Tommy Smits’ work will outlive you, me, and everything we know

According to Tommy Smits, the world divides neatly into two: people who like rocks, and people who don’t. The archaeology-inspired artist-slash-photographer is firmly in the former camp. Following his fresh feature in Glamcult #143, Tommy is unveiling a new altarpiece in his hometown church, a Digging Man tableau that nods to Bosch and Van Eyck while keeping his distinct and peculiar style. His work fossilises photography and aims to become the last artwork on Earth, or at least an unexplainable, ancient, alien-esque artifact for a future archaeologist to find. In his catacomb-adjacent studiospace (a grim hallway filled to the top with his concrete-poured photography), he works with found objects, fossils, bones, toy dinosaurs, his photography, and, as of recently, an air gun he insists is purely for artistic purposes. We felt like investigating his motives. 

It appears to me that you like digging.
That I like…?

Digging.
Well, I’ve done a lot of work in caves, and I worked a lot on mines, and the idea of mining into my own body, and the cave as a sort of origin space of a lot of myths. People used to dig for ochre to decorate themselves. The more sophisticated things became, the deeper they started to dig. So the gold mines were the first mines that really went into the mountain. They found these remnants of very old altars made of bones and whatever inside of them. They found more of them, the deeper they went into the mine, which made me kind of think… in this time, people had like nature gods, like a strange relationship with the environment. One does not simply pick into a mountain; it’s very bad for your karma with the nature gods. So, they placed these altars to appease the nature gods.

Ah, because they were feeling guilt for destroying the mountain.
But the mine still went deeper, right? So, there were more and more of these altars. I envision this sort of fear of the large world around you, and your sort of apologetic attitude towards your actions. But then in the end… You still continue whatever the fuck you’re doing. I see windmills as a sort of symbol of this too. Like, a big electric windmill, for me, is a bit of an altar to sort of appease something that you are afraid of. 

It’s like, if we put this windmill here, then maybe we can sort of chill with the eco-friendliness. We can still use our phones and fly all the time.
Yeah. I mean, they do produce power. They are great inventions. But in the end, they’re just, like, super monumental symbols of us… Well, appeasing the nature gods.

Tell me about your work “Conquest of Paradise”, about the Digging Man?
In essence, I want to make an altarpiece like works like Het Lam Gods and Jeroen Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, very big monumental sort of storytelling sculptures that are not afraid to sort of tell some very large stories. They have a religious connotation, but they’re not really religious paintings. They’re just massive stories. My dream is to see if you can make a story like that with only found photography and found objects. So I’m just collecting a lot of stuff and making photographs into objects and turning them into a big story about… digging. It’s an altar piece for the church in Eindhoven, the Catharinakerk. It started as a collaboration between me and the Erfgoedhuis in Eindhoven. I’m friends with an archaeologist there who gives me some archaeological waste, stuff that’s in their depot that they can’t really use. 

What kind of things?
If you’re building on a building site and they find some form of pottery, the building site has to be shut down. So they collect the pottery and they label it, and they put it in a city archive. So there’s like a mix of a lot of historically very old stuff, like fire axes and medieval stuff. Also, more recent trash. But there’s also just a lot of stuff that’s just not so valuable, that kind of clogs up their archive, and they cannot get rid of it.

I see. I think it’s also interesting that you used the word sculptures to describe Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Jan van Eyck’s Het Lam Gods, because traditionally, I think I would describe it as a painting. But I think exactly what your work is all about is turning a traditionally 2D medium into a 3D object, I guess.
That’s true. I mean, photography is super flat. I always like to turn that into a sculptural object because they have the idea of sort of permanence to it. Flat things don’t really have that.

Interesting – what does preservation mean to you?
I like history, and the more I learn about history, the more I don’t want to die and would rather live multiple lives. A finished work crystallises a thought or mood or moment in my little life that I can look back on, and sort of accept to let go of that fleeting moment, externalising it as an object, or rather keeping it as a souvenir.

