moldy art': the exotic world of jack smith

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SDF 4 (2) pp. 173–186 Intellect Limited 2010

Studies in Documentary Film Volume 4 Number 2

© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.4.2.173_1

CONSTANTINE VEREVISMonash University

‘Moldy Art’: The exotic world

of Jack Smith

ABSTRACT

Mary Jordan’s film, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2007) presents a documentary portrait of New York film-maker and performer Jack Smith, an artist whose work has been as influential as it has been neglected. For a brief period in the 1960s Smith ran ‘Cinemaroc Movie Studios’, an underground film scene that paral-leled and influenced Andy Warhol’s film Factory. Jordan assembles Smith’s friends and associates, contemporary artists and critics, along with excerpts from Smith’s films, performance pieces and audio tapes, to provide an account of the artist’s ‘life-work’, including his best-known film, Flaming Creatures (1963). This article takes up James Clifford’s notion of ethnographic surrealism to examine Smith’s life-work as an open exercise in self-portraiture, an intensively personal vision, but one that strives for the guarantee of objectivity, a type of ‘documentary truth’.

Ideas get moldy but art goes on.—Jack Smith, Journal (1962)

People never know why they do what they do. But they have to have explanations for themselves and others.

—Jack Smith, ‘Belated Appreciation of V.S.’ (1963/64)

By all accounts, Jack Smith was one of the most volatile – one of the most exhausting and creative – of the original contributors to the New American Cinema movement of the early 1960s. Best known for his controversial

KEYWORDS

Jack SmithJack Smith and the

Destruction of AtlantisNew American CinemaFlaming Creaturesethnographic

surrealismfilm criticism

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featurette Flaming Creatures (from 1963), Smith devoted his life not only to film-making, but also to acting, writing, photography and performance art. For a short period in the 1960s, Smith was at the centre of Cinemaroc, a faux-Hollywood empire that rivaled (and inspired) Andy Warhol’s film Factory. With the exception of Flaming Creatures, Smith’s work has not been widely seen, but in the years since his death (16 September 1989) his contribution to the New York experimental film and theatre scenes, and his ongoing influ-ence and inspiration, has been increasingly acknowledged, most prominently in the P.S.1 Museum’s 1997 ‘Flaming Creature: The Art and Times of Jack Smith’ exhibition tour (and accompanying publications Flaming Creature: Jack Smith, His Amazing Life and Times and Wait for me at the bottom of the pool: The Writings of Jack Smith), and most recently in ‘LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World’, a conference held at Berlin’s Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst, October 2009 (Velasco 2010: 59).

In the period immediately following Smith’s death, his ‘life-work’ was preserved by performance artist Penny Arcade (aka Susana Ventura) with the assistance of film critic Jim Hoberman, and subsequently incorporated as the ‘Plaster Foundation’ (for the P.S.1 Museum retrospective in 1997). In 2002, Mary Jordan approached the Foundation seeking permission to access the Smith archive for a documentary work, provisionally entitled You Don’t Know Jack. In the process, Jordan – in consultation with former Smith asso-ciate and editor of Big Table magazine Irving Rosenthal – alerted Smith’s estranged sister Mary Sue Slater to the potential value of the archive, putting the estate into dispute. Litigation spilled out over the next few years, with a Surrogate Court Judge ruling (in 2004) that the Smith archive belonged to his younger sister, whereby the estate was passed on to the relation, and sub-sequently sold to New York’s Gladstone Gallery in 2008 (Carr 2004: 36–9; Gallagher 2007). Jordan went on to complete her film, now entitled Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (re-named after Smith’s 1965 expanded cinema piece Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis), but not before alienating many in the Jack Smith community, who complained that Jordan’s film failed to provide any real sense of Smith’s ‘galvanizing charisma, his psychotically painstaking attention to detail, [or] his self-described “madness” and insula-tion’ (Tavel in Frick and Hein 2009: n.p.). The interview-based Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (2007) nonetheless contributes to the transformation of Smith’s image (from marginal cult figure to visionary performer), immers-ing the viewer in a kaleidoscopic assemblage of still images, film clips and audio recordings to advance the argument that the figure – ‘Jack Smith’ – was the artist’s most fabulous creation.

