Criticism Volume 56 Article 14 Issue 2 Jack Smith: Beyond the Rented World

2014 Glittering Logic in a Minor Key Jon Davies Oakville Galleries, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Davies, Jon (2014) "Glittering Logic in a Minor Key," Criticism: Vol. 56: Iss. 2, Article 14. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol56/iss2/14 Glittering London-based performance art- ist and scholar Dominic Johnson’s Logic in a Minor Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Key Performance and Visual Culture will Jon Davies stand as the definitive academic study of Smith’s persona, work, Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, and import to contemporary cul- Performance and Visual Culture ture. The book is the result of al- by Dominic Johnson. Rethinking most a decade of Johnson’s rigorous Art’s Histories. Manchester, research and thinking about Smith, England: Manchester University who has become an iconic figure Press, 2012. Pp. 256; 40 black-and- embodying a kind of queer per- white illustrations. $95.00 cloth, formance avant la lettre. A wildly $32.95 paper. influential, downtrodden figure in the New York City postwar un- derground film and performance milieux, his films—for which he is still best known—were radically provisional both in their form and in their content: sexual decadence verging on collapse. While best known for the infamous Flaming Creatures (1963), most of his other titles remained in unfinished, or rather never-to-be-finished, states throughout his lifetime (and be- yond), and would be reworked by the artist as live-film perfor- mances, their guts mutating in a confoundingly open-ended fashion over the years. Smith embraced the ephemerality and obsolescence of pop-cultural detritus in opposition to the “crust” of staid, frozen tra- dition. His live and his cinematic performances—not to mention the performance of his life itself—were about the impossibility of their own coming into existence, according to Smith expert J. Hoberman (37).1

Criticism Spring 2014, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 405–412. ISSN 0011-1589. 405 © 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 406 Jon davies

Studies of Smith’s practice tend critical fandom managed to keep to focus on the films more than on the artist’s infamous “difficulty” his equally innovative work in du- alive by (largely) resisting soft-focus rational performance and expanded romanticism. cinema or his dazzling writing and As Johnson’s title suggests, still photography. Johnson very ca- Smith’s potent engagement with pably synthesizes what has come catastrophe and failure is the central before while redressing the gaps tenet of the study. Johnson argues in the scholarship. The most im- that, for Smith, the very “possibil- portant publication until now on ity for meaning is predicated upon Smith was the Hoberman- and Ed- accumulated catastrophes, repre- ward Leffingwell-edited anthology sented in the logics of fragmenta- Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool tion, vulgarity, excess and waste” (1). (2008), in large part because it in- Johnson expertly analyzes the major cluded Smith’s writings alongside themes of Smith’s persona and work insightful critical texts. Johnson’s and how they operated within the most original achievement in Glo- prevailing cultural and political dis- rious Catastrophe is in his compre- courses of his time, and in the here hensive mapping of the written and now, which finds his work cir- word in Smith’s oeuvre (specifi- culating as a touchstone for contem- cally in chapter 6) and his ventur- porary queer artists. Johnson charts ing an analysis of its relationship to the entire Smith cosmology: from his performance. vendettas to his obscenity trials, each I should note a key event that piece of the puzzle works to con- contributed greatly to the criti- textualize his films, performances, cal discourse on Smith: Live Film! and images, which are considered Jack Smith! Five Flaming Days in depth. As Johnson describes, “I in a Rented World, organized by explore many facets of Smith’s glit- Marc Siegel, Susanne Sachsse, and tering logic, which extends from his Stephanie Schulte Strathaus in political and social grievances, to his 2009. Johnson was one of dozens of idiosyncratic perspectives on aes- participants from around the world thetics, and the problems entailed in who gathered to consume Smith’s a life lived towards art” (2). Smith’s work and discuss his legacy before work is always buttressed by his fer- returning to their hometowns to vent beliefs and philosophies, “his produce new films, studies, perfor- own politicised responses to what mances, and more, inspired by his he understood as a perpetual state of oeuvre, which were premiered six exploitation, misrepresentation and months later in Berlin. The result abuse” (8). was a fascinating, polyvocal collec- Johnson begins by productively tive autopsy of Smith; its raging yet framing Smith as a “lost cause” On