Stan_cz presents ... Jack Smith Day

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In a perfect world November 14, 1932 would be a major international holiday, since on this day, in Columbus, Ohio, one of the 20th or any other century’s greatest artists was born. One of those special creatures who didn’t just create art, but lived it with every breath and thought. I am referring to Jack Smith, godfather of performance art, visionary independent filmmaker, creator of incandescent photography and legend of the New York underground. Jack stood for art in all its purity and everything he did, from painstakingly painting and furnishing his apartment to collecting junk from the streets of Downtown New York to decorate the sets of his plays and performances, formed the largest work of art that was his life. And then, he also influenced all of us.

The creation of an aesthetic

Jack Smith always had a very particular vision in his mind. It was his goal to create an aesthetic delirium in all his work. Every element was handpicked and –crafted. For his performances, plays and films Smith collected a wide variety of gowns, dresses, jewels and props from the streets, redesigned them and incorporated them into his work. Everything was self-made, such as the black flower vase visible in some background shots in “Flaming Creatures”, which Smith painted on a nine feet square.

This element of total authorship and control was something that Smith shared with one of his soul mates, the German-born Hollywood director Josef Von Sternberg. In the Film Culture issue #31 (Winter 1963-64) Smith’s Belated Appreciation of V.S. was printed. In this article, which is actually more of an aesthetic manifesto, Smith bemoans the fact that most people judge films by their plots and ignore their visual expressivity. He notes that the bad plots that Von Sternberg was forced to tell were unnecessary since his films already had them “inherent in the images.” Furthermore, Smith says that Von Sternberg “lived in a visual world”, which can just as well be applied to Smith himself, who was always suspicious of verbal explanations of works of art and thus came to ridicule and ignore critics (such as Susan Sontag or Jonas Mekas).

Smith also explained his unique philosophy of acting in that particular article, writing that “a bad actor is rich, unique, idiosyncratic, revealing of himself not of the bad script. Select the right bad actor and you can have a visual revelation very appropriate to the complex of ideas and sets of qualities that make up your film.” The actor thereby exposed his personality on film, which is exactly what Smith wanted.

And then there was Smith’s muse, Maria Montez, the “Queen of Technicolor” who starred in such escapist swashbucklers as “Arabian Nights”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Cobra Woman”. It was Montez’ independence and transcendence that Smith admired. Smith had always been highly suspicious of old-fashioned acting, memorizing of dialogue and recitation. He championed Montez’ inability to act, because it laid bare her idiosyncratic personality on the screen in a pure way.

Another less-often noted source of inspiration for Smith was the collage artist, sculptor and para-surrealist filmmaker Joseph Cornell. Ken Jacobs, who by then already had a falling out with Smith, was socializing with Cornell and helped him with some of his work as an assistant. One day Cornell lent Jacobs his original print of the 1936 film Rose Hobart (which at its premiere in Julian Levy’s NYC gallery enraged Salvador Dalí, who said that it was exactly the kind of film he had planned to make and that Cornell stole it from his dreams). Jacobs was so overwhelmed by what he saw that he decided to break the ice and call Smith to show him the film. Showing “Rose Hobart” to Smith was important to Jacobs than harboring their bad relationship. When Smith arrived at Jacobs’ apartment the two started to study the film extensively. “We looked at it in every possible way: on the ceiling, in mirrors, bouncing it all over the room, in corners, in focus, out of focus, with a blue filter that Cornell had given me, without it, backwards. It was just like an eruption of energy” said Jacobs (Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, second edition (New York; Oxford University Press, 1979)). Later, in his book of photography called “The Beautiful Book”, Smith made reference to “the previously greatest movie on earth, Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart film.”

As film critic J. Hoberman once wrote in a review of “Rose Hobart” in the Village Voice, the film’s influence was apparent in both “Flaming Creatures” and Jacobs’ “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” from 1969: “In a spirit similar to the Cornell film, ‘Flaming Creatures’ presented exotic Hollywood-style imagery (and ‘found’ musical accompaniment) without narrative restraint, while ‘Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son’ followed Cornell’s lead in using a pre-existent film as the ready-made material for a new one” (J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 10/26/1980).