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis begins with a number of sound bites – arresting grabs from Smith interviews and performances – including a halting admission: ‘Me? I’m … I’m Ali Baba’ (Jordan 2007). These words not only invoke Smith’s muse – Universal Studio’s ‘Queen of Technicolor’, and star of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (Lubin, 1944) Maria Montez – but present Smith as an artist enmeshed in displaying his own self through the personage of exotic others. Following James Clifford’s account of ‘ethno-graphic surrealism’, Smith’s life-work can be described as an ongoing exer-cise in ‘self-portraiture’, one that reveals an interest in those ‘autobiographical moments in which the articulation of self and society [can] be brought to consciousness’ (Clifford 1981: 560; see McHugh 2005). That is, by way of an ‘excess of subjectivity’ Smith’s strategy was to provide the guarantee of an ‘objectivity’ – a kind of ‘documentary truth’ – but one that was paradoxically


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that of ‘a personal ethnography’ (Clifford 1988: 167). Like Clifford’s favoured example of surrealist writer Michel Leiris, Smith appeared to keep ‘field notes on himself’, and his life-work became a search for a ‘satisfactory way of tell-ing – of collecting and displaying – his own uncertain existence’ (Clifford 1988: 167 and 170). In his work, Smith adopts an ‘ethnographic attitude’, one that invests in the withering analysis of a cultural reality identified as artifi-cial and corrupt – what Smith called ‘Lobster-land’ – and supplants it with an ‘exotic alternative’, one that ‘delights in cultural impurities and disturb-ing syncretisms’ – Smith’s muse-inspired, ‘Montez-land’ (Clifford 1981: 549). Smith’s life-work combines, then, an ‘acute sense of the futility of existence with a tenacious desire to salvage meaningful details’, separating poetic ges-tures from the banality of everyday life (Clifford 1988: 173; see Pickering and Chaney 1986: 46).

Smith’s posing, and re-composing, of identity is rendered from the very beginning of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, where he says, ‘My past is dead. Remember, I came out of nowhere’ (Smith in Jordan 2007). Born in Columbus, Ohio on 14 November 1932, to a mother of Hungarian descent, Smith once referred to himself as ‘a Hungarian Hill-billy’ (Eberstadt 1997: 71). Insisting that he was a damaged child, Smith dramatically told his patron, Isabel Eberstadt, that ‘his father was cut in half by a shrimp boat when [Jack] was a child’, and described his mother as an ‘ogress’: ‘a trained nurse who specialized in isolating her dying patients and extracting large bequests from them’ (Eberstadt 1997: 71). Smith’s early collaborator, film-maker Ken Jacobs, makes a similar observation: ‘Jack would be reticent about giving the real facts of his life. I never knew when he spoke about his childhood: was it a self-amusing fabrication or was it fact’ (Jacobs in Jordan 2007). Semitoext(e) editor Sylvère Lotringer adds that Smith arrived in New York without a past, ‘a man from the desert wrapped up in veils’ (Lotringer in Jordan 2007), but it is now widely known that Smith and his family left Columbus when he was seven, moving first to Galveston, Texas, and then on to Kenosha, Wisconsin. In 1951, Smith enrolled in a local community college, but withdrew, moving to Chicago where he worked as an usher at the Orpheum Theater. In 1953 Smith moved again, this time (via Los Angeles) to New York, to finally take up residence in a hotel on Twelfth Street near Union Square (Leffingwell 1997b: 68–87).

In New York, Smith became interested in experimental theatre, and he attended classes at the City College of New York in Morningside Heights, where he met the film-makers (and soon, collaborators) Ken Jacobs and Bob Fleischner. As an actor, Smith first emerged in Jacobs’ underground films, appearing initially in Little Stabs at Happiness (Jacobs, 1959–1962) and Star Spangled to Death (Jacobs, 1956–1960 and 2004), and later in the remarkable Blonde Cobra (Jacobs and Fleischner, 1959–1963). Like the determinedly beat collaborations of Ron Rice and actor Taylor Mead – The Flower Thief (Rice, 1960) and The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (Rice, 1963) – Jacobs’ early works endeavoured to present the cultural change – the freedom and spir-itual awakening – that was emerging in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Joseph 2008: 235–38; Carney 1995; Hanhardt 1995). In his early films with Smith (and performer Jerry Sims), Jacobs embraced a typically Beat attitude to renounce the social responsibilities and emotional demands of adulthood (of ‘Normals’) to develop a ‘new film idiom’, a demented aesthetic vision ‘devoted to spon-taneous antics and manic despair, in which socially marginalized under-dogs dramatized themselves as the true anti-heroes of America’s scrap-heap


