JACK SMITH

His best-known film, Flaming Creatures (1963), was confiscated by the New York Police Department and banned throughout the United States due to nudity and charges of obscenity. Smith never again created a finished artwork. His next film, Normal Love (1963), was often re-spliced as it ran, repeatedly reedited, and regularly awarded new titles such as Normal Fantasy, Exotic Landlordism of Crab Lagoon, and The Great Pasty Triumph. From the late 1960s into the 1980s, Smith focused on theater and performance, and combined live happenings with screenings of films and slideshows.

Throughout his life, Smith pioneered a radical artistic practice that challenged the economic conditions of late capitalism, fixed definitions of gender and sexuality, and the production and dissemination of art itself. Smith’s influence pervades experimental filmmaking and performance art in the US to this day, and is present in the works of Andy Warhol, John Waters, Laurie Anderson, and Cindy Sherman, among countless others. In 1998, The Institute for Contemporary Art/P.S.1 Museum mounted Jack Smith: Flaming Creature: His Amazing Life and Times, a retrospective of his work that traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Berkeley, California; and Berlin, Germany.

^{Text courtesy Gladstone Gallery}