, and alchemy; and his sexual fluidity. Author Suzaan Boettger uncovers Smithson’s story with great sensitivity to the experiences of loss and existential strife that defined his distinct artistic language. This biographical analysis offers unprecedented insight into the hidden impulses of one of modern art’s most enigmatic figures. Here, Suzaan Boettger is joined in conversation with Greg Lindquist.
Suzaan Boettger is a scholar, arts journalist, and critic based in New York City. She is author of Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson and Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties.
Greg Lindquist is an artist, writer, and professor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Suzaan Boettger:
Historically, you have to look what else is happening in their life. What else happened in Smithson?
Greg Lindquist:
Do we owe the world complete transparency professor. My work deals with the issues of ecology through landscape painting and installation, also issues of environmental justice. But my interest in earthworks has been pretty long term, the last probably twenty years or so. And so I encountered Suzanne's seminal work on earthworks quite a while before we were colleagues at Bergen Community College for about a decade. Also, I'm really interested in Smithson's reclamation projects of mines that were unrealized and the relationship that they had with my father's work as a marine biologist creating artificial reefs out of boxcars to create habitats for fish to repopulate during the depopulation of fish in the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties.
Greg Lindquist:
So I'm thrilled to be here with you, Suzanne, and talk about this book and also be one of the first people to talk about the book. And I'm just wanna say congratulations on this book and all of your hard work to get it out there.
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, let me just say thank you, Greg, for interrogating me for being with me on this conversation. I know we met, I was just thinking we met decades ago at the Rubin Museum at a meeting of the American section of the International Association of Art Critics where, you know, you tapped my shoulder behind me and said, hey, you're the author of Earthworks, aren't you? And I was, you know, woah, So glad to be recognized. Let's be friends.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. And then you generously came out to Governors Island and saw the painting installation I did that Omar Lopez Jahud curated into No One is an Island that was with Melissa Levin at LMCC space out there. And we had a great conversation about the Hudson River School and Thanatopsis and Earthworks.
Suzaan Boettger:
Yeah. So okay. So I am a long standing, I have to say, arts critic. First in San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Berkeley and, wrote for all sorts of publications, was the Artforum correspondent for a few years.
Suzaan Boettger:
Then I moved to New York for my doctorate, continued to write for Artforum Art Art in America, various other places, became a professor at Bergen Community College, and then got interested in extending my work on Smithson into this book, which in the course of it became, very biographical. And in the course of it, I discovered things I didn't even had no idea I would discover. I mean, it's news to me too that I'm fascinated myself. I mean, it's not as if I set out to write X, Y, and Z. I discovered X, Y, and Z in the act of, researching and writing it.
Suzaan Boettger:
And then I was able to retire and had to be able to finish this book. So, glad to see it will soon be in my and everyone's hands.
Greg Lindquist:
I also forgot that probably our previous collaboration was when you contributed to the Social Ecology's editorial at the Brooklyn Rail in 2015, where I did an editorial about the relationship between art and ecology, especially the sociological dimension of ecology. And you wrote a great piece. I think you had just come from Venice.
Suzaan Boettger:
Oh, oh, that's right. I mean, one of my interests for years has been the relation environmental degradation and and now climate change. So that's a whole another area I've worked on for a great, many years, but in the last few have diverted from that because I wanted to, get this material out and look in this material about Smithson.
Greg Lindquist:
And that's definitely something I'd like to bring up, this question about Smithson's relationship to environmentalism because you've spent so much time with his writing and with his work, do you find definitive evidence to support that if he would have kept working, that he would have somehow aligned himself with the mainstream environmental movements that were kind of picking up steam as he tragically died at 35.
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, yes and no. You know, he ridiculed the environmentalists.
Greg Lindquist:
Exactly.
Suzaan Boettger:
Because he was against idealism. He He was against romanticism of nature. What he saw was not springtime. What he saw in nature was barren winter. What he saw was, not the dynamism of volcanoes exploding, but the destruction of volcanoes exploding.
Greg Lindquist:
Can I just interject for one moment? Because you're absolutely right. And in, like, tour of the monuments of Pasaic, New Jersey, we just read it a few days ago in my Pratt art since the sixties class, and a student pointed out the same thing that careful readers point out is for all of his rejection of idealization of the landscape through some mode like romanticism, you know, that he would find probably retardere. He romanticized the industrial scape. Would you agree with that?
Suzaan Boettger:
No. I don't I don't I don't think he romanticized it. I think he felt an affiliation with it.
Greg Lindquist:
Mhmm.
Suzaan Boettger:
I mean, he said the fundamental property of steel is rust. That isn't romanticizing it. And even in his trip through his unacknowledged birthplace, Passaic, he was derogatory about Passaic as a kind of emotionally empty place. And of course, he ended up with the sandbox as a grave. I mean, he was definitely drawn to it.
Suzaan Boettger:
I mean, he wrote in his Spiral Jetty essay how he took pleasure in the rusting old abandoned, oil refinery and extraction mechanics that were abandoned there. One could think, as your student did, that because he wrote about it, he was drawn to it. Well, maybe we could say he was drawn to it, but he was inversely drawn to it.
Greg Lindquist:
Well, what about the camera cuts in Spiral Jetty where it cuts back and forth between the earth moving machinery and the dinosaurs? Would you say that's a romanticization of the industrial through the prehistoric or the geological?
Suzaan Boettger:
No. Because and listeners of this can find my article on Smithson's relation to dinosaurs on the Burlington Contemporary website. He's likening the Earth movement equipment to dinosaurs because dinosaurs are a dead but extinct species, beings, which are still alive in imagination, which is like a very important person to his early life. Dead, but still alive in memory or alive in thoughts. And that likening links the Spiral Jetty to that person, I mean, and to that experience.
Suzaan Boettger:
One could see externally, and maybe he even wanted it to be seen that way, that he was heroizing the earthmoving as grunting dinosaurs. But biographically, those dinosaurs, which he pictured pretty much throughout his artistic life, had a personal symbolism that was not related to industry, except in its degradation. Well, let's start
Greg Lindquist:
with, your relationship with Smithson. I mean, you talk about in the gratitudes chapter about that it seems like pivotal moment when you received the collected writings of Smithson, the original version that was designed by Solowitt and edited by Nancy Holt, in your mailbox in 1979, which is a kind of funny date because that's the year I was born. And and then you talked about giving a lecture. But when did you first discover his work? And what was your reaction, if you can recall it?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, first of all, absolute awe at the radiant image by Gianfranco Giorgione of the spiral j that were all over. I was a TA for Peter Sells, the originally German emigre from Munich who was the expert on German Expressionism. Okay. And he was giving a course on twentieth century sculpture. So I was one of the TAs in this big stadium seating in which, we had, you know, discussion sections.
