Interview with Tony Smith

A young man around 25 stands in some scenery reciting a monologue. Both the blades of grass in the foreground and the sounds indicate that he is standing at the side of a motorway. The man with dark and straggly hair wears a parka and talks in a concentrated manner, while his gestures and facial expression appear to be nervous and confused. Disturbed by the noise of the cars he interrupts his lecture several times. The spectator first has to become acquainted with the situation of the lecture that comments on the words in a peculiar way. The man is reciting a text from an interview with architect and sculptor Tony Smith, conducted by Samuel Wagstaff for the Art Magazine in 1966.
There the artist describes a nocturnal journey on an unfinished motorway. In this artificial industrial landscape he experienced a new kind of reality, a reality he had never before come across within the spectrum of art and which thoroughly questioned his own conception of art. The description of this journey, the confusion it caused in the artist and the difficult attempt to put his feelings into words are audio-visually very impressively realized in this video work. At the end the statements about art dissolve in fragmentary trains of thought: enraptured the reciter turns away, and the video ends abruptly. (Katja Heckes)