12-22-2023, 08:44 PM
Harry Everett Smith, who was born in 1923 and died in 1991, was a lot of things. Wikipedia describes him first as a polymath, then as an ‘artist, experimental filmmaker, bohemian, mystic, record collector, hoarder, student of anthropology and a Neo-Gnostic bishop’. The title of an unbridled oral history that Semiotext(e) published in 1996, meanwhile, rolls all his roles into the phrase American Magus. Does any of that help to articulate what Smith was? Perhaps not, but there is the promise of a clearer reflection in New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art’s upcoming retrospective exploration of Smith’s many-sided activity, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith.
In New York, where Smith lived from the 1950s onwards, he met Ginsberg (who became a longstanding supporter); began studying mysticism in earnest, particularly Kabbalah and the works of Aleister Crowley; and alongside other pursuits (meticulous scratchboard illustrations and drawings; amassing a vast collection of found paper airplanes) made increasingly ambitious and intricate films. Some of these, like the black-and-white animation using cutouts from Victorian catalogues to depict a series of alchemical transformations, Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1957–62), were supposedly meant to run for six hours (the existing cut only lasts for one).
From:
https://artreview.com/what-to-make-of-harry-smith/
Exhibition announced here:
https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harry-smith
Film no. 12 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbjSSyAo9WA
In New York, where Smith lived from the 1950s onwards, he met Ginsberg (who became a longstanding supporter); began studying mysticism in earnest, particularly Kabbalah and the works of Aleister Crowley; and alongside other pursuits (meticulous scratchboard illustrations and drawings; amassing a vast collection of found paper airplanes) made increasingly ambitious and intricate films. Some of these, like the black-and-white animation using cutouts from Victorian catalogues to depict a series of alchemical transformations, Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1957–62), were supposedly meant to run for six hours (the existing cut only lasts for one).
From:
https://artreview.com/what-to-make-of-harry-smith/
Exhibition announced here:
https://whitney.org/exhibitions/harry-smith
Film no. 12 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbjSSyAo9WA