Bridging the Gap: Contemporary Craft Practices (Gallery Lecture)

Hi everyone, thank you so much for being here tonight, and thank you to Jessica Todd and Jovencio de la Paz, fellow jurors, gallery manager Kelsey Dillow for her tireless work in bringing this exhibition together, all of the artists that contributed work, the current artists in residence, and to everyone at Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts for their generosity and hospitality. It’s been an honor to see a swift glipse of the school and everything that goes into creating a holistic environment of education and practice in craft. I am endlessly grateful for the work being done here and at craft institutions throughout the country.

My name is Ariel Zaccheo, I’m the Assistant Curator at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco and have been with the organization for th e past six years, which was my introduction to the craft world after being siloed in the world of art history during grad school. The Museum of Craft and Design is the only institution dedicated to craft and design in Northern California, and the core of our mission is to provide creativity for all, through programming and exhibitions that explore creative process and materiality in its many forms. It is an honor and a privilege to engage fine craft and design in this role, and even more of an honor to be a part of the Arrowmont community tonight.

When asked to be a juror for this exhibition, I started mulling over a crucial piece of information that was provided: the title. The title was chosen before the three jurors chose the works, before the artists submitted work, and even before the jurors were chosen by Arrowmont.

This title, Bridging the Gap: Contemporary Craft Practices became the seed from which the exhibition sprouted–but what was the gap? What needed bridging?

I started first thinking about the descriptive part of this combination title, Contemporary Craft Practices. To think contemporarily, it seemed important first to think about the past. Craft’s definitions are endless and subjective, so I thought to start with etymology (stereotypical, I know): from its origins in Old English, “craft” referred to skill and physical strength. As the term evolved to refer to trades, the focus shifted primarily to process and skill. How and by what methods materials are manipulated remains central to a contemporary understanding of craft. The traditional definition also rested in materiality: invoking but not limited to glass, wood, clay, textile, paper, or metals. A third interpretation might be craft’s assumed servile function and domesticity, as in the past craft has more often been located in the home than on gallery walls. But all of these constraints are in intentional decay, as recent craft histories have unfolded at pace with the conceptual legacies of art as an expanded field.

To return to the implicative and catchy part: Bridging the Gap, this title reads, to me, like a rebuttal to the three admittedly basic categorizations of “craft” listed above. The gap being bridged might be one of intertextuality among materials. It might be a bridge between artists and art-viewers to showcase their process more transparently. Or it might refer to the ever shrinking distance between fine art and craft. The works in this exhibition address each of these ideas before following their own more complex trajectories towards questions of identity, environment, politics, and pedagogy.

While craft is usually discussed in terms of paper, fiber, glass, wood, metal and ceramics– what I love most about it is that it is a plastic category: in that it is able to flex and resist basic definitions in order to serve many purposes. I came to realize the importance of craft through my research into feminist and queer theory. No other category in the expanded field of art and art history comes to mind that has consistently been more inclusive of practitioners from within marginalized and minority groups, including women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community than craft.

Something that interests me specifically, and something that I think craft is uniquely positioned to do, is to give voice to women, people of color, queer people and others that have been disenfranchised by haughtier and loftier institutions. It is because of craft’s history and the definitions offered earlier, not in spite of them, that craft is able to lend voice to artists and craftspeople that have been written out or written over in traditional art history.

In the past, the perception of certain materials, processes and styles rooted in craft as “women’s work” or work of the home caused them to be absent or footnoted from the cultural record of fine arts– reinforcing a devaluation of the materials and subjects explored in the work. However, much of the work in Bridging the Gap push against and break through the borders of craft’s perceived secondary status, as well as its break from patriarchal systems embedded more deeply in traditional fine art institutions. This reversal allows craft practices the space to critique the systems they are a part of.

Though Bridging the Gap exhibits work in a variety of media, all of which take craft’s subverted status as a position in one way or another; I’d like to narrow the focus here to be specifically oriented around textiles and the often gendered associations we have around textiles using two examples from the exhibition. For context, fiber art as a movement within the institution of “fine art” began in the United States in the 1960s, led by pioneers Sheila Hicks and Lenore Tawney among others. Some male artists of this period adopted the mantle of fiber and textiles as a medium, (to cite some hometown heroes of mine: Ed Rossbach & Dominic di Mare were early adopters of melding fine art and fiber work) but the majority of practitioners were women. Fiber as a medium was quickly adopted by feminist artists as a means to unravel the embedded sexual politics woven within this medium. The gendered ground that historically contextualized fiber art has always been embedded with associations with domesticity, intimacy and costume, ripe ground for critically unpacking femininity’s place within those realms.

Within the exhibition, Kristy Bishop examines how women’s clothing and costume has shaped not only bodies (through elaborate corsetry, bustles and bustiers) but also the ways that we view eroticism and femininity. Using tassles as an abstract nod to the bedecked decolletage of burlesque, her piece features pinks & reds (colors primarily associated with women and eroticism–think red light districts and some flesh tones) as the primary color field. The tassel, when used in burlesque costuming, is used both to conceal and draw attention, something at the core of feminine experience of objectification and sensuality. The shape and woven pattern, read in a different light, might resemble a Victorian boudoir curtain, meant to conceal the outside, public realm from the private intimacy that may transpire inside. Flaunting the eroticism of female costumery, Bishop’s tapestries examine the way that textiles double to cover and importantly, reveal female bodies and how that has lead to both their objectification, and a source of their power.

Abuse Patterns (Institutional Stripes) by Arrowmont artist in residence Alex Younger uses the materiality and process of jacquard weavings to adroitly contrast the impersonal and restrained language of institutions during a time of trauma. For what is a textile to do but to cover, comfort, warm? Except when hung on a gallery wall, where its function is to resist and inform. The artist, uses this coded syntax to reveal the ways in which language can conceal and obfuscate meaning. Contained within the woven lines are quotes from college proceedings following up from an incident of sexual assault. The carefully chosen words dance around the issue, offering no closure, never addressing the incident in terms as plain, as black and white, as they appear in the weaving. Unfurled from the ceiling and spilling onto gallery floors, the increased size is confrontational and unavoidable. The extreme timeliness of her work, and her chosen material of woven jacquard, speak to the work women have traditionally done and are contemporarily doing in order to create safety and space for themselves.

Both of these textiles weave craft’s history together with contemporary feminist ideologies and political movements to question and complicate decades of women’s subjugation both within the art world and within culture more broadly. Each showcases the ways that craft can adopt the mantles of fine art in it’s own way, as simultaneously beautiful, technically masterful, and poignant.

To return to the three craft “categories” sketched in the beginning, Perhaps the range of materials, processes, and lines of questioning posed by the work in this exhibition bridges the gap between the roots of craft’s etymological origins, shifting the balance towards “strength” in its resistance to simplistic definitions.

Kicked Out of the Webelos

Steven and William Ladd, Webelos, 2015, shredded paper, glue, wheat starch, metal beads, metal trinkets, glass beads, crystal beads, pins, screws, dye, mesh, staples, wood

A hornet’s nest is composed of paper made from saliva and wood pulp. The outside of the hornet’s nest is a paper envelope, protecting and shielding the colonies’ combs vested inside.

