Performance by Jack Smith (Midi Onodera/1984/1992/5 mins/16mm) Putting Litter in the Pool (1977/10 mins/Digital) The Secret of Rented Island Excerpt (1977/1997/20 mins/Digital) Jack Smith in Cologne (1974/11 mins/Digital) Hamlet in the Rented World: A Fragment (1970-3/27 mins/Digital) Midnight at the Plaster Foundation of Atlantis (1970/17 mins/Digital) Cloaked in glamour and excess, these films depict the sinister side of a distinctly American obsession with fame, wealth, and beauty in a detritus-ridden capitalist world. Meanwhile Jungle Island (aka Reefers of Technicolor Island ) captures Mario Montez in a psychedelic, pot-filled, tropical fantasy-land. In Song for Rent, Smith stars as the drunk and delirious matron Rose Courtyard (inspired by Rose Kennedy), who sits in a room filled with trash and decaying corpses while Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” plays in the background. I Was A Male Yvonne De Carlo features a scene inside Smith’s detritus-filled loft, where Warhol Superstar Ondine snaps glamour shots of a visibly bored Smith and an attendant nurse whips a crowd of zealous fans. In response to the 1968 presidential campaign, Smith’s No President juxtaposes black and white found footage from Wendell Willkie’s 1940 presidential campaign with Smith’s costumed and masked creatures. Jungle Island (aka Reefers of Technicolor Island ) (1967/15 mins/16mm) I Was a Male Yvonne de Carlo (1960s-70s/30 mins/16mm) This program will also include the coda to Normal Love entitled Yellow Sequence, which features outtakes from the film. Enacting his “pasty” fantasy of Atlantis through scenes of bacchanalian excess, Smith’s exotic creatures bathe in a pool of milk, cavort with a slithering cobra, and chase each other through the woods in Edenic pursuit. The film features many of Smith’s “creatures” including Mario Montez cast in the role of a mermaid and the Velvet Underground’s Angus MacLise as a mummy. Shown in many versions and often edited live in his film performances, Normal Love is emblematic of Smith’s new approach to filmmaking. The program ends with Smith’s most notorious-and his last completed- film, Flaming Creatures, which was seized by the NYPD at the time of its debut and became the subject of a censorship battle over its lascivious content.įollowing the controversy over Flaming Creatures, Smith never completed another film. Smith’s Overstimulated, a silent reel later used in his live lm performances, deliriously depicts actors Jerry Sims and Bob Fleischner frantically jumping up and down in a room filled with mysterious objects and debris. In Scotch Tape, his cast dances across a landscape of industrial wreckage (the future site of Lincoln Center), while Eddie Duchin’s rhumba “Carinhoso” sounds in the background. Jack Smith produced films characterized by their hallucinatory, frenetic vision. In history, as in life, Smith’s oeuvre exists in renegade defiance of the capitalist imperatives of commodification and containment, as vilified in his philosophical fabulations of “lucky landlordism,” “rented island,” “art crust,” and “black light of false lighthouse capitalism.” In conjunction with the exhibition Jack Smith: Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis at Artists Space through September 9th, this program of films and previously unseen recorded performances includes Flaming Creatures, Normal Love, Scotch Tape, I Was A Male Yvonne de Carlo, and a newly discovered recording of Smith performing at the University of Colorado in 1980.Įxplorations of an "Aesthetic of Delirium" Yet, since his death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1989, his artistic legacy has proven to be similarly incalcitrant and resistant to clean-cut narrativization. Beginning September 8, Metrograph will present a six-program retrospective of Jack Smith. Smith’s (1932–1989) virtuosic output is revered for its caustic humor, self- invention, and debasement of institutional authority, which intensified throughout his ever-evolving work.
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