Yet Smith didn’t just admire visual artists, he also very well read – more than most people expected of him. Smith particularly admired the playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Henrik Ibsen (whose “Ghosts” he staged at his apartment/theatre the Plaster Foundation). What he liked about them was their criticism of institutions, often respectable ones, who corrupted individuals and gave them the power to commit evil acts. This worldview corresponded very much with Smith’s own, who referred to institutions as the “real criminals” and had a lifelong hatred for any kind of authority, particularly landlords. Smith was also quite outspoken about the dangers and evils of capitalism. In aninterview with Semiotext(e) Smith even suggested that the magazine should rather name itself “Hatred of Capitalism” (which became the title of a Semiotext(e) anthology book).

This mixture of love for baroque visual art, disregard of conventional narrative and anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics formed the basis of Smith’s work to come.

Filmmaking

Smith got started in filmmaking in 1959 with “Scotch Tape”, because he “wanted delirium…uhhh, the tweekyeffluvium of my photographs” (Film Culture No. 78 (Summer 1994), P. 14). Smith took his friend Ken Jacobs’ Bell & Howell camera to a construction site in Manhattan and started filming an hyperactive dance of Jacobs and Jerry Sims amid and around the concrete that was to become Lincoln Center. Three years later Smith instructed his roommate Tony Conrad to sync the Peter Duchin rumba “Carinhoso” up with the footage from 1959. The resulting fusion of sound and image inspired Conrad so much that he decided to become a filmmaker himself.

“Scotch Tape” is Smith’s first attempt to cinematically capture the exuberant frenzy that defined his work. The artist’s bohemian sensibility is set up from the start. He finds utopian joy in a junkyard with two innocent creatures cavorting through it dressed in found gowns and dresses. Furthermore, the film shows Smith’s acceptance of unforeseeable mistakes, here exemplified by the piece of dirty scotch tape that was caught in the camera gate during the filming. In that regard we can already see Smith foreshadowing his most ardent admirer and pupil, Andy Warhol. Yet despite the brevity and imperfection of this work, we see Smith, already in his first cinematic work, creating a microcosm of his own and enlivening it with rhythmic energy. The visible scotch tape in the frame continually reminds us of the film’s artificiality, yet Smith’s delirious rhythms take over and transports us into the exotic wasteland of Smith’s unbounded imagination.

After “Scotch Tape” Smith filmed a 6-minute long silent piece called “Overstimulated” in which Jerry Sims and “Blonde Cobra” collaborator Bob Fleischner jump up and down in front of a TV set. Nowadays almost impossible to see, Smith later included the footage in “Horror and Fantasy at Midnight” which then became “No President”.

In 1963 the earth must’ve been shaking, because Jack Smith unleashed his magnum opus “Flaming Creatures” on the world. “Flaming Creatures” was shot on the roof of the Windsor Theater at 412 Grand Street, New York, which, alas, no longer exists. How Smith got the permission to film there? He knew photographer and filmmaker Richard Preston, tenant of the loft above the theater. His studio was used by Smith and his actors as a dressing and preparation room.

“Flaming Creatures” is well known for its faded black and white look, which was an intentional choice of Smith’s. To achieve this extraordinary effect, Smith stole outdated film stock from the Camera Barn and thereby achieved the haunted, ethereal imagery. The most famous scene of “Flaming Creatures” remains the earth-quake orgy in which the creatures of the title pleasure themselves in various ways while ceiling plaster pours down on them, caused by the shaking ground (Smith created that effect by simply shaking his camera).

As improvisational and spontaneous as “Flaming Creatures” seems, it was actually carefully prepared and scripted by Smith. Before deciding on the final title “Flaming Creatures”, Smith, at various times, considered naming his film “Pasty Thighs and Moldy Midriffs”, “Flaking Moldy Almond Petals”, “Moldy Rapture” or “Horora Femina”. Smith started shooting in the late summer of 1962 and spent a budget of around $300 (which, according to Tony Conrad, was mostly spent on lab processing costs). The main cast consisted of Smith’s friends from the New York art world, such as Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Mario Montez (credited as Dolores Flores), Arnold Rockwood, Judith Malina and Marian Zazeela. There are also various uncredited participants such as Tony Conrad, David Gurin, Kate and Piero Heliczer, Ray Johnson, Angus MacLise, Ed Marshall, Henry Proach, Jerry Raphael, Irving Rosenthal, Mark Schleifer, Harvey Tavel, Ronald Tavel, John Weiners and LaMonte Young. Throughout the fall and winter of 1962 Smith was busy with editing the film, while also instructing Tony Conrad to synchronize the sound. Conrad attested that Smith was supervising his every step and selected the music from his own record collection. The soundtrack of the film rivals the musical accompaniment of Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” in terms of originality and variety. Juxtaposing Béla Bartók with Kitty Kallen and Yoshiko Yamiguchi with The Everly Brothers, Smith created a mixtape that was both surprising and perfectly apt for the on-screen action. It is also worth noting that the soundtrac contains excerpts from the scores of “The Devil is a Woman” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”.

