That’s the Way the Roachcrust Crumbles

by Jerry Tartaglia

July 2008 Oley Valley, Pennsylvania

This is probably old news to many of the gossip addicts and culture vultures who make their nests around the snake pit that is laughably called the arts “community” in America. Out here in the wilds of Pennsylvania, however, we like to digest our facts for a few days before connecting the brain to the wagging tongue. So if this comes as old news, please understand that we move a bit more slowly here than in the rest of the country.

Late last month, Jack Smith’s sister, Mrs. Susan Slater, sold the entirety of her brother’s estate to the Gladstone Gallery in New York City. The ownership of the photographs, paintings, slides, films, etc. has been transferred. The Plaster Foundation no longer has custody nor custodianship of the work.

No doubt there are many who have already rushed to their phones to begin their personal campaigns for the fame and gain that lies ahead. Stories will be concocted about their participation in the Lucky Landlord performances, old snapshots of seventy year old ex-hippies with Jack will surface, endless tales will be retold mimicking Jack’s falsetto voice, and each new version is intended to add to the marketability of the work and drive the Smith stock value ( NY Art Exchange symbol: SMIT ) through the roof.

It was a predictable conclusion, really, for anyone who actually knew Jack. Anything connected to Jack Smith always took place with melodrama, infectious hysteria, and always, always, ended in “failure”. That was his aesthetic. So the fact that his work finds itself in the hands of a commercial art gallery makes sense to me.

For me personally, except for the troublesome discovery of who my friends really are, the last seventeen years of restoring and preserving Jack’s film legacy has been an amazingly positive experience. J. Hoberman, Penny Arcade and Mary Dorman behaved with the utmost integrity and dedication to genuinely preserving Jack’s work. I sincerely thank them and all of my friends and colleagues who supported the preservation of Jack Smith’s work. Whether or not we were in some instances able to produce tangible results, your support remains valuable.

My friends – and Jack’s friends- in Europe, especially, have my unending gratitude and love for standing up for artistic integrity and for the ideals that Underground Cinema has always embodied.

For a brief moment, in between the production of that “documentary” film and the sale of the estate, it looked like the films were going to be housed at the most respected Museum of American Art in town. That, of course, turned out to be too good to be true. Considering what still remains to be done in the way of preservation and restoration it would have meant that the remaining performance reels in the Smith film archive could have been restored and preserved under ideal conditions. Much still remains to be done.

Whether the Gladstone Gallery chooses to avail itself of the reliable resources that actually care about and understand the work, or chooses to be taken in by the salivating vultures that are perched in their ego driven clouds of unknowing, remains to be seen. Good business sense advises the former.

For the last seventeen years or so, the four of us, J. Hoberman, Penny Arcade, Mary Dorman, and Jerry Tartaglia have done our best to keep the work intact and out of the hands of exploiters. What does it mean? Simply that no one has the right to turn another artist’s work into something that it is not. That was the guiding principle under which I restored and reassembled his films and worked on their preservation and exhibition during these years.

In the early 1990s, Flaming Creatures was screened at the New York Film Festival. Someone noticed that the soundtrack was out of sync. I had been working at Anthology Film Archives, and Jonas Mekas asked me if I could resync it. It turns out that the sound was off by about 39 frames. I fixed it. Shortly thereafter I was asked to help get the films ready for the exhibition of Jack’s work at the American Museum of the Moving Image and the PS1 Museum.

I put my own filmmaking on hold for more than a decade, and dedicated my creative energy to Jack Smith’s work.

A lot of very self inflated people immediately began throwing spitballs at me from the sidelines. One friend of Jack’s wanted to create a “new” version of Normal Love and bring in some friends to create a “new” soundtrack. Another one insisted that Normal Love was intended as a double screen projection. I rejected these ideas and kept to the belief that the work had to be preserved as it was left at the time of death, and not as any of us determined that it “should” be. Restoration and Preservation requires that the work be preserved as it is.

Just because the artist is dead, the survivors don’t have the right to re-do his art and make it into something else. In addition, it seems that some of the people that Jack rejected in life are under the impression that his death provides them carte blanche and that his feelings, no matter how ridiculous they might seem to others, are invalid and somehow negated. If someone rejects your aesthetic choices in life, how does their death negate the validity of their rejection??

Fortunately, the film legacy has been preserved. I have my notes, documents, and the stories of the last seventeen years. Under the terms of the sale, the prints of the films, as I restored them, that are housed in various museums and institutions around the world, remain intact. This means that the true story can and will be told if there is an attempt to erase what we have done or to lie and distort the facts, or if there is any attempt to “re-create” Jack Smith’s work. I will continue to speak and write about the restoration and preservation of filmmakers’ work; Jack’s especially.

I am confident that the new owner understands the value and meaning of Jack Smith’s work, and I sincerely wish them the best as they begin their enterprise. I also hope that they will respect the work, in particular the film legacy, as it has been restored, and continue with the remaining restorations that still remain to be done.

My only fear about the Jack Smith legacy is that the new owner of the work will rely on the advice of the vulgar, pretentious, and uninformed troublemakers who are waiting in the wings, to create the “Interactive DVD of Jack Smith in Lobsterland, with the 3D video game of Jack vs. Fishhook for sale at $29.95 from Amazon - Jack Smith: that crazy 60s Gay Jokester- always good for a laugh!!”

Some acquaintances will no doubt choose to support the trivialization of Art and join the efforts of those troublemaking roaches from the Cesspools of Atlantis. It is part of the Pastiness of those Creatures who need the Glamour of someone else’s Horror in order to survive. But they would do well to remember that Glamour is a lot like Roachcrust. As they lay dying in their nest, one day in a few short years, those Roaches of Atlantis will realize the depths of their illusions - the damage, the disappointment, and the hurt they have caused to people who had done nothing to hurt them. With the futility of their wagging tongues pressed against their quivering mandibles they will whisper the words of Jack Smith’s own judgment upon them: “What a horrible life!”

The rest of us are free to continue on with our integrity and pursue our own work. Those other poor creatures suffer the Curse of Jack Smith, doomed to wander the sewers of Atlantis watching the Roachcrust crumble off of their withering shells. Beware the Curse of the Cobra!

Long Live Jack Smith!! Long Live Underground Cinema!!