CultureZohn

View Original

Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt vamp and camp in a sendup of Coastal artists

In Robert Smithson's and Nancy Holt's hilarious film, East Coast, West Coast, loaded online Friday via the Holt Smithson Foundation IG, the old tropes of the two historically pugilistic factions of the deep blue coastal US states of California and New York are brilliantly played out by Holt, representing the sophisticated, Eastern intellectual art world maven, and Smithson, the hippy dippy Western love child artist. The grainy verite was filmed at Joan Jonas's New York house and she sits atop a bookshelf in the rear, a hulking, skeptical Greek chorus of one.   Holt is brainy interlocutor and Smithson the fey, reluctant interviewee as they discuss bicycles, mapping and the art world. Holt--who is trying to get Smithson's character to wake up and smell the money says: If you don't consider the money part of art you can be a victim. Smithson looking away and abashed: I'm just out there doing my thing in the fresh air. I want to ranch in Fresno and groove in the grass and dig nature...I make art man...Holt: You're some kind of mystical pragmatist; Smithson: Definitions are for uptight types...I'm on my way to India, I don't belong here, you're just a New Yorker you don't know were its at, you just need to let yourself feel things...out in California I had my own little garden and organic foods...you're a bad trip. Stop thinking and start feeling, man!  These cliches are still bandied about even as the two cities have become more and more alike, epicenters of the Pandemic. Don't miss this.