Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture by Dominic Johnson (review)

Performer Jack Smith is infamously difficult to talk about. This is due not only to the difficult and often incomplete nature of his work — scholars have no published play texts to draw on and the ephemera that remain of his performances are stashed away in difficult-to-access archives — but also to the fact that there is something in his work that almost demands that it not be talked about. Smith was an ostentatious performer, but he was also notoriously withholding, seldom publicizing his loft performances and eschewing any easy identification between artist and audience. Given his fears that his films might be stolen and illegally edited if he allowed them to be housed in the Anthology Film Archives, and his request to Penny Arcade that she burn his papers after his death, Smith seems at times to ask us to let him just fade into obscurity.

The questions of how to do justice to Smith’s work and how to respect its alterity in a way that does not simply recuperate it into dominant histories of 20th-century art are at the center of Dominic Johnson’s Glorious Catastrophe: Jack Smith, Performance and Visual Culture. In this wide-ranging and vividly illustrated book, Johnson takes on Smith’s Janus-faced legacy. Smith is at once infamous, because of the controversy (and United States Senate hearing, which he did not attend) that followed the release of his 1963 film Flaming Creatures; and obsolete, as he has since dropped out of dominant narratives of the visual art of the 1960s. Art historians such as David Hopkins and Rosalind Krauss fail to include Smith in their discussions of the decade — but, of course, Smith’s work also knowingly resists archivization and deliberately refuses to “assimilate to the tendencies and fashions of the 1960s” (11). In other words, Smith’s exclusion from dominant art-historical narratives is, in part, borne from a self-marginalizing impulse present in his work and his relation to the art-world public. Though Johnson’s methodology is necessarily interdisciplinary, his primary interest is in challenging the modes of art historiography that are inattentive to the messiness and plurality of art during this time. For Johnson, Smith has evaded these dominant art-historical narratives because his work refuses to tether itself to any one medium. Smith’s eschewal of the boundaries between film, live performance, and photography resists the modernist investment in the singular medium. (On this point, we might remember, from his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried’s famous and negative association of intermedial artworks with theatricality [1998].) Johnson’s approach is not additive: his interest is not in restoring Smith to a supposedly rightful “place” in the canon, but in questioning the logics by which the canon is constructed in the first place. Johnson sees Smith as a “minor artist” operating on the margins of cultural history, and he asks that Smith be “allowed to persist in […] his difference” (18). Smith occupies a curious place within art-historical narratives because (contra Andy Warhol) he allows his homosexuality to stand unabashedly at the forefront of his work, because his work is defiantly political (as seen in his castigation of New York City “landlordism”), because the work delights in its own failure, and because he traffics in retrograde affects that run counter to the “cool” minimalism and pop art of the 1960s. Smith’s work is deliberately marginal and Johnson’s study works tirelessly to respect this marginality.

Though Johnson is critical of the ways in which the word “queer” has been deployed within academic writing — he is rightfully uneasy with the way scholars often unmoor the word “queer” from specific sexual practices — he nonetheless situates Glorious Catastrophe within recent debates in queer theory about negativity, failure, and utopianism, drawing on the work of scholars such as J. Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, Leo Bersani, and Lee Edelman. For Johnson, Smith is...