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.