glorious catastrophe 407 who represented a road not taken “counterhistory of cultural experi- for the development of a radical, mentation in the 1960s” by tracing utopian art (4). Rather than being Smith’s complex position “between consciously excluded from the his- narratives of art, theatre and film” torical record, Johnson suggests (29). Chapter 1, “Little triumphs that Smith “necessarily failed to of disaster: failure, boredom and register” (17). For Johnson, Smith excess” introduces the notion of was too messy and idiosyncratic a failure as a way of understanding figure to fit into prevailing narra- the threat that Smith’s marginal ex- tives of the development of visual pressionism presents to the writing and performance cultures, and of art history’s dominant narratives, Johnson resists imprisoning Smith specifically the cool, conceptual art as a product of the 1960s by consid- of the 1960s. “At once moronic and ering the “collision between glam- tragic, triumphant and vulner- our, disaster and sexual excess” able, bored and hysterical, Smith’s (8) that his work staged into the work poses peculiar challenges to 1970s and 1980s, as well. Johnson criticism,” Johnson explains, but it does not seek to recuperate Smith embodies the value of seeking out into any canons, but instead iden- the “itinerant, volatile and elusive” tifies him with a “minor” history as a way of fully understanding poised in between and to some the complexity inherent in every degree outside performance and historical moment (36, 38). John- visual culture (14). Uninterested son explores the intricate nuances in heroizing Smith, Johnson is at- of Smith’s relentless drive towards tuned to the problems of historiog- failure—from frenzy to atrophy raphy surrounding his subject and and everything in between—and of art and culture more broadly, the vital role of failure in perfor- and he is conscientious about how mance more broadly. The culti- these narratives and canons were vated boredom in Smith’s work and are built. Johnson neatly sum- becomes an infinitely complex art marizes the ambitions of this copi- form and metaphor for his—and ously illustrated tome: “Seduced by Johnson’s—emphasis on the mea- Smith’s aggressive attacks on pub- ger and minor, one that refuses to lic morality, Glorious Catastrophe give audiences easy satisfaction. reads Smith’s practice as a fruitfully Chapter 2, “‘Beyond self-dis- ambivalent investment in crisis, ex- appearance’: Jack Smith and art’s ploring representations of sexuality, histories,” analyzes how Smith’s failure and death across art, perfor- art and life intertwined through his mance, film, and writing” (26–27). persona and his polemics, which The first two chapters of consistently and vociferously de- Glorious Catastrophe advance a nounced the artist’s subjection to 408 Jon davies disciplinary processes of art histori- sexuality and especially heterosexu- cal institutionalization as “repres- ality always veer towards the cata- sive, punitive, and delimiting of strophic—and the specter of male artistic labour” (58). According to homosexuality. He also critiques Johnson, what makes Smith dif- Susan Sontag’s famed defense of ficult, specifically, is “his unapolo- the film at the height of its noto- getic queerness; his vociferous riety for desexualizing both it and critiques of art and art history; his Smith (102). Johnson concludes by rejection of finite and commodifi- positing that, for Smith, the per- able forms of production . . . and formances undertaken for Flaming his generally inappropriate poli- Creatures—the queer world they tics” (61). Johnson productively imagined into being—had a kind contrasts Smith to Andy Warhol— of life of their own that exceeded specifically Warhol’s enthusiastic their recording. embrace of careerism and financial Chapter 4, “Innocent mon- success as antithetical to Smith’s sters and Normal Love,” analyzes stubborn, all-consuming “hatred of Smith’s gorgeous color follow-up capitalism” (111). He concludes the film to Flaming Creatures—and the chapter by proposing that Smith’s controversy it, too, engendered— aesthetic ideas were virtually insep- which acts “as a satire on heterosex- arable from his moral judgments of uality that imagines it as a mundane the (art) world and his place within submission to social and economic it (82–83). pressures” (117). Smith saw all Johnson’s chapter 3, “Flaming sexual desire as deformed by the Creatures and the burden of dis- demands of capitalism to the point gust,” examines Smith’s defining that the masses are “shocked” by the work, Flaming Creatures, the ban- real, unvarnished bodies that lack ning of which Johnson argues was the market’s artificial plastic sheen “the defining event of [Smith’s] ca- (119). In sharp contrast, Smith’s reer” (110). He analyzes it through view of sexuality is as a force always the lens of the disgust brought to veering towards collapse and death, bear on it by the US courts and a “diffuse and opportune register of