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civilization’ (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1983: 47). Along with Jacobs, Smith embraced a trash aesthetic, and ‘politics of failure’, in distinct opposition to the prevailing ideology of consumer culture and corporate success (Sitney 1979: 334; Rowe 1982: 39). Jacobs recalls:

We were obsessed by the quality of failure. My film, Star Spangled to Death, is a testament to failure. Jack and I had a horror of life, a deep disgust with existence. Jack indulged in it spitefully, he would plunge himself into the garbage of life. […] We suffered from nostalgia already, saw Hollywood as a seedy garbage heap.

(Jacobs in Rowe 1982: 39)

Jordon’s film provides a chronology of Smith’s early years in New York, including the circa-1957 opening of the Hyperbole Photography Studio, a storefront space on Eighth Street, near Cooper Square, where Smith trans-ferred an aesthetic of impoverishment (and fascination with tawdry images of Hollywood) to his early ‘experimental colour photography’ (Helen Gee in Jordan 2007). Art curator Lawrence Rinder writes that ‘Smith found salva-tion from the banality of postwar American mainstream culture in the sheer artifice and ingenuity of […] celluloid dreams’, creating colour photographs that were ‘extraordinary puzzles of bodies [and] bedclothes’, and a surrealist collage of other seemingly unrelated items: ‘a frozen chicken, an old radio, a chart of the stars, drapes, veils, books, and photos clipped from newspapers’ (Rinder 1997: 139–40). Exhibiting the same unerring sense of composition that characterized film-maker Josef von Sternberg’s best collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, Smith’s compositions resembled film stills from some ‘achingly absent’ motion picture: ‘Jack would make these photographs [that] appeared as if they were stills from a movie. So there was no movie, but there were these very, very evocative images that suggested a movie’ (Jacobs in Jordan 2007). As underground film historian P. Adams Sitney describes it, Smith’s early photographs (like his later film work) stripped away con-vention to reveal a ‘visual truth’, assembling all that was implicated in the films of von Sternberg (and the Hollywood dream factory) – ‘visual texture, androgynous sexual presence, exotic locations’ – but without the encum-brances of narrative motivation and plot (Sitney 1979: 353; see also Smith 1963–1964a: 4–5).

From the fall of 1961 through to June 1962, Smith staged a series of pho-tographic sessions that produced a large number of small-format, black and white images, nineteen of which appeared in The Beautiful Book, a handmade limited edition book published by poet Piero Heliczer’s The Dead Language Press (Smith 2002). In a promotional statement for the book, Ron Rice attested to the dense body language and mesmerizing gesture of Smith’s composi-tions: ‘we studied these photographs with keen eye discovering new & more beautiful images hidden in every dissolve & curve of the draperies & silks which ran through these masterpieces like some long lost mysterious fume from byzantium’ (Rice in Leffingwell 1997a: 109). The Beautiful Book included poses by several ‘models’ – Mario Montez, Francis Francine, Joel Markman, Arnold Rockwood and Irving Rosenthal – who would appear in other of Smith’s early photographs and films, but above all it showcased artist-model Marian Zazeela. Later in 1962, Zazeela would make a ‘cameo’ appearance (in an elaborately populated tableau) at the end of Flaming Creatures, the lead role of which Smith had created especially to commemorate the work


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they had done together in still photography: ‘It was a part that would have allowed the fulfillment of any impressionable, imaginative, ambitious young woman’s fantasy: to be a Star in a Great Work of Art, to be a Dietrich to [Jack’s] von Sternberg’ (Zazeela 1997: 72). But the artist–muse relationship changed abruptly when (in June 1962) Zazeela began an intense relation-ship with musician and minimalist composer La Monte Young, Smith writing (with equal measures of pain and acrimony) in his journal: ‘The heart is a small room. When one person enters someone else must leave. Small true the size of a cunt’ (Smith 1962: 153).

