Jack Smith: Notes on Some Homeless Objects

What doesn’t exist is important.

—Jack Smith¹

In affirming the importance of the nonexistent, Jack Smith insists on the centrality of the imagination in his work. For all of its typically late-night atmosphere of incense and dreamy music, his work rarely, if ever, was a continuously sustained reverie. Accidents, hesitations, revisions, conflicts, and assorted mishaps would intervene, opening up spaces that not only provided the opportunity for reflection but also presented themselves as possible appropriate topics for that reflection. Even given the importance of the imaginative nonexistent, the inevitable conflict with actuality embodied by these interruptions calls into question the ambiguous and unstable place of imagination in our lives and world. In this essay, through an examination of the nature of Smith’s work itself, based on observations gained in several years of sporadic work as a photographer for Smith during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and through a consideration of philosophical approaches to the identities of imaginative objects, I will suggest that this metaphorical homelessness served to maintain an anarchic openness by resisting the regimentation of his work into a final form.

Jack Smith was unique, both as a person and as an artist. That uniqueness, however, was never merely a matter of personal eccentricity. Tony Conrad has suggested that it was as if Jack was his own country:² to spend time and work with him was to enter into a distinct culture with its own language, its own customs, its own values, its own way of doing even the most ordinary things.³ Whether wandering about the city with him or simply sitting around his East Village apartment, you were brought into a world transformed through a vivid personal mythology created by his extraordinary imagination, one dominated by the controlling forces of the lobster and populated by figures like Uncle Fishhook, Pasty Andy, and Yolanda La Penguina. A casual glance at something blue in the cityscape would be revealed, with an acknowledging giggle, as The Thief of Bagdad’s (1940) Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. Even a simple act like peeling an apple or brewing coffee would become imbued with an oddly ritualistic character. Jack created himself, but he also created a world in which that self could, not without great difficulty, live and work.

This act of transformation, of imaginative superimposition, was particularly striking when we would move out into the city with bags of costumes and props to shoot photographic slides on location. Posing against a white building with a vaguely toothlike scalloped upper level became a scene of Jack fending off a shark attack. Jumping over a fence into the sandy landfill on Manhattan’s Lower West Side would (if we weren’t caught) provide us with a quite convincing set for an exotic desert scene, albeit one in which the World Trade Center loomed in the back of the frame. At times, Jack’s instructions would push up against the limits of photography’s literalness: How exactly, do you bring out what Jack saw as the Yvonne de Carlo-ish qualities of a building, even if you happened to be aware of her role in his mythology as a debased studio-imposed copy of his muse Maria Montez? Jack was utterly committed to an imaginative world, but through his use of photographic media a tension inevitably emerged between the imaginative superimposition and the reality upon which the imagination is superimposed.

The stated purpose of these photographic excursions was to provide material for Jack’s slide shows, but one often got the feeling that for him they were also important in themselves. Jack loved to pose for the camera and to be directed as he did so, and the extended process of preparation, of putting on costume and makeup, choosing and arranging props, took on the character of a performance even in isolated situations where there was not even an audience of passersby.⁴ It often seemed to be a means by which he could physically participate in the adventures of his imagination, exhibiting the same commitment to them that he admired in the performances of Maria Montez...