Suzaan Boettger:
And then he, being who he he was and who we are, he told his cadre of TAs that we each should give a lecture. And okay, what should I give a lecture on? Well, I just flipped open books and there it was. So first of all, there was the visual attraction. But then when I began to read Smithson, which was then before that collected writings arrived, so, you know, so I had to I go went to the, art forum where he'd done most of it and other art magazines.
Suzaan Boettger:
I'll be when I began to read him, I think I grooved with the focus on mortality. He found myriad metaphors for mournfulness, mortality, metaphysical, existence. I had recently experienced a significant, death of someone close to me. And this I I related. I would both related and I was curious.
Suzaan Boettger:
Where did this come from? As I say in my prologue to this this book, alright, it was fashionable to call museums tombs, to think that, society was radically changing, and the youth culture of the baby boomers of which I was one, he wasn't. He was too early for that, but, okay, are going to push away all the, signs of the establishment convention and make something reborn. Okay. Culturally reborn.
Suzaan Boettger:
Fine. But of that milieu, Smithson was the, only one to actively, creatively meditate on death so much that it had to be more than a social reason, had to be a personal reason. That's what I was interested in.
Greg Lindquist:
The title, The Passions of Robert Smithson, I think you you addressed this in the introduction, but I thought maybe to pique your readers' interest, maybe you could just talk a little bit about the multilayered, multivalent nature of that term. What what are were you referring to by passions?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, the I think socially, or linguistically most direct parallel that I'm riffing on is the passion of Christ. So that should key the reader. There there should be some little glimmer that we're making an analogy between the passion of Christ and the passions of Robert Smithson. We have a religious artist here, but who an artist who also win was the passions of Christ. The passions of Christ, even though we think, you know, we can have passion, love, we can think passion as a positive characteristic, positive expression.
Suzaan Boettger:
The passions of Christ were in his death. So the other subliminal illusion is to agony. Smithson is experiencing passions of, it's not only related to Christ, but it's also related to pain and agony. But then we change it from passion of Christ or passion of to passions because I didn't want the book just to be I mean, it's not just about his religious devotion or ambiguities. It also alludes to passion in the other sense, you know, sexual passion.
Suzaan Boettger:
And then of course, the passion for making art, to stand in for the characteristics of Robert Smithson, who approached things more expressively than conceptually as he has been designated, and as he wanted to be designated, to hide his emotional passions and keep them private.
Greg Lindquist:
And that's an interesting question in kind of the decoding of what you've done here. You know, it raises the question, do you believe he was self conscious about leaving historical record of these hidden narratives, of these coded narratives?
Suzaan Boettger:
I do. If I can decode them simply by using what I call investigative art history, I think he he shifts continually between disguise and disclose, disclose and disguise. I mean, there are large areas where there's no disclosing because, in my belief, he used cryptology. And with cryptology, you need to know the key. There are many works, like there's a painting Buried Angel.
Suzaan Boettger:
Buried Angel has three interesting aspects. It has an underground angel with full wings out, and it has a deep kind of cutaway of underground. In that deep cutaway are a number of letters that don't make words, and numbers that go like from one to nine or various other numbers, and they're really confounding. I mean, some of them I have added up, as in numerology. They don't really add up to anything significant.
Suzaan Boettger:
That is one of the one of the images that I think will never be completely revealed.
Greg Lindquist:
Will Shorts couldn't crack it?
Suzaan Boettger:
Will Shorts sends me to the American Cryptogram, Association, which did crack something else. But I'm hoping I'm hoping that this study will inspire a graduate student who has a degree in computer science or something also. A graduate student computer scientist becoming, becoming an art historian to take up some of these, mysterious. Okay. But in that buried angel okay.
Suzaan Boettger:
So we have the underground angel with the full wings that this shows that the angel is not dead, but he's underground. He can't be seen. Okay. Then we have all those letters and numbers that are undecipherable. And then we have the volcanic channel that has these kind of bulbous forms at the end that look like a scrotum and a and a phallus that's spewing pink flume.
Greg Lindquist:
Could he be, like, pimples too? I mean, you know, he was, like he had an acneed face. Right? Have you thought about that?
Suzaan Boettger:
The face has nothing to do. The face, we could say, is his own manifestation of the passions of Christ because it's bloody. You know? It's bloody because everyone, who I talked to who knew him, the first thing they said is Smithson was tall, gangly, and he had bloody pocked cheeks because he would scratch his acne. And and, of course, he he objected to Alice Neel painting that, and and he told Alice he he objected to Alice Neel, not only painting with kind of vivid strokes his red cheeks, but she put it against green, which being its opposite, you know, its compliment on the color wheel brings out the red.
Suzaan Boettger:
So when she went to his studio, then later, she said, Bob, you objected to my painting your cheeks bloody red as they really were, but look at all this blood in these paintings. These paintings of Christ only, Christ only in the crucifixion. The crucifixion and the Via Della Rosa. His paintings are not religious. They're not Christ scenes.
Suzaan Boettger:
They're only Christological death scenes. It's much more easy to sanitize them as, oh, they're religious. Well, if they're religious, fine. But the only ex extent ones are of Christ. He has one Saint Michael and one little drawing of a Madonna.
Greg Lindquist:
Where does his relationship with Christian symbolism come from?
Suzaan Boettger:
Was he an altar boy? I couldn't find that out.
Greg Lindquist:
And he was Catholic. Right?
Suzaan Boettger:
He was absolutely Catholic. He was baptized twenty one days after he was born. Let me tell you a story about doing research. The number '38 became significant. His birth year.
Suzaan Boettger:
I was taking a train from Penn Station to Princeton to attend a conference on art and ecology. American artists in the nineteenth century response to environmental problems. Alright. And when I got the train ticket at Penn Station and the last numbers were 38, I thought, this must have something to do with Smithson, but he was absolutely not interested environmentalism, political environmentalism. He ridiculed it.
