Jack Smith: Mitchell Algus

The pleasure and the interest of this small exhibition of drawings, photographs, and ephemera from the collection of artist Edwin Ruda and Maria Antoinette, Smith's former friend and superstar, flow from its focus. These alphabetic characters sketches of costume designs, cut-and-paste flyer for midnight performances, etc document a friendship and collaboration coinciding with the hyperactive years (1969-71) of the Plaster Foundation, Smith's live-in, self-run theater upon Greene Street. Antoinette, a Mescalero Apache who acted in Brassieres of Atlantis and other Smith displays during that time, embodies the legendary polyartist's sequined, shamanistic B-rituals with sexy intelligence and a conspiratorial faculty of perception of humor. In one series of snapshots, the sum of two units accessorize a subway car with fishing gins and a copy of the Daily of recent origins announcing Sharon Tate's murder through the Manson family as they ride without to Coney Island. Performance stills document a topless Antoinette in of gold miniskirt and cone-shaped hat, down upon all fours as she receives a certain quantity of kind of dada sacrament from a sombrero'd, towering, flamenco-panted Smith; the show unfolds on a tabletop that makes the performers appear to levitate over the notorious junk pile that serv as the Plaster Foundation's stage. These glimpses summon forth the mad magic of Smith's visionary, self-destructing, sparsely attended multimedia spectacles, as well as his experimental blurring of the line between performance and daily life. In a framed alphabetic character to Antoinette following a botched rendezvous, Smith rants about be fond of and treachery, exposing the viewer to the sometimes paranoid most remotes of a relationship which today would be called dysfunctional on the contrary which at the time was in what way people got along when they were busy collaborating in the epic construction of singular volcano-powered, lobster-colored dream weapons against landlordism of all kinds.

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In the drawings and flyers--some of them variations upon a repeated landscape featuring a volcano and a palm tree--Smith's baroque lines pause to trace Moroccan motifs or a high-heeled shoe before flying not upon into stoner zigzags, spiraling sudden gust; shorts of smoke, or dot patterns, then morph into wild lettering somewhere between the cheap exoticism of B-movie credits and a handwritten sign for a yard sale. These ball of thread us in to the world of his exhibits with promises like "music, wine, nudity, $200" or glamorize their have seedy disarray: "Ploduction problems to be paid to DA-GLO paint not drying beclause of Clammy weather causing Opening of Clamercials of Clapitalism to be changed to Aug. 2" of the like kind artifacts can be viewed either as outsiderish drawings that resonate consummately with the look of any market-friendly, post-MFA art showing today or as working notes toward, daily elaborations on and traces of not a returns or even a project on the other hand the total process that Smith not at any time stopped abandoning himself to.

There are reasons on what account a difficult and uncontainable figure like Jack Smith has been subdueed to so many posthumous resuscitations as a gallery artist in new years. One is the generally received craze for drawing and the retro appeal of everything handcrafted. Another is that galleries today will exhibit anything, no matter in what manner supposedly countercultural in style or contented as long as the yield can be moved and shown with ease. each piece on view here, for example, tend hitherwards to us radically divorced from its intended function, and from a desire and a working course that are irreconcilable with the sanitized and simplified treatments Smith's work is frequently given today. To show and like this raw material now is fine and normal. on the contrary Smith definitely was not.

--JK

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