Hear the Student (y1969-19)

Hello, my name is Laura Herman and I am a member of Princeton’s class of 2018. In the fall of 2014, I took a freshman seminar titled “Historic Gardens and Designed Landscapes” with professor William Barksdale Maynard. For my final project, I studied David Smith’s Cubi XIII and the way it relates to the environment around it. Smith’s artistic philosophy hinged on discordance and harsh asymmetry, and his sculptures create stark contrasts with nature, provoking an uneasy sense of non-belonging. He often used the landscape as an incongruous background to enliven his objects, many of which incorporate discarded machine parts, setting them apart from nature. Smith saw nature and industry as mutually exclusive; he established himself as an ally of industry by exaggerating its separation from nature. Although his sculptures are placed in a landscape, to Smith, this placement did not mean that his sculptures were interacting with the landscape. In fact, he specifically chose a natural setting to highlight the very lack of interaction between his works and the surrounding environment. As seen in Cubi XIII, Smith’s works create many juxtapositions: steel structure against hills and forests, linear abstract forms next to open sky, the familiar and the unknown, communal and singular, presence and absence. The surface of Cubi XIII reflects the leaves and nature around it, glistening with the colors of the current season. In this way, Smith’s sculpture ironically reflects, both literally and figuratively, on the nature around it.