A hornet’s nest is also a metaphor used to describe an unsettling situation in which many are affected. The metaphor relies on the implied act of shaking a hornet’s nest, in which the colony of up to 700 hornets living inside may swarm outwardly and surround the nest-shaker, causing dismay and likely many stings. Perhaps relevant, a hornet may sting as many times as he’d like, as his stinger does not contain the same harikari barbs as the honey bee’s, a dangerous balance by which the honey bee may sting, but must also lose his life.

Steven and William Ladd’s Webelos (2015, shredded paper, glue, wheat starch, metal beads, metal trinkets, glass beads, crystal beads, pins, screws, dye, mesh, staples, wood) is a hornet’s nest of both registers.

Steven and William Ladd, Webelos, 2015, shredded paper, glue, wheat starch, metal beads, metal trinkets, glass beads, crystal beads, pins, screws, dye, mesh, staples, wood

The ground is primarily shredded paper in a brownish-goldish color, pocked with thread-bare areas revealing mesh screen beneath. The mesh is orderly and tight beneath the clumpy shrouding of shredded paper, a perfect geometry like honeycomb. I imagine the shredded and crumpled bits of paper adhering to the surface with a glue chemically analogous to the saliva and wood pulp mixture of the hornet’s nest.

Built up from the surface, tight clusters of meticulously categorized gold and brass beads encrust small circular openings in irregular clusters. These bedecked orifices give way sometimes to mesh backing, sometimes through to nothingness. I envision swarms landing upon the surface of Webelos, fighting for entry to the mesh colony in wait behind these entry points.

Trypophobia is a freshly coined term for a fear or unease linked to clusters of irregularly placed holes (think Lotus pods). Trypophobia’s symptoms can be severe, inciting anxiety, or can be as relatively trivial as the feeling of skin crawling. The closer I zoom in on a high resolution image of Webelos, despite all its glittered golden gorgeousness, the more I notice the hairs on my arms raise and my skin tingle and tighten uneasily. Its luxe surfaces are clustered, irregular, like a demented honeycomb– the soothing, perfect geometry melted and warped.

And then there’s the other kind of hornet’s nest. The work’s title, Webelos, references “a Cub Scout section for older participants”, its color “the glimmering gold of the Scout badge for that division” according to a statement from the artists.

Innocuous, no? An older Cub Scout division for whom badges are golden. Its a surface statement, somewhat hollow. Webelos is somewhere between portmanteau and acronym for “We’ll Be Loyal Scouts”. The obedience and collegiality of the sentiment seems almost too obvious an analogy to colonies of hornets or worker bees, building and protecting the hives of the queen.

We’ll be loyal scouts.

Prior to 1994, 2,000 instances of sexual abuse were reported within the Boy Scouts of America organization. As Chief Scout Executive J.L. Tarr (a murky, sticky sort to be sure, but what’s in a name?) responded without affect after allegations in 1988: “That’s been an issue since the Boy Scouts began”. [1]

Fortunately, the numbers of sexual abuse accounts in the BSA have nearly zeroed out in recent years. But how can a work titled Webelos operate without evoking this shared cultural trauma in our recent past? Without erasing or replacing this traumatic memory, can we view this work in a light less shot through, less like a hornet’s nest?

The artists, Steven and William Ladd, are brothers. They grew up together in a community outside of St. Louis with two other siblings in a “supportive Catholic family.”[2] Their work often references their shared memories of childhood and family relationships. Though the two seem to be profoundly upbeat, positive dudes (William traveled the world as a fashion model– they’re both handsome, brilliant, engaged in community, artistic) I can’t seem to get past the melancholic overtones of Webelos. There is a duality that wrests itself throughout their biography and artist statement.

Two sentences lifted from their artists’ statement highlights the struggle: “we tease and laugh and talk as we work, shaping the development of each piece over time. The physical process is painstaking and unpredictable.”[3]

The first sentence is light, airy, you can imagine the positive energy emanating from two people, so close, sharing and molding their creative vision. The second sentence, a rebuttal, deliberately stark, maps the conflicts that arise from working with someone you love. Love, family, memory, home, time… all of these can be “painstaking and unpredictable.”

Later in the artist statement, the brothers address the material explorations in their work: “seemingly soft surfaces may disguise jagged pins and dangers we call ‘infections’ or ‘wounds.’ It is all part of our world.”[4]

Infections, wounds, painstaking labor (and elsewhere in their oeuvre appear infestations[5]) dressed up in gleaming gold beads. Is this how we access our memory? As a wound, a hollow, surrounded by but isolated from detail and decoration?

I realize that the swarm is shaken and angry. The hornet’s nest has been riled. The Ladd brothers are profound makers, and this is but one example of their diligent labors exploring variant materials and styles of making. The part should not be taken for the whole, however redolent. But Webelos and its relationship to memory, to trauma, to the collaborative and collective living spaces of bees is stuck in the slow-like-honey spaces of my memory. It takes on, collects, distills some minor and major traumas.

[1] Patrick, Boyle (1991). “Scouts Honor”. The Washington Times.
[2] Biography of the artists as mentioned on their website, stevenandwilliam.com
[3] Steven and William Ladd, Artist Statement http://www.stevenandwilliam.com/artist-statement/
[4] Ibid.
[5] One series from the Ladd brothers sprang from a memory of an ant infestation pouring out of a plastic LEGO container. One piece is a plastic LEGO container filled with paper ants, another series features large hand-blown glass ants anthropomorphized with names like “Billy”, “Barbie”, “Mom”, “Dad”, “Matt”, “Stevie” (all names of the Ladd siblings and ostensibly their parents.)

Giggling Blonde

The nearer I get to it, the more upsetting it becomes. It is capped, contained, deflated behind a plexiglass cube. Elevated just below eye level so that you have to lean over it in order to decipher the mess of platinum blonde spilling out of the frame of a wooden shadow box, the stiff wax skin glistens as it peeks out from amidst the spill and shine of ratted wig hair.

Behind the stiff skin, the eyes are locked shut as if they had been forced so by an embalmer’s hand. The lips are parted slightly but expressionless. Coral lipstick picks up the undertones of rouge on the cheek. Half of the face is obscured by the platinum wig, it parts like a curtain to reveal the sallow, waxy skin. As I leer over it, for it is displayed prone, a troubling and disembodied giggle cuts the silence.

A giggle is entirely feminine. It is the remainder of a laugh, either forced or repressed. It is flirtacious, perhaps, a reaction in concert with eyelash-batting to a john’s bad joke. It is also the laughter that follows stinging gossip about that john with the other girls later on. It is a laugh with a hand covering the mouth, squeezing the sounds down like a choked cough.

But this stifled laugh is mechanical. It is the musing of a skinned cyborg paired with a maniacal repeated laugh track, triggered by a surveilling eye as bodies near.  It is as if this creature had disobeyed the laws of Asimov, and its remains are kept under a plexiglass prison.

