Sandra C. Haynes
Podcast #7	Alexis Smith
The Twentieth Century (1983)
Artist-in-Residence Fine Art Collection
Shatford Library and Boone Sculpture Garden
Pasadena City College
March  2007

In her clever and insightful "fictional biography" of Alexis Smith, written for the artist's retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1991, writer Amy Gerstler calls Smith "a social historian with a pastepot," and "Irony-edged archivist of the vernacular" (Armstrong, 211).  These descriptive phrases only begin to capture the essence of the person and vision of 1993 Artist-in-Residence, Alexis Smith.  

Smith is a California "girl."  Born in Los Angeles in 1949, she attended the University of California, Irvine in the mid sixties when the artistic atmosphere was exceptionally open, and creative.  From childhood, Smith enjoyed collecting pieces of mass-produced detritus-such as old photographs, advertisements, vintage magazines and posters that she found or purchased at thrift shops and swap meets.  From this cache of ephemera, she created collages whose hybrid text and images come together to form multiple possible associations for the viewer.  Alexis Smith has gone on to create large-scale public art, and indeed, the Pasadena City College gallery show, coinciding with her residency here, took the form of an original site installation called "Looking for America."  

Smith is a natural storyteller with a strong sense of irony and humor.  She has been called a Conceptual artist because of her greater interest in the often-irreverent ideas presented in the work of art, as opposed to concerns over the art object itself as the vehicle of communication.  Popular culture, mass media and especially the Hollywood ambiance are important influences in Smith's work.  Hollywood is renowned for presenting life as grander, more dramatically tragic and simply more mythic than reality.  Indeed, Smith's real name is Patricia Anne, a name she changed in college, aware that she would share her new name with a movie star named Alexis Smith.

The name of the work of art donated by Smith to P.C.C that hangs in the Shatford Library next to the Patrick Graham is The Twentieth Century (1983).  The title sets up all kinds of expectations.  The virtual collage of elements we are presented with, is a visual metaphor called into existence through associations about the American experience offered by the artist.  The work's dense surface clutter of words and images reflects on an age of crushing stimulation.  It comprises another piece in Smith's large repertoire of works that are part of an historical tour of American culture.  As is true of much of Smith's art, there is an additive layer of meaning in the title, since Twentieth Century is also the name of a 1934 John Barrymore movie comedy whose action takes place on a train called "The Twentieth Century."  

Let's examine some details of the work.  What you are looking at is an altered vintage, Hollywood movie poster dominated by a black, red and white palette.  It has been altered by silk screening additional words and imagery over the original words and images.  If you peer through the additive, silk-screened splashes of black ink at the lower right for instance, you can make out the full title of the movie being advertised---The Violent and the Damned, a 1962 B-movie starring no one you have ever heard of.  Here's the plot:  during a bloody prison riot in Panama, an inmate escapes into the jungle, where he barely survives while hiding from the law.  Ah, that scenario explains what looks like a fight scene at the center right, and the rugged-looking men, one with his bloody mouth open in a frantic shout.  Bold, yellow-stenciled letters, part of the original poster design, make the words "Violence-Adventure" that scream out along the top margin of the work. 

Alexis Smith has added some silk screened, pithy, clichˇ-riddled dialogue, starting at the upper left, "I've died so often/ Made love so much/ I've lost track of what's real."  And, along the bottom of the poster, and upside-down, "I don't live I act."  We don't know who is speaking these words, which adds to the mysterious, fantasy-like quality of the fiction being presented to us.  

Smith's art reveals a fascination with Hollywood, the premier factory of American mass culture in the 20th century. This attraction-however ironic--to the glamorous mythology of Southern California comes through in her reworking of this B-movie poster.


References:

Armstrong, Richard.  Alexis Smith. exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New 	York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc. 1991.

Grynsztejn, Madeleine. Alexis Smith Interview, Journal of Contemporary Art, 1991
	http://www.jca-online.com/asmith.html, 1 March 2007.

Isenberg, Barbara.  State of the Arts: California Artists Talk about Their Work (New 	York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.

Smith, Alexis. Vosloh Forum Lecture, Pasadena: Pasadena City College, 26 April 1993.


Haynes(c)



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