Description
Book SynopsisGlorious catastrophe presents the first detailed critical analysis of the visual art, film, performance and writing of Jack Smith, an icon of the New York avant-garde, from the early 1960s until his AIDS-related death in 1989. It uses his personal papers, and unpublished interviews with friends and collaborators.
Trade Review‘In Glorious Catastrophe, Johnson celebrates the fabulous, freakish spectacle of Jack Smith and his work to its fullest extent in a manner that reflects his subject’s contempt for assimilation. In this, he seems inspired by Kathy Acker’s injunction to writers ‘to scream, to forget, to do anything except reduce radical difference, through representation, to identities, singularity, calculable and controllable’ in the rethinking of art’s histories.’
Fiona Anderson, Contemporary Theatre Review 24:1
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: Jack Smith’s glorious catastrophes
1. ‘Little triumphs of disaster’: failure, boredom and excess
2. ‘Beyond self-disappearance’: Jack Smith and art’s histories
3. Flaming Creatures and the burden of disgust
4. Innocent monsters and Normal Love
5. The deaths of Maria Montez
6. ‘Glamorize your messes’: scenes of writing
7. Rehearsals for the destruction of Atlantis
Appendix of illustrations
Bibliography
Index