Around the same time as his break with Zazeela, Smith was introduced to wunderkind musician and (later) film-maker Tony Conrad, who had moved to New York after graduating in mathematics from Harvard. Smith and Conrad would become (odd-couple) friends in the fall of 1962, Conrad working closely with Smith on the soundtrack for Flaming Creatures and appearing briefly in the film in a torn backless dress with his backside exposed (Joseph 2008: 233). An associate of Young’s, with whom he collaborated on the Theater of Eternal Music and The Dream Syndicate (Pouncey 2001), Conrad was introduced to Smith via Zazeela, and moved in to share an apartment on Ninth Street that she had vacated and sublet to Smith (Joseph 2008: 231–32). Initially, Conrad regarded everything Smith was working on – including the series of semi-nude photographs of Zazeela for The Beautiful Book – as ‘some kind of con-temptible New York art pornography’. And Conrad was likewise unimpressed when he found Smith working on a ‘gigantic grey painting of a vase of flow-ers’ that was to be ‘the set for [Smith’s] new movie’ (Conrad in Reisman 1990–1991: 63). Days later, experiencing for the first time ‘the full flush of [Smith’s] inspiration and spirit’, Conrad offered to help carry the painting up to the roof of the old Windsor Theatre on Grand Street where, outside of the back of a small sixth floor apartment, Smith was preparing to shoot Flaming Creatures (Conrad in Reisman 1990–1991: 63–64). Up on the sun-washed roof, Conrad found that ‘there were lots of weird substances being consumed and strange people arriving on the scene’:

And boy, was I surprised when it turned out that people took three hours to put on their makeup [and] very more surprised when people took several more hours to put on their costumes […] of mixed gender, of non-specific period and body coverage […] The whole experience was mysterious and electrifying.

(Conrad in Reisman 1990–1991: 64; see also Adler 1975)

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis presents Smith as a highly engaged and demanding director, one who insisted that ‘you can’t get artistic results with “Normals”’ (Mario Montez in Jordan 2007), and set about transform-ing his models and actors from ‘ordinary mortals into gods and goddesses, into Superstars, into Flaming Creatures of the night’ (Zazeela 1997: 119). Smith declared his ambition to realize a company (his own dream factory) – Cinemaroc Movie Studios – and invited his overstimulated creatures – including his most famous creation, Mario Montez (aka René Ricard) – to a new apartment he shared with Conrad at 56 Ludlow Street (on the Lower East Side) for evening dress-up and recording sessions called ‘Tangier fantasies’ (Conrad 2006: 64–65). In performances such as ‘The First Memoirs of Maria Montez’ (February 1963; see Smith 1963–1964b) Smith staged for Conrad’s tape recorder his own version of Montez-land, and communicated


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the impossibility of recovering the Hollywood of the 1940s as anything but a series of re-figured fragments – ‘ruinous remakes’ – filtered through his persona and cult predisposition of the time (see Smith 1997a and 1997b). In this way, the intersection of Smith’s collage work and love of cinema owed much to artist-film-maker Joseph Cornell, whose early surrealist collage film Rose Hobart (1936) was assembled by re-editing fragments of the Columbia Pictures jungle drama East of Borneo (1931) to pay tribute to its star, Rose Hobart (Hoberman 1997a: 158; Sitney 1979: 347–48).

Conrad provided sound for Smith’s first, single-reel film, Scotch Tape (1959–1962), but the picture that established Smith’s underground following and reputation was the notorious Flaming Creatures. Outlined in the pages of Smith’s ledger-journal (Smith 1962: 55–7; see Hoberman 2001: 141–43), and shot across eight consecutive weekends over the summer of 1962 in bright sunlight and on outdated (expired) black and white stock, Flaming Creatures invites abstraction, its overexposure stressing the ‘gossamer nature’ of the film strip (Jacobs 1998: 74). Conrad remembers his first encounter with Flaming Creatures (in private screenings for friends and associates) as a ‘lambent, wonderful, surging, frolicking, exquisitely, happy experience’ (Conrad in Jordan 2007). Lotringer describes it as a ‘flaming parody of what life could be if things were not stifled. It was a [subversive] parody of Hollywood, and Hollywood was America’ (Lotringer in Jordan 2007). And film-maker-critic, Jonas Mekas (who was among the first to write publicly about the film) announced its arrival in his column for the Village Voice:

Jack Smith just finished a great movie, Flaming Creatures, which is so beautiful I feel ashamed 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. […] Flaming Creatures will not be shown theatrically because our social-moral-etc. guides are sick. […] This movie will be called pornographic, degenerate, homosex-ual, trite, disgusting, etc. It is all that, and it is so much more than that.

