Films
- Read MoreExperimental
Normal Love
Jack Smithcolor, sound on CD, 120 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Respectable Creatures
Jack Smithcolor, sound on CD, 24 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Scotch Tape
Jack Smith16mm, color, sound, 3 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Overstimulated
Jack Smith16mm, black and white, silent, 3 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Flaming Creatures
Jack Smith16mm, black and white, sound, 43 minRental formats: 16mm, Digital file - Read MoreExperimental
Yellow Sequence
Jack Smithcolor, sound on CD, 15 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
I Was A Male Yvonne De Carlo
Jack Smith16mm, black and white, sound on CD, 28 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
Jungle Island
Jack Smithcolor, sound on CD, 15 minRental format: 16mm - Read MoreExperimental
No President
Jack Smithblack and white, sound on CD, 45 minRental format: 16mm
Biography
Few artists can be said to have had a greater influence on the history of experimental cinema, queer cinema, and performance art than Jack Smith (1932–1989). Smith was an antic performer who played to the cheap seats, flamboyantly and tragicomically overwrought in the manner of Theda Bara, Maria Montez, Gloria Swanson, and Dorothy Lamour.
His style of camp blended Hollywood orientalism, burlesque, kitsch, polymorphous sexuality, and social satire. Caustically funny, politically trenchant, and defiantly intolerant of intolerance, he provoked police raids and censorial judges, and created a beautiful, haunting, poignant, outrageous, orgiastic body of work that transformed the artistic landscape of the New York underground—a culture also being shaped in profoundly radical ways by Andy Warhol, Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice, the Kuchars, Jonas Mekas, the Velvet Underground, Charles Ludlam, and Susan Sontag—as well as inspiring a subsequent generation of artists, including Richard Foreman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Christophe Schlingensief, Laurie Anderson, Derek Jarman, Nan Goldin, Robert Wilson Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Pipilotti Rist, Vaginal Davis, Cindy Sherman, Guy Maddin, Ryan Trecartin, John Waters, Vivienne Dick, The Cockettes, John Bock, and countless others.