"Hakenovsky's Little Nap"

“In November 1999, Smithson presented the installation "Hakenovsky's Little Nap" at the Moltkerei Werkstatt in Cologne. This complex work has an obvious connection to the artist's hooks of earlier days (the German word "Haken" means "hook"). In this installation, a transparent, reclining hook served as an object within a space, from within which the stapled slides of collaged interior and exterior spaces were projected. Thus, the sculpture not only represented space, it indeed became space, which in turn was a projection screen for a myriad of images of additional spaces. Inside became outside and vice-versa; boundaries became blurred and indistinct. Seen in this light, one might say that the artist deconstructed space, and with it (as they are always interconnected) time as well. But time and space were not the only things being deconstructed here. There's the hook that's no longer a hook, but rather a semitransparent projection screen; as well as the sculpture, which is no longer a sculpture, but rather a temporary installation. And what about the slides themselves? By cutting them up and stapling them together in new and irritating combinations, he destroyed not only the film, but also and especially our conventional perception of space and time. Taking this one step further, not only were incongruous images stapled together to create confusing perspectives, but, since the plastic that covered the skeleton of the enormous hook was transparent, these hybrid images mixed together with each other as their projections crossed over and intercepted each other.

Smithson argues that "the images probe how I would like to live, or maybe how I am living in this world". A very confusing world indeed! Or is he merely making reference to his own nomadic existence as an eternal foreigner - an American living in Germany working in Italy and experimenting in Holland. Various cultures and languages with different perspectives and lifestyles that are incongruously congruent. I sometimes think that Smithson is obsessed with being a foreigner, obsessed with living several lives simultaneously. And then I saw an image that delighted me and disturbed me at the same time. In 2000, he created a double portrait by stapling together two separate halves of two different slides - one depicting his father and the other himself. The generation gap is closed as father and son are joined together as one new individual, the staples acting as connectors (circuits), but also as scars between the two personalities. Could this be seen as an attempt to visualise the absurdity of relationships? For in a relationship the primary goal is to become as one. And how many fathers want their sons to follow in their footsteps, to live the lives they couldn't live themselves? How many sons take their fathers as role models? This too is a kind of daily obsession. But this would mean that the individual looses his own identity - the father in the son, and the son in the father; much in the same way that some lovers loose themselves in their partners. Do the two identities merge and really become as one? Or do they remain separate and united simultaneously.

This is something that Smithson has to work out for himself, as do each of us - on a daily basis. But isn't that what's he's talking about in all his work? The fact that we have to question and confront all kinds of truths and truisms on a daily basis? By questioning and contradicting obvious truths, we enter the realm of the absurd. And to really accomplish something, to really get anywhere, we have to become obsessed with this; we have to take one step too far. Throughout his career, David Smithson has done just that - he's taken it one step too far. But by doing so, by stretching the boundaries of his media (as well as those of art history), he's been able to enter a realm that is not as absurd as one might think at first glance. For it has opened new perspectives, new ways of seeing, new ways of looking beyond and contradicting the "obvious truth". Now, what's so absurd about that?”
 
 (Excerpt from the text "Absurd Obsessions" by Gérard Goodrow, in: David Smithson "Absurd Obsessions", Catalogue, 2002)