The giggle repels me. Any reflection of identity, any simper I read into the lipstick, any flush I spotted in the cheek, I suddenly recognize as duplicitous. The giggle is scripted, forced and run through audio tape. This giggle has been translated and traversed mediums like a nomad– from human lips to microphones, recorded on audio tapes, sent through mixers, play-back mediums, perhaps first on tape or vinyl (she was made in 1968) then later through Beta, audio cassette, CD, MP3 now, perhaps… who knows. Her mechanisms are hidden in the shadow box.

“In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics — the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other — the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.” — Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto1

Though Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto was written in the late 1980s, Hershman Leeson’s work seems to battle both sides of the border war. In an interview with curator Hou Hanru, Hershman Leeson says, “…I made objects as far back as 1957 that resembled cyborgs. The word wasn’t even coined until 1960, by the biologists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Klein, but I was making robotic figures with organic features nonetheless.”2

Upon connecting to Haraway’s figuring of the cyborg as an ironic analog to feminine identities, the threads of the exhibition, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar, seemed to appear. The Giggling Machine: Self-Portrait as Blonde is a perfect cipher. The identity is overtly feminine– the giggle, the makeup, the platinum wig– but contained as a “machine”, a cyborg, programmable yet adaptable, and always one step ahead of her human onlookers. Perhaps that’s why she giggles.

And it is a self-portrait. But what self can we determine through this portrait? It mirrors back its nothingness to us, its collapsed face rendered hollow, its giggle mechanical and forced. Later in the exhibition, as we explore the artifacts of the life of Roberta Breitmore (perhaps Hershman’s most famed project, a construction of a life lived as another), the Phantom Limb series, wherein women and representation-machines merge bodies, the Artificial Intelligence of DiNA and Agent Ruby, we are reminded of the themes of Giggling Machine: Self-Portrait as Blonde. It is a constant re-engendering of identity, less a reflection than a refraction.

Lynn Hershman, Phantom Limb, Seduction, 1985, b/w photograph

As Haraway reminds us in Cyborg Manifesto, “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”

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[1] Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. 1991. Routledge.
[2] Hanru, Hou and Lynn Hershman Leeson. “Hou Hanru: Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson.” Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar. 2014.

blow up, break away: mod revolution

Blow Up (1966 dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) begins with David Hemmings playing the character of Thomas photographing a lithe blonde model (Vanessa Redgrave?). As he steps over her with his camera, the model writhes prone on the floor. Thomas shouts pre-orgasmic phrases usually relegated to a breathy moan, “give it to me”, “yes, yes, oh yes!” The mock sexual conduct climaxes as he leans over his camera and kisses the young model’s ear. The shot is taken and he exits to sit spent on the couch, as she rises, unsatisfied, and leaves the room. The scene establishes the unilateral direction of power given to the photographer and the blatantly sexual dynamics of the photographer/model relationship.

The next scene is another photoshoot, this time with several models, one of them a cameo by Peggy Moffitt. Moffitt is in her classic Vidal Sassoon geometric hair and makeup of her own design– mirrored metallic triangles set beneath heavy liner and lashes. Moffitt poses snake-like, each hold a seamless reflection of the previous pose and a midpoint for the next.

The photographer, pedantic and patronizing, stops the fluid dance, shouting “re-think it! Start again!” and continues to berate and belittle the models before him. “Wake up!” “Smile, I asked you to smile- do you know what a smile is?” he barks before ending the shoot and the scene.

Blow Up’s intention, in part, was to mirror a phenomena of the swinging 60s, exemplified by designer Rudi Gernreich, his photographer/collaborator William Claxton and his model/collaborator Peggy Moffitt. The three came to define the mod look of the 60s, and created an entirely new paradigm for modelling, fashion and fashion photography. Despite her cameo in Blow Up, Moffitt’s modelling career with Claxton and Gernreich was defined not by a paternalistic exploitation of her choreography, but by a collaborative spirit in which she and Gernreich worked together to define a “Total Look” of the 60s.

Gernreich’s designs stirred controversy (his monokini continues to shock even by contemporary standards) and defined the era. For a runway show in 1971, Gernreich outfitted the models in fairly standard knitted separates, but accessorized them with dogtags and rifles. Only a few months after the student shootings at Kent State, Gernreich reiterated his refusal of normative standards of fashion and voiced his politicization of the medium, stating “Women are on the warpath, they’re tired of being sex objects.”1

Surreptitiously using the medium of fashion to implode it’s own codes, Gernreich and Moffitt blew apart conventions in order to question them and their relevance in an ever expanding cultural zeitgeist. Reconstructing the troubling power binaries of photographer/subject, the collaboration brought about an entirely new lens for dressing and photographing the female body. Reversing the course of Dior’s “New Look” which structured and constricted the feminine form at the chest and waist, many of Gernreich’s designs were voluminous, taking inspiration from the caftan. Many more featured transparent panels or bared breasts to accentuate the body rather than conceal and reform it. Moffitt’s body in these clothes did not seem particularly more susceptible to the lustful eye, but rather engaged it– spoke directly to it as an equal participant rather than as a submissive.  

No longer a sexualized object to inspire desire, Moffitt’s direct gaze and choreographed movements revealed her artistic control in the deployment of her body. Moffitt was able to animate a narrative for the designs that pushed them into the creation of a politicized, feminist world; one where the function of design is no longer to sexualize the female body but to assist in its liberation.

From the beginning of their collaboration in the early 1960s, Moffitt designed her own makeup for each shoot and runway show. The shared creative syncopation pushed Moffitt and Gernreich down similar aesthetic and conceptual paths simultaneously and wordlessly.

The most amazing example of our being on the same page occurred with the 1968 resort collection. By this time I was living in New York and had no idea what Rudi’s collection would look like. Just before he came to town, something compelled me to design a very exotic Siamese face. When I saw the clothes and Rudi saw the makeup, neither of us could believe it. It looked like the same person had designed both.2

Released the same year as Blow Up and Gernreich and Moffitt’s 1966 collection film Basic Black, Bay Area-based artist Bruce Conner created BREAKAWAY (1966, dir. Bruce Conner), a 5-minute experimental film starring a 23-year old Toni Basil.

BREAKAWAY (1966) is unlike much of Conner’s body of collage and assemblage work while maintaining his line of questioning. Filmed by Conner himself, a rarity in his body of work, the film questions cinematic convention through medium and representations of the female body.

“ This notion of remixing found footage was key to almost all of his films, although he did also insert his own footage, here and there. BREAKAWAY is the big exception as it’s completely his footage, but its a driven, frantic, complex montage and its aesthetics show he’s continuing his exploration of the representation of the female body.” – Rudolf Frieling2.

Featuring Toni Basil as the object of the camera’s gaze and the singer of the accompanying title track, BREAKAWAY acts as a collaboration between Basil’s choreography and voice and Conner’s manipulation of medium.

The film is five minutes long. It opens with a credit, “Antonia Christina Basilotta” (Toni Basil’s full name), followed by the title, BREAKAWAY. Conner often played with movie titles and authorship. A Movie (1958, dir. Bruce Conner), for example, disrupts narrative time by inserting the title cards and countdown sequences, “A MOVIE… BY BRUCE CONNER” throughout the duration of the film. Immediately crediting Basil, and only Basil, alerts the viewer of the collaborative nature of the film.