government in their suppression the perverse” (138) that poses dif- of the film through the 1960s; as ference proudly against perfection a serious target of morality cru- and prudishness. Johnson interprets sades, it becomes a case study in the Normal Love (1963) as a struggle to state subjugation of queer subjects “crystallise emergent political and at that time. Johnson articulates theoretical knowledge about sexual an aesthetics of disgust, particu- dissidence” (120). This contributed larly around the film’s central to building a nascent pre-Stonewall rape scene—which suggests that gay subculture around the figure On glorious catastrophe 409 of the freak, which became a kind Montez are “decoys for self-analy- of prefiguration of “queer” (128). sis” (153)—at a time when this was Normal Love advances an ethical out of fashion in both theater and code around freakishness akin to performance. He identifies the crux that developed in the similarly ni- of Smith’s practice as the lesson hilistic film Freaks (1931) by Tod from Montez that, in ineptly failing Browning, with its deviants’ rally- to perform a fiction, something far ing cry of “One of us! One of us!” more genuine and truthful reveals (124). itself (154). Smith’s zealous invest- Glorious Catastrophe’s final three ment in Montez—and the wound chapters develop Johnson’s thesis of her failure—ultimately lays a on the centrality of failure and ca- foundation for a queer politics. tastrophe in Smith’s work to frui- Smith’s prolific writing, which tion. Chapter 5, “The Deaths of includes everything from scribbled Maria Montez,” explores Smith’s notes, plentiful lists, performance profound investment in the titular scores, and doodles, to journal en- 1940s Hollywood actress—a mys- tries, erotic fantasias, and screeds, tical beauty with no acting skills. is the subject of chapter 6, “‘Glam- Johnson also unpacks the meta- orize your messes’: scenes of writ- phor of the wound—its “proximity ing,” interpreted by Johnson as a to death, disease, disgrace and other “labour of wayward performances bodily disasters” (144)—as a site for and ugly feelings” (167–68). John- camp meanings. Johnson here is son pored over every fragment of interested in Smith’s queer appro- written ephemera in the Smith ar- priation of Montez’s trashy per- chive over six weeks in 2005, a task formances and films, arguing that that had not been undertaken to this “subcultural ethics of wounded such an exhaustive degree before. recognition” can be a model for ex- The emotional impact on Johnson amining how Smith’s own legacy of finding the more private and continues to influence and be taken personal scraps of Smith’s detritus on by others today (144). Montez’s is palpable, and in that sense the mode of being and exotic glam- chapter is perhaps the most invo- our and mise-en-scènes opened catory of a (mythic?) “real” Smith up the possibility of a “better time who existed without an imagined and place” for Smith; writer Ron- reader or audience that needed to ald Tavel even suggested that, be communicated to. Johnson pos- for Smith, “every pertinent phe- its that Smith’s artistic practices nomenon was screened through “inhabit a curious space between her” (151). Johnson reads Smith’s artistic endeavour, therapeutic pur- work as distinctly autobiographi- suit, and domestic hobbyhorse” cal—his passionate comments on (179). While distinct from his 410 Jon davies spoken words, many of the written Finally, chapter 7, “Rehearsals words acted to spur on his impro- for the destruction of Atlantis,” ex- visations in the performances (some amines Smith’s investment in exoti- performances were more tightly cism and the myth of Atlantis as the scripted, however), whereas other foundation of his specific brand of texts become poetic undertakings “apocalyptic utopianism.” Focus- to Johnson’s eye. Writing here is a ing on the 1980s, with its unholy highly performative act—though trinity of Ronald Reagan, AIDS, one oriented towards preservation and the Culture Wars, Johnson po- rather than disappearance—with sitions Smith’s queer utopianism Johnson paying particular atten- as a performative model for imag- tion to the “hinge between the body ining the future useful to us now, that lives and the text that it writes” when queer theory is bound up in (182). questions of temporality and futu- He also traces Smith’s written rity: “Smith’s utopia is allegorised attacks on figures such as Jonas through the myth of Atlantis, as a Mekas and Susan Sontag and the vanquished plenitude that has been question of whether he was indeed and gone . . . his fostering of the fu- pathologically paranoid—seeing an ture is an ambivalent gesture, nur- organized conspiracy in what could tured without any concern for its be random occurrences—or simply material realization, and problem- “having all the facts,” as William atically modeled upon a fascina- Burroughs put it (187). Artists’ tion with the figure of apocalypse” writings for Johnson represent a (197). Johnson