When Smith started to show various unfinished versions of “Flaming Creatures” to friends, enthusiasm started to build. Village Voice film critic Jonas Mekas wrote the following in his column from April 18, 1963: “Jack Smith just finished a great movie, ‘Flaming Creatures’, which is so beautiful that I feel ashamed even to sit through the current Hollywood and European movies. I saw it privately, and there is little hope that Smith’s movie will ever reach the movie theatre screens. But I tell you, it is a most luxurious outpouring of imagination, of imagery, of poetry, of movie artistry – comparable only to the work of the greatest, like Von Sternberg.” In the following days “Flaming Creatures” would come up again and again in Mekas’ column, until it theatrically premiered at the Bleecker Street Cinema on April 29, 1963, on a double bill with Jacobs’ “Blonde Cobra” (which starred Jack Smith). The screening took place, appropriately, at midnight and anticipated the Midnight Movie boom by almost a decade.

Inspired by the explosion of underground cinema in the United States, Jonas Mekas wrote a piece in the Village Voice, championing the films of Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs and Ron Rice and labelling it the “Baudelairean Cinema”. Mekas wrote that these artists were “opening up sensibilities and experiences never before recorded in the American arts; a content which Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, and Rimbaud gave to world literature a century ago and which Burroughs gave to American literature three years ago.” With every new screening “Flaming Creatures” gained more worshipful admirers (such as Allen Ginsberg and Jean-Luc Godard). Screenings of the film usually played to packed houses and Jonas Mekas even rented the Tivoli Theater to present Smith with the Independent Filmmaker Award (annually awarded by Film Culture). The statement read that that “[Jack Smith] has graced the anarchic liberation of new American cinema with graphic and rhythmic power worthy of the best of formal cinema. He has attained for the first time in motion pictures a high level of art which is absolutely lacking in decorum; and a treatment of sex which makes us aware of the restraint of all previous filmmakers. He has shown more clearly than anyone before how the poet's license includes all things, not only of spirit, but also of flesh; not only of dreams and of symbol, but also of solid reality. In no other art but the movies could this have so fully been done; and their capacity was realized by Smith.” (Film Culture, No. 29 (Summer 1963)) jack4.jpg It was then that the scandal around “Flaming Creatures” slowly began. Because the film was not submitted to the New York State Board of Regents for licensing, the management of the Tivoli Theatre was forced to cancel the award ceremony and screening, which led Jonas Mekas to give Smith the Independent Film Award on the roof of a parked car in front of the theatre. Mekas then brought “Flaming Creatures” to the Knokke-le-Zout experimental film festival in Belgium and resigned from the jury because the festival refused to screen Smith’s film. Mekas then started showing the film privately in his hotel room, until he and Barbara Rubin decided to hijack a festival theatre, tied up the projectionist and screened a print that they smuggled in with Warhol’s “Sleep”. A riot broke out and when the Belgian Minister of Justice arrived at the spot, Mekas projected the film onto his face until the power was cut off. Nevertheless, “Flaming Creatures” was awarded the appropriately titled Prix Film Maudit.

On March 2, 1964, “Flaming Creatures” was shown at the New Bowery Theater in New York, on a double bill with Andy Warhol’s document “Jack Smith Filming Normal Love”. Theater manager Ken Jacobs and ticket-taker Florence Karpf didn’t know that an undercover policeman was in the audience. This led to the raid of the next night’s screening by two NYPD detectives, who immediately impounded both films and arrested Jacobs and Karpf. And then on March 7, Jonas Mekas was arrested for showing Jean Genet’s “Un chant d’amour” at the Writers Stage Theatre. Mekas’ intention was to link Jack Smith’s suppressed film to the equally provocative and sexually explicit “Un chant d’amour”, which was after all made by the highly acclaimed and famous European novelist Jean Genet. Yet Mekas’ strategy didn’t pay off, since none of the officers who jailed him knew who Genet was.