(Mekas 1963b: 13)

Around the same time (across the period 1962–1964), Mekas published (as editor) a number of Smith’s essays in Film Culture magazine, including Smith’s most sustained aesthetic statement, ‘The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez’, and a contemporaneous piece on von Sternberg, ‘Belated Appreciation of V.S.’ (see Smith 1962–1963 and 1963–1964a, respectively). The first of these was a paean to the Hollywood diva Maria Montez (‘Moldy Movie Queen, Shoulder pad, gold platform wedgie Siren’), but in it Smith also laid out an entire manifesto of his art, advancing the idea that the intui-tive appeal of Montez’s ‘spectacular, flaming image’ was (as his own Flaming Creatures would soon be) ‘the bane of [those] critics […] hostile and uneasy in the presence of a visual phenomenon’ (Smith 1962–1963: 29; see Tartaglia 2001; Tavel 1997). For Smith, the films of Maria Montez – along with other so-called ‘secret-flix’ (cult movies and figures) – were moldy artifacts, ‘imper-fect and ugly’, from the declining Hollywood studio system but ones imbued with revolutionary potential (Malanga 1967: 16; Hoberman 1997b). Smith’s manifesto begins:

At least in America a Maria Montez could believe she was the Cobra woman, the Siren of Atlantis, Scheherazade, etc. She believed and


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thereby made the people who went to her movies believe. Those who could believe, did. Those who saw the World’s Worst Actress just couldn’t and they missed the magic. […]

The vast machinery of a movie company worked overtime to make her vision into sets. They achieved only inept approximations. But one of her atrocious acting sighs suffused a thousand tons of dead plaster with imaginative life and a truth. […]

To admit of Maria Montez validities would be to turn on to moldiness, Glamourous Rapture, schizophrenic delight, hopeless naivete, and glittering technicolored trash!

(Smith 1962–1963: 28, emphasis added)

Flaming Creatures premiered at midnight on 29 April 1963 at the Bleecker Street Cinema on a double-bill with Blonde Cobra (Hoberman 1997a: 161; Hoberman 1997b, 2001). Later in the year (7 December), Mekas booked the Tivoli Theater to bestow upon Flaming Creatures Film Culture’s ‘Fifth Independent Film Award’, Smith creating a poster of a spidery creature to publicize the midnight event that was interrupted, before the screening could go ahead, by the New York bureau of licences (Anon 1963; Mekas 1963a). Mekas subsequently took Flaming Creatures to the Third Experimental Film Exhibition in Knokke-Le Zoute, Belgium (December 1963) where it was deemed unfit for public screening before ultimately attracting a special ‘maudit’ prize (Mekas 1964; Tomkins 1973). Upon returning to New York, Mekas screened Smith’s film as part of his ‘Filmmakers’ showcase, initially at the Gramercy Arts Theater and (when police harassment caused the theatre to cancel further screenings) at the New Bowery Theater on St Mark’s Place in the East Village. Early in March 1964, New York police raided a screening, arresting Mekas and Ken Jacobs (who was projectionist), and initiating a long line of legal maneuvers, which eventually culminated in the banning of the film in the state of New York (Anon 1964; Harrington 1964; Hoberman 1997a; Sontag 1964b; Staiger 1999; Tomkins 1973). Over the spring of 1964, Mekas devoted himself not only to a series of court battles protesting the banning of Flaming Creatures, but more generally inveighed against censorship, pub-lishing a short ‘Underground Manifesto on Censorship’ (Mekas 1972: 126–28; Tomkins 1973: 40). At the same time, the prosecution of Flaming Creatures prompted Mekas and others – most notably Susan Sontag (in a review article that anticipates ‘Notes on Camp’) – to mount a high culture defence for it, attempting to legitimate its images of ‘inter-sexuality’ by framing it within discourses of elite art, and a ‘tradition [of] the poetic cinema of shock’ (Sontag 1964a, 1967).

The defense of Flaming Creatures brought it national attention, but alien-ated Smith: ‘It got away from him’, says Conrad, ‘It became a cause’ (Conrad in Jordan 2007). Years later Smith would complain that the identification of Flaming Creatures within discourses of censorship and high art had merely served to limit its potentiality. Asked how he came about the idea to make Flaming Creatures, Smith replied:

I started making a comedy about everything I thought was funny […] The first audiences were laughing from beginning all the way through. But then that writing started – and it became a sex thing. It turned the movie into a magazine sex issue […] Then it fertilized Hollywood […]


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When they got through licking their chops over the movie there was no more laughter. There was dead silence in the auditorium.