The first 2.5 minutes are a spasmodic, strobing exploration of Basil’s body and movement set to driving Northern Soul beats. Toni Basil is first introduced to us in an outfit that could have been a Gernreich design from the cutting room floor. She wears a black bra and leggings cut through with holes that double as polka dots. The polka dots both reveal and disguise her body as she hits poses. Her poses are smooth and articulate, but spliced with black frames that strobe and distort the movement.

Bruce Conner, Breakaway, 1966. Collection of MoMA NY.

The song, composed by Ed Cobb and sung by Basil, is the main narrative force of BREAKAWAY. Piano riffs punctuate loose driving guitar and drums to push forward lyrics like

“I’m gonna break away from all the chains that bind/ And everyday I’ll wear what I want and do what suits me fine/ Hey, hey I’m gonna break away, break away from the everyday”

Like a manifesto for a newly liberated world, the lyrics follow Basil as she gyrates with the deliverance of a lone dancer in their bedroom.

Sometimes credited as being the father of the music video, Conner often drew inspiration from music, as in a video collaboration with DEVO for the song “Mongoloid”, Cosmic Ray (1962 dir. Bruce Conner) an experimental film set to the Ray Charles song “What’d I Say”, and his photographic exploration of the 1970s San Francisco punk scene (some photos also featured Toni Basil). BREAKAWAY syncs its strobing camerawork with the heavy downbeat to transfix the viewer.

The camera roves back and forth and Basil moves in and out of frame. Like a moth trying to absorb itself into a streetlamp, the movements are jarring and spectral. Despite the frenzy, it’s clear that Basil is an experienced dancer, at one point she twirls with the precision and expertise of a ballerina. Her choreography animates and narrates Conner’s camera histrionics. Cigarette burns pulse in an overlay through the frame, mirroring the polka dots of Basil’s initial outfit and grounding the film in the geometric zeitgeist of the mid-60s.

As the song powers on, Basil jumps in and out of costume through nighties to nudity, and though the costumes have a sexualized air, the spastic camera eludes any eroticism. There is simply not enough time for desire to ferment in her image. The viewer is constantly trying to catch up.

Once the song ends, the film stops its forward motion and is set in reverse. The viewer takes in the entirety of the visuals again, this time in reverse motion– Basil’s movements seem even more convulsive when detached from linear time. Like a possession, the viewer soaks up the lyrics in their warped retrograde.

Though the lighting, camerawork, time reversals and the synaptic structure of BREAKAWAY create the film’s reverie, Basil’s ownership of the screen and her movements imbue the work with a feminist re-reading of the cinematic starlet– un-fixing them from the static subjectivity of the silver screen. BREAKAWAY not only ruptures this subject/object relationship, but, in reference to the title, breaks from traditional cinematic narrative by denying a fixed beginning-climax-ending structure.

Scott MacDonald: “Have you assumed that people would look at your films on a rewind, as well as watch them projected?”

Bruce Conner: “I look at them on the rewind.”3

Conner and Basil’s collaboration spanned from their first meeting in the early 60s and included many other famous faces. The collision of creative forces also brought in Teri Garr, Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper. Hopper recalls holding the lights as Basil danced for BREAKAWAY, and later cast Basil in Easy Rider (1969 dir. Peter Fonda). This collaborative network was one of many for Conner, as he flitted through different crowds and subcultures.

“I really did have the same vision as he did, and since I was the vehicle, I knew I could help drive the vision.” — Toni Basil4

Bruce Conner (in tub), Toni Basil, Teri Garr, and Ann Marshall, 1965. Photo by Dennis Hopper. Courtesy of and (c) The Dennis Hopper Trust

After her collaboration with Conner, Basil herself began working with film as a medium. She created 8mm films involving superimposition, still frames, and physically manipulating the film. Her experience exemplifies how collaborative nodes and networks span outward, influencing and providing the backbone for movements.

BREAKAWAY existed in the same moment as Blow Up and Gernreich’s designs as modelled by Peggy Moffitt. The three depict a similar world, one driven by a collusion between art, film and design–  a new paradigm, geometric, swinging and liberated. The failure of the opening scene of Blow Up in contrast to the two artifacts of the time is in it’s depiction of a unilateral power dynamic between the photographer and model. The relationships exhibited by Basil/Conner and Gernreich/Moffitt showcase how collaborative work can transcend normative power dynamics to incorporate politicization and radical world making. This division of authorship allows for creative capacities and possibilities that would not exist in a vacuum of power.

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1.Peggy Moffitt and William Claxton, “The Rudi Gernreich Book” Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1991
2.Leigh Markoupolos, “Rudolf Frieling: In Conversation with Leigh Markoupolos” SFAQ, 2016. http://sfaq.us/2016/11/rudolf-frieling-in-conversation-with-leigh-markopoulos/
3.Chuck Stephens, “Exploded View: Bruce Conner’s BREAKAWAY”, Cinema Scope, vol. 53. http://cinema-scope.com/columns/exploded-view-bruce-conners-breakaway/
4.”Bruce Conner – BREAKAWAY – Art + Music MOCA TV.” https://youtu.be/5CHtEASlzG8

Banana Republics: The Way Things Go

“This article is about the retail chain. For countries dependent on a single, limited-resource export, see ‘Banana republic.’”[1]

See also:
Banana Republic (album): a live album by Italian signer-songwriters Francesco De Gregori and Lucio Dalla
Banana Republic (song): a single by The Boomtown Rats

It does roll off the tongue. Ba-na-na re-pub-lic. Syllabically rhythmic, it conjures fruit trees and easy elegance—khakis and seersucker tops, cotton… but that’s another story. The overlap between the colonial safari aesthetic of the Gap Inc. brand Banana Republic and the actual lived horror of political instability dependent upon a singular primary export is a startlingly close disambiguation.

Although banana republic is a pejorative term, it aptly describes the thinly veiled colonialism that characterizes these impoverished nations. The term began, of course, with the exploitation of banana exports from Central America under the United Fruit Company (a merger consisting of US fruit enterprises Chiquita Brands + Boston Fruit Company.) The UFC bought huge tracts of land in Honduras and the Caribbean Basin, displacing native peoples through a policy of legalistic dispossession[2], and then employing them to work their own land for extremely low-wages.

When the trumpet sounded
Everything was prepared on earth,
And Jehovah gave the world
To Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors and other corporations.
The United Fruit Company
reserved for itself the most juicy
Piece, the central coast of my world,
The delicate waist of America.

It rebaptized these countries
Banana Republics,
And over the sleeping dead,
Over the unquiet heroes
Who won greatness,
Liberty, and banners,
It established a comic opera:
It abolished free will,
Gave out imperial crowns,
Encouraged envy,
Attracted the dictatorship of flies…

Pablo Neruda’s “La United Fruit Co.” in Canto General of 1950. [3]

The terms co-optation into a multinational retail chain with high brand recognition is a classic win-win in capitalism’s unyielding optimism; the lifestyle brand of a successful neocolonial plantation owner appeals to middle class Americans enough to overwrite history and place a store in every indoor mall in the United States.

