What’s Underground About Marshmallows? Texte von und über Jack Smith

What’s Underground About Marshmallows? Texts by and about Jack Smith (Alexander Verlag) is a new bilingual book, edited by Marc Siegel, that brings together a selection of writings by the pathbreaking US queer artist for the first time in German. The book also contains essays by such key Smith commentators as Stefan Brecht, J. Hoberman, Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag and numerous illustrations of Smith’s performances and projects in West Germany in the 1970s and ‘80s. Marc Siegel will present the book along with a screening Birgit Hein’s KINO ’74 – JACK SMITH  (1974) and Jack Smith’s NO PRESIDENT (1967). In the former, Smith performs critique of the art world while collecting garbage in the Cologne Zoo. “The best scene,” according to Hein, “was with the apes: Jack Smith handed out the exhibition’s advertising leaflets with the slogan “Art remains art” to the apes, who looked at them curiously and then ate them up.” NO PRESIDENT is a work that evolved out the artist’s exotic underground midnight performances. The film’s associative, erotic and grotesque scenario suggests, as J. Hoberman puts it, “that it is precisely the jubilant absence of patriarchal authority that feeds the primal longing for a charismatic leader.” (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus)

Films: Kino 74 – Jack Smith Birgit Hein BRD 1974 16 mm on DVD 10 min.
No President (The Kidnapping of Wendell Willkie by the Love Bandit) Jack Smith USA 1967–70
With Irving Rosenthal, Mario Montez, Tally Brown, Donna Kerness 16 mm OV 50 min.