Jack smith art movie#
''Marie, turn on Channel 5 at 11:30 - Garbo's last movie - 1941 - a movie which illustrates THE HATRED OF BEAUTY!!! xxx Jack.'' And written above, in underscored letters, is the terse command: ''Get some Dristan.'' You get a sense of its tone from a casual note he once left for Ms. But surely some young artists are independent-minded enough, or crazy enough, to take a lesson from Smith, who was generous, not to say insistent, with advice, aesthetic and otherwise.
They are also reminders of how tame so much new art is, and how quickly whatever strengths it has are neutralized by a stuffy, swelled-headed establishment. So Smith's films, the last of them titled ''No President,'' remain as proof of his brilliance. His stage pieces - radical, intense, unfixed - are long gone and just as surely beyond reconstruction, as are the installations of his contemporary, Paul Thek, a different sort of visionary, who also made epic art from throwaway things. This odds-and-ends exhibition only hints at his complicated dynamism even the 1997 Smith retrospective at P.S. He was scary - freakish, furious, hilarious - in the way revolutionaries can be. Antoinette that suggests why some people found him a bit scary.
In addition there are photographs of Smith and some of his actors on a Coney Island excursion, and a vituperative letter from him to Ms. (Smith, who referred to himself as ''the last normal man in Baghdad,'' had a thing for back-lot Orientalia.) They include costume designs, a Beardsleyesque figure drawn on a paper napkin, handwritten performance fliers, the pages of a remarkable unprinted book and a sheet of sketches of Islamic architecture, derived from sets in Maria Montez movies. The rest of his surviving work is made up of odd scraps, a handful of which appear in this charming show. Smith's films have had an incalculable influence. A drawing in the show titled ''Mortal Abhorrence of Courts'' refers to this experience. Antoinette, who died in 1996, performed in three of Smith's theater productions in 19.īy that point he had created his masterpiece film, ''Flaming Creatures,'' with its cast of drag queens and women who looked like drag queens, and had seen the film banned by the New York courts as obscene. You can sample work by Smith himself at Mitchell Algus, in a modest ensemble of drawings, photographs and ephemera from the collection of the performer Maria Antoinette and the artist Edwin Ruda. Pay a visit to the sprawling group show of hot new art titled ''K48 Klubhouse'' at Deitch Projects in Williamsburg, Brooklyn - as I highly recommend you do - and you'll find it permeated with the second-hand perfume of Smith's abject, exquisite aesthetic.
Much work being made by young New York artists is, directly or indirectly, in his debt. The great filmmaker and performer Jack Smith (1932-1989) is an artist for all seasons, but especially for this season.