In a dispatch from Berlin, David D’Arcy reports on a screening of a restored print of some works by experimental filmmaker/performance artist Jack Smith. D’arcy concisely sums up the drama surrounding Smith’s estate, which has thrown a wrench into further restorations:

Smith left his apartment a mess when he died of AIDS in 1989, and the material that was saved was salvaged by friends who were working in spite of the indifference of Smith’s family, who had spurned him for his homosexuality decades before that. Performance artist Penny Arcade and Village Voice film critic J Hoberman, as what would later be called the Plaster Foundation, sifted through cat shit and years of newspapers to save the materials in the 6th floor walkup, and put enough order into the mess to create several books and a museum exhibition. Within the last five years, however, Smith’s sister reappeared, at the prodding of the filmmakers behind Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, a bio-doc that played in theaters in 2006, which served the interests of its filmmakers more than it served Smith’s memory. Courts in New York have declared that the sister who abandoned Jack Smith is now the owner of the materials in his apartment that she abandoned when she saw them and recoiled in disgust in 1989. Now Smith’s sister is asking for those materials back, and the filmmakers of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis are demanding access to the archive, and suing the Plaster Foundation for that access, which they say was promised them for the making of the film. It’s an object lesson in the notion that no good deed goes unpunished

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Interestingly, the fight over Smith is also being played out on YouTube, although there it’s more about what Smith stood for than the future of his archive. Above: a video apparently produced under the auspices of the New York Underground Museum, in which Penny Arcade explains how Jack Smith suffered for “turn[ing] his back on being an art star.” More details, and an opposing argument, after the jump.

Penny’s video is labeled a “lecture.” It’s an almost unbroken monologue about the scourge of careerism in art, about the tragedy of a new generation going to art school and reading the Village Voice to find out what’s cool rather than getting an education through experience in the “underground” (a term she uses incessantly), about Jack Smith rejecting an image-based economy in order to be poor and crazy but noble in his creative pursuits, and about Smith in turn being rejected from the 80s art world because he didn’t have that careerist/celebrity mentality, and because the new gatekeepers didn’t recognize his infamy and significance. All the while, she’s looking in the mirror, perfecting her own image, and then she stops in the middle of a sentence and says, “Hold on, let me see if I can get my hair looking a little bit better.” It’s hard to tell whether or not the irony is totally intentional.

On the comments to that YouTube post, a YouTuber named Chillroom argues that “Penny is wrong about several things here. Jack Smith hated being called “underground”…” Chillroom refers interested parties to this interview which he says he conducted with Smith in 1982. In the interview, Smith suggests that he did turn his back on art stardom, but remains interested in mainstream celebrity and financial triumph. He says “people that collect art are always criminal” and mentions wanting to “eventually become like Liberace and do Las Vegas night clubs. He makes six million a year from working half a year, twenty-five weeks.”

I don’t know if any of these accounts can be taken totally at face value, but I thought it was all interesting in light of the fact that this kind of war between media success and credibility is obviously still going on today, with filmmakers having to hand in their cool cards for even a modicum of non-”underground” success. I just get cranky at the idea that it has to be one or the other. Also, “underground” as synonym for “good” is really annoying.