Against Reason, Volume 2 Tony Smith, Architecture, and Other Modernisms

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.

James Voorhies is a curator and historian of modern and contemporary art based in New York. He is the author of Postsensual Aesthetics and Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 (both MIT Press) and has taught at Bennington College and Harvard University.