Consequentially, Banana Republic and parent company Gap have production in factories in New Delhi and Bangalore, which, as recently as 2007, were employing children as young as 10. The Gap also settled from a lawsuit for using sweatshop labor in Saipan, a US territory in the South Pacific. Despite claims to the contrary [4] Saipan may very well also be classified as a banana republic.

The ever expanding nodes of history, exchange and imbued postcolonial energies makes the banana republic an analogous port to access the works in Rikrit Tiravanija’s curatorial project The Way Things Gothrough May 24, 2015 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The project traces the global flows of commodity exchange, often through the cipher of food. The Way Things Go subtly hints at the shared experience that food provides, while also tracing the cultural ruptures of globalized trade as it relates to food as a commodity.

The exhibition consists of thirteen artists/artist-groups unpicking and untangling the multi-fibred net of postcolonial trade and cultural exchange. The objects are all imbued with a narrative essence; they weave together forgotten truths and slippery fictions to expose the agency and power of objects in a history of imperialistic exchange.

Maria Thereza Alves, detail from Wake in Guangzhou, 2008

The work opens with a literal journey tracing the life and migration of seeds and plants from the Guangzhou district of China, as it was the lone port city through which foreigners were allowed entry into China. Maria Thereza Alves, a Brazilian artist working in Berlin, painstakingly delineates the network of travelers and options for migration of single seeds (she lists the mud-caked wheels of bicycles and traveling entertainers as well as various conquests) inWake in Guangzhou: The History of the Earth(2008.) The viewer walks through this web around a constructed circular wall, and feels dizzy and dazed by the end of the proposition, having done exactly what the title suggested— traveling the history of the earth through a very specific lens.

Victoria Wagner

Similarly, the Museum of Gourd in the central gallery of YBCA offers a look at the permutations of one specific object through its iterations in different cultures. A curatorial project by Chihiro Minato with works by Terri Friedman, Daizaburo Harada, Reiko Ogura, Shiro Takahashi, Victoria Wagner and Chihiro Minato and objects from the California Gourd Society, Museum of Gourd ranges from historical artifacts and archival traces to loose associative works. Reiko Ogura, an archivist, maps the usage of gourds in mythology; Terri Friedman and Victoria Wagner, two Bay Area artists, use the gourd as a springboard into deeper imaginations of their distinct practices. An anthropological assortment of objects both made of and influenced by the shape of gourds rest under plexiglass vitrines while two gourd shaped contraptions by Terri Friedman circulate water colored with glitter and light.

If the circulation of the gourd, and the range of its influences seems oddly specific to Native American cultures of the American West, it may surprise you to find that The American Gourd Society has chapters in 26 states, and there are brick and mortar Gourd Museums in Angier, North Carolina and Sautee, Georgia.

A secondary look through the intertwined distribution of product and politic is evident in Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s Monument of Sugar. Rows of thick bricks made of refined white sugar lie in a grid on the floor. The narrow spaces between the bricks are dusted with erosion– some bricks have suffered vertical fractures leaving free standing columns of condensed sugar sediment.

Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, Monument of Sugar

While some blocks retain the opalescent white of refined cane sugar, others have experience browning and discoloration. Warm taupe colors radiate from the centers of the blocks, result in a gradation, which could be photographed and formatted to become a quality control test.

Van Brummelen and de Haan are based out of Amsterdam, and as such, their work had to be imported from the European Union. Currently, the European Union controls sugar imports by Tariff-Rate Quotas. These limitations force EU countries to meet their own sugar demands through the production of sugar beets and limit the amount of sugar that can be imported from abroad.

The Netherlands has a storied history with sugar import. The Dutch East India company first supported an international network of sugar exportation from the Brazilian sugar industry in the mid-1600s, creating their dependence upon South American supply. Trying to ease this dependence, trade restrictions have created a complicated web for the transport of sugar across international borders.

According to the Institute of Sugar Beet Research, two Netherlands-based companies, co-op Royal Consun and CSM Sugar, produced 865,000 tons of white sugar from 14,000 sugar beet growers in 2005[5]. Despite these numbers, the EU is currently facing a supply shortage of sugar, due, in part to its tariff limitations. Between 2010 and 2011, the European Commission allowed for 500,000 tons of sugar to be imported duty-free from African, Caribbean and Pacific suppliers.

Van Brummelen and de Haan bypassed these restrictions by naming their piece as a monument, which is subject to an entirely different system of import. The United States Harmonized Tariff Schedule classifies works of art and monuments, regardless of material, as duty-free, liable to be imported and exported without overbearing tax penalties and restrictions.

Co-curator Bettie-Sue Hertz says of Monument of Sugar, “circumventing international trade regulations by converting a valuable commodity (sugar) into a work of art, their project exposes the complex sugar trade between the European Union and other countries while also exploring the larger intersection of social and political issues with artistic and aesthetic practices.”

The work is paired with a 16mm film, which is projected daily in the space at 3pm. The silent film hauntingly grazes over images both of the artists preparing the blocks of sugar which have arrived in the gallery, and of the landscape of sugar production in Nigeria, charting the labor intensive process of both international projects.

The piece has traveled to Brussles, Shanghai, and the Palais de Tokyo, spreading its network through different cultures and receptions.

The projects in The Way Things Go fold together with time. It may take more than one viewing to absorb the nodes they weave together and unwrap apart, but each work at the least wraps the viewer into a deeper understanding of the way goods move, and the politics that engage in the movement of product. Like the dual meaning now implied through the vast reaches of the Banana Republic brand, we can think more of the global implications of seemingly benign commoditization.

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Republic
[2] Dan Koeppel (2008). Banana. The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. London: Hudson Street Press. pp. 281, p. 68. ISBN 1-594-63038-0; ISBN 978-1-59463-038-5.
[3] http://www.writing.ucsb.edu/faculty/dean/Upload501B-Fall06/PabloNeruda.pdf
[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/muhammadcohen/2014/07/16/no-banana-republic-us-owned-saipan-acts-it-in-casino-battle/
[5]http://applicaties.irs.nl/ccmsupload/ccmsalg/sugar%20beet%20growing%20in%20the%20netherlands%20.pdf
[6]http://ybca.org/the-way-things-go

King of the Kiddie Matinee

Christmas has just passed, and I’ve been high off the fumes of plastic blow-mold Santas and canned-snow on tinsel trees. One of my favorite cinematic masters of the holiday is producer K. Gordon Murray, and I’ve been meaning to write about him for some time. In my obsession with his camp treatises on Santa Claus and his mismatched band of “helpers” (the titular misfits of 1964’s short film Santa Claus and His Helpersinexplicably include Stinky the Skunk and Puss N’ Boots) I’ve never really understood the “King of the Kiddie Matinee.”

A short biography of Murray may shed some light on his eccentric aesthetics and tastes (big thanks to the research of fellow odd blogger The Uranium Cafe.) Murray was born in 1922, the son of a funeral home director, in Bloomington, Illinois. Bloomington happened to be the home-base for many wintering carnival workers. Murray, who hung around the carnival as a kid, later toured with West’s World Wonder Shows Carnival as a game operator, and eventually rose to the position of manager. He slipped into showbiz by aiding fellow carnival workers find work as extras in such Hollywood flagships as The Wizard of Oz and by helping to promote Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Finding his calling, Murray and his wife moved to Miami to set up a film production company, K. Gordon Murray Productions.

