By Leon D'Souza

Dennis Smith's most recent contribution to the world of art is an accumulation of junk.

Literally.

Standing on the south end of the celebrated artist's 4-acre backyard in Highland, Utah, is an untidy heap of gargantuan proportions. It will occupy a room 26 by 85 feet at Brigham Young University's Museum of Art in Provo, where it will be on display from June 5 through Oct. 11.

The sculpture is, at first, daunting to the untrained eye. It is not instantly awe-inspiring, and is almost entirely perplexing.

Bicycle wheels, bulky chains, skis, cables and propellers seem randomly positioned at various points along the work. A propeller juts out from the front end of the edifice, and what appears to be a busted flying machine dangles from a piece of scrap at the back. Lodged between fragments of metal toward the rear is a Nativity scene. Next to it, an old cash register is
suspended longitudinally.

An unfinished rolling-ball track runs along the structure from the front, then a couple of feet upward, and along a metal arm toward the back. When finished, it will carry the ball all the way through the length of the arm, but now it lets the sphere fall to the ground halfway.

This apparent chaos is Smith's monument to life.

"The scraps of things are what we pick up," he explains. "Our lives are made up of the bits and pieces that you see. Everybody will relate to different objects for different reasons."

To Smith, the sculpture is a gateway to forgotten memories of childhood and youth.

"I wanted it to lend the feeling of walking into a carnival," he says, alluding to the sculpture's playful feel. "It's going to be called 'Portal', because it transports people out of their regular world and into this one."

Portal is a kinetic sculpture, which means that while all these pieces of scrap seem chaotically arranged, there is enough order in the creation to facilitate movement.

But movement isn't Smith's forte. So he's enlisted the help of another creative mind – his 24-year-old son, Andrew. The younger Smith has achieved somewhat of a reputation for inheriting his father's abstract aesthetic and reinventing it into a kinetic form. Essentially, he has a gift for making junk move.

The result is a creative exchange between father and son, and also between two artists. Through their lively exhibit, the Smiths hope to transport the museum visitor to a time when discovery came from play. The creative process is likened to tinkering with scrap.

"Let me show you how this works," Dennis Smith says.

Andrew plugs a cable into a socket. A low whir grows louder and quickly becomes monotonous. Wheels turn, cables move, propellers rotate. A metal ball is lifted to the partially completed track. Scraps of memory come to life.

One man's trash becomes another man's treasure.

POETIC KINETICS

"When Andrew starts getting the pieces to move, there is almost a lyrical quality to the motion," Smith says, walking back toward the house.

From the outside, the Smith home looks like an enormous rustic wood cabin, camouflaged by the dense vegetation that creeps up its sides, and the tall trees that surround it. It is a house you have to be looking for, and yet it is there for all to see. Inside, models of airships hang from the ceiling.

A couple of giant-size replicas, with massive wingspans, stand on display near the entrance to the large living room. One appears to have wings that resemble those of a dragon. Smith refers to the crafts as airships, but most people will identify the primitive-looking vehicles as flying machines, or
artistically adapted versions of early airplanes.

Smith enjoys aviation.

"There was a fellow in our ward [church] who used to fly, and he got me
involved with paraplanes," he explains. "The culmination of that experience was a flight over my grandpa's farm in Alpine, over the tall poplar trees that he planted. My earliest memories would be sitting and looking at those tall trees."

A grand piano lies alongside a church organ near the west window of the living room, some sheets of notes clipped to its music stand. A showcase on the south end of the room boasts a variety of exhibits, but Smith is especially proud of a series of wire frame models.

"One of my sons made those," he says.

Colorful paintings adorn the north wall, where a still life drawing by one of
his daughters is on display.

"She went to Stanford and then studied law at the University of Utah. But now she's doing art full time," he explains.

A quilt with nine names sown into it hangs on the east wall of the room.

"That's back when we had nine grandchildren," he says. "We now have 12."

Soft chairs and a couch are arranged around a hollow center table. The Smiths call it the "coffin table" due to its creepy resemblance to a sarcophagus. Two sculptures of a boy and a girl, seemingly lost in thought, lie on either side of a fireplace stove.

Plopping himself down in a chair, Smith explains his fascination with
assemblages and what he calls, "poetic kinetics".

At the heart of it all, he says, is the concept of play.

"For me, play is important because it is a spontaneous, natural expression of the mind that does not have an agenda or ulterior motive," Smith says. "Play is a way a child explores reality."

He sees himself as no more than a mature child.

"I went to an astrologer once, and he said, ‘You think like a child and the child will always be with you.' I am that sort of person," Smith continues.

His work seems to follow the ideas of pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, although he doesn't make the association himself, though he agrees with the comparison.

Like Piaget, Smith has embraced the belief that behind the ostensibly illogical mannerisms of a child, there is a special logic, which translates to a more honest view of the world.

His childlikeness permeates every facet of his life, beyond the sculptures of children in vibrant poses that have brought his work recognition all over the country.

Grant Lund, a longtime friend and former schoolmate from BYU, recalls the time he and his family were sucked into one of Smith's playful undertakings.

"We were visiting Dennis over Christmas, and he had this tubing run set up behind his house. Before we even went into the house, Dennis said, ‘Do you want to go tubing?' And so off we went," Lund laughed. "In many ways, he's just an oversized kid."

****

Poetry is another vital aspect of Smith's art. He's been blending verse and form since the early 1970s, when he combined the two in Star-Counter, a book of poems and sculpture.

The book is filled with telling narratives that explain several of Smith's works. Like one of a teenage boy, gazing into the distance, hands on his hips. The poem is titled Past Fourteen. It reads:

And so

To find a clue

To being more

Than all alone,

I stand

Out on the hill

And face the winded sky

And hold a conference

With the world

And tell the air and earth

I sense

That I'm aware

Of being all alone

Out on the hill,

But not alone.

