Glittering Logic in a Minor Key

London-based performance artist and scholar Dominic Johnson’s Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture will stand as the definitive academic study of Smith’s persona, work, and import to contemporary culture. The book is the result of almost a decade of Johnson’s rigorous research and thinking about Smith, who has become an iconic figure embodying a kind of queer performance avant la lettre. A wildly influential, downtrodden figure in the New York City postwar underground film and performance milieux, his films—for which he is still best known—were radically provisional both in their form and in their content: sexual decadence verging on collapse. While best known for the infamous Flaming Creatures (1963), most of his other titles remained in unfinished, or rather never-to-be-finished, states throughout his lifetime (and beyond), and would be reworked by the artist as live-film performances, their guts mutating in a confoundingly open-ended fashion over the years. Smith embraced the ephemerality and obsolescence of pop-cultural detritus in opposition to the “crust” of staid, frozen tradition. His live and his cinematic performances—not to mention the performance of his life itself—were about the impossibility of their own coming into existence, according to Smith expert J. Hoberman (37).¹

Studies of Smith’s practice tend to focus on the films more than on his equally innovative work in durational performance and expanded cinema or his dazzling writing and still photography. Johnson very capably synthesizes what has come before while redressing the gaps in the scholarship. The most important publication until now on Smith was the Hoberman- and Edward Leffingwell-edited anthology Wait for Me at the Bottom of the Pool (2008), in large part because it included Smith’s writings alongside insightful critical texts. Johnson’s most original achievement in Glorious Catastrophe is in his comprehensive mapping of the written word in Smith’s oeuvre (specifically in chapter 6) and his venturing an analysis of its relationship to performance.

I should note a key event that contributed greatly to the critical discourse on Smith: Live Film! Jack Smith! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World, organized by Marc Siegel, Susanne Sachsse, and Stephanie Schulte Strathaus in 2009. Johnson was one of dozens of participants from around the world who gathered to consume Smith’s work and discuss his legacy before returning to their hometowns to produce new films, studies, performances, and more, inspired by his oeuvre, which were premiered six months later in Berlin. The result was a fascinating, polyvocal collective autopsy of Smith; its raging yet critical fandom managed to keep the artist’s infamous “difficulty” alive by (largely) resisting soft-focus romanticism.

As Johnson’s title suggests, Smith’s potent engagement with catastrophe and failure is the central tenet of the study. Johnson argues that, for Smith, the very “possibility for meaning is predicated upon accumulated catastrophes, represented in the logics of fragmentation, vulgarity, excess and waste” (1). Johnson expertly analyzes the major themes of Smith’s persona and work and how they operated within the prevailing cultural and political discourses of his time, and in the here and now, which finds his work circulating as a touchstone for contemporary queer artists. Johnson charts the entire Smith cosmology: from his vendettas to his obscenity trials, each piece of the puzzle works to contextualize his films, performances, and images, which are considered in depth. As Johnson describes, “I explore many facets of Smith’s glittering logic, which extends from his political and social grievances, to his idiosyncratic perspectives on aesthetics, and the problems entailed in a life lived towards art” (2). Smith’s work is always buttressed by his fervent beliefs and philosophies, “his own politicised responses to what he understood as a perpetual state of exploitation, misrepresentation and abuse” (8).

Johnson begins by productively framing Smith as a “lost cause” who represented a road not taken...