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.