What’s your relationship to spirituality or religion? As you’re exhibiting something in a church.
Well, it would be crazy to be a Catholic poster boy artist again. They’ve been gone for a long time. I was raised Catholic, but I’m not making work from that perspective. I just like to install my works in spaces that have a sort of sacral meaning to them. When I usually work in nature, it’s like I install works on mountains, or in caves, or in deserts, and look for sublime places. For me, the church is a bit the same, but then it’s a man-made structure. I mean, if you go into a big Catholic church, you have to recognise the sort of genius of their building.

In a way, it also makes me think of a cave with stalactites. It has a similar grandeur.
It’s really made to make you immediately shut up.

Exactly.
And also, early cave paintings have the same effect. For some reason, the darkness and this underground feeling evoke something in people, a sense of fear, but also ease, I guess. It’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Yeah, maybe awe is the right word. [Contextual description: Tommy is pacing up and down his hallway, occasionally stopping to smoke out of his window before retreating to his studio for a better internet connection. The walls of the hallway are laden with his work, and it seems to kill the signal entirely.] 

Wow, your hallway looks incredible.
Yeah, this is my hall of meaning. All my work is just here, as you can see. 

What role does your studio or immediate space play in your process? Did you choose for it to be so cave-like?
It’s a place to be a complete loser and god. A place where no one can interrupt me. I cannot even interrupt myself, not even the urge to eat or socialise. My studio feels like a physical version of the iconic soundtrack “Donkey Kong Country Aquatic Ambiance”.

It looks like the catacombs in Paris, with all your work hanging in this dark little hallway.
It’s a bit similar. I like all underground places. The catacombs, I loved it. My studio hallway is also a bit like a mine shaft. But that’s just by accident. 

Do you remember the first time that you buried a piece of your work? Did you ever uncover the piece later, or is the piece being hidden forever part of the art?
Nice question. The first work I installed disappeared after a few weeks. It was a frame for the sun, it was a big concrete circle, and I put it on a hill on the dune, and then the sun would set, and it would be exactly in the middle. In these moments, you really feel like a romantic painter, sort of in the wild, and you’re like, everything comes together, it has to happen now, and it’s very like if you’re in an exciting photoshoot, and there’s, like, stress, you know?  And afterwards, this work disappeared, and it was such a traumatic experience. I kept looking for it for so long, and at one point I realised it’s really gone.

Maybe one of our readers reads this article and is like, Oh, fuck, I have that. I hope somehow you can find it!
Oh, yeah, please reach out, because it’s still very difficult for me. 

So if an archaeologist in 300 years uncovered one of your pieces, what would you want them to think it was?
I have the idea of this game where you place work in the wild, and it will be found by a future archaeologist or an alien archaeologist, and you can convince them that it’s a relic from the past. But at the same time, I think it is actually also a relic of the past. Like, whether I sort of try to larp being a real object or not – it will be an artifact of our current times. Because the images and materials used are a mix of very old stuff and very recent stuff. But for me, they do tell a story just about the world today, how I see it. I guess figuring out the meaning of it will be a problem for future people to solve. They have to figure out how our culture worked and the problems we dealt with and how it was all connected to each other. For example, to go back to Jeroen Bosch, these paintings were also made in a very weird transition time where religion changed a lot and became extreme in some parts, people were very afraid of the future. But they were also not aware of it at the time.

I think in hindsight, you can also articulate the zeitgeist of this era differently or maybe better than we can explain it now. Or worse perhaps, like when we interpret the meaning of cave drawings. Were they just someone’s doodles, or was this appealing to gods… or are we just projecting significance onto something that might’ve been as trivial to them as a random scribble is to us?
Definitely. But then, even if it was a doodle, it’s very weird that people only doodle once in a thousand years. Another case of work that is inexplicable are Dolmen, these big, solitary rocks that are just put upright. If you stand in front of a really good one, a really old one, it’s just very, very crazy to be in that presence, I would say.

