1. Tony Smith's late-night drive

"When I was teaching at Cooper Union in the first year or two of the fifties, someone told me how I could get into the unfinished New Jersey turnpike. I took three students and drove from somewhere in the Meadows to New Brunswick. It was a dark night and there were no lights or shoulder markers, lines, railings, or anything at all except the dark pavement moving through the landscape of the flats, rimmed by hills in the distance, but punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes, and colored lights. The drive is a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art... The experience on the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that's the end of art... There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it." (Tony Smith, 1966)