Jack Smith
Jonas Mekas, champion of the New American Cinema, wrote, ‘I have often been asked to explain … the meaningless, stupid, absurd movies of Ken Jacobs or Jack Smith’. Smith’s films resist definitive explanation, offering, in Mekas’ words, ‘non-verbal intelligence … the beauty of the silly … an impression of rough chunks of something huge’. This exhibition of works at the Lawrence O’Hana Gallery testified to these edifying ambivalences in Smith’s practice.
A show in two parts, it consisted of a series of photographs by Norman Solomon of Smith and his cast in the production of his masterpiece Flaming Creatures (1962), accompanied by a comprehensive programme of film screenings. The film season was a fine opportunity to see rare Smith gems, as well as other pioneering movies by Jacobs, Ron Rice and others, each featuring endearingly unhinged performances from Smith. This will have been the last chance to see many of these films for some time, as Smith’s estate, The Plaster Foundation, is embroiled in a much publicized legal battle over ownership, with estate handlers Penny Arcade and J. Hoberman being challenged by estranged family members newly interested in the potential windfall offered by the artist’s burgeoning popularity.
Smith’s work has indeed attracted a steady growth in attention since his large-scale retrospective at P.S.1 in 1997–8. He is credited with being a crucial influence on key iconoclasts of his generation, including John Waters, Andy Warhol, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson; his loft performances, slide shows and eccentric writings also gained him a small but devoted following until his AIDS-related death in 1989. Largely forgotten through the early 1990s, the recent critical and popular revision of Smith’s work has elevated him to cult status and continues to further the acknowledgement of his centrality in the developments not only of avant-garde film but also of Performance art, experimental theatre and early colour photography. This particular show, one of a recent spate of small exhibitions and screenings in London and New York, contributed admirably to the critical understanding of his practice, contrasting documents of the production process with the films themselves. These photos – the only extant photographic documentation – show a palpable calm by mostly representing moments of repose and preparation, where the ‘creatures’ slip out of their calculated performances of violence, erotic excess and horseplay.
Wilfully transgressing punitive codes of moral decency, social comportment, and – God forbid – the imposition of narrative sense, Smith’s creatures embellished barely scripted routines with inspired improvisation, indulging in schlock brutality, puerile clowning, sexual prurience and generally playing the fool. By showing us the placid interludes in Smith’s ring-led inanity, Solomon’s photos exaggerate the artifice of his visionary stagings. Documents such as these, like photos of musicians or actors in backstage repose – an exemplar being the work of Peter Hujar, an exact contemporary of Smith’s – emphasize the transformative élan of some modes of performance and frame it as strategy.
Transformation and the overcoming of set-backs are key themes in Smith’s work; he consistently exploits the creative potential of adversity, carrying out little triumphs of disaster, abuses of failure and constructive violations of good technique. Cases in point are his use of stolen, out-of-date film stock for Flaming Creatures, accidentally achieving a yellowed and quaintly ‘historical’ texture, and transforming a piece of sticky tape stuck in the camera gate, lazily visible throughout Scotch Tape (1959), into a defining innovation. Similarly Smith’s later films are structured so that remnants of humdrum daily life are reconfigured as the ‘moldy’, the decadent, the hypocritical and the socially retrograde. Here, in a twist of sorts on the customarily ‘avant-garde’ project of denaturalizing the familiar, the mundane is presented only in its overwhelmed relation to the extravagance and excess of his creatures in their celluloid superstar turns. In No President (1969), for example, this relation is put to work to expose the limitations of liberal politics, with characteristically off-centre and indeterminately interpretable results. Smith collages footage of a hospitalized baby-fetishist being teased by a hag in horror-drag with the televised presidential campaign of Wendell Willkie, clips of a courting débutante singing muted ditties of happy love and vanilla sex, floppy dicks soaking in champagne flutes, a tribal fishing documentary and Andy Warhol’s Batman/Dracula (1964).
Other films, especially Flaming Creatures and Overstimulated (1960), work to eliminate totally the tawdry consolations of domestic culture, opting to give free rein to constructing on-screen convolutions of sexual fetish and unseemly erotic fantasy. Running amok, Smith declines any categorical impulse in the sense of a ‘containment of perversions’, and opts for the creation of a sex-coloured filmic world inhabited by flaming wretches ruined for normal love, licked by deviations too outlandish for any disciplinary science.
