Michael Ned Holte on Barbara T. Smith’s “The Way to Be”

THE MOST AMAZING SHOW the viewer encounters in “The Way to Be,” the Barbara T. Smith retrospective at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, is a massive Xerox 914 copier, which looks stunningly new despite its obvious 1960s vintage. Designed to revolutionize the modern office , the 914 became an unlikely tool for artistic production and personal revolution when Smith rented one in 1965, placing it in the living room of his conventional middle-class home in Arcadia, California. Smith was surely among the first artists to explore the possibilities of this technology, if not the first; the work she did with 914 predates that of Seth Siegelaub Xerox Book, a seminal demonstration of conceptual art methodology, spanning nearly three years. In Smith’s 2023 animated memoir, also titled The way to be, we learn that his acquisition of the copier follows an unsuccessful attempt to hire famed Los Angeles lithography studio Gemini GEL We also learn that Smith used the machine to document his immediate world amid a falling-out marriage. quickly crumbles: Soon, she would separate from her husband, and two of her three children would go to live with their father. This harrowing personal narrative is largely elided in the exhibition, but it propels memoirs forward and provides insight into the very real stakes of Smith’s risky gamble as an artist ambitiously challenging gendered expectations and social convention.

Smith’s approach to the new medium of photocopying is inherently experimental, yet reveals a sense of its immediate mastery and attunement to a remarkable range of possibilities. Images of her children feature prominently in her hand-bound folios, or “coffins,” as she called them, a provocative title of an undertaker’s daughter. There is also playful, serialized material exploration in Xerox works like rice and object, 1965-1966, which suggests a lineage with the concrete rayographies of Man Ray, as well as frankly erotic self-portraits, all emphasizing the physicality of the flatbed scanner. Defying the association of mechanical reproduction with cool, corporate effect, Smith’s Xerox works are unlikely appeals to sensuality and bodily feelings.

From these early works emerge at least two compelling thematic strands that run through the exhibition, which was curated by Glenn Phillips and Pietro Rigolo and draws extensively from the artist’s archives, held by the Getty Research Institute. First, there’s Smith’s enthusiasm for technology, which often leads to works without obvious precedent. Take it Land piece, 1968–72, an environmental installation of 180 towering fiberglass blades, all fitted with light bulbs and interconnected with programmable electronics, all vaguely resembling a giant field of grass. What can now be understood as a pivotal work in the development of the California Light and Space movement was first shown in part at F-Space in Santa Ana in June 1971, but not exhibited in its full glory until briefly, first at the Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles. in September 1971 and the following year at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Its reception has been mixed and many of its blades have been damaged by vandalism, revelry or neglect. Only sixteen remained intact. On loan from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, they have been displayed supported by mirrors, suggesting the vast space they once occupied and alluding to the social possibilities of a larger field: a nearby video reveals the prelapsarian vibe of the installation as it was originally exhibited, with the artist and his friends frolicking naked amid fiberglass flora.

A related proposal for Experiments in Art and Technology’s Osaka Pavilion, 1970 – shown here as a schematic drawing – was rejected. Smith was also overlooked for Maurice Tuchman’s 1967–71 Art and Technology program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the misogyny of this program has long been evident. In the face of such rejections and exclusions, Smith thrived by setting the rules of engagement rather than waiting for external permission or validation, often drawing his attention inward.

Smith thrived on defining the rules of engagement rather than waiting for external clearance or validation.

The second component that runs through the exhibition is a perpetual search for food, both personal and professional, with food often serving as a metaphorical or literal vehicle. Visualization of a table setting from “Ritual Meal,” 2023, is a table setting consisting of serving ware, medical lab equipment, art supplies (rainbow-hued oil sticks), and a projector beaming cosmic images onto the ceiling. Beyond the almost abstract photograph of open-heart surgery hanging on the wall, there is something oddly sterile about the presentation, given the apparent chaos of ritual mealthe 1969 performance on which Visualization is based. At the Getty, the exuberant chaos of this Happening-like feast is conveyed by Smith’s Rube Goldberg-esque preparatory drawings and a tableau of the many choreographed journeys.

The documentary material of feed me(mainly men), and a current video of the artist reminiscent of the work. During the night, the artist received one stranger at a time, hoping to be fed – with wine, food, massage oil, marijuana, conversation. Several encounters were sexual. Some critics have expressed unease with the job, but Smith maintains that she has always been in control.

Smith’s practice then and still – the artist is ninety-one – is decidedly individualistic and decidedly spiritual, setting her apart from many of her more explicitly political feminist peers and collaborators, including Nancy Buchanan, Judy Chicago and Suzanne Lacy. A serious spirituality also separated her from her male peers like Chris Burden, Allan Kaprow and Paul McCarthy. In Smith’s memoir, she cites shamanic European figures such as Joseph Beuys and Hermann Nitsch as important role models. But Kaprow, a mentor of sorts and occasional lover who appears (seeming both pained and puzzled) in Anniversary, 1981, Smith’s audacious performance to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, exemplifies a useful if less spectacle-oriented paradigm. “Doing life, consciously, was a compelling notion to me,” he noted in his 1979 essay “Performing Life.” “When you live consciously, however, life gets pretty weird.”

While Kaprow’s version of “live the scene” might be analytical, even stiff, Smith’s interpretation tends to be strange, indeed, but also very charged – spiritually, sexually or otherwise. If the latter’s works are sometimes procedurally complicated or result in messy social relations, such is the nature of “doing life” as frankly as possible. The way to be, the 1972 performance that gave the show and memoir its name, traces a trip Smith took from San Francisco to Seattle, dressed in white with half of her face painted red. Beyond this costume, and the choice of the artist not to speak during the journey, the complexity of the performance results from his many random encounters. Two photographers hired to document the work reveal Smith in a wide variety of landscapes and social contexts, highlighting the unpredictability of the effort while inevitably becoming part of its ongoing narrative.

What was difficult in Smith’s work for the artist herself – testing personal boundaries and social boundaries – presents a very different challenge for her audience, precisely because her work is primarily focused on self-transformation: l Viewer access to these changes is inherently restricted. Despite its considerable aesthetic qualities, particularly evident here in Xerox Caskets, Land piece, and one of the examples in the exhibition of Smith’s exquisite series of the minimalist era “Black Glass Paintings”, 1965-1966 – the form is generally secondary to whatever goes on inside the artist in the production of the work. “In my performances, I’m not so interested in a finished product or how entertaining it might be,” Smith notes in accompanying wall-filling text. Anniversary. “I leave the room open until the last possible moment and work above all on the transformation that takes place [sic] so that everyone who participates can use the piece as a tool or a vehicle for their own achievements or transformations.

From almost the beginning, Smith’s quest had little to do with climbing the perceived (and mostly patriarchal) ladder of art history. Perhaps that is why it has taken so long for an artist so central to the development of West Coast art and many of its social circles to gain the kind of recognition demonstrated by this retrospective, her first since a 2005 exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art (now the Benton Museum) documenting his major performances. A second, more comprehensive survey will arrive at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles this fall. In our moment of risk aversion, nearly sixty years after Smith self-copied in an act of liberation, her work still evocatively offers a model of personal revolution for those willing to look within. and to embrace the unknown, as it has for the past six decades.

“Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be” is on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles through July 16.

Michel Ned Holte is an independent curator who teaches in the art program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.