Against Reason, Volume 2

Original essays and visual arts projects that explore the understudied breadth and richness of American artist Tony Smith’s work in architecture.


Against Reason: Volume 2 is the companion publication to Tony Smith Catalogue Raisonné: Architecture, the second in a two-volume, four-book printed publication series dedicated to Tony Smith’s sculpture and architecture. Edited by curator and historian James Voorhies, Against Reason gathers newly commissioned essays together with visual arts projects by practitioners and critics, including Mario Gooden, Christopher Ketcham, Marta Kuzma, Peter L’Official, R.H. Quaytman, and Jasmine Rault. Their contributions from a wide range of disciplines— from American studies, architecture, and art history to theory, design, and visual art—place Smith’s architectural design work in dialogue with contemporary culture, expanding perspectives on the artist’s canonical work and offering fresh twenty-first-century insights.

The Against Reason books complicate and pluralize the very idea of the catalogue raisonné to challenge the monolithic place these forms have in writing art history by providing a more nuanced and historically rich lens through which the Tony Smith archive and his work can be read. In this case, the dual-publication project is an innovative approach to scholarship that situates Smith within contemporary culture, thus making evident his ongoing relevance in the fields of art and design.Preface
James Voorhies

In-Between Reason: Tony Smith’s Transmutation of Space Architecture and Sculpture
Mario Gooden

Outsider Art: Hawai‘i, Haole Crater, and Tony Smith
Peter L’Official

A Valid Confrontation: Tony Smith and the Socio-Geometries of Urban Space
Christopher Ketcham

Tony Smith’s Queer Architectures: “the inscrutability and the mysteriousness of the thing”
Jas Rault

The Olsen House, Old Quarry, Guilford, Connecticut
Marta Kuzma

My Home: A Pentagon
R. H. Quaytman

The Olsen House, Old Quarry, Guilford, Connecticut
Marta Kuzma

Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgments
Photography CreditsJames Voorhies is an American curator and historian of modern and contemporary art. He has authored several books including Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial (MIT Press, 2023) and Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 (MIT Press, 2017); he is coeditor of a two-volume catalogue raisonné of the work of American artist Tony Smith, and editor of two companion volumes of essays and projects related to Smith (all MIT Press, 2024–2025).Voorhies is based New York, has taught at Bennington College and Harvard University, and holds a PhD in modern and contemporary art history from the Ohio State University, USA.