Suzaan Boettger:
He was not interested in ecology per se. Okay. What's this about Smithson? Okay. When I got to Princeton and I had a hotel because the conference was two days, as soon as I got into my room, I got a phone call.
Suzaan Boettger:
Oh, miss Betker, this is Theodore from remember you called the church where Smithson, attended? I have for you the dates of his baptism, first communion, and confirmation. You think, woah. There it is. That's the '38.
Greg Lindquist:
Wow. So so wait. He would be 84 if he were alive today. Is that right?
Suzaan Boettger:
Yeah. I guess so if we can count. And I just got an email from a wonderful poet still living in Soho who was, Smithson's army buddy in the fall of nineteen fifty six. There are a few peers still alive.
Greg Lindquist:
No. I was just trying to get a sense of how old he would be now because, you know, as as artists who die young, they're immortalized forever young. I mean, it's a kind of strange thing to think about, you know, because I know Rackstraw quite well, and I'm just imagining what Smithson would be like at 84.
Suzaan Boettger:
Some people think he would have been become a filmmaker.
Greg Lindquist:
But what about but what else is land reclamation? Like, the mine reclamation, you know, like, I mean, I think we've talked about this in passing over the years because a lot of artists that I know, of my generation point to that as proof that he would have become environmentally driven. But I think you may have correct me if I'm wrong. You might have pragmatically re corrected me and said, no. I mean, he was trying to make money.
Greg Lindquist:
You know? Like, this was an attempt to get the companies to pay him to make an earthwork. Right?
Suzaan Boettger:
That's what I say. Yes. You have to look at people historically. You have to look what else is happening in their life. What else happened in Smithson?
Suzaan Boettger:
His patron, his what I think him is his another one of his mothers, the good mother who funded him, exhibited him, traveled with him. I know she didn't sleep with him. She that was one of the artists she didn't sleep with. Virginia Dwan had just closed her gallery. And what was he making?
Suzaan Boettger:
He wasn't really making much gallery work that was sellable. I mean, there's a limited attraction to triangular bins with rocks in them. So he hoped the mining companies, in Colorado and the West would fund his redo of depleted mines. The issue here, Greg, which I have discussed or disagreed with in terms of my art historical colleagues, is the identity or the description of what reclamation entails.
Greg Lindquist:
Exactly. And I think that that term is a moving goal post in 2023. Wouldn't you agree?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, it's not moving now because I think people in the last even twenty years think that reclamation is ecological. It's getting into the earth and reclaiming whatever healthful soil they can do. I mean, it's it's material ecological reclamation. But that is not what it was for him. For him, it was aesthetic reclamation.
Suzaan Boettger:
His proposals, oh, he'd have a little ground cover. But his proposals was to make sculpture, arched arcing sculpture out of earth on top of the bowls of, ravaged mine sites. And people would, you know, come do it the way they do with the Spiral Jetty to see this phenomenal sight. But what he did not include in his plans was, what are they gonna do when they get there beyond looking at it? It's not social reclamation either.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. I mean so I think if I remember correctly, didn't he pitch it to the companies as a beautification? Like, that would be their interest in him doing this?
Suzaan Boettger:
Yes. Beautification and also, I mean, some acclaim to the companies for reviving visually their disused mining sites.
Greg Lindquist:
Yes. Yeah. And and that's the interesting thing about reclamation because I think in 2023, it implies this, like, dimension of corporate responsibility, which, I mean, we can pivot and talk about greenwashing and all of that stuff. But to just pivot a little bit here, there's a lot of material in this book that precedes that. And I wanna talk about that in terms of the way in which it was cut out, and then just why it's important to the understanding of what follows.
Greg Lindquist:
Maybe we could agree, and I mean, if not I'm not mistaken the way I wrote this, this is your perspective, that you could arguably say his legacy begins with Earthworks in 1966 at the age 28. And this is still pretty young considering, you know, the average life expectancy, and this is less than ten years of of a working life. When he dies at 35, this is an extremely short period of time. Maybe, you know, we could look at, like, other modernists like Seurat, I mean, that had, like, maybe around the same time. But I think he even had more working time.
Greg Lindquist:
But why do you feel it's so unnecessary to, as you say, unearth his pre Earthworks? Like, how do these pieces inform his mature works?
Suzaan Boettger:
Both Thomas Crow in his essay for the 02/2004 MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art catalog and myself say that, and others have recognized this, that the early and the late work are linked. And in between was, let me describe this in terms of three phases. The first phase I discovered he actually had an exhibition in the summer of fifty six, after he graduated from high school and he was away in the South at his army reserves. So he had he had nine exhibitions of painting between '56 and '62. Of those, four of them were solo shows.
Suzaan Boettger:
Now the official chronology that Nancy Holt provided, she was probably uninformed. Okay. So instead of nine and four, there's four and two.
Greg Lindquist:
How could she be uninformed? Weren't they, like, high school sweethearts?
Suzaan Boettger:
No. No. No. They were not high school sweethearts.
Greg Lindquist:
Okay. But they knew each other in high school. Right?
Suzaan Boettger:
They were sweethearts in middle school.
Greg Lindquist:
In middle school. Okay. But they didn't know each other in high school and, like, right after?
Suzaan Boettger:
I think they were estranged in high school. They they had little to do with each other. I think that is why well, I don't know what no. No. This is another thing.
Suzaan Boettger:
I mean, she did not want to tell me where she went to high school.
Greg Lindquist:
Right. She kind of distanced that relationship. Right? I think you had told me this before.
Suzaan Boettger:
Yeah. Yes. It may have been because Smithson was exploring a homosexual identity. It may have been Someone who went to high school with them at that time believes that could be so. There's a picture in the book of them at 14.
Suzaan Boettger:
They are standing very close to each other. They are obviously I mean, I don't think at 14 they were lovers, but, you know, who knows? But they were a couple. Okay? They were not a couple in high school.
Suzaan Boettger:
Both of their high school yearbook pictures are in the book, and it shows his has one word, general. Hers, the first one they list is majorette. Maybe that's why she didn't want me to know that where she went to high school. The second one, get this, is National Honor Society.