All of this resulted in the case “People of the State of New York vs. Kenneth Jacobs, Florence Karpf and Jonas Mekas” and even though Herman Weinberg, Lewis Allen, Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Clarke and Willard Van Dyke defended the film at the court hearing, the case was lost and Mekas and Jacobs were sentenced to sixty days in the New York City workhouse. The sentences were later suspended, yet the ruling remains intact, therefore deeming any current screening of “Flaming Creatures” in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx illegal (even though the film is now regularly shown as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema program in Manhattan). On April 13, 1964, Susan Sontag defended the film in The Nation, calling it a “rare, modern work of art about joy and innocence.” She continued that “without any doubts, this innocence is composed of perverse – according to the current acceptance of that term – and decadent, at least theatrical and artificial themes. But I think, it’s for that reason that the film attains beauty and modernity.”

The film continued to be screened at all kinds of locations, such as university campuses, yet these screenings were often accompanied by police raids which then resulted in riots. As a consequence of all this misunderstanding, Smith withdrew the film from circulation in the late 60s until it resurfaced in Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema program in the 70s.

Sontag and Mekas weren’t the only people to understand the greatness of “Flaming Creatures”. It was Smith who inspired Andy Warhol to make movies, and as J. Hoberman notes in an interview, “if you asked Andy Warhol in 1964 or 1965 what his favorite movie was, he'd always say ‘Flaming Creatures’.” Playwright Richard Foreman described his first encounter with Smith’s art this way: “[Seeing ‘Flaming Creatures’] was an overwhelming experience, one of unfathomable mystery and emotionally delirious 'otherness.' Opening one's eyes to its faded, 'pasty,' incredibly unplaceable beauties was to experience the radiance of angels — not the fallen type, but the real and inexplicable 'nonhuman' kind — a blinding white acid that bleached the film emulsion as it passed through a mere camera.” and photographer Nan Goldin said that “Seeing ‘Flaming Creatures’ at the age of fifteen was an earthquake that shook up my life forever after.”

With Federico Fellini, Smith also found a passionate admirer overseas. As Stanley Kauffmann reported in the winter 1964 issue of The New Republic: “Two minutes after I met Federico Fellini in Rome, he asked me whether I’d seen Jack Smith’s ‘Flaming Creatures’.” Fellini apparently got a chance to see Smith’s film while he was presenting “8 ½” in New York. The critic Parker Tyler said that Fellini “saw and admired ‘Flaming Creatures’ before he made the ‘Satyricon’.” The comparison isn’t as far fetched as it may at first seem to some. Yet Smith was more of a soul mate of Fellini’s than a direct influence, since both operated in the realm of modernized baroque visual art, filtered through uniquely personal and intimate visions.

Jack Smith was once called an artist’s artist and the same can be said of “Flaming Creatures”. It is a film that speaks to passionate, open-minded people who are grateful to bathe in Smith’s luxuriously decadent and yet innocent imagery and succumb to the pleasures of its non-narrative deliriousness. Maybe it’s the film’s purity and directness that shocks people who are more accustomed to the carefully assembled studio product. “Flaming Creatures” is raw and came directly from Smith’s imagination, who possessed the skill and artistry to capture his vision on celluloid. We should all be forever grateful for this gift and cherish every chance we get to see it in a theatre. As J. Hoberman said: “At once primitive and sophisticated, hilarious and poignant, spontaneous and studied, frenzied and languid, crude and delicate, avant and nostalgic, gritty and fanciful, fresh and faded, innocent and jaded, high and low, raw and cooked, underground and camp, black and white and white on white, composed and decomposed, richly perverse and gloriously impoverished, ‘Flaming Creatures’ was something new. Had Jack Smith produced nothing other than this amazing artifice, he would still rank among the great visionaries of American film.“