Easily parlaying his carnival barking roots into the promotion of exploitation flicks, Murray released 60 titles in 15 years. IMDB gives K. Gordon Murray 23 credits as a producer, 8 as an actor (usually as the dubbed over voice of perennial nightmare-fuel character Stinky the Skunk,) 6 as writer, and another 8 as “miscellaneous crew.” Murray is known best for plucking foreign B-movies and dubbing them in English for an American audience. Beyond the live action/puppet character films that earned him his monarchic title, Murray also dabbled in explicit horror films of the 1950s and 60s, as well as an odd assortment of Mexploitation Luchador films. The titles on his IMDB page read like a schizophrenic grab-bag of the subversive and bizarre. (Bring Me the Vampires of 1963, appears right below Santa Claus and His Helpersof 1964.) He might be the most important curator that camp has ever seen, but producers are rarely lionized as auteurs in the same way that Murray has been.

Pitch, from Santa Claus of 1959

Murray’s Christmas oeuvre includesSanta Claus and His Helpers, Santa Claus, Santa’s Enchanted Village, Santa’s Magic Kingdom, Santa’s Giant Film Festival of the Brothers Grimm,andSanta’s Fantasy Fair. The first in the series,Santa Clausof 1959 was released in theaters every few years for several decades. Although originially produced in Mexico, directed by René Cardona and co-written with Adolfo Torres Portillo, Murray’s english dubbing of the film is the version most remember, and can never forget. It is the oddball, live-action precursor to the stop-motion camp Christmas classics of Rankin/Bass (The Year Without A Santa Claus, Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer) But K. Gordon Murray’s production of a seemingly benign holiday plot pushes the limits of subversion at a time that we typically relate with an obsession with normalcy. These films exploit the notion of Santa Claus as the purveyor of good and evil, literally pitting him against the Devil’s best henchman, “Pitch”, inSanta Claus.

Pitch is sent to Earth to convince children to lie and steal and engage in general juvenile delinquency. (As he says, “The devil loves rude little boys.”) Sometime after Christmas moved from the dark reign of the Krampus and into the world of Coca-Cola, it lost its glaze of religiosity and alternatively, I argue, some of its base pleasures. Santa Claus, for a time, was a simpler, psuedo-secular version of God, a seer of sinners, a punisher of evils. Now a figurehead of the capitalist state, Santa stands less as a symbol of discipline and punishment, and more as an emblem of the rewards of capital. All children of means receive gifts, only the poor are punished. (And just imagine the disappointment in the dedicated suburban bully’s eye when he woke not to lumpen coal but to a bounty of gifts! Try harder next year, asshole!) But I digress..

The Magic TeleTalker, Santa Claus, 1959

Santa Claus, meanwhile, polices the children from above in his panopticon. “Santa’s Laboratory” hovers above the North Pole… in space! A tour of the lab reveals the tools of Santa’s police state: “The Magic Teletalker”– a set of plush velvet lips undulating from within a riveted brass frame set with jewel-tone buttons and toggles. The Magic Teletalker is connected (somehow) to the “Hear-All Ear”, which floats, disembodied, in the dark of space and the “See-it-All Telescope.” These sensorial appendages are ultimately controlled by the “Behavior Tracker Computer”. Anthropomorphic and obviously sexualized, these components all aid Santa in his quest to delineate naughtiness. Although I still don’t know what the Magic Teletalker does, other than talk nasty to Santa about the baddies…

1964’s Santa Claus and his Helpers regurgitates some choice scenes of Santa Claus but mixes it with a few of K. Gordon Murray’s favorite characters and places them within the context of a promotional film for a franchise of Christmas-themed amusement parks. Joy! After an establishing shot of Santa’s space Laboratory, SC&H then pans, via the See-it-All Telescope to look down upon Earth from the heavens and focuses on the whimsical painted mushrooms that line the entrance to Santa’s Village.

The view of Santa’s Village is indeed magical and mysterious, reinforced by the narrator’s insistence that by “using the 5th dimension, Santa can be seen everywhere.” An engineering Easter Bunny motors us through the outside of the village by conducting a small train.

Stinky the Skunk, Duke the Dog, and Puss N’ Boots, Santa and His Helpers, 1964

Inexplicably, we change course to an ensuing argument between the horrifying fur-suited Stinky the Skunk and Duke the Dog (recylced characters from Murray’s english-dubbing ofLittle Red Riding Hood and the Monstersof 1962.) Stinky the Skunk is voiced by Murray himself, recorded like the Chipmunks at 45RPM and played at 75RPM. The argument, of course, is about Stinky the Skunk’s offensive odor and lasts forFOURof the twelve minutes that make up this short film. As Duke condemns Stinky, he carries ahugeassault rifle, adding some immediacy and menace to the otherwise prolonged and benign quarrel. Puss N’ Boots then appears to break up the fight, but is forced to side with Duke, as Stinky apparently lives up to his moniker.

Good Witch, Jack the Pumpkin Head and Santa at Santa’s Village in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz

The Stinky the Skunk scenes ofSanta Claus and His Helperswere filmed on location at three different “Santa’s Village” parks across the country. These Santa’s Village parks influenced some of the oddball circus of characters featured in the short film (the Easter Bunny Engineer was a Santa’s Village original.) In addition to a sleigh pulled by imported Arctic reindeer, Santa’s Village in Santa Cruz featured such odd characters as a good witch and “Jack the Pumpkin Head” (Tim Burton, I’m looking right at you, man.) Opened first in Santa Cruz in 1957 by H. Glenn Holland, with franchises later in Southern California and Dundee, Illinois, Santa’s Village was the first franchised theme park in the world. It’s rides are kind of lame, although the Santa Cruz park featured a small roller coaster and a snowman and snowball themed version of the Disneyland teacups ride. What a perfect storm that brought Christmas camp masterminds H. Glenn Holland and K. Gordon Murray together. I’d love to be a fly on the wall of this meeting.

Peppermint Slide at Santa’s Village in Dundee Illinois

Back in the twisted world of Santa Claus and his Helpers, the plot ends with Santa breaking up Stinky, Puss N’ Boots and Duke’s fight before the rifle has to be used. Santa then forces the three creeps to go make toys, because he underestimated the number of good children this year. (Distracted, perhaps, by the Magic Teletalker?) A final (ish) shot cuts between a tight focus of human hands assembling toy guns and Stinky operating a spark-firing band saw for 2 of the 12 minutes that make up this Christmas classic before abruptly, and without closure, sending up a “The End” title card.

Stinky the Skunk at the end of Santa Claus and His Helpers, 1964

Although Santa Claus of 1959 is undoubtedly a better film in the twisted cult sense, K. Gordon Murray’s involvement was only in Americanizing the film– dubbing it in English, giving it his name and a sensationalist pitch.Santa Claus and his Helpers was a direct product of Murray’s astounding filmic ineptitude. Splicing scenes from his appropriation ofSanta Claus with out-of-context original scenes featuring recycled characters and costumes fromLittle Red Riding Hood and the Monsters and promotional video from Santa’s Village theme parks,Santa Claus and his Helpers is a perfect Frankenstein’s monster featuring the highlights of K. Gordon Murray’s eccentricities. I believe the film was also used to promote Santa’s Village theme parks…

Well, the one in Dundee, Illinois still exists. Let’s go!

