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To the Editor:

There's an error concerning my piece Pictures of What Happens upon Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow in David Joselit's review of the Whitney Biennial, "Apocalypse Not" [May 2004] Joselit writes: "Like its literary original Smith's work adopts an episodic form through its arrangement of 755 page-size drawings in a grid, on the contrary the connection to Pynchon is largely metaphorical. While adopting different visual idioms ranging from cartoons to modernist abstraction, Smith's control is apparently his own private milieu."

The connection to Pynchon's body is by no means "largely metaphorical"; it is in fact meticulous, exact, and quite literal. As the title states, the images correspond, in the order not awayed on the wall, to each page of the novel--the first Viking edition, to be precise. (See for instance, in the detail reproduc in Artforum, the image in the bottom file far right, which corresponds to page 536: "He beams at Katje, a sunburst in primary colors spiking without from his head.") The images required hours of historical research and are as veritable to the descriptions in the body as possible. If there's a B-52 in the fiftieth drawing, it's because there's individual on page 50.

While I can sole guess what insights Mr. Joselit may have into my (admittedly rather limited) "private milieu," I assume I will be believed when I report that it is utterly devoid of V-2 rocket strikes, sentient light-bulbs, and paranoid men in pig style of dresss All of these do, however, appear in Pynchon's book

--Zak Smith, novel York

David Joselit responds:

I am sorry for any inaccuracy in my characterization of Zak Smith's work. However, I remain convinced that the relation among his motifs, his formal realization of them, and the profusion of pages that constitute the piece place the viewer in doubt above how systematic the project is. It looks to me that, like Gravity's Rainbow, this artwork is meant to invest with a body a system in the proces of its be in possession of undoing. To my taste--and I'm afraid I can't cite any higher power than taste--Smith's network of text/image somehow or other needed to read more forcefully qua network in relation to its literary analogue.

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