(Smith in Lotringer 1978: 192)

In the years following the making of Flaming Creatures, Smith held no doubt that the film had been used by Mekas (disparagingly referred to by Smith as ‘Uncle Fishook’ and ‘The Lucky Landlord’) to publicize the New York under-ground, sacrificing Smith and his film in the process: ‘[Mekas] wanted to have something in court at the time […] It was another way by which he could be made to look like a saint, to be in the position of defending something when he was really kicking it to death […] It inflated Uncle Fishook, it made his career’ (Smith in Lotringer 1978: 193). Most significantly, when asked about the intention of Flaming Creatures, Smith observed that the meaning was determined by the film’s uptake and use: ‘The way my movie was used – that was the meaning of the movie […] What you do with it [politically or] economically is what the meaning is. If it goes to support Uncle Fishook, that’s what it means’ (Smith in Lotringer 1978: 193–94). Smith declared ‘critics [to be] handmaidens of the Lobster’, spineless and cannibalistic embodiment of capitalism and society (Smith in Jordan 2007).

While controversy erupted around the screening of Flaming Creatures, Smith was at work on a ‘sequel’, spending the summer of 1963 in the New York countryside making a ‘lovely pasty, pink and green color movie that [was] going to be the definitive pasty expression’ (Smith in Hoberman and Leffingwell 1997: 55). Featuring some of the rarest (little seen) and most beautiful images ever created by Smith, the unfinished Normal Love (aka The Great Pasty Triumph, 1963–1964) is described as a ‘documentary of people’s real reality: not the realities they had to be subjected to in the hideousness of the world around them’ (Conrad in Jordan 2007). A homage to Maria Montez that ‘went haywire’, Normal Love again assembles Smith’s stable of Superstars, expanded now to include the ‘new vamp’ of underground movies, Beverly Grant, and (in the film’s famous Cake Sequence finale) a cameo appearance by Andy Warhol (Mekas 1963c: 4). When asked in a 1965 interview whom he most admired in the New American Cinema, Warhol answered, in imita-tion of Smith’s penchant for exaggeration and delay, ‘Jaaaaacck Smiiiitttth’ (Goldsmith 2004: 66). In POPism: The Warhol ’60s, Warhol was more specific about Smith’s influence, describing weekends over the summer of 1963 spent in Old Lyme, Connecticut: ‘Jack Smith was filming a lot out there, and I picked something up from him for my own movies – the way he used anyone who happened to be around that day, and also how he just kept shooting until the actors got bored’ (Warhol and Hackett 1980: 31–2). During the filming of Normal Love, Warhol shot a single-roll, early ‘newsreel’ – Andy Warhol Films Jack Smith Filming ‘Normal Love’ (1963) – confiscated and presumably lost when New York police detectives raided the March 1964 screening of Flaming Creatures. More significantly, Warhol borrowed two influential aesthetics from Smith’s method: a camp fascination with Hollywood (and its star system), and a minimalist use of time (Sitney 1997: 69).

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis makes the point that ‘many [historians] trace things back to Warhol at this point but much comes from Jack Smith’ (Nayland Blake in Jordan 2007). In an Artforum print symposium featuring seven of Smith’s friends and associates (timed to coincide with the 1997 retrospective of the artist’s work at P.S.1 Museum), Sitney (1997: 69) wrote that ‘Jack Smith and his “creatures” [were] breaking up just as [another


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New York group], Andy Warhol and his associates, was expanding’. René Ricard similarly reflected upon the moment:

It’s strange to look back now and remember how in the early 1960s film aesthetics seemed so neatly split between [Andy] Warhol and Jack Smith. The apparent antithesis made an entire and rich culture. Where Andy was slick and shiny, Jack was, in his own words, ‘moldy and pasty.’ […] But Jack didn’t see Andy as a complement. Jack had to make Andy a vampire. And whose blood? That’s right – always Jack’s.