You can watch Santa Claus and His Helpers here, and Santa Claus here.

The Ever-Unfolding Pasty Triumph: Jack Smith's Performative Cinema

Jack Smith’s film, Normal Love (1963) is available only in traces. Edited in-house, often during the screening of the film, a definitive version of the film was never finalized. A three-minute clip, uploaded to YouTube, offers the film’s “Swamp Sequence” tableaux. It begins with a closely cropped frame of legs bent pell-mell, draped with dusty pink fabric on a swath of emerald grass. The color is like tinted Victorian photographs: sublime but untrue. Arms, presumably attached to the same body as the legs, outstretch to ignite a sparkler, which spills forth smoke and showers light in abstruse layers as the image is doubled. An echo of itself, two images seem to kaleidoscope upon themselves. They obscure and abstract the swaths of rose and emerald tones, expanding through the frame like the soft spread of mold on bread.

Exotic Arabian tambourine sounds flutter behind the image as the camera glides among bodies curled in on themselves, forming fleshy arabesques, and lighting sparklers one after another in a rhizomatic flow of sprinkling light and curls of smoke. The smoke and light dance with the camera amidst veils of patterned color, vivid pastels in hues of watermelon tourmaline. Legs linger, twisted about on themselves, stacked in different lengths on thirsty grass, a gradation from emerald to a gold dust color. The pink flesh tones match the luscious over-bloomed rose held by an outstretched arm. Sparklers lit by brassiered queers are twirled in dance-steps behind a silken scarf amidst paper posies. Faces stretch and peer through taut sheer prints of turning leaves. The haptic simultaneity of the frame elicits uninhibited sensorial hedonism from the viewer. The clip ends by scanning up the body of a bather in a milk-bath, revealing only hints of pearls and a coy red-lipped smile through the sheer veil of the cream. The tones of pasty cream and off-white bathe the entire scene in a sugary sweetness.

Although this short scene from the film may or may not be the one Smith would choose to represent himself and his film, it doesn’t matter- any combination of frames would have achieved the same absurd elegance. It is the tableaux vivant, the collage of myriad strands of moving pictures, all surface, the marriage of styles as diverse as Dutch Renaissance still lives, the complex chiaroscuro portraiture of Richard Avedon, and the tinted film of Meliés magic cinema.

Although filmmaker Jack Smith is known primarily for his infamously banned film Flaming Creatures (1962-63), his reduction to the land of shock-cinema boils out his richer contributions as an artist in all forms: as a photographer, a live theatre performer and director, and as a filmmaker. Under each of his artistic hats, Smith elaborated upon his total utopia- an alternate reality of exotic sets, vibrating against his subjects in muted Technicolor. Smith’s medium was a bricolage of life, an aesthetic performance of identity.

A photographer in his initial days in New York, Smith revived the photographic medium with his specifically cinematic mise-en-scene constructions of sets. If we think of photography as a medium of index or trace, Jack Smith’s photographs, films and performances are indexes of an ever unfolding daydream, of a lucidly exotic, decadent and vapidly Technicolor tableaux that exists only in the careful calibration of Smith’s vision and then let loose into the realm of the real.

Film still, Normal Love, dir. Jack Smith, 1963

    Each detail is rendered in precision. Every individual frame in his films has been laid out in a visual splendor that renders cinematic concerns beyond the visual  (narrative, character arcs) superlative. During the same time period as Smith’s cinematic inquiries in the 1960s, fine arts movements of the time privileged highly reductive aesthetics in order to lay bare the essence of specific mediums. His contemporaries in structuralist American underground cinema, auteurs like Stan Brakhage, explored the optical limitations of cinematic capture, exploring the physical structure of film’s ability to record motion. Smith instead relied upon the medium as one more strategy to deploy his poetic world of the ethereal imaginary.

Smith moves from form-as-content to form as a decadent luxurious fullness, overriding content with an optic hedonism. Reclaiming the Baroque, the screen seems to burst forth with layered images, characters, colors, sets. Within the screen space, the images kaleidoscope and collage together. Outside of the screen space, Smith staged elaborate performances, often to correspond with the screening of his films. Although Flaming Creatures ran as a complete cinematic feature, Smith’s film Normal Love (1963) is literally pasted together, edited in-house during screenings at Smith’s house/performance space titled ‘The Plaster Foundation of Atlantis’. These performative screenings collaged together mediums from live theatre, photography, cinema, and sculpture. His filmic performances unfolded, unending, into the wee hours of the night, meticulously calculated and entirely improvisational, polished and perishable… the perfect paradox of performativity.

    This essay will attempt to situate Smith’s style of filmic performance as the creation of a filmic medium in and of itself; a category that has been explored in his wake, part of an unfolding and complicated relationship between the live theatre experience and the cinema.

Smith’s Taxonomy of Many Media

    Jack Smith, born in Columbus, Ohio in 1932, moved from LA to New York in the early 1950s. He was of a class of New York immigrants, migrating not from other countries, but from roaming middle-American childhoods to the glittering metropolis, with visions of bohemian rhapsody. During the early 1950s, Smith hung around with filmmaker Ken Jacobs, appearing in several of Jacob’s films. In 1952, Smith made his first film, Buzzards over Baghdad, which was later turned into a flip-book for Aspen magazine, and featured Andy Warhol’s Kiss (1963) as a B-Side.

    In 1957, Smith opened his Hyperbole Photography Studio. Like his film performances, he worked the studio as an unexpected snare; the photography studio would lure in customers, who would then be posed in typical Smith tableaux, resplendent in pastel Technicolor and overflowing with immersive camp detail. Smith’s photography presents his typical totalized environments. The photos swallow the viewer into the immersive imagined world into which they gaze. in 1962, Smith released his collection of photography as The Beautiful Book, a collaboration with Ken Jacobs.

    In the early 1960s, Smith experimented in the film format, releasing several films. Scotch Tape, a 100-foot reel of Kodachrome edited in-camera, was released in 1959 and can boast of being one of only two “complete” films in Smith’s oeuvre (the other being Flaming Creatures).  In 1962, Smith released Flaming Creatures, which was confiscated from its premiere and later banned because of “pornographic” content. Flaming Creatures is arguably the only feature that Smith ever created. While Normal Love (1963) has a conventional length of 105 mins (with an extra 20 mins of addendum footage, titled “The Yellow Sequence”), each screening of the film under Smith’s supervision was constantly edited, in-house, during the screening, to allow for an infinite number of combinative forms for the film. This performative aspect of filmmaking and editing may have been a partial catalyst for Smith’s later endeavors in live theatre.

    Smith’s first major theatre piece was titled Capitalism of Atlantis, which he performed twice in 1965 as part of the New Cinema Festival. Smith created his own performative studio, ‘The Plaster Foundation of Atlantis’ in a duplex loft in lower Manhattan In 1970. Both his workplace and home, Smith enacted durational performances in this space that would sometimes last long into the night. That Smith’s home was also his theatre is oddly brilliant, as the blurred line between his art and his life never did settle into one side or the other. Presenting an ongoing slide-show (titled, sometimes, Spiritual Oasis of Lucky Landlord Paradise, Fear Ritual of Shark Museum, and other times Horror of the Rented World) which “has in some ways superceded his 16mm film work”. Other performances included Withdrawal from Orchid Lagoon.

