Correspondence #31: Steven Taylor

Harry Smith, the Beats and the Whitney

THE WHITNEY Museum of American Art has enjoyed a prominent place in the cultural life of New York City since the 1930s. The institution also made a significant contribution to the history of the Beat Generation when, in 1995, it welcomed a major touring exhibition ‘Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965’.

By hosting the Beat show, the Whitney, founded by and named for prominent socialite and sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was credited with helping to promote an upsurge of interest in Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and the other writers and artists of that community, when there was a feeling quite widely that concern with their lives and work had actually declined.

The museum has led a peripatetic life, siting itself at various locations over many decades. In 1978, when I last visited the venue, its home was on the Upper East Side at Madison Ave and 75th St. This millennium has seen a massive switch with operations, from 2015, shifting to a purpose-built setting in the West Village and Meatpacking District of Lower Manhattan.

Pictured above: Whitney Museum of American Art

And it is there, in a position adjacent to the southern entrance of High Line park, that an important retrospective of the work of the bohemian folklorist, musicologist and artist Harry Smith is currently housed. ‘Fragments of the Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith’ continues at the Whitney until February 2024.

Harry Smith was a determined outsider yet his output in various mediums was influential on New York’s downtown culture from the 1950s and his legendary Anthology of American Folk Music became a seminal compilation for that generation of performers, including of course Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, who emerged in the US folk boom of the later 1950s and 1960s.

Smith was a long time Chelsea Hotel resident and, as a member of that eclectic gallery of guests, encountered and befriended various key Beat individuals – Gregory Corso and Burroughs – and also connected with other creative forces from Sam Shepard to Ed Sanders, Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith and more. Interestingly, his first contact with Ginsberg occurred much earlier at a Thelonious Monk gig in 1958.

Pictured above: Harry Smith, artist, outsider, influencer

Two days ago, we carried a review of John Szwed’s new biography of the artist, Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, penned by Allen Ginsberg’s long-time musical accompanist Steven Taylor. Taylor knew Smith, who died in 1991, and will form part of the supporting events arranged to place the Whitney exhibition in context.

On December 10th, Taylor will be joined by the great post-Beat poet Anne Waldman to talk about the man in a live museum panel. He has shared some notes with Rock and the Beat Generation explaining his participation and outlining his personal thoughts about the Smith celebration…

Email, November 30th, 2023

Hi Simon,

The Whitney built a magnificent new building, designed by Renzo Piano, on the west side of the Village, overlooking the river. 

It's on the High Line, which is an old elevated railway that used to service the long-gone slaughterhouses and food warehouses of that district, and is now repurposed as a walkway for tourists.

It is kee-razy to sit in the room on the fifth floor where they have Harry's Anthology playing constantly, and face the wall of glass high above the West Side Highway and look out over the river to the Jersey side.

I invited Harry's ghost to go there with me, but he wouldn't be caught dead among that sort of crowd.

My own contribution is part of a longer program called My Harry, which runs from 11am-5pm on Sunday, December 10th at the museum. I will be on at 4 for roughly an hour with Anne Waldman. The title of our bit is ‘Changing the Frequency’ (Not my idea for a title, but I'll go with it). 

The curator just wrote to propose that they show a video that I shot in 1991, before or during our talk. Context: When Harry died, Ginsberg asked me to go to Harry's room at the Chelsea Hotel and make a kind of video inventory of the contents.

There was barely space between stacks of books to stand in one place and slowly scan the bookshelves; the neat towers of volumes; the boxes of cassette tapes, his ambient recordings, arranged on the bed; the blood flecks coughed on the carpet, the Ukrainian eggs on a side table, and the drawer where he kept his weed. 

Allen had asked (I believe) Stan Brackhage, who was then on the film faculty at University of Colorado, to similarly record the contents of Harry's cottage at Naropa. That was Allen's genius, to collect the minute particulars. 

Best wishes,

Steven

See also: ‘Book review #19: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, November 29th, 2023