He went west. In 1973 he was teaching in New Mexico when Robert Smithson showed up, demanding that Shafrazi take him to see the collector Stanley Marsh, who had a ranch near Amarillo called the Hidden Art Ranch. "He kind of forced the idea of doing something on Stanley," Shafrazi says. "So Stanley flew us in a private plane over the land and Bob was seeing things in the landscape that was whizzing by. He knew he had it when he saw the lake.

What Smithson saw was a fortlike structure, and he had a name for it. He had thought of giving it a contemporary twist by calling it The Watergate, but settled on The Amarillo Ramp. Marsh said he would make the money and labor available. Smithson flew back to New York, got into a fierce argument with Joseph Kosuth, who thought Earthworks were much too material, and flew back out west. He sent Kosuth a postcard: a photo of a hearse. Smithson wrote HERE'S AN "IDEA" FOR YOU on the card.

Stanley Marsh had loaned a little house to Smithson, his wife, Nancy, and Shafrazi. They would stay up late, working on the plans. "Then he persuaded Stanley to rent the plane again to take more aerial views. I went up with him. It wasn't right for what they wanted to do, which was to tip over and have a look at the lake, 'cause the windows were above the wing and it was too fast," Shafrazi says.

"The feeling was really horrible. Yet Bob was sort of laughing and giggling. He would give these beady-eyed reptilian giggles. Smithson liked this - the whole thing of entropy, this experience of the stomach dropping. It was all part of his art. You know, Humpty-Dumpty." It is also worth remembering that LSD was Smithson's drug of choice that time.

A second flight had been arranged for the following morning. Shafrazi declined. He had, he says, a horrible dream. "And in my dream I realized that I had to get up, wake up, and stop him from going. And I couldn't do it! I heard a voice. Now I'm sure that it was Bob, calling out, to see if I wanted to go. But it was impossible to go." The next thing he knew he was being woken by the Marshes. There had been a crash. Smithson was dead.

"I felt I was hallucinating," Shafrazi says. "Maybe it was all planned. A conspiracy. Some peculiar thing or other." A look at the site convinced him it was pilot error, and he went back to New York.

The art world was in shock. "There was a wake, and then a huge party. Sol LeWitt and people were saying, `well, what are you going to do?'"

In the event, Shafrazi, Nancy Smithson, and Richard Serra went to Texas, drained the lake, and spent forty-five days building The Amarillo Ramp with heavy machinery. But as far as Shafrazi was concerned, no exorcism occurred. He returned to Manhattan. "It seemed that art was truly ineffective in this world of politics and chaos," he says. "This was the culmination of Watergate. Something had to be confronted.

"From October until that spring - five months - I concentrated on the idea of the written word, applying it to something else. Because it was meaningless on a piece of paper." The "something else" he had decided to write on were the greatest paintings in the Museum of Modern Art.

"In my head the great masters were looming like icons. The pictures I had in mind were from this century. From Malevich's White on White to Duchamp all the way to Jackson Pollock and Johns's Flag. All the noble examples. The idea to write on these paintings was tremendously terrifying. I felt I had to let the words speak, and speak the most terrifying message. Almost like a sneer." Shafrazi began scribbling phrases into notebooks. The one he chose came from Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It was: "Lies. All lies."

He arranged for a call to the Associated Press in enough time to report the action but not to alert the museum, and computed that this would leave him three minutes, which would not be time enough to deface all the paintings he had in mind. "I had to pick one painting," he says. "It didn't matter whether the subject matter was appropriate, but it was. It was Guernica. It was at the top of the stairs.

"I took a spray can. The most convenient thing, really. It was red. Cherry-red. There were about forty people looking at the painting, and I had to cross the invisible threshhold that's there. You never cross that! And once you do touch that surface, that tabooed surface, it's like you're a child and could be hit on the head.

"So I wrote LIES ALL. And then I had reached the end of the painting. So I went to the front. It was a matter of writing a clean sentence. So I wrote KILL."

Shafrazi, who had feared his action might trigger the guards, who might or might not be armed, stepped back from the disfigured canvas. "A guard approached and I hand him the can," he says. "Everything was in frozen stages ... more guards came ... and the head of security came and he was pretty obnoxious. I mean he really was ... They took me into a men's bathroom and searched me.... I had my passport and travelers' checks. I was thinking from here I would go to prison.

"And as we came out, there were already four or five people in white coats cleaning it. And, oh, many, many press were there to ask my name, and how to spell it. I said, `I am an artist!'"