Artists Space

Jack Smith Film Retrospective

Screenings
September 8 – 10, 2018

Metrograph
7 Ludlow Street
New York
NY 10002

In conjunction with the exhibition Jack Smith: Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis on view through September 9, Artists Space and Metrograph present a six-program retrospective of Jack Smith’s visionary films, including Flaming Creatures (1962-63), Normal Love (1963-64), and I Was a Male Yvonne De Carlo (1960s-70s). The series will also feature rare and previously unseen documentation of Smith’s live performances, as well as his work as an actor in the films of Ken Jacobs and Ron Rice. All screenings will take place at Metrograph.

Jack Smith’s (1932–1989) virtuosic output is revered for its caustic humor, self-invention, and debasement of institutional authority, which intensified throughout his ever-evolving work. Yet, since his death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1989, his artistic legacy has proven to be similarly incalcitrant and resistant to cleancut narrativization. In history, as in life, Smith’s oeuvre exists in renegade defiance of the capitalist imperatives of commodification and containment, as vilified in his philosophical fabulations of “lucky landlordism,” “rented island,” “art crust,” and “black light of false lighthouse capitalism.” Smith’s vision is one that consequently imbues art into life and has fundamentally articulated avant-garde film, performance, and critical discourse in New York from the 1960s to the present.

September 8, 2018

Explorations of an “Aesthetic of Delirium"
Screening
7:30 p.m.

Critical Americana
Screening
9:15pm

September 9, 2018

Not Even Acting
Screening
1:15 p.m.

Reconstructing Performance
Screening
4:15 p.m.

September 10, 2018

The Great Pasty Triumph
Screening
6:30 p.m.

Performance Premiere
Screening
9 p.m.

Thank you: Anthology Film Archives, Isaac Alpert, Barbara Gladstone, Claire Henry, J. Hoberman, Ed Leffingwell, Jerry Tartaglia.

Organized by Kathrin Bentele, Stella Cilman, Jay Sanders, and Jamie Stevens.

Presented in collaboration with Metrograph.

Wheelchair accessible seats and accompanying companion seats are available at Metrograph. For access inquiries please contact Metrograph at 212 660 0312.