Jack
Smith
By Jerry Tartaglia, 1994
Vanguard Filmmaker, radical photographer, seminal
performance artist, Queer saint: the late Jack Smith maintained an intense,
lifelong rapture conjured out of the frayed magic and glamour of a
Jack Smith was one of
the most accomplished and influential underground artists in the 1960s, 70s,
and 80s, a key figure in the cultural history of Downtown film, performance,
and art. From the late
1950s until his death from A.I.D.S. in 1989, Smith was chiefly recognized for
his work in film and performance. Innovative and idiosyncratic, Smith explored
and developed a deceptively frivolous camp aesthetic, importing allusions to
B-Grade Hollywood films and elements of social and political critique into the
arena of high art. Less celebrated than the many people he inspired, Smith's
multi-media influence is evident in the works of a broad segment of the
American Avant Garde. In film, his influence is evident in the work of Andy
Warhol, Ken Jacobs, John Waters, George Kuchar, Scott
and Beth B. In avant-garde theater and performance art, his hand touches Robert
Wilson, Charles Ludlam, John Vaccaro,
Cindy Sherman, and Richard Foreman.
In his filmmaking, Smith created a sense of "aesthetic delirium." Through his use of outdated film stock and baroque subject matter, he pushed the limits of the medium, liberating it from the straitjacket of "good"' technique and "proper" behavior. In his best known film, Flaming Creatures (1961), characters cavort in a setting reminiscent of the court of Ali Baba, with a mood suggestive of the paintings of Heironymous Bosch. The film is a quasi-documentary of Androgynes and Transvestites in which flaccid penises and bouncing breasts are so ambiguously equated as to disarm the distinction between male and female. In Flaming Creatures, Smith manages to combine the ornate imagination of his youth with the realities of adult fantasy.
Smith's second feature length film was Normal
Love (1963). Unlike the black and white Flaming Creatures, it is
shot in rich color, at outdoor locations including the swamplands of
Smith also created No President
(1968), originally titled The Kidnapping of Wendell Willkie
by the Love Bandit, in reaction to the 1968 Presidential campaign. It mixes
black and white footage of Smith's creatures, with old campaign footage of
Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican Presidential
candidate.
In addition to No President there
are numerous shorts and fragments of short films. Some of these include: Overstimulated
(c.1960), Scotch Tape (1962), Buzzards Over
Baghdad, Respectable Creatures, and others.
See the Jack Smith Filmography
for additional descriptions.
The Films and The
Performances
Smith was both a filmmaker and performance
artist. After a period of about eight years (1961 - 1969) in which Smith showed
the films in their completed forms in conventional film screening settings, he
began to incorporate the films and his slides into the performances. He
developed this technique of
"Expanded Cinema" in many of his performance pieces of the
period: "Exotic Landlordism of the World," "Dance of the Sacred
Foundation Application," "Death of A Penguin," " The Secret
of Rented Island, " "Shark Bait of Capitalism," and "The
Horror of Uncle Fish Hook's Safe."
Smith created startling stage effects through the spontaneous re arrangement and interplay of recorded imagery on film and slides, with the live action on the "stage", editing and re-editing the film images on the spot, in the midst of the performance. This spontaneous editing, however, required a unique form of splicing in which he put together strands of camera original as well as printed material with masking tape. Thus he managed to create a unique version of the films for each performance.