Shocked and saddened by the scandal of “Flaming Creatures”, Smith semi-consciously vowed never to complete another film. He didn’t care any longer for finished, polished products, which he equated with a capitalist mentality. He then went on to shoot “Normal Love” with, among other people, Mario Montez, Francis Francine, John Vaccaro, Arnold Rockwood, Diana Baccus and Beverly Grant. If you look carefully enough you can also spot a cameo by Andy Warhol, who was filming Smith at work. For “Normal Love” (which at first was to be titled “The Great Patsy Triumph” or “The Pink and Green Horrors”) Smith chose New Jersey, Queens and Old Lyme, Connecticut, as locations. He never finished shooting in the conventional sense and began to show “Normal Love” in various versions throughout 1965. Later, he would incorporate it into slide shows or performance pieces. “Normal Love” shouldn’t really be regarded as an unfinished work, since Smith never intended to complete it anyway. He didn’t want to risk another ban or confiscation, which is why he kept the film to himself and altered it whenever he liked.

In the Spring 1966 issue of Film Culture (No. 60) journalist and film critic David Ehrenstein interviewed Andy Warhol and asked him which artists of the New American Cinema he admired. Warhol enthusiastically responded with “Jaaaaacck Smiiiitttth” and continued that “When I was little, I always… thought he was my best director… I mean, just the only person I would ever copy, and just… so terrific and now since I’m grown up, I just think that he makes the best movies.” Warhol also noted that Smith’s way of working with actors, “the way he used anyone who happened to be around that day, and also how he just kept shooting until the actors got bored”, influenced his own technique.

“Normal Love” is a purely Smithian vision of a utopian society. His creatures are free and unbound, dancing and cavorting through a colorful dream of life at a heightened state of being. The major difference between “Flaming Creatures” and “Normal Love” is that the latter was shot in color, as opposed to the faded black and white glory of the former. If you get a chance to see a good print of Jerry Tartaglia’s restoration, the colors seem to pop out of the screen. Unfortunately “Normal Love” remains rather little known, mostly because it didn’t cause a scandal like “Flaming Creatures”. Yet it’s essential to be familiar with “Normal Love” to understand Smith’s vision of life and art, to perceive the world through his eyes.

In 1967 Smith used to stage a program called “Horror and Fantasy at Midnight” (which would later morph into “No President”), a work that Smith first presented on November 9 and 14, 1967, at the New Cinema Playhouse (the very theatre that showcased Warhol’s legendary “Chelsea Girls”). Smith advertised the event as a series of “film clips from the subterranean chambers of Dr. Madman!” which consisted of “Reefers of Technicolor Island”, “Scrub-woman of Atlantis”, “Rat-droppings of Uranus”, “Marshgas of Flatulandia”, “The Flake of Soot” and “Overstimulated”. Jonas Mekas attended the event, praised it in the Village Voice and said that seeing Smith’s new work was “like a national holiday.” At this point Smith’s work became increasingly more political. This was evident in his intercutting of “Overstimulated” with newsreel footage of the 1940 Republican Convention and the soundtrack, which included a tape of Vietnam discourse that was mixed with the Cineola Orchestra’s music. Smith wanted the audience “to consider the footage of exotic beings, Christmas snow falling, etc. in a considerably wider context” (James Stoller in the Village Voice, 12/7/67).

The program then became “Kidnapping and Auctioning of Wendell Wilkie [sic] by the Love Bandit” and starred writer Irving Rosenthal, until “No President” was born and shown in February 1969 at the Elgin. This screening, which took the form of a cultural event in New York, lead Parker Tyler to praise “No President” as “an even more daring exploitation of the themes in ‘Flaming Creatures’ (minus cunnilingual rape and plus political burlesque)” (Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995)), while Jonas Mekas called it “one of cinema’s glories.” The version of “No President” that one can nowadays see at Anthology Film Archives consists of scenes that were shot in Smith’s Greene Street loft, juxtaposed with all kinds of found footage.

Other artefacts from Smith’s filmic oeuvre are rarities like “Respectable Creatures”, a 35-minute color video that intercuts Smith’s first movie “Buzzards over Bagdad” (which he shot in the 1950s in Los Angeles) with footage that he shot in the 60s in Rio de Janeiro, where he originally planned to make a travelogue which he then decided to expand “into a dramatic movie that will use the carnival as its starting point” (Smith’s undated letter to songwriter Jerry Leiber and actress Gaby Rodgers, who financed the trip). Then there’s “I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo”, which derives from Smith’s performance piece “I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground”, a 30-minute video restored by Jerry Tartaglia in 1998, as well as various 8mm movies that Smith experimented with.

