From Waddington Custot: Ian Davenport

Ian Davenport: Lake runs 6 October – 11 November 2023.

HARRY’S STYLE

“I think I’m the third best film producer in the country,” the painter, musicologist, folklorist, and filmmaker Harry Smith (1923–1991) once told the Village Voice. “I think Andy Warhol is the best. Kenneth Anger is the second best. And now I’ve decided I’m the third best. There was a question in my mind whether Brakhage or myself was the third best, but now I think I am.” In his rigorous assessment of the boundary-crossing polymath’s cinematic achievements, from the “batiked geometrical animations” of the 1940s to preparations for his Brechtian opus Mahagonny (1970–80), P. Adams Sitney endorses Smith’s claim to be “one of the central filmmakers of the avant-garde tradition.” Published in Artforum in May 1972, Sitney’s essay—alongside Sasha Frere-Jones’s reflections on the artist, archivist, and alchemist in our October issue—is recommended reading before taking in the heady brew of hermeticism, structuralism, and uncanny Americana on view in Smith’s current Whitney retrospective.  —The editors