Greg Lindquist:
You're talking about Holt.
Suzaan Boettger:
Yeah. For Holt. That that was the the value then. Major rep first is for major accomplishment, then National Honor Society.
Greg Lindquist:
So wait. What was general? Was that in the, like, army reserves, like ROTC or something?
Suzaan Boettger:
No. No. General was, like, not college prep, just whatever it takes to graduate. And okay. So the first phase goes up to about 1964.
Suzaan Boettger:
His art life, you know, obviously he was making art before he graduated from high school, but he started showing in '56, okay, up to about 1964. And then he transitions from expressionistic painter to cerebral sculptor and published essayist. He was writing before, but he didn't seem to seek publication of those essays in the early sixties. Alright. So then he was a a sculptor of interior gallery works, until the Spiral Jenny, which was 1970.
Suzaan Boettger:
Okay. It's 6465, He was doing gallery sculptures, and then he catapulted himself via Virginia Dwan, who funded this, the gallerist and the patron. And then so then the last three years, he was a earthworker. Or he I mean, he was an earthworker before, but he didn't really make anything large until, let's say, '69. He starts doing the pours down the Roman hill hillside.
Suzaan Boettger:
So then at the end, he's starting to transition out of, well, he's still in Earthworks, but he's trying, he's trying to transition out of privately funded by patrons, namely Dwan. And Doug Christmas, the gallery owner on the West Coast, funded the, film, the Spiral Jetty. And he was trying to get into more publicly funded or corporate funded visual reclamations of mining sites. But he really couldn't do public art because he wasn't making work that would withstand the elements. You know, they would degrade in the elements.
Suzaan Boettger:
The he wasn't making work out of steel or even wood, what a material, you know, he so he couldn't apply. And besides his public art, you know, would require a very long process of of evaluation. He he needed money.
Greg Lindquist:
So how do these pieces inform his mature works?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, first of all, they have references to astrology and alchemy. And they're basically expressive works. They're emotionally expressive. They're autobiographical works. And then, okay, along the way, he makes works in even in his sculptures that can be read as I read them as expressive as much as conceptual.
Suzaan Boettger:
I mean, like his work Plunge with a series of, blocks put together that are very tiny at one end of the series, very large at the other. Well, Plunge? What's Plunge call up? Plunge sounds, you know, violent. First, you know, you're plunging the toilet or you're plunging into the water.
Suzaan Boettger:
I mean, it sounds dangerous and violent. There's this emotional affiliation with, again, risk.
Greg Lindquist:
These are the works that are, like, they're painted steel. Right? Yeah. And and are they are they in perspective so they gradually decrease in scale or in size, like a perspectival recession?
Suzaan Boettger:
Exactly. They either decrease or increase depending on which end you look at them.
Greg Lindquist:
Right. So these are like Smithson inflected Judds in a way.
Suzaan Boettger:
No. They were all they were all working with geometric forms.
Greg Lindquist:
But they are serial like minimalism. Can we agree on that?
Suzaan Boettger:
Definitely. Definitely. But they're not really serial because serial is identical.
Greg Lindquist:
Exactly. They're sequential.
Suzaan Boettger:
John did not title anything with such emotionally resonant words.
Greg Lindquist:
Of course. But, like, this brings a larger question, Suzanne, that, like, did he know how to read the wind of art world trends?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, of course, he did.
Greg Lindquist:
Because it seems like he just was, like, coasting into the Earthworks by reading the room, so to speak. I mean, it makes me think about what Sheldahl said about the Smithson during like, when he saw the retrospective in 02/2005. He said, was Smithson a bullshitter? Yeah. He was.
Greg Lindquist:
I mean, and, like, I I always, like, am ambivalent about that description. Because if you read the writing, it's pretty esoteric, in places. Then you kind of, like, decode it like you're doing and and analyze it and look at the metaphor, and there's definite anchors. So what do you think?
Suzaan Boettger:
I have a whole section on how he deliberately transitioned. I'm looking at the shape of time. Okay. George Kupler remarks on the history of things in that book is a recipe for artistic success. I mean, success by an artist.
Suzaan Boettger:
This is what you do with Smithson. You look at the thing he quotes in the actual original text, and then you look what's around it. You think, woah. What's on the next page from what he quoted is a statement about basically how to become famous. And Smithson's transition from painter to sculpture was absolutely career driven.
Greg Lindquist:
It sounds pretty manufactured as well.
Suzaan Boettger:
By the mid sixties, who was painting? Andy Warhol and the pop artist, but Smithson did not have the mentality, the spirit to do pop art. He tried it, but it's it's not his spirit. Okay.
Greg Lindquist:
Well, I mean, he also rejected painting in a similar way that Judd rejected painting.
Suzaan Boettger:
Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They all they because where?
Suzaan Boettger:
Because painting had gotten down to ground zero. I mean, it had gotten down to Reinhardt's Black Fields, or had gotten completely full of Pollock's splatters. So when you have the two ends being filled, people then moved into sculpture because it was a place that had room for innovation. So they all just say, oh, painting's done. It was done at that point.
Suzaan Boettger:
And as a matter of fact, there's so many people still doing abstract expressionism or early you think can't you think of something new?
Greg Lindquist:
Well, I mean, that that flame does not get extinguished very quickly.
Suzaan Boettger:
If a critic says that, you think, oh, you're just after novelty. No. I'm not after novelty. I'm after an experience that's new to me.
Greg Lindquist:
Which is interesting because I just read this morning the Bois chapter on the morning of painting in painting as model, and he talks about novelty as a driving factor of painting in relationship to the market and capitalism and all that stuff.
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, I think it's a driving factor of all art, all contemporary art.
Greg Lindquist:
Of course. And so some of the things, you know, this death of painting thing that comes over and over and over again, I mean, you know, like, you see every artist, like, inhabit it in some way or confront it.
Suzaan Boettger:
But you just you just had an interesting painting on view I saw last month.
Greg Lindquist:
Yep. Thank you for that, shout out. Can we talk more about the relationship of three things here, Suzanne? And I know you you wanna have your reveals. So anyone who's listening, you need to read the book to get the details.
Greg Lindquist:
Suzanne explicitly instructed me not to reveal anything. But can we just talk broadly about the relationship between his early loss, which we can leave it in that generalized category, his sexuality, which, you know, like, I'm still just so interested that, like, Smithson was showing at 18. I mean, that's so unusual in so many ways, you know, even now.