In addition to filmmaking Smith also starred in some of the defining underground films of the 60s, particularly those of Ken Jacobs. Smith can be seen in the shorts “Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice” and “Little Cobra Dance” from 1957, as well as in “Little Stabs at Happiness” and “The Death of P’Town”. More famous is his starring role in “Blonde Cobra”, a project that Smith started with Bob Fleischner in 1959 and then abandoned due to a falling out. Jacobs took the footage and assembled it in his own unique way into a 33-minute portrait of Jack Smith. Jonas Mekas praised it as “the masterpiece of the Baudelairaen cinema… a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy.” The film remains a great artefact for those who want to see a glimpse of Smith’s extraordinary performance style and personality.

In Andy Warhol’s “Camp” Jack Smith comes literally out of a closet, while Gregory J. Markopoulos cast him as Orpheus in his 1967 “The Illiac Passion”. Smith also appeared in Warhol’s apparently lost “Batman Dracula” and Ron Rice’s masterful symphony of superimpositions “Chumlum”. Smith’s final movie acting performance can be see in Ari M. Roussimoff’s underground homage “Shadows in the City” from 1991 in which Smith plays the Spirit of Death.

Smith is also featured prominently in Jacobs’ 50-years in the making, only recently finished underground epic “Star Spangled to Death”. In the course of the film’s seven hours, Jacobs intercuts political footage, audio snippets, dubious TV commercials, racist cartoons, newsreels and scenes from 1930s race movies with Jerry Sims and Jack Smith dancing and performing on the streets of New York in the 1950s. What emerges is a monumental work about the past 50 years of American history filtered through Jacobs’ underdog vision, starring Jack Smith as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living.

Photography

Before Smith ever picked up a movie camera, he was already one of the most imaginative photographers in the United States. After his move from Los Angeles to New York’s East Village, Smith opened the Hyperbole Photography Studio in a storefront space on 8th Street near Cooper Square in 1957 and photographed both customers and friends. The models usually pose in theatrically exaggerated ways and are often semi-nude. Chiffon veils, feathers, jewels and masks often conceal parts of the body, while others are transformed by rouge and mascara. The settings seem otherworldly and are cluttered with props that Smith either found on the street or got from thrift stores. As Lawrence Rinder put it “Smith’s photographs have the rare ability to evoke in a single image an entire world, an epoch, and an ethos.”

Yet Smith’s extraordinary talent for photography wasn’t confined to the interiors of his studio and the fantasy worlds that he created there, he also possessed the ability to capture real outdoor life with almost uncanny perception. Smith’s photo essay “new york – the underworld people”, which juxtaposes posed images with documented life in the East Village, appeared in the April 1962 issue of the culture magazine Scene. This is what the editor’s introduction said: “Jack Smith has chosen the fringe world of the subconscious as the subject for his photographic art. He depicts the shadow area between the normal and the perverse with extraordinary sensitivity to symbol and nuance. Roaming through the odd corners of the city, Jack Smith captures those rare moments when the subconscious erupts close to the surface. A scene in a cemetery becomes a necrophilic nightmare; Central Park is transformed into a surrealist vision; a Greenwich Village party, haunted by transvestites, is made uncomfortably visual. Smith’s vision is strange, but no one who examines these pages can doubt its power.” Smith continued, over the years, to photograph real-life locations in a way that subtly abstracted their shapes and colors to fit his vision (such as in the remarkable late snapshot collection called “Secrets of the Neighborhood” from 1985). This is the reason why his photographic work stands out among most of his more naturalistic contemporaries.

Smith also revolutionized the use of color in fine art photography. An exhibition of Smith’s photographic work in 1960 at the Limelight Gallery featured thirty large-scale color photographs which possessed a remarkable “richness of color, texture, light, and shadow” that created “a highly sensual, almost hallucinatory effect” (Rinder), which was exactly what Smith was always after. Later in his career Smith would also create a series of self portraits which magnificently captured his charismatic and mysterious persona.

Smith would also use his photographs in various slide-shows and performance pieces, as well as collages, where he juxtaposed them with cut-out advertisements from newspapers or pieces of text, often resulting in slyly sarcastic political criticism.

Nowadays people still marvel at the precise compositions, moody lighting and delirious atmosphere captured in Smith’s photographs. While these pictures seem to come from another world, one born out of Smith’s subconscious, they are also highly representative of their tumultuous and chaotic time, the 60s. Smith’s genius is particularly apparent in this precious fusion of timeliness and timelessness.

Performance Art

To Laurie Anderson Jack Smith was “the godfather of performance art” and Richard Foreman famously called him “the hidden source of practically everything that’s of any interest in the so-called experimental American theater today.” One can certainly say that Smith’s performance art, his plays and presentations were unlike anyone else’s. Whether he invented performance art or not isn’t the point, it’s what he made of it that was revolutionary and thrilling.

Time was always the most important factor in Smith’s performances, which usually started around midnight in his loft, the Plaster Foundation. Smith would play ominous music to build up an atmosphere. The sounds of Yma Sumac or Martin Denny would fill the room, while Smith would arrange props on the stage, change things at the last minute and make impromptu picks of actors from the audience. Smith postponed the actual play or performance ad infinitum to distil his audience to the appreciative core. Jonas Mekas, in his article “Jack Smith, or The End of Civilization”, described a particular performance of Smith’s that he attended with Ken Jacobs and his wife Flo: “Now it was past 2 a.m., and as I watched, as we watched this fantastic show, I had a feeling, I suddenly was very conscious that it was 2 a.m. in New York, and very late, and most of the city was sleeping, even on Saturday night, and that all the theatres had been closed and over, long ago, all that’s called theatre, all the ugly, banal, stupid theatres of the world, and that only here, in this downtown loft, somewhere at the very end of all the empty and dead and gray downtown streets, was this huge junk set and these end-of-civilization activities, these happenings, this theatre. I began getting a feeling, it resembled more and more the final burial ceremonies, the final burials rites of the capitalist civilization, competitive civilization, these were the magic burial grounds and the burial rites of all the corruption, comfort and money and good living, and free gifts of the world that was now asleep, at 2 a.m., only Jack Smith was still alive, a madman, the high priest of the ironical burial grounds, administering last services here alone and by himself, because really the seven or eight people who were now his audience (the other three were on the set) were really no audience at all, Jack didn’t need any audience[…]” (Village Voice, 7/23/1970).

Mekas’ writing excellently conveys the sense of delirium and intensity that made Smith’s plays so famous and revered in the New York art scene. Smith might have appeared as unprepared to some, but he had everything in his mind. “The Bottles, containers, old Xmas trees, signs, broken toys, baby carriages that compound his stage setting – a central object taking up to 80 percent or more of the area set aside for performance – have all been carefully arranged and this has taken him a long time because many minute rearrangements were needed…” wrote Stefan Brecht in Queer Theater (Frankfurt Germany: Suhrkamp, 1978).

Smith was too absorbed by the “landscapes of desire” (Brecht) he was trying to create on stage to think about choosing or even casting actors. He rather asked audience members to come up, gave them a few pages of text and interacted with them on stage. His only way of advertising were small ads that were placed in the Village Voice, with marvellous titles like “Brassieres
of Atlantis” and “Gas Stations of the Cross Religious Spectacular” . Everything became part of the performance; confusion, anger, sadness and helplessness were all incorporated by Smith into a framework so far ahead of its time that contemporary theater still hasn’t caught up with him. Mekas wrote that “whatever anybody does to destroy his art falls into his art, becomes part of the huge collage, no matter what they do. He prearranged the music and the whole set so that it absorbs everything – exactly like the end of civilization itself which it seemed to portray – yes, this set became like this culture that seems to absorb everything and everybody – a huge dumping grounds, an open mouth of graveyards” and finally concluded that he and his friends “had seen one of the greatest and purest theatre evenings of our lives.”

Stefan Brecht was similarly enthusiastic and after leaving one of Smith’s performances at 4 a.m., he wrote that “I have learned more about art than on any other day or night of my life.” Once again, Smith was dividing his audiences. Those who stayed and had the sensibility to appreciate what he was doing had ecstatic revelations like those of Mekas and Brecht, yet the impatient crowds that Smith associated with capitalism left early, agitated and confused by what Smith was doing, and missed out on a life-altering event.

Smith didn’t just bring his one-of-a-kind performing skills into his own plays, but also performed in other people’s work, such as Dov Lederberg’s “Eargogh” from 1964-65 (in which he played Vincent Van Gogh) and Robert Wilson’s “Life and Times of Sigmund Freud”. Another major artistic project of Smith’s was his apartment, which he meticulously painted, decorated and designed into a set for a movie he was planning to make (it was to be called “Sinbad in a Rented World”).

Smith’s legacy is immeasurable. I have pointed out many of the people who have credited Smith as a formative influence on their work, yet the list goes on and on. John Vaccaro, Charles Ludlam, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, John Waters, Matthew Barney, John Zorn, David Byrne and Gary Indiana are all people who owe Smith a debt they could never pay back. Yet unfortunately the radical work itself has been the focus of a nasty rights battle. After Smith’s death of AIDS in 1989, performance artist Penny Arcade and Village Voice critic J. Hoberman looked after Smith’s work and did everything to preserve it. In 1997 they formed the Plaster Foundation and restored, among other things, “Flaming Creatures”. For years Smith’s sister Mary Sue Slater ignored her brother and his art. Even after his death she showed no interest in his work, yet never relinquished her claims to it, which prevented Hoberman and Arcade from giving the oeuvre over to a not-for-profit institution which would take care of it in the appropriate way. Yet in this ugly rights battle I lack the facts and on-hand knowledge of journalist C. Carr, whose comprehensive article on the whole case can be read here. We can only hope that a museum can get hold of Smith’s material and preserve it for generations to come.

What Jack Smith continues to represent to all of us is artistic purity, integrity and independence. Let us be thankful that we have his films, photographs and some rare recorded performances to enrich our lives.

Essential links

UBU WEB’s Jack Smith page, where you can see and download “Flaming Creatures”, “Scotch Tape” and “Normal Love”.
Jack Smith’s Apartment, filmmaker MM Serra’s short film of Smith’s extraordinary apartment.
A rare interview with Smith from Semiotext(e)
A Buzzards over Bagdad Flipbook
NPR’s radio show on the legacy of Smith’s work.
Jack Smith’s The Beautiful Book in a rare but terribly expensive reprint from 2001.
The Official Website of Mary Jordan’s documentary “Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis”. The website features some amazing photographs of Smith’s and a visual biography to look out for is in the works.

My most invaluable sources of facts, dates, quotes and information for this article were the following three books, which I wholeheartedly recommend and whose authors I thank:
Flaming Creature: Jack Smith – His Amazing Life and Times, a thick catalogue for a past P.S.1 exhibition that is filled with gorgeous photographs, collages, frame enlargements and snapshots of and by Jack Smith, as well as fascinating essays and articles by the likes of Stefan Brecht, Jonas Mekas, Nayland Blake and Richard Foreman.
Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool, a wonderful collection of Smith’s writing.
On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc, J. Hoberman’s meticulously researched, beautifully illustrated book on Smith’s films (a particular highlight is a series of both black and white and color photographs taken on the set of “Flaming Creatures” by Norman Solomon).

Special thanks:

Ken Jacobs, for sharing his recollections and memories of Jack Smith with me in the summers of 2006 and 2007 and for continuing to be a major inspiration. Tony Conrad, for our email correspondence and his generosity in supplying facts and memories of Smith. J. Hoberman, for his above-quoted book that supplied me with the facts that I couldn’t otherwise get my hands on and for selflessly caring about and preserving Smith’s work for 19 years. Jonas Mekas, for his championing of Smith’s work since the beginning and putting his enthusiasm down on paper. Most of his quotes in this article are from the out-of-print book Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971. Jerry Tartaglia for his often uncredited yet invaluable work in restoring and preserving Smith’s films. Dennis Cooper, for giving me both the opportunity to write this article and providing the space to post it on his blog, as well as for the inspiration of his novels and poems and most of all, for his friendship.

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p.s. Hey. Jack Smith has been due a day on this blog for far too long, but I'm glad I waited because Stan_cz has done a magnificent thing here. Or I think so, and I'm thinking you might agree. I hope you'll take part of this long upcoming weekend to explore and talk about it amongst yourselves as well as to your host with the most. Thank you so much, Carsten. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm off to Sweden today, in a few minutes in fact, and I won't be back here again until Monday. I'll have my trusty camera along with me on my journey, and if there are sights that seem interesting enough to share, you'll see them next week. Enjoy your weekends, and take care.