![]() ![]() ![]() Smith moved to New York City in 1953, where he attended film classes at the City College of New York, finding employment as a photographer. Jack Smith (1932–1989) was a New York-based filmmaker, photographer, and actor known for his pioneering influence in experimental filmmaking and performance art. His unwavering commitment to art and artists is a legacy that will continue to guide our work. This exhibition is dedicated to our co-founder and friend Irving Sandler. The final project to take place at Artists Space's current location at 55 Walker Street, Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis occupies two floors of exhibition space, providing access to some of Smith's most startling yet unknown performances, as well as extensive documentation and materials from the Plaster Foundation of Atlantis. This period was marked by the artist's eviction from his legendary SoHo loft, the Plaster Foundation of Atlantis in 1971 and, consequently, by a movement towards performances staged in ad-hoc theater spaces, clubs, and notably in the literal outside of a morphing urban environment, as the artist found himself at the margins of a professionalizing art world, with the city of New York transformed by a bullish real estate market. It frames Smith’s time “in exile,” as described by film historian and Smith archivist J. Following restorations by Jerry Tartaglia and assembling selections of slides from the thousands in Jack Smith’s archive, Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis was is the most comprehensive gathering of Smith’s work since the 1997 exhibition at MoMA PS1 and focuses particularly on the largely overlooked period of the 1970s and early 1980s. Smith’s vision is one that consequently imbues art into life, to the point of rendering assumed distinctions between the two as absurd and elitist.Īrt Crust of Spiritual Oasis marks the first time that many of Smith's performances-composed and chronicled in drawings, scripts, film fragments, "boiled lobster color slideshows," audio recordings, and costumes-have been articulated. In history, as in life, Smith's comprehensive oeuvre exists in renegade defiance of the capitalist imperatives of commodification and containment, as vilified in his ideas of "lucky landlordism," "rented island," "claptailism," "art crust," and so forth. Yet, since his death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1989, his artistic legacy has proven to be similarly incalcitrant and resistant to clean-cut narrativization. Smith’s virtuosic output is revered for its caustic humor, self-invention, and debasement of institutional authority, which intensified throughout his ever-evolving work. This includes the downtown artistic community from which Artists Space emerged, where Smith performed four times, presenting: Life with Mekas, Thanksgiving Show of Lucky Consumer Paradise (both 1974), How Can Uncle Fishhook Have a Free Bicentennial Zombie Underground? (1976), and Art Crust on Crab Lagoon (1981). With his shadow looming over the development of avant-garde film, performance, photography, and critical discourse in New York between the 1960s and 1980s, Jack Smith nonetheless remains an outlier among the many artistic contexts within which he played an important role. Artists Space presents an exhibition of theatrical and live performance works by Jack Smith, the first extensive institutional retrospective in New York of his groundbreaking art in over twenty years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |