Harry Smith, for instance. The Anthology is a great artistic achievement, and one can’t help but listen to it in the context of Robert Frank’s The Americans, but therein lies the problem. It totally transforms, and in fact aestheticizes its subject. Would any of the musicians compiled in the Anthology have recognized themselves in how they were presented? Why would their own positions be any less legitimate? Why, indeed, does any of this stuff need recognition much less appropriation from the official art world?
Smith and Frank were complex characters, both had reasons to be considered outsiders. But let’s take a look at Smith’s film work and who else constituted his milieu, there was Oskar Fischinger, Stan Brakhage, Warhol, Brecht and so on. In other words, urban avant-gardists. Frank was compared to Diane Arbus, Lisette Model, people at the time who were pushing the edge of what was possible with photography. Certainly not Frank’s subjects, did they not also take photographs?
Look, Smith is one of my favorite artists in any medium especially as far as Americans go but there are problems that go along with the tremendous achievements including that of the Anthology. I don’t mean to exaggerate my criticisms here it is just a standpoint worth considering.