Suzaan Boettger:
That was a minor show. I mean
Greg Lindquist:
I know. But doesn't it speak to his ambition? I mean, like, he just was, like, chomping at the bits for recognition and for dialogue and all of that stuff. But the three categories are early loss, sexuality, and Christian symbolism. Because they're such a weird mixture, but maybe not because I know that you have some ideas about that.
Suzaan Boettger:
First of all, the Christian symbolism was about, as I've said, dying, death. And that relates to this loss that he was born out of, okay, that but that he, his parents carried with them and thus he learned, here's a term, he learned melancholy. He because he didn't directly experience it. All this will be explained. But so the Christian symbolism is either about someone else's bloody death or himself feeling crucified.
Suzaan Boettger:
Himself feeling crucified because of what he wasn't. This is a little oblique, but we need to let people have the joy of discovery themselves.
Greg Lindquist:
Well, but let me just say something. Like, you have these reproductions and you reference, like, the Isenheim Altar piece, right, which as we know from teaching intro to art or the survey of class, we know that that's about skin diseases, right, which is really interesting considering, you know, some of the things like acne and all that stuff. But also, is it possible and I mean, I don't wanna play psychoanalyst, you know,
Suzaan Boettger:
for, you
Greg Lindquist:
know, for someone who's dead, but couldn't the Christian symbolism of the crucifixions, you know, like, you know, the flayed angel, like the open wing angel that you were talking about, and so on and so forth. Couldn't there be a way of rehearsing the loss over and over again through his work and somehow processing it?
Suzaan Boettger:
Of course, Greg. You're absolutely right. Of course. It's not quite rehearsing it, but it's like trying to process it.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. But he's also intellectualizing it, which is really curious. Like, where's the emotionality in it? I guess the expressiveness of the painting? I mean, what do you think?
Suzaan Boettger:
Oh, well, now, yes. And then when he transitions into a sculptor, he finds an intellectual correlate in entropy.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah.
Suzaan Boettger:
And so entropy is like Christ. Everything will degrade.
Greg Lindquist:
The child in the sandbox. Humpty Dumpty. You know, like, those were his two famous examples of it. Right?
Suzaan Boettger:
Yes. Yes. Yes. But you could say you you caught on to this, to something significant. Obsession, trying to deal with this, trying to resolve it, trying to extricate it from under his skin.
Suzaan Boettger:
Why? Because it was not sufficiently dealt with. Why is he doing this as a a young adult? This problem came out of a family situation because obviously his parents didn't resolve it.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah.
Suzaan Boettger:
So in the in this situation, often they put it upon the child to be the carrier of grief. So the parents obviously didn't resolve it because if they resolved it in the family, he wouldn't have to continually obsess about it.
Greg Lindquist:
Okay. Carter Radcliffe, if you're listening to this, I apologize if I'm not supposed to tell the story, but you told it to me without telling me not to tell anyone. But we talked about this, Suzanne. Like, remember at the rail meeting, like, in 02/1212, or '13, I believe I met Carter Radcliffe. And we were talking about Smithson.
Greg Lindquist:
Somehow that came up. And he told me this story that I don't know how he knew. It was, like, maybe gossip or something that Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, and Ruth Kligman had a menage a trois. I've thought a lot about this and it's come up as I've been reading your book. For me, you know, Ruth Kligman was such a storied person and also the locus of many relationships in the art world, including Jackson Pollock?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, she was Jackson Pollock's girlfriend at the time of his death. His wife, Lee Krasner, was traveling in Europe because they had difficulties. And he, was dating Ruth Kligman, and she was in the car along with her own girlfriend when Pollock had a, accident, which killed him and the girlfriend, but not Ruth Kligman. So then she told me that thereafter, when she went to Max's Kansas City bar and restaurant, all the guys wanted to, assume the position of Jackson Pollock in bed in relation to her.
Greg Lindquist:
Exactly. I think you may have even told me this, or that was my conjecture. But but to have it said straight from the source is is even more remarkable and uncanny. Wouldn't you agree?
Suzaan Boettger:
Yes. But I don't think she acknowledged to me actually getting in bed with Smithson.
Greg Lindquist:
Okay.
Suzaan Boettger:
Because, of course, that's what I wanted to know.
Greg Lindquist:
What about the essay Spiral Jetty? What about his obsession with Pollock in it?
Suzaan Boettger:
I I think Pollock having died in the summer after Smithson graduated from high school
Greg Lindquist:
Mhmm.
Suzaan Boettger:
Was a another person dead to him. I think Pollock thereby became another or a surrogate or another stand in for the person the other person that he had lost.
Greg Lindquist:
So, like, a lost doppelganger or something.
Suzaan Boettger:
Or Yes. Yes. Yes.
Greg Lindquist:
Interesting. That's a really interesting theory.
Suzaan Boettger:
Howard Juncker wrote an article on, Smithson and Pollock. I gave a lecture at the Pollock Krasner House in the summer of my, PhD graduation, 1998, on Pollock and Smithson's relation to obsession with Pollock. Because you're right, it's significant that he calls up Pollock at the Spiral Jetty.
Greg Lindquist:
This raises a lot of interesting questions. Do we owe the world complete transparency to our lives as artists, and how do you draw that line as to what's invasive? There's a lot of writing of personal mythologies here that you've found ways around with Nancy Holt's restructuring and editing of the narrative. And also, I think we talked about how, like, there were essays that were left out of that second collected writings, right, that, you felt were important?
Suzaan Boettger:
No. No. No. No. No.
Suzaan Boettger:
I don't think any were left out of Lam's.
Greg Lindquist:
Okay.
Suzaan Boettger:
I think they didn't know of them. But there were paragraphs excised from the ones they printed. But Greg, this is an important point you're raising as you an artist. It's not that we want to know your or the artist's private lives. But if you make art with pink penises or a penis that is called vile flower, or do exquisitely detailed drawings of highly sexualized men, then I wanna know to understand the art.
Suzaan Boettger:
Where's this coming from? And it's the art I wanna understand. And if I need to understand you to understand the art, well then, you know, we look to you, your life. But it's not so much directly you. It's like we're art historians.