also interrogates an- productive interruption in the nar- other strain of exoticism in Smith’s rating of history, particularly as work: his notorious deployment they occupy a place between “cre- of “racial kitsch” (Tavia Nyong’o’s ative practice and everyday life” term), which is particularly evi- (191). (As a side note, it’s interesting dent in his early still photography. to consider whether this chapter Johnson sees it as a self-consciously would have been possible to un- artificial and, in the end, critical ex- dertake before art dealer Barbara amination of the normalization of Gladstone’s acquisition of Smith’s racist clichés and Orientalist signi- estate from the Plaster Foundation, fiers (204–7). Smith consistently the small group of friends who had “rehearsed” the destruction of At- salvaged, preserved, and dissemi- lantis throughout his career (216), nated Smith’s work before the vi- and the island’s intoxicating com- cious legal battle that eventually bination of “disaster and possibil- saw Gladstone’s acquisition and ity” (219) can be seen throughout rigorous cataloging of every frag- his oeuvre. Johnson concludes with ment of Smithiana.) what could be a summation of his On glorious catastrophe 411 entire book: “In his recalcitrant (27). Johnson also identifies him- threats, [Smith] reminds us that the self with the writer—or artist—as shaky yet singular space of culture scrounger, rummaging through de- offers an ersatz paradise, prone to tritus to cobble together “a life amid fantasy, pleasure and desire, while the details” (31), a humble prac- also, in the same gesture, invoking tice very much in harmony with a presentiment of something cata- Smith’s own work of bricolage. strophic” (220). Though his scholarship is spe- Johnson struck a nerve for me cifically grounded in performance with his precise and deeply af- studies, Johnson casts an extremely fecting account of the importance wide net in Glorious Catastrophe, in- of tracing queer cultural lineages voking a generous, eclectic range of and legacies. He states in his references that draw on numerous introduction, disciplines and cultural fields. One very much gets a sense of Johnson As individuals frequently as an intellectual magpie, as he removed from reproductive summons everyone from Lenny futurity, and often alienated Bruce and the debates between from familial legacies, les- Norman Mailer and Kate Millett bian, gay and transgender to the plays Who’s Afraid of Virginia people are especially well- Woolf? (Edward Albee, 1962) and placed to reinvent fantasti- The Boys in the Band (Mart Crow- cal histories by asserting new ley, 1968). His promiscuous bibliog- lineages with figures who raphy finds Alain Badiou, Roland attract our attention. Plot- Barthes, and Leo Bersani cheek by ting out a marginal ancestry, jowl, not to mention Freud and we may procure imaginative Fried. Frank O’Hara and Her- cultural heredities to prolong man Melville make appearances, the affective reverberations as do Nan Goldin and Penny Ar- of missed encounters with cade. Johnson spins off in many those who have preceded us. directions here; while this makes a (21) concise summary of his arguments challenging, it proves to be an un- Johnson’s motives and perspective mitigated thrill to read. Johnson is resonate strongly with our pres- also very conscientious about offer- ent historical moment, and they ing alternative viewpoints, caveats, commanded my identification, and self-criticisms. Even when cov- particularly as he describes him- ering his bases, his writing is highly self as someone “conditioned by poetic and, dare I say, performa- the inescapable subject position of tive. His evocative descriptions and being queer in the time of AIDS” interpretations of Smith’s films, 412 Jon davies performances, and lectures—like Johnson’s commitment to catastro- the Midnight at the Plaster Founda- phe, his adventurous intelligence, tion (1970) video documentation or and his keen sensitivity to thinking the 1984 “Art and art history” lec- through Smith’s work, because all ture—are particularly satisfying. of these are prominently on display The great irony of all this at- in this landmark book. tention to Smith—Johnson’s and others’—is that the artist would Jon Davies is a writer and curator based in have howled in protest at the dis- Toronto. In 2009, his book on Andy Warhol cursive vivisection taking place and Paul Morrissey’s film Trash (1970) was published in the series Queer Film Classics. on the body of his work, no doubt He currently works as Associate Curator at disagreeing with every commen- Oakville Galleries. tator’s assessments and opinions of his motives and accomplish- ments. Although Smith railed Note against artists being consigned to the crypts of museum, archive, 1. J. Hoberman, On Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” (and Other Secret-Flix of Cin- and academe, I would hope that emaroc) (New York: Granary Books/ he would appreciate the depth of Hips Road, 2001).