Smith's attraction to poetry originated in a high school English class, with a teacher he says he can't forget.

"Mr. Washburn was divorced, a little eccentric and headed up the journalism program. He infected me with a realization of what poetry was," he recalls. "I will always remember him because he invited me into the world of expression. He infected me with his passion for art."

Since then, Smith has sought out the poetry in aesthetics and motion. He's borrowed from the works of Edgar Degas, a French impressionist painter and sculptor famed for his bronze figurines. He was exposed to Degas' work while serving a mission for the Mormon Church in Denmark.

"Whenever we had an off-day, I'd drag my companion along and we'd go to see the sculptures," Smith recalls.

Then there was Alexander Calder, America's first abstract artist of international renown. Calder became one of his favorites.

"Art, to him, was play," Smith says of the sculptor noted for his "Stabiles".

Thus poetry and play were married into poetic kinetics.

Smith's only failing involved bringing movement to his works, though he never saw that as an impediment.

"For me, the pieces do not have to move because they move in people's minds," he explains. "Also, when I couldn't make the kinetics happen, it made me feel insecure."

Now, with Andrew's help, Smith is pushing the envelope. With Portal, he's at the leading edge of his art.

MODERN ART WITH A DIFFERENCE

And at the leading edge of contemporary art, in general.

At least, according to Lund.

Lund would know. An art professor for 28 years, he's been exposed to the entire spectrum of contemporary art, or the avant-garde movement, as it is called. He isn't awed by anything he's seen.

"In so much of contemporary art, there is no meaning," Lund explains. "Contemporary art has become a study of art for art's sake."

As has the academic art movement.

"In some ways, it's a confusing of means and ends," Lund says. "In academics, there are a lot of professors today who play at being artists, but they are actually teachers. And they're not good teachers because their passion is not full-blown."

Smith's art, he continues, offers the academic and avant-garde movements, a bridge to reality.

"What he's doing with his work is, he's taking junk that people attach some
meaning to, and reversing the meaning," Lund says.

Without Smith's meaningful creations, the academic art movement is "dead in the water," and contemporary art is left without a connection to audiences.

Smith is of the same mind. He looks upon contemporary art with comparable disdain.

It's a matter of integrity, he says.

"If you really are an artist of any significance, your art is a poetic expression of your anxiety or ecstasy. It is also, in large part, an expression for society itself. The artist is a spokesman for some of the feelings of the culture," Smith explains.

Contemporary art lacks this association.

Take, for example, the work of Andy Warhol, a giant of the Pop Art scene whose work anticipated a world where a consumer-driven culture came to value the brand name and iconic item above individuality.

Smith dismisses Warhol.

"His work was so full of pretense. It had no core. There is a total disdain
for the craft of painting in his work," he says. "It has the same power as
when a person uses the word, 'fuck.' It demands attention. But after the word is used so much, it becomes insignificant even as an expletive. There is a void in the art world now because there is so much of expletive."

Others share his point of view.

Former colleague and close friend, Trevor Southey, a San Francisco artist of considerable repute famed for his homoerotic paintings and sculptures defines a lot of contemporary art as "visual masturbation".

Lund agrees.

"This sort of obscure, obnoxious and obscene work has expanded the definition of art to nothing," he says. "Modern artists haven't attached meaning to symbols."

Smith compares himself with the pivotal character in Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes.

"I am reminded of the child, who cried out, ‘Look the emperor is naked,'" he says.

Then again, he does not want to be characterized as blinkered.

"I become paranoid about being parochial because of my feelings toward Andy Warhol," Smith says. "I want to emphasize that I totally respect what Andy Warhol did."

But he strives to be different.

DRAWING FROM EMILY DICKENSON

His quest for a unique identity is what kept him away from the New York art scene.

"I concluded early that if I embraced contemporary art, there was a risk that
I'd lose myself. If I were in New York City, I'd be a different person," Smith explains. "I decided, instead, to embrace the cultural values of my youth – Mormonism, growing up on a farm etc. Alpine is one of the main places in my paintings."

Still, he's had to compromise in order to create saleable images.

"I made a commitment to my family," Smith says. "Yet, I had a Bohemian nature. Being that way has given me a tendency to create as if someone is always looking over my shoulder. At times, when I'm working on my more abstract pieces, I feel embarrassed. When people come in the room, I prejudge the type of audience they are, and I show them only certain pieces."

All that must change over the next decade. From now on, Smith wants to create entirely for his own fulfillment.

"Like Emily Dickenson was able to write in her father's attic with no need for approval," he explains. "This is difficult because now I have to reprogram myself not to need approval. In a painting, I have to work on trusting my passion for pure form, color and texture."

Sometimes, that's the best way to work, he says, adding, "Doing what you do to be safe doesn't excite people as much as when you focus on your instincts.

Lund is certain Smith's art will go places. He has faith in his friend's ambitions.

"I remember once, when Dennis didn't have even a bachelor's degree, he handed me a business card, which read: ‘Dennis Smith, professional sculptor,'" Lund recalls. "I said, ‘Dennis, aren't you getting ahead of yourself?' He said, ‘No. I'm going to be a famous sculptor someday.' That summer, he filled six sketch books, and these were not for classes."

Then there was the time he dropped out of graduate school.

"I told him, ‘You may need your master's degree to fall back on.' He said, ‘If I have it to fall back on, I'll never be a great sculptor,'" Lund laughed.

Needless to say, he's hopeful for the future.

"I think, if someone writes about Dennis, he could become very famous," Lund says.

Smith is expectant, too.

TJ
TJ