Suzaan Boettger:
This is like with Jasper Johns. If you put it out there in the art, then it's fair game for viewers to look at and speculate about. You know, what Jasper Johns did is refuse, like in his MoMA retrospective, refuse essayists to refer to him as homosexual. But then there's the issue that the difficulty of knowing, I mean, what was Nancy Holt's relation to this?
Greg Lindquist:
Right. And I believe you did indicate at some point that Nancy Holt had told you that she was working a day job. Smithson was not working. And I guess, you know, that's a whole another question I was wondering about. I was like, how did he live?
Greg Lindquist:
How did he pay to live? Was he a trust a fun kid, or did he have an inheritance? But you told me that he would go out all night, I think, to S and M bondage clubs and come back early in the morning as Nancy was getting up to go to work for her editing job at a scientific publication or something like that. Am I am I fabricating this, or is this is this true?
Suzaan Boettger:
You're, smooshing two things together incorrectly.
Greg Lindquist:
Okay.
Suzaan Boettger:
She told me, oh, Smithson had the metabolism of Hummingbird. He was always active, and he would work during the day, and he'd go to galleries, and then he'd go to Max's Kansas City at night, and I couldn't keep up with him. I went home, went to bed, and the next morning he told me what happened. And that quote is in the book. But I'm I don't know what happened.
Suzaan Boettger:
I don't know what it is he told her that had happened. I mean, so I I mean, on the one hand, there's her not only being involved up to a certain point. On the other hand, there's suggestions of his activities, but I don't know how the two mesh. You know, another person I quote in the book said that whenever he was with Smithson, Smithson wanted to go to leather bars. And Nancy said, as I had oh, when I asked her about this, oh, Smithson was a voyeur.
Suzaan Boettger:
He only went five or six times. I mean, she but Nancy Holt believed that Smithson was a tourist in those places. Maybe he was. But if you're a tourist, you don't have to go five or six times to see it.
Greg Lindquist:
So if Smithson was bisexual, how does that change our view of his artwork in your opinion?
Suzaan Boettger:
It doesn't.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. I mean, this is the essentialist question that gets batted around in 2023 a lot, that somehow your identity has to be reflected in the subject matter of your work.
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, let me take that back. I can't say it doesn't. Why is the erect thick stem with the exploding petals a painting miraculously and astonishingly recently acquired by the Guggenheim Museum titled Vile Flower. What's vile about this flower? Knowing that he had this ambiguous, ambiguous to us, relationship to same sex sexuality, we might think that this exploding penis is vile because it is a temptation that he does not want to succumb to.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. I mean, he's ambivalent and also maybe self flagellating. I mean, if you wanna go back to Christian mythology. Right? Yeah.
Greg Lindquist:
It's really interesting. I mean, like, so let me ask the question of the elephant in the room here, Suzanne, and I don't agree with this, but I have to ask it. Is to the people that, as you mentioned, will will say that you outed Smithson, how would you respond?
Suzaan Boettger:
I'd say, don't blame the messenger. I mean, look, the paintings are there.
Greg Lindquist:
Right. Right. I what
Suzaan Boettger:
I did out is the paintings.
Greg Lindquist:
Which have been suppressed.
Suzaan Boettger:
Yes. Which has been suppressed.
Greg Lindquist:
Do you think that's the reason why they've been suppressed? Or what are the reasons?
Suzaan Boettger:
Yes. I think it was also that Smithson wanted to be known as a intellectual, who, you know, who devised this, and promoted this idea of entropy and, sites and non sites and these these esoteric new forms of art. He did not want to be known as someone who painted exploding penises, which he did, you know, at least, twice. And then renamed a painting of another penis that's more like a, lingam, dark sister. The penis is female.
Greg Lindquist:
How does one discuss sexuality from a specific time period? Because the language of that time doesn't necessarily reflect our language in our present moment. Right? And I think that you mentioned that you you consulted with David Getsy about this.
Suzaan Boettger:
No. No. Jonathan Jonathan Katz.
Greg Lindquist:
Jonathan Katz. Okay. But, you know, the the question of, like, intersex versus transgender, for example. I mean, it's just one that comes to mind and
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, this this is a interesting, issue for art historians.
Greg Lindquist:
Right. So how do you address that?
Suzaan Boettger:
When you're talking about historical art, do you use the terms contemporary to you or contemporary to them? You know, I mean, because today we would call such a person queer, and then they would call such a person gay. But now we think that gay implies a bifurcation, either straight or you're gay. Whereas queer suggests more of a spectrum that's, I think, more accurate to people.
Greg Lindquist:
It's a very amorphous term right now. Well, I mean, it's an interesting question because, like, I know that the discourse on Louise Nevelson is struggling with this right now of, like, younger writers who are saying that she was queer. And people who knew her and did biographies of her said, absolutely not. Like, I've I've talked to her when she was living, talked to her friends in writing the biography. You know?
Greg Lindquist:
So, I mean, the these ideas of, like, how do you talk about that? It seems like a quagmire.
Suzaan Boettger:
It isn't really a quagmire because what you have to introduce, and which I did, is the social political context. And in the mid twentieth century, post World War II, is known historically by scholars of historical homosexuality, which I learned by reading them, was a period of really extreme homophobia. Because starting with the US government did not want to hire anyone who might be gay because they thought the communists could blackmail them into giving up, US secrets. You know, Newsweek wrote an article, Homosexuality, pity or punish? What?
Suzaan Boettger:
So in the context of Louise Nevelson and Smithson and so many others, they needed to be in the closet.
Greg Lindquist:
Well, what about how this maps on the Roman Catholicism and their position on homosexuality?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, of course, that's the other thing. I mean, for Smithson, that's the quagmire. How can you be a devout Catholic and gay? You can't. That's another reason the flower is vile.
Greg Lindquist:
So it just seems like a layer upon layer of suppression, repression, and then unearthing.
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, yeah. I see. My feeling is basically sympathy for Smithson, what he felt he had to disguise in order to be successful, to be a success. I was talking to a couple of young guys at an opening the other night. They don't realize the freedoms, the personal freedoms they enjoy, at least in New York City.
Suzaan Boettger:
New York State did not make sex between consenting adults of the same sex legal until 1980.