And the idea is that a human did it?
Yeah. Nobody knows why the fuck everybody did that. You find them all across the world and especially in France and South England. So it’s like the first act of art that really prevailed in a way, but it has lost its meaning entirely. In the end, that’s my dream, to be the only artwork left. Because there’s only a handful of cave paintings. So there must be a lot of stuff that just went missing along the way. And there’s also a lot of art right now and a lot of like beautiful things. But I mean, you don’t need to be the most beautiful, you just need to outlast them, right? Then you have the final word.

The only way to become the voice of your generation, the voice of your zeitgeist.
Would be nice. But what I actually like about it is that I would love to, in a way, find a way to conserve photography in the end. It’s being conserved very well in depots and climate-controlled spaces. But that’s very based on how we live right now. If the power is out already, you can get mould, and the objects will go bad, and it will disappear in a couple of hundred years. But if you find a way to conserve it in material… to make an actual physical fossil of it, it can last millions of years. Because nothing we’ve built can last even a hundred thousand years. My dream is to make something to last a million years. 

I first came across your work ‘A Desk with a View’. Was that the first piece that got you wider recognition?
A classic. I mean, in the Instagram world, I guess, yes. I was in Italy making it together with Marijn, my girlfriend, we were cycling back to the Netherlands, I just posted it while we were in some very rainy place and we could not get out. We had no tent, we were just like miserable, and then for some reason the thing went viral.

And why do you think it resonated so much with the way that it did?
I have no idea. It’s a nice work, nice picture, it feels very robust and it feels very sort of like as if it’s been there forever. But why it went viral… I mean, ask Mark Zuckerberg.

It feels like it’s from an ancient era, but clearly it can’t be that old because there are pictures, so it feels alienesque. I guess it messes with your mind a little bit. You’ve been turning photos into artefacts, relics even, that portray quite light-hearted or humorous subjects. What makes a photo feel worth turning into a sculpture? When do you feel like this image is important enough to keep forever?
That’s a very good question. It’s this unexplainable element. I mean, there’s like formal qualities I like about images, you know, how much background there is, where the subject is, what is going on, but in the end, what makes it pop is just… it speaks to you in a way. It’s a very clear image that resonates, and it’s a very innocent, mundane thing. However, I often see darker references or things that are perhaps not so innocent or just absurd.

Funny, because most of the images that I see in your work are very campy. I thought you might have chosen them from the perspective of combining ‘low art’ (an advertisement never meant as art) to elevate it as high art… What do you mean by darker references?
I mean, there are advertisement pictures of lawnmowers that I really liked for a long time. They were very well-made in the 90s and the zeroes, and they’re very innocent images of people, happy, beautiful people, mowing their lawn. But then if you read a bit into the image, then I also see the urge to assert dominance over each other or over animals or over their environment.

Interesting. What about stone do you like so much that you want to turn an image into it? And how do they shape the meaning of the piece?
It’s hard to argue with a rock. And it gives me foundational strength and joy to look at the outcome of millions of years of decay and deformation. The mediums are just very, very opposite. It’s like a stone is just so old, and a photograph, it cannot even be outside for a week and it will be gone. But the stone… I like stones, you know, you have a large group of people that just like stones.. I would say you can divide the world by people that like stones and people that don’t really think about them. So it starts with just connecting them and just looking at them. I have a lot of stones, like lying around here that are just, yeah, nice to have. And they’re also different. They have their own structure, their own weight, and they’re formed over, you cannot even imagine how long. They give weight to this very weightless medium of photography in a very literal way. Picture frames are made to be very portable and hangable. We take a thousand photographs because it weighs nothing, except that your phone is constantly full and you need to delete stuff to use your apps. But to combine it with stone and to give it a real weight makes me also choose and look at photographs differently. Because it makes you really selective. To own a photograph that weighs 20 kilos is a different choice.

Yeah, exactly. It’s funny to divide the world into people who like stones and people who don’t like stones, as a sort of new gender binary.
I think it would solve a lot of identity problems.