(Ricard 1997: 68)

Tony Conrad also notes Smith’s antipathy toward Warhol, saying that the lat-ter took ‘everything from the East Side, from Ludlow Street, because 56 Ludlow Street was mined by [Warhol] for Jack, for the films [and the] whole cluster of things that wound up being sucked into the Factory complex’ (Conrad in Reisman 1990–1991: 66–67). For Smith, ‘careerist’ was the greatest insult, and Warhol, or ‘Andy Panda’ (because he pandered to the market), became just another ‘Vampire of the Cocktail World’. In his subsequent film and (performance) work, Smith was resolute in his determination to resist the mercenary aspect of a system that worked overtime to de-sexualize and de-politicize, to transform everything into profit. Smith invested in a ‘strategy of failure’, whereby he refused to create a fin-ished work – a product – lest it be banned or seized or captured by the voracious Lobster, symbol of all exploiters (Leffingwell 1997b: 77).

The latter part of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis documents the many ways in which Smith increasingly rallied ‘against the mercenary aspect of capitalism: [the Lobster’s appetite for] taking your aesthetic intention away and transforming it into profit’ (Lotringer in Jordan 2007). Film historian Juan Suárez describes Flaming Creatures as an assemblage of disparate fragments, an uncertain body, or a set of uncertain bodies, always on the verge of collapse, of ‘falling to pieces’ (Suárez 1996: 197). If this signature film is ‘fixed’ or cap-tured by discourses of sex and censorship, of art and aesthetics, then Smith’s strategy is to make his later works more resistant to such acts of capture and containment. Smith’s interest in fragmentary, provisional texts becomes more and more pronounced, with his subsequent film-works – Normal Love, No President (1967–1970), and others – circulating under various titles and in mul-tiple versions. Throughout his 1970s stage performances, Smith constantly remakes these earlier film-works as performance reels, developing a unique way of spontaneously re-editing them: removing the take-up reel during the screening and re-splicing the material into a new arrangement (Tartaglia 1997: 209). Additionally, Smith’s basic method of fragmentation and juxtaposition – of ‘fortuitous collage’ (Clifford 1981: 550–51) – is extended, especially in the performance reels (I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo, Jungle Jack in Cologne Zoo and others) through ‘recurring images of rubble, debris, and [human] wreck-age’ (Suárez 1996: 199). The dated artifacts of consumer culture – stripped of the their functional context, scrambled and rearranged – become background for Smith’s films and performances, and (in a further collapse of the distinc-tion between ‘life’ and ‘work’) even the décor and furnishing for his own loft/performance space, which he named the Plaster Foundation (Brecht 1978). As Smith famously declared, ‘trash [was] the material of creators’, and he envi-sioned a city organized around a giant, central junkyard: ‘I think this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a centre of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it’ (Smith in Lotringer 1978: 199).


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Ira Cohen – who edited the (perfectly apposite) miniature book of Smith’s writings Historical Treasures (1990) – describes Smith as a ‘resolutely political person’, someone who lived his anti-capitalistic philosophy (Cohen in Jordan 2007). Over the past decade or more, Smith’s moldy aesthetic – his project for ‘anti-aesthetically redeeming the debris of everyday life’ (Suárez 1996: 201) and predisposition for ‘junk-like stasis’ (Indiana 1997: 67) – has gener-ally been understood as an antidote to, and resistance against, the expan-sion of post-war multinational capital (Rinder 1997: 139). As Suárez explains, Smith lived in New York’s Lower East Side from the late 1950s and suffered from the gradual transformation of the neighbourhood, something that had in part been facilitated by local artists whose well-publicized lifestyles and per-formance scenes had recreated working-class industrial districts as bohemian enclaves. This gentrification – the refurbishment and conversion of lofts, tene-ments and warehouses into high-rent apartments – was what Smith named ‘landlordism’ (Suárez 1996: 205–06). This form of exploitation was in turn related to what Smith saw as the institutionalization of the avant-garde itself, emblematic of which was Mekas, who (like Warhol) was a ‘landlord profiteer’, one whose ‘careerist’ attitude had capitalized famously on the reputation of Flaming Creatures in order to rally enough sponsorship to create Anthology Film Archives (Suárez 1996: 207). Smith’s strategies of ‘fragmentation, het-erogeneity, the recycling of aesthetically disreputable material, and dedica-tion to performance art’, along with an endeavour to place his work ‘outside’ of systems of conceptualization, all appear as tactics to avoid commercializa-tion and institutionalization (Suárez 1996: 208–09). As Suárez concludes, the accentuation of these features in Smith’s later work – his interest in that which escaped institutionally bound encounters – meant that ‘[Smith’s] performances became more and more about the impossibility to stage or say anything, to the point of dramatizing their own failure, their own coming undone’ (Suárez 1996: 209; see Johnson 2007; Moon 1995; Siegel 1997).

