Jack Smith

Jack Smith (November 14, 1932 – September 18, 1989) was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema. He is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American performance art, and has been critically recognized as a master photographer.

Life and career Smith was raised in Texas, where he made his first film, Buzzards over Baghdad, in 1952. He moved to New York City in 1953.

The most famous of Smith's productions is Flaming Creatures (1963). The film, that first put camp on the map, is a satire of Hollywood B movies and tribute to actress Maria Montez, who starred in many such productions. However, authorities considered some scenes to be pornographic. Copies of the movie were confiscated at the premiere, and it was subsequently banned from public view. Despite not being viewable, the movie gained some anti-heroic notoriety when footage was screened during Congressional hearings and right-wing politician Strom Thurmond mentioned it in anti-porn speeches.

Smith's next movie Normal Love (aka Normal Fantasy, Exotic Landlordism of Crab Lagoon, and The Great Pasty Triumph) (1963–1964) was the only work in Smith's oeuvre with an almost conventional length (120 mins.), and featured multiple underground stars, including Mario Montez, Diane di Prima, Tiny Tim, Francis Francine, Beverly Grant, John Vaccaro, and others. The rest of his productions consists mainly of short movies, many never screened in a cinema, but featured in performances and constantly re-edited to fit the stage needs (including Normal Love).

After his last completed film, No President (1967), (Smith’s follow-up film, Sinbad In the Rented World (1972–1984) was never completed) he created small intermedia performance and experimental theatre work until his death on September 18, 1989, from AIDS-related pneumonia. Smith produced many theatrical mini-productions, often using slide projectors, in his loft and in art space settings such as Artists Space and Colab's The Times Square Show. Descriptors of lobsters as greedy landlords dominate, along with crabs, Atlantis, 1950s exotica music, and camp-glamorous North African costumes. A pungent odor of burning incense and marijuana often perfumed the performances.

Apart from appearing in his own work, Smith worked as an actor. He played the lead in Andy Warhol's unfinished film Batman Dracula, Ken Jacobs's Blonde Cobra, and appeared in several theater productions by Robert Wilson.

Smith also worked as a photographer and founded the Hyperbole Photographic Studio in New York City. In 1962, he released The Beautiful Book, a collection of pictures of New York artists, that was re-published in facsimile by Granary Books in 2001. As a draftsman, his posters, hand written scripts and drawing-notes superimpose a very eccentric personal imagery onto the traditional language of theater.

In 1978, Sylvère Lotringer conducted a 13-page interview with Smith (with photos) in Columbia University's philosophy department publication of Semiotext(e). It was collected in 2013 in Schizo-Culture: The Event, The Book. In 2014, it was released as a limited-ledition vinyl picture disc by Semiotext(e).

In 1987, Smith was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) degree from Whittier College.

Estate In 1989, New York performance artist Penny Arcade tried to salvage Smith's work from his apartment after his long bout with AIDS and subsequent death. Arcade attempted to preserve the apartment as Smith had transformed it – an elaborate stage set for his never-to-be-filmed epic Sinbad in a Rented World – as a museum dedicated to Jack Smith and his work. This effort failed when the landlord decided to evict them.

Until the mid-2000s, Smith's archive was co-managed by Arcade, alongside the film historian J. Hoberman via their corporation, The Plaster Foundation, Inc. Within ten years of Smith's death, the Foundation, operating largely without funding but through donations and good will, was able to restore all of Smith's films, create a major retrospective curated by Edward Leffingwell

In 1992, performer Ron Vawter recreated Smith's performance "What's Underground about Marshmallows" in Roy Cohn/Jack Smith which he presented in a live performance and which was later released as a film directed by Jill Godmilow and produced by Jonathan Demme.

Playwright Richard Foreman was influenced by Smith.

Tony Conrad produced two CDs from the Jack Smith tape archives subtitled 56 Ludlow Street that were recorded at 56 Ludlow Street between 1962 and 1964.

In 2017, Jerry Tartaglia directed a documentary called Escape from Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith which is a film essay concerning the works of Jack Smith, aimed at the artist's most devoted followers.

In 2009, Germany's Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin staged Five Flaming Days in a Rented World, a festival and conference on Smith's work. The event included several commissioned short films in tribute to Smith's films, the most noted of which was Guy Maddin's The Little White Cloud That Cried. 1963: in Ron Rice's Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man 1974: in Ted Gershunny's Silent Night, Bloody Night starring Mary Woronov, Patrick O'Neal, John Carradine, Candy Darling, Ondine, and Tally Brown 1989: in Ari Roussimoff (Frankenhooker)'s Shadows in the City About Jack Smith 2006: Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, documentary written, directed, and co-produced by Mary Jordan

Books by Smith 1960 16 Immortal Photos 1962 The Beautiful Book (dead language press, republished 2001 Granary Books)

2026 What's Underground About Marshmallows? Texts by and about Jack Smith/Texte von und über Jack Smith. Herausgegeben von/Edited by Marc Siegel. Texts by Jack Smith, Marc Siegel, Susan Sontag, Stefan Brecht, J. Hoberman, Jonas Mekas, Sylvère Lotringer. Alexander Verlag Berlin. ISBN 978-3-89581-622-2