Might be true. So what’s the last thing that you found and held on to? Do you collect a lot of things for your personal archive?
I have a lot of cabinets and a lot of boxes with a lot of stuff that I find and resort to. These are all boxes full of plastic dinosaurs, plastic soldiers, big rocks, small rocks… These are all bones from mammals from the ice age. But the most recent thing is I got a gun. I saw it and I could not let go. We went to Belgium, and there they sell them a lot in these flea markets, right? 

In a way, it makes me think of your story about lawnmowers. A gun has the same quality of trying to control, or the possibility of controlling life.
Yeah. At the same time it’s just a piece of beautiful carved wood with a metal. It’s just a bit too bad that we like it a bit too much.

Are you going to shoot something or are you going to make something with it?
Well, yeah, I mean, first I wanted to make shooting art. But I also just like to shoot at this target for a very long distance. I found out that I’m actually a really good shot. It fits me.

Maybe you can shoot into a stone. Leave your mark forever.
This gun cannot shoot into the stone. I mean, it’s not really a real gun. It’s not that I’m carrying illegal firearms. It’s an air gun.

Lol.
Yeah. I also don’t want to be in Glamcult with an illegal gun. Weapons, I think they’re so beautiful, but it’s just I don’t know why I have this interest in them. And I also don’t think it’s a very good quality to have because the only thing you can do is like shoot yourself accidentally at one point or someone else. 

And how do you decide if an object you find, like a plastic dinosaur or a little soldier or whatever, is suitable to feature in your works?
So I have a lot of stuff, as you see in that room, and it’s all organised. So it’s like also just a bit of borderline hoarding, I guess. In the beginning, it was just hoarding.

You collect anything that has any form of sort of resonance in your mind. So now I’m becoming more and more critical. But I still cannot redefine what it is that I like. It’s the same as with pictures. You just see it and it activates sort of an extra extra. Oh, yeah. Like this. This thing. I need to have it. [Tommy holds up a 2-parted piece of rusty metal chain]. 

I get that. In an era where so much art is digitally consumed and created, how do you see your analog, physical work speaking back to that system?
I’m getting wrecked in my eyeballs every day from looking at brainrot, even I can’t escape. I’m addicted to seeing beautiful things since I started with photography. It’s the eye that drives us and the visuals we like. Sculpture has given me the option of achieving that without leaving the room. And giving photographs, I value a physical life. Working with these works to place them in remote locations is a very physical and sometimes daunting task. It has happened more than once that what starts as a small doodle sketch on Tuesday night ends up with me in a situation on a mountain with this sculpture and a portable flash studio, battling the elements and gravity. And those moments I do live for. 

Anything else that’s keeping you excited lately? An artist, a book, a sound or something that you’ve experienced?
My girlfriend. She is a very important part of my practice, and we go out together to caves, and she’s part of all these expeditions. And something that recently sort of revived since I’ve worked on this altar, and I went more to the church, I started to go more to church and it was just such a sick experience. I was just like, finally a place where you could just be and like not have to fucking think about anything. So it’s just the church and my girlfriend.

The answers of a very traditional, well-raised man.
And you, do you have something that you get inspiration from lately?

Good question. I’ve recently taken up sports for the first time in my life. I’ve been playing soccer. It’s taught me a lot about people, especially. And visually… I’ve been very drawn to horses lately.
Horses are crazy. They are majestic. 

Right. Now with the confidence I gained from soccer, I decided I want to take up horse riding.
That’s what soccer does to you. Makes you believe in yourself, right?

Makes you believe you can ride a horse.
I was in Bulgaria looking for caves, but then I was on this mountain top, and I heard something and it was a group of six wild-ish horses.

Wow.
They just came thumping to the forest and it was so insane. I never really thought about horses that much, but then I was like, wow. I understand why people say they’re like noble animals because they’re just so smart. I took my camera and I flashed and they were like, fuck this guy. They thumped away, but I was like, take me with you.

And just like that, Tommy’s off again, looking for caves, chasing wild horses, and figuring out how to turn photography into a fossil.