Classics of Rock: Adam Parker Smith’s Whimsical Approach Squeezes The Satire Out of Classical Sculpture
Adam Parker Smith takes famed—perhaps infamous—sculptures from Greco-Roman antiquity and squishes them. It’s in their squashing that new meanings, and new questions, rise to the surface. “Apollo del Belvedere,” Bernini’s “David,” “Cupid Triumphant”—the artworks Smith “crushes” are all too familiar in the canon. Smith, by crunching them to fit into a one-by-one-square-foot cube shape, defamiliarizes the sculptures, makes them unusual and curious, forces us to look at them another way, and then look again, and again, and again.
When I was eight-years-old, I remember seeing the “Augustus of Prima Porta” in the Vatican on a family vacation to Italy. To my then-untrained eye, it looked big—the sculpture stands over six-feet-tall—and not much else. After hours in the Vatican pouring over art from antiquity, the effect of the white marble sculptures offered diminishing returns. I was ready for the Neapolitan pizza my parents had promised upon entering the museum.
In Smith’s interpretation of “Augustus,” the Roman ruler’s limbs are mangled and twisted. A foot peaks out from the folds of a thigh. A hand wraps unnaturally around a shoulder. That cherubic baby that caught my attention in youth looks as if he’s drowning in a sea of folded marble. I have not seen Smith’s reference sculpture in more than two decades, but his iteration of the work makes me want to take another look.
But reverence is hardly the goal here. Smith’s opus continuously boasts a characteristic humor and irreverence to that which we hold sacred. But we’re not supposed to simply laugh at the sculptures. We’re supposed to think.
“I think humor and death are great counterbalances,” New York-based Smith says. “They are what they are because of one another. Humor sort of exists as a way to repel and digest ideas of death. It’s funny, but also, in a way, what’s happening to the sculptures isn’t funny.”
What Smith is referencing, I think, is the possibility of these sculptures’ destruction. Marble is a hardy material. It must be dug from the earth with dynamite or dynamite-tipped tools. But always looming is the possibility that the art Western culture has come to revere so deeply may one day disappear. What will become of us without the art that for thousands of years has elevated humanity toward the angels rather than beasts?
At all times, there’s a “nagging voice in my head saying, ‘This might be a disaster.'”
Smith grew up far away from all that, in the small Northern California town of Arcata, Population: 18,000. His parents owned a mom-and-pop bicycle shop and lived on an apple orchard. It was by all accounts an idyllic childhood, save for the lack of arts education and culture up north, where much of the economy revolved around growing and selling marijuana.
“That was the only problem really,” Smith says. “I went to a small public school, and there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure for creative development.”
But Smith’s parents were wise. Early on, they tuned into the fact that Smith enjoyed making art—and that he was good at it. “As soon as I could hold a pencil, it was what I wanted to do,” Smith says. Smith admits he “could get corny” about his artistic beginnings. There was “never any sort of pivotal moment” in which he discovered, “Aha! I am Artist!” But there were dribbles of encouragement and glee.
He remembers screwing around at a friend’s house and asking for a pen and pencil. His friend didn’t want to scribble, but his mom yelled at him and said, “Get him some paper and pencils! He’s going to be a famous artist one day.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh jeez, I got to make that come true.’”
Before that friend’s mother died a few years ago, Smith told her the story, which she’d long
forgotten, crediting her, “You may be responsible for the trajectory I’m on.”
It’s little moments like these that arguably make the artist. But it’s also an alchemical force that can’t be entirely explained by human language. Did Smith become an artist because he was good at art? Or did he become an artist because he thought he was good at it? Sometimes, when we grow up thinking we are made for one destiny, the other paths fall away quickly. Had Smith grown thinking he was made to be a carpenter or a tech CEO or a florist, might his path have changed? The natural skills of the child—both a curse and a blessing—often pave our yellow brick roads.
