The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art

When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get onto the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first, I didn’t know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression in art. The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. Later I discovered some abandoned airstrips in Europe – abandoned works, surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition. Artificial landscapes without cultural precedent began to draw on me. There is a drill ground in Nuremberg, large enough to accommodate two million men. The entire field is enclosed with high embarkments and towers. The concrete approach is three sixteen-inch steps, one above the other, stretching for a mile or so.

Tony Smith, 1966.