Greg Lindquist:
Let me just add to that that if I'm not mistaken, there are sodomy laws still in effect in North Carolina. They're not enforced, but they're still on the books. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you wanna talk about repression.
Suzaan Boettger:
The secret's in. I have a I have a picture in the book of the pecatum muntum, the secret sin, the book that Smithson had from the first edition, first US edition, 1958. He I mean, he was quite aware of the problem as, I mean, as another book he had, he had titled The Problem of Homosexuality in Modern Society. He was personally aware of this, I think.
Greg Lindquist:
How does that map onto his library? Because I know that you went through and provided a selected list of the library.
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, the the library is absolutely illuminating because it shows his concerns by the books he bought and, and retained. The library cataloguing was made upon his death. I mean, it actually shows two things. It shows what his interests were, not only the problem of homosexuality in modern society, but the early Christian teachings of Saint Jerome. He had many books on the early fathers of Catholicism, Christianity, and their sayings, their writings.
Suzaan Boettger:
He had many books on saints. So it shows that he had them. And the other thing it shows is that Nancy Holt was aware of them because she commissioned the catalog and published it or allowed it to be published in a couple of books. In those catalogs where it was published as a con in contrast to mine, these books were mushed into very vague groups where you wouldn't find them as easily.
Greg Lindquist:
Is this the one that Alex Obero did for one of the museum monographs?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, he wrote on the library, but and the lie yeah. The library was in that catalog that he wrote on, which I also have an essay in, the 02/2004 MOCA catalog. I mean, this whole thing brings up the probable difficulty that Nancy Holt must have experienced. I mean, if she did, you know, but she, like Lee Krasner, the widow of Pollock, flourished after his death, after their their husband's violent deaths. So Nancy Holt made her sun tunnels.
Suzaan Boettger:
She, made major public artworks. She,
Greg Lindquist:
grew. What were her attitudes towards having to be kind of the caretaker of his legacy at the same time that she was engaged in her own practice?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, I think she was ambivalent. It was kind of ambivalent to me because she would tell me what a burden it is. It was, you know, there were constantly people like me asking her for copyright permission. I mean, for my Earthworks book. But she did have artist rights or a contract with artist rights organization to get payment for that.
Greg Lindquist:
But she wouldn't delegate this to someone else?
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, not no. It was both a burden, but it was also a source of income and a source of attention as the widow. I mean, as as the, controller so that they did, you know, the, floating island piece on the barge at the time when that 02/2004 show came to the Whitney. I mean, it was a it was a great source of attention to her, as well as a great source of burden distracting her from her own work. And she wanted to control what got displayed.
Suzaan Boettger:
The surveys subject to her approval were sanitized.
Greg Lindquist:
Mhmm. In what ways?
Suzaan Boettger:
In that they had very few paintings of relatively innocuous subject matter.
Greg Lindquist:
Okay. This is an impossible question to answer, but I just have to ask it. So I'm just gonna use it as an example. Like, I was in Wilmington last week, for my father's scholarship dinner, and I met with one of his colleagues who is still on faculty. And my father collected over 23,000 fish specimen and created a collection.
Greg Lindquist:
He was curator of fish. The Museum of Natural History tried to get that collection as soon as my dad finished it. And my dad said to Dave Webster, his colleague, before he died, do not let them get it. You have to promise me. Do not let them get it.
Greg Lindquist:
There are all these things about, like, how do you how do you have someone's legacy? How does a person do that? And, of course, Smithson died tragically young and unexpected, and, you know, it wasn't after a long illness or it wasn't after, you know, old age. So I'm just wondering, because it sounds like Holt and Smithson were such different people, and they thought so differently. I mean, I think about the East Coast West Coast video and how they kind of crossed their identities, you know, like, or interchange their identities.
Greg Lindquist:
Right? And I just wonder, Suzanne, I mean, when you're saying this, like, how much possibility and this is a huge question. How much possibility and you seem to suggest it. Maybe you've already answered this question. But how much possibility did Holt totally misread his intentions if he would have wanted his legacy to go a certain way?
Greg Lindquist:
Because it seems like a lot of these things that you've told me over the years and that you're telling me now and that you have in your book are more in the self interest of Holt and Holt's narrative and Holt's perception of Smithson. Like, we don't know. He can't speak for himself. So, of course, this is com this is a complicated question.
Suzaan Boettger:
I actually I'm a little confused. I don't know what you mean about in the self interest of Holt.
Greg Lindquist:
Well, that she's telling the story she wants to tell. It's not necessarily the story that he wants to tell. Oh. It's not like his perception of who he was as an artist. Maybe he wanted all that stuff to be shown eventually.
Greg Lindquist:
You have arguments that he very self consciously, as you say, transitioned from painter to sculptor, sculptor to earthwork creator. I don't know if that's a sculpture or not. We could debate that. But, but you know what I'm saying? Because it's like, if you look at Holt's work, she kind of used being the gatekeeper to her own professional advantage in some way.
Greg Lindquist:
It's unavoidable for her to have done so. Right? Right. So what do you think? I mean, do you think this is Holt's?
Greg Lindquist:
Because you said sanitized too. I mean, so implies that this was an edit. This was a conscious construction of that personal mythology of Robert Smithson, big capital r, big capital s, rather than Bob Smithson. You know what I mean?
Suzaan Boettger:
I know what you mean, but I think she was carrying out his desires to suppress his early work and his agonies. It may have been the way she managed his legacy may have been contrary to who he really was, but it wasn't contrary to what he wanted. He created a persona of an intellectual. Of course, what I argue in the book is that in the earthworks, basically the three big earthworks in the Great Salt Lake and in Yemen, The Netherlands and in Amarillo, he was returning, and this is what Tom Crow said also, he's returning to the use of symbols, even I'm saying even alchemical symbols of the early work. This is one thing that's amazed me.
Suzaan Boettger:
I mean, there's several things about amazed me about my colleagues. How, for instance, just to throw in something, for instance, Smithson would drop in phrases in Latin in his early writings, and nobody translated them. No analyst translated them. Don't you wanna know what what he's talking about? And then also there has been almost no discussion of the spiral as a mystical symbol and of the broken circle in Netherlands as being a yin yang symbol, or the last work being Absol in Ouroboros, you know, a snake or dragon biting its tail.
