Matt Sheridan Smith – flotsam and jetsam

Matt Sheridan Smith had one of those 3-minute Shakespeare installations that Western Bridge now features. Besides a central exhibit, Western Bridge has taken to offering now-you-see-them, now-you’ve-missed them exhibits upstairs. They last two weeks. Considering that Western Bridge is open Thursday to Saturday, that means the audience has six days to hop to it or regret its choices at its leisure.

I saw Matt Sheridan Smith’s Flotsam and Jetsam late Saturday afternoon, the last day. It was riveting, but fortunately for those who failed to stop by, his is the kind of riveting that can be appreciated online through images. One of Sol LeWitt’s better gambits was to bury a drawing, refuse to say where but offer a certificate of ownership to whoever was smart enough to snap it up. Of all his drawings, this is one I think of most, the one I never saw.

Flotsam and Jetsam is a remake of a sculpture Smith presented at Lisa Cooley in 2009,
Self-portrait (golden sections). Reviewing that show, the astute Marie-Adele Moniot is worth quoting:

Self-portrait (golden sections), the “heart of the show” according to
the gallery’s press materials, is a series of pedestals arranged in a
sort of postmodern Stonehenge in the center of the room. Smith made each
pedestal according to the “golden ratio,” measuring the proportions of
his own body and transferring them to plywood. Though he literally puts
himself on display, the various shapes and sizes still seem to conceal
something essential about the artist, his process and the works’ import
as stand-ins for the body. (more) 

At Western Bridge were the same arrangement of pedestals:

This time out, however, they’re going down. In the corner of the room was a sack of cement.

At the end of the day on Saturday, as the exhibit drew to a close, Smith mixed the cement, opened the pedestals and poured it in. Two he dumped in the Sound, as jetsam. One might have been rescued, to serve as a bench in front of Western Bridge. (Flotsam.) Whether he’d dispose of the final pedestal or recycle it had not, late Saturday afternoon, been determined.

As with his exhibit in New York, the pedestals served as stand-ins for his body.

The shift in meaning, from last year to the present, when the recession grinds on and opportunities for artists to make any sort of living recede before us, is haunting.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:
(via)

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Unlike Gatsby, artists are rapidly losing faith in that future. They see losses – what they can no longer afford, what they’ll never have, what they’ll have to do to survive and continue to be artists. Will they jetsam their work or park it to be retrieved later, like flotsam left after a wreck?

D.W. W.D. Snodgrass wrote in a similar vein about his child, following a bitter divorce:

Heart’s Needle,  Part 5

Winter again and it is snowing;

Although you are still three,

You are already growing

Strange to me.

You chatter about new playmates, sing

Strange songs; you do not know

Hey ding-a-ding-a-ding

Or where I go

Or when I sang for bedtime,
Fox
Went out on a chilly night,

Before I went for walks

And did not write;

You never mind the squalls and storms
That are renewed long since;

Outside, the thick snow swarms

Into my prints

And swirls out by warehouses, sealed,
Dark cowbarns, huddled, still,

Beyond to the blank field,
The fox’s hill

Where he backtracks and sees the paw,

Gnawed off, he cannot feel;

Conceded to the jaw

Of toothed, blue steel

And while on the subject of the melancholy passage of time, the invaluable, essential Western Bridge is six years old. When launched by Bill and Ruth True, they said they saw it as a 10-year project. Recently, they speculated that it might conclude at eight. That leaves two years. Tick, tick.