John Waters: New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

JOHN WATERS

fresh MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, fresh YORK

In 1964 John Waters discharge his first short film, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, using shoplifted film stock and a Brownie 8 mm movie camera given to him by means of his grandmother for his seventeenth birthday. Thirty-three years later, while directing Edward forty rods and Christina Ricci in Pecker he noticed that the tape marks his ship's company was using to position the actors upon set looked a lot like abstract drawings, and decided to photograph and near them as art (Mark #1-Mark #15 1998) the one and the other Hag and the "Mark" series were included in "Change of Life," Waters's exhibition of photographic and sculptural work, curated by dint of New Museum director Lisa Phillips and independent curator and critic Marvin Heiferman for the novel Museum of Contemporary Art. on the contrary the most remarkable discovery here was what Waters calls his "little movies"--sequences of up to twenty-four still images, framed and legible from left to right like storyboards or image-sentences. First exhibited at Colin de Land's American Fine Arts gallery in the mid-'90s and steadily evolving at any time since, this body of work could be said to constitute a fresh static, and silent kind of moviemaking, individual based on captured and edited fragments. More than debating by what means this activity relates to a novel history of art photography, we should ask instead what kind of cinema is being made here.

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At the of recent origin Museum, after passing a framed grid of the scribbled-out, Twomblyesque index cards that Waters uses to organize his daily life (308 Days, 2003) as well as a photograph of the turn backed mail he'd addressed to various deceased, jailed, or relocated celebrities (Return to Sender 2003)--this kind of anecdotal, autobiographical riff upon the readymade also played a large part in the exhibition--the viewer unexpectedly collided with razor-sharp little blockbusters Grace Kelly's angles 1998, and Lana Backwards, 1994 These borderline photo-films are the follows of his obsessive practice of snapping still frames not on the screen while watching and rewatching his have a title to and other directors' movies upon video. If such low-tech images present the appearance to nod to the art of "antiphotographers" Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, Waters's spin upon rephotography eschews these artists' coolly critical flirtations with the "death of the author" to announce something flat more exciting: the death of the audience. Each following of stills is a subtly terroristic act of cinema and a elated subversion of spectatorship, perpetrated with the simplest and greatest in quantity available means: a videotape, a TV and an ordinary still camera. As Waters make subordinates well-known and obscure Hollywood films and their stars to the adoring violence of his decontextualizations and juxtapositions--freezing, cropping, speeding up recasting, and reorganizing cinema in the ultimate director's cut--he rediscovers authorship in the low depths of fandom and consumption, unleashing a relentles libidinized spectator-director.

vomit in the Cinema, 1998; Retard, 2000; and Movie Star Junkie, 1997 match-cut frames from a variety of films according to abject control matter, generating crude and plotles star-studded epics. In fetish percepts like Sophia Loren Decapitated, 1998 and Farrah, 2000-two successions of X-Actoknifed close-ups--Waters stalks and slashes movie stars known for their impeccably controll self-images. Manson Copies Richard Gere 2000 is a concisely told two-frame makeover saga, while Wicked Glinda, 2003--a single still snapped at the precise point of time The Wizard of Oz dissolves from the advantageous Witch to the Wicked Witch of the West--is the psychedelic first attempt of a dreamy new shield heroine.

Waters wields his VCR and his camera like a dement studio bos reclaiming productions from their directors drawn out after they've already been released, if not abandoned to history's dustbins. The greatest in quantity provocative of his little movies are those that gravitate toward the glitches, grain, and material part of the degraded, reformatted film-to-tape image, excavating minor, level subliminal events like hairs in the gate, video lines, academy leader, etc These material point of times become the new stars of his drastic reedits, as do actresses' angles insignificant details of costume, and credit successions Ten Change-Over Marks, 2003, isolates and enlarges the scratchy little circles that flash in the corner of film frames to catchword the projectionist for reel changes. Echoing Twelve Assholes and a Dirty lower extremity 1996--a sequence of raunchy porn stills displayed behind a drawn soft curtain--these signals suddenly resemble celluloid anuses (there are enough of other cases where Waters eroticizes the real material and mechanisms of cinematic production and distribution). Despair, 1995 collections melancholy instances of the film credit "Directed by means of Alan Smithee," which ends up upon botched Hollywood films whose real directors offer to remain anonymous. In the same way that he's fascinated through faded stars and glamorous loser Waters is drawn to the little deaths and breakdowns that happen in cinema; he shakes films from the grave and makes us notice their decompos beauty.