Suzaan Boettger:
Here and there, the people have dropped us in who I cite, like Joseph Maciek, early on identified it as such. Art history has not been open or receptive to analyzing work as mystical symbolic. There's been the onslaught of, you know, art as language, as deconstruction, or as, you know, linguistic construction. So this book is also, I'm hoping, opening up a new territory of how to talk about art. You can include biography.
Suzaan Boettger:
You can include religion. You can include alchemical symbols as legit. And speaking of which, in that East Coast, West Coast, as I say, Nancy Holt and Smithson were absolutely playing themselves. It appeared that they were playing opposites, but Nancy Holt was the administrator. She played the conceptual intellectual artist in that conversation, that parodic conversation.
Suzaan Boettger:
She was the actual the household administrator, the keeper of the calendar, the keeper of the financial books, the photographer, the driver, allowed him to, you know, float with his ideas.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. I mean, just to back up the spiral for a second, like, didn't the symbol come from the idea of a stairway to heaven
Suzaan Boettger:
I never heard that.
Greg Lindquist:
In terms of magic and the Kabbalah?
Suzaan Boettger:
Look, I mean, the spiral can go down. Hemor spoke about it to Dennis Wheeler as descending than ascending.
Greg Lindquist:
To the the myth of Atlantis. Right?
Suzaan Boettger:
Yeah. Or or just descending into hell. And you know it goes leftward from the shore. Mhmm. Anticlockwise.
Suzaan Boettger:
Yeah. Counter. It's going backward in time to what he called his unicellular beginning.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. Again, loss.
Suzaan Boettger:
That's something we'd all like to do sometimes. Go back and start over.
Greg Lindquist:
Regression. Yeah. In some ways, let me just say maybe in closing as we're getting to the end of our time together, I'm really shocked that this is the first biography. Why hasn't there been one until now? And I know that you've been working on this for quite a while.
Greg Lindquist:
Look at all the other biographies that have come out in the last ten years. There are figures that many are more recent than Smithson.
Suzaan Boettger:
You mean the deaths are more recent?
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. Exactly.
Suzaan Boettger:
The time span between the death and the biography is shorter.
Greg Lindquist:
Correct. But, I mean, we're talking about, you know, over forty years. I'm so curious to see how people react to this who have thought that they knew Smithson. You know?
Suzaan Boettger:
No one is more curious than me.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. Yeah. So can you just speak to, like, why hasn't it been? Is it all these issues we've been talking about about, like, the poised narrative versus, like, more of the raw narrative or authentic narrative? I hate that word, but I don't know what other word is to use here.
Suzaan Boettger:
Well, Harold Rosenberg I'm reading from a footnote, an endnote. As Harold Rosenberg, the famous art critic of the forties, fifties, sixties, observed about the position of the artist's widow, quote, she controls the entirety of her dead husband's unsold production, giving her economic power. But also, she is the official source of the artist's life story, as well as of his private interpretation of that story. This is Harold Rosenberg in The Art Establishment, which he published in Esquire, 01/01/1965. Well, Nancy Holt personifies that, the artist's widow who controls both the economic power and the official source of the artist's life story as well as his private interpretation of that story.
Suzaan Boettger:
Fortunately, the Holt Smithson Foundation is more progressive in its ideas of what the public needs to know. That's the reason. Nancy Holt died in, I think February 2014. This is like I remember when I published my Earthworks book, and I feel the same way now. You don't want to come out of that tunnel that you're in obsessing.
Suzaan Boettger:
The other aspect is I'm still running into people who give me new information. Yeah. I just met someone two nights ago who told me that the painter Ed Ruscha titled a work 28 Gas Stations in reference to the 14 Stations of the Cross times two, and Ed Ruscha is a secret Catholic. What?
Greg Lindquist:
That is so weird.
Suzaan Boettger:
But I'd known that boy, I would have put in because Smithson doesn't work using the 14 stations of the cross.
Greg Lindquist:
Yeah. You know, it's so interesting because, you know, like, you talk about the occult in this book. And then I thought about, like, that dimension in his record collection, which I know that you don't have in your collection, but you had Black Sabbath records. It's so weird to think about that. You know?
Suzaan Boettger:
Yeah. I couldn't even get into the record collection. Oh.
Greg Lindquist:
Well, it overlapped my parents' record collection quite a bit. And during the pandemic, I got back into vinyl and, like, I got my mom's collection. I got my aunt's collection. And, like, that's a whole another dimension of cultural things that doesn't really get talked about with art, but I so appreciate that being part of that.
Suzaan Boettger:
He does quote Dion, you know, as an use a use a line from a Dion song as an epigraph.
Greg Lindquist:
Interesting. Where is that? Do you remember?
Suzaan Boettger:
That's, I think, in the Lamentations of a Paroxximal artist. Oh, oh, which reminds me. When Nancy Holt speaks about Smithson having a metabolism of a hummingbird, the latent content of that is he had manic energy. I mean, he's kind of classically bipolar, depressive and manic. He produced about 50 paintings in one month.
Suzaan Boettger:
How do I know this? I know this because he wrote his dealer in, Rome that he has been turning out paintings to bring to Rome to exhibit.
Greg Lindquist:
Well, one only needs to watch East Coast, West Coast to get a sense of that monomaniacal, like, mania that you're talking about. But that's really interesting because it kinda points towards and here's another teaser trailer for the circumstances under which he died. That mania that you're speaking to, what you would you agree with that?
Suzaan Boettger:
Absolutely. Oh, well, that's what observers with him at the time described, having a kind of manic excitement about making this work. Greg, it's been so marvelous talking with you because you're informed about Smithson. You have ideas and you you throw them out there, and we've I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
Greg Lindquist:
I would second that, Suzanne. I always love talking to you about this because I always learn a lot, and it was such a pleasure talking to you about your book. I hope that everyone reads it and that it gets the dues that it deserves. So thanks for having this conversation. I really enjoyed it.
Suzaan Boettger:
My pleasure. And all I can say is to folks out there, one of my blurbs calls it a monumental achievement. Woah. By a psychoanalytic arch historian, Jonathan Feinberg, on the back cover of the book. Woah.
Suzaan Boettger:
Okay.
Narrator:
This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Inside the Spiral, The Passions of Robert Smithson is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.