    Smith, in his work, was constantly cross-referencing text and image. In a collection of his photographs, titles are written on the back, languidly describing scenes and giving them life beyond their visual splendor. Smith constantly invokes a specific and odd textual reference, using the term ‘pasty’ repeatedly throughout his work. In the flipbook edition of Buzzards over Baghdad, the only caption over the action reads, “Meboubeh, the slave woman, lifts the artificial elephant off the Love Bandit’s chair and creates a pasty novelty.” Smith’s first one-person photography exhibition in 1965 was titled “The Great Pasty Triumph”, and indeed, Normal Love was first titled The Great Pasty Triumph, before being changed, first to The Pink and Green Horrors and finally settling on its current designation. After the “sickeningly pasty reception” of Flaming Creatures, Smith translated the term into the color palette and demonstrable theory behind Normal Love, calling it a “pasty, pink and green color movie that is going to be the definitive pasty expression…”

    An odd descriptive term, ‘pasty’ invokes a pastel color palette, a gelatinous texture, and the adhesive qualities of glue, or paste. The last signification seems especially astute as a trope through which to read Smith’s adhesive artistic process. Constantly melding mediums together, Smith is as much a collage artist as he is specific to any one medium. He pastes together pastel photographs with the cinematic mise-en-scene of Baroque still live paintings, gluing the liveness of theatre with the precise indexical motion and sound capture of cinema.  

Performative Cinema

Film still, Normal Love, dir. Jack Smith, 1963

    This performative cinema was a moment explored in the “expanded cinema” movement, but embodied fully by Jack Smith. In “Ontology of Performance”, Peggy Phelan outlines performance’s fleeting temporality in the present moment. Averse to documentation, the performance lasts only in the time shared between the audience and performer. It is an irreproducible act. As Phelan outlines, “performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” In this sense, Smith’s films are already outside of the realm of the performance. The films are always already indexes of lived traces. Though they are fantastical and ethereal, they are still traces of constructed moments. As traces, the films themselves survive to be reproduced and copied, digitally transferred, updated and thus saved from obsolescence.

Instead, the film strips themselves act as accomplices to Smith’s constant performative upending. Each performative gesture of Normal Love remakes it, an instantaneous utterance of its own history. The degradation of the film through in-house edits allows for the type of slow entropy usually saved for traditional mediums, such as painting. During each performance of the film, the entropy is quickened to the pace of performance itself, a witnessed ‘now’ in a lived present; once it is over, the pace is slowed once again to the gradual decay of emulsion and film. The last trace of the films inclusion as an accomplice of the performance is on the film itself. Without access to pasted together filmstrips, my only recreation of the Normal Love performances lies with the trace of witness accounts and documents.

    Performance as a medium occurs in a specifically authored space and time. Smith’s performances took place in an expanded time format, wherein the slowness of the action melted like molasses over audience members, often abusing to the point of exasperation. The performances often lasted until 4 a.m., as Jonas Mekas explicates in a first-hand account:

Now it was past 2 a.m., and as I watched… this fantastic show, I had a feeling, I suddenly was very conscious that it was 2 a.m. in New York... and most of the city was sleeping… and that all the theatres had been closed and over, long ago…and that only here, in this downtown loft, somewhere at the very end of all the empty and dead and gray downtown streets, was this huge junk set and these end-of-civilization activities, these happenings, this theatre... at 2 a.m., only Jack Smith was still alive, a madman, the high priest of the ironical burial grounds, administering last services here alone and by himself, because really the 7 or 8 people who were now his audience (the other three were on set) were really no audience at all…

Many of Smith’s performances ended simply because the audience had left, however, one could argue that they never ended. Smith was constantly unfolding his own performative world, creating and calling into being creatures, colors, textures, and combinations that once imagined, inhabited his world. Hoberman continues where Mekas leaves:

Ultimately the actors leave in the middle of the piece. I was present at this particular performance. What seemed most memorable at the time was the piece’s stunning conclusion. As the audience left the Plaster Foundation for the deserted streets outside, Smith turned up the volume of his record player so that one walked away with the sounds of “Orchid Lagoon” slowly fading into the night.

That the sounds of “Orchid Lagoon” linger as the audience disperses only solidifies that Smith is constantly living in this world of his creation, while the audience are left only nascent lingering traces, visually eavesdropping, while still occluded from any totality of vision.

Phelan writes, “in performance art spectatorship there is an element of consumption: there are no left-overs.” The left-overs of these accounts are still only partial, the performance was never-ending, and constantly unfolding in Smith’s real time, a constant lucid pasty daydream in which worlds are pastiched together through film performance and photography, creating a blurred line between Jack Smith as human being and Jack Smith as a medium himself: a conduit for a performative lived-art. Mekas continues in his account:

Jack didn’t need any audience, he would do it anyway, and I had a feeling that he did it anyway, many nights like this, many Saturdays, by himself, audience or no audience, actors or no actors, he reenacted this ceremony, the last man who was still around and above it all and not part of it but at the same time conscious of it all, very painfully conscious of it all, the sadness himself, the essence of sadness itself.

    Smith worked on constantly unfinished projects, their never-ending infinitude a testament to their constant performing. Smith’s films and filmic performances wait for an apocalypse, the end of civilization, they wait to be abandoned and discarded, awaiting an end to their immortality. Smith himself, never declaring an end, only created and created, never ceasing or proclaiming finitude, because nothing is ever done when you are building a world. Even the failed projects he has made into being, it would be unjust to kill them off before they are taken by entropy. The performances, as documented by Hoberman and Mekas, are never finished- they are only documented to end, when critics leave, when they are forsaken by their audience. But for Smith, the performances just go on the next day, and the day after that and so on and so on until one day he isn’t around to imagine the world’s creation anymore, himself a subject of entropy. Smith joins the illusionary nature of the Hollywood film, but usurps its temporal constraints into an unending, constantly unfolding world. If performance’s media limitations locate it to a specifically authored space and time, the viewer is a necessary completion to the work. But for Smith, the viewer is simply eavesdropping, spying, a reluctantly accepted voyeur, allowed the pleasure of the look but denied access to the totality of immersion in Smith’s inhabited visual world.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Hoberman, J. On Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, and other secret-flix of cinemaroc. New York, NY: Granary Books, 2001.

———“The Theatre of Jack Smith.” The Drama Review 23, no. 1 (March 1979): 3-12.

Krauss, Rosalind. Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1999.

Leffingwell, Edward G., Carole Kismaric, and Marvin Heiferman. 1997. Flaming creature: Jack Smith, his amazing life and times. London: Serpent's Tail.

Mekas, Jonas. “Jack Smith or the End of Civilization” in Flaming Creature: Jack Smith, His Amazing Life and Times, 48-65. London, England: Serpent’s Tail, 1997.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York, NY: Routledge, 1993.