Given his youthful instincts, Smith did what he thought he needed to do: go to graduate school for painting. But after the first year and the “fiftieth devastating critique,” the tides changed. Professors actually came to his studio and said, “You should not be painting.”
It wasn’t that he wasn’t good at painting. He was technically skilled. But he didn’t have anything to say. “I think when one has too many technical facilities, they rely on them in a knee-jerk, automatic way and don’t deeply consider what they’re doing,” Smith says. “There’s no struggle, no risk.”
For Smith, the work he finds himself most drawn to is that in which a “real gamble was made,” that professes “real struggle.” At all times, there’s a “nagging voice in my head saying, ‘This might be a disaster.’”
He decided to take a different direction. Instead of painting, he used the models he painted from for his show—and asked his friends and collaborators to contribute to paintings based off the models. It was his senior thesis show when things finally clicked.
“That sort of has informed the rest of my practice,” he says. “A lot of the work in my exhibitions are not actually fabricated by me. I work, to some degree, in a collaborative nature for most everything I do.”
Let’s get back to Crush, Smith’s smooshed sculptures. Inspired by a year abroad in Italy and “absorbed by osmosis”—they begin as raw marble, cut from a quarry in Carrara, a city in Italy famed for its blue-gray marble.
If you think about it in a sort of cyclical way, [my sculptures] are kind of going back to where they came from.”
…when people are empowered to grow to their strengths, the work is stronger.”
Smith creates the concept and design but leaves the carving to Italian masters. The man that carved the sculptures for Crush was born at the base of a mountain in Carrara. The village he lived was once a holding pen for Roman slaves, Smith says. And even Michaelangelo Buonarroti could have been found casing the grounds of the quarries in Carrara at the turn of the sixteenth century.
“A lot of the sculptures that have been taken from the Roman Forum or Galleria Borghese came from this quarry,” Smith says.
He remembers going up the mountains and the carver pointing out exactly where Bernini’s original stone came from, pointing, “This is Bernini’s, and this is yours.”
“They were just blocks to begin with, his and mine,” Smith says. “If you think about it in a sort of cyclical way, [my sculptures] are kind of going back to where they came from.”
Smith says the marble’s “narrative and history… plays an important role in all this.” It’s a complicated history, indeed. The works of great Greek and Roman sculptors “are highly problematic,” Smith points out. He thinks his squashed sculptures speak to that.
“I think [sculpture from antiquity] has been misrepresented and used to formulate ideas about culture and art and race,” he says. “Originally, all of these sculptures were painted in bright colors and depicted people of darker skin tones. We’ve whitewashed it.”
“It’s a foundation, sure,” he continues. “But only for a certain subsect of the art world.” There are many “foundations” from which great art has been borne, but Greco-Roman art “has been given real significance,” Smith says. “I think some people are starting to come to terms with that.”
Greco-Roman sculpture, after all, is in many ways a very literal, straightforward, and linear way of thinking about and creating art. But to Smith: “It might not be the best thing.” Thus, his sculptures, which both partake and critique.
The Crush sculptures, in many ways, bring his praxis full circle. Smith begins with a 3-D scan of the original sculptures, then works with a computer technician to process “algorithms” that condense the sculpture into cube-like forms. From there, a file is given to the fabrication team in Italy, and a seven-axis CNC-reductive robot carves them into their general forms. (To the neophyte, CNC stands for “computer numerical control.”) Next, a team of specialized artists carves the details by hand—with each carver serving as an expert in his or her form. One does the hair, another does the hands and flowers, and another does the hair, and so on. “They all do their thing in a very Italian way,” Smith says. “Mostly chain smoking.” And at a certain point, Smith explains, the master carvers adopt his projects as their own. “It’s just like a lot of the community-based projects I’ve done,” including his master’s thesis, Smith reflects. “They take on a life of their own. I allow it because even though it might not be the final version I imagined, I find that when people are empowered to grow to their strengths, the work is stronger.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 64. You can get the entire issue in print here. Thanks for supporting our independent publication.
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