In his later work, it seems that Smith repeated a strategy – ‘a self-conscious negation so acute that it all but prevented [his work] from coming into being’ (James 1989: 125–26) – that reached back at least as far as Blonde Cobra. In that early collaboration – portraits of Smith shot by Fleischner and composed by Jacobs – Smith turned on to naïve moldiness, but with that move he seemed to suggest that it was only through artifice – only through ‘inept approximation’ (Hoberman 1997b: 20) – that the world could be transformed, that the crea-ture could be created anew. In his theatrical work Smith cast himself in various exotic roles – Donald Flamingo and Sinbad Glick – but as the ‘Blonde Cobra’ he had already turned attention away from identity towards personage: to a kind of anthology of the self, one that invested in the symbolic richness of fig-ures and the relationship between them. With Blonde Cobra, Smith seemed to accept (as Clifford describes it) a documentary ‘rule of public comportment’ – a romantic notion of confession – but then, by pushing this to its limit, he exposed the entire proceeding as just another conceit of a subjectivity in proc-ess, one that was forever making and remaking itself (Clifford 1988: 172). In this way, Smith narrated (or more accurately, refused to narrate) scraps of exist-ence: he gave ‘public form to personal experiences without betraying their peculiar lived authenticity’ (Clifford 1988: 167). Smith thus created as objective and sincere a document as possible, but one that refused to present itself as an expression of a self-revelatory subject. That is, Jack Smith defended a rigor-ous subjectivity by leaving the document – the Blonde Cobra, the life-work – open to objective chance, by transcribing and transforming – by remaking and


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transforming – the boring, the passionate, the interesting, the unexpected, the banal […] and the ‘moldy’ (Clifford 1988: 168).

At the very end of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, Jacobs – one of Smith’s closet collaborators – affirms the thesis that structures Jordan’s docu-ment: ‘Jack became a performance. He created a persona that totally swallowed him. His own Flaming Creature’ (Jacobs in Jordan 2007). Despite the acuity with which this message is presented, Jordan’s film has been condemned for defying Smith’s own studiously glacial pace, ‘assaulting the eye and ear with split-second images’ and thus ‘reinforcing every evil that sketcher, architect, filmmaker, and essayist Jack Smith fought against all his life’ (Tavel in Frick and Hein 2009: n.p.). Multimedia artist Nayland Blake identifies a related and general problem: namely, how to document Smith’s achievements and deal with his legacy without enacting a kind of violence upon it; how to provide an understanding of a life-work that is deliberately unfinished and demand-ing while retaining that difficulty and its political disruptive dimension (Blake 1997: 170). Blake suggests that to understand the ‘true genius’ of Smith’s work one must take it as a whole, ‘not chop it into highlights and master-pieces’ (Blake 1997: 183). Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis falters for never displaying an awareness of the problem of re-presenting Jack Smith, something that the recent ‘LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH!’ conference was acutely aware of when it acknowledged ‘that to subject an artist like Smith […] to the institutional colloquy of scholars, artists, and peers is to risk seeking a canoni-cal recuperation that inverts the analysand’s own tropisms’ (Velasco 2010: 59). The strategy of ‘LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH!’ is thus to work with Smith’s entire ‘uncareer’– ‘his trash aesthetic; his obtuse, paratactic tableaux; his aggressive ineptness in matters of money and publicity’ (Velasco 2010: 59) – and admit that this adds up – not to a unified entity – but to an unfinished collage, and tribute to Smith’s ‘über-failure’.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Ann Restak and Miciah Hussey at the Jack Smith Archive, Gladstone Gallery, New York.

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SUGGESTED CITATION

Verevis, C. (2010), ‘Moldy Art’: The exotic world of Jack Smith, Studies in Documentary Film 4: 2, pp. 173–186, doi: 10.1386/sdf.4.2.173_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Constantine Verevis is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is the author of Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP, 2006), and co-editor of Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (SUNY P, 2010).

Contact: School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia.Tel: +61 3 9903 5079E-mail: [email protected]


moldy art': the exotic world of jack smith

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