JAY SANDERS: When did you meet Jack?

FELIX BERNSTEIN: Well, I was really young, and Jack, at the end, nobody really liked him, I would just hang out on the lower east side, I was a poser, I wasn’t an artist, I wasn’t really interested in culture, I just found the lower east side a compelling place to experience things.

I would pick up guys, I would cruise, basically one of the guys was Jack, and he had all these punk neo-Nazis hanging around with him. Ludlum was over, and the Club Kids were a mess, and Jack was really generous, and I wouldn’t be an artist or anything if it weren’t for his generosity. He would tell me to meet him for a rendezvous or whatever, but he wouldn’t even show up. But that taught me a lot. Him not giving me attention made me show up in wilder and wilder costumes. I was called a child prostitute, but I wouldn’t think of myself as that, but as a rebel. We had a lot of encounters where we wouldn’t talk. He would give just little statements, not positive or negative, that just pushed me along. I think of that as generous. Pina Bausch, or someone like that, is very hands on, obviously…. Jack wasn’t even there. It was a teaching in absence.

Was it difficult?

Yeah cause you’re put on the spot and there’s no one there for you. His father died when he was very young, in a sea accident.

I don’t want to say I came into my own because he didn’t want me to come into my own. I wasn’t self-possessed; I didn’t have a self, and he took that material and used it.

Anyone who evaluated him was ascribed as a monster, patriarchal, crazy. I grew up in a world where there was no evaluation. You can imagine that having a teacher like that wasn’t an easy situation. He wasn’t evaluated and didn’t evaluate me, but I learned from him to evaluate others. But nowadays, German art magazines pay me to say the sort of stuff Jack Smith said. They love to see me bite the hand that feeds.

What about ideas? Did he have any ideas?

His ideas were already out there, and people used them all the time. When I was on St. Marks Place I was bored, cause everyone wanted to be Jack, and I didn’t. I didn’t want anything to do with him, and I think that’s why he found me.

I had no diva worship for Jack, and I don’t like Jack and I don’t like who you think he is. To put it cutely, You Don’t Know Jack, and that was the space of our interaction. I’m not gonna dress up as a Flaming Creature and dance around Barbara Gladstone gallery or at a Pride parade. He would hate that. In fact, I’ll let you know: he hates you, if you do that. And if you say performance art is subversive in a museum, he’ll kill you.

Did you ever have sex?

The phallus is an organ belonging to the father, and Jack’s father was dead but he didn’t care. Jack had no phallus: he hated phallic men. He just had a flaccid penis, hanging around all the time. That’s what’s so “obscene” about his film Flaming Creatures; there are no erections.

Jack was at that weird time: the birth of pop art. Like Warhol, he didn’t want to be a subject; he wanted to be an object. But unlike Warhol, he didn’t want to be a commodity, even though he loved the world of commodities—Maria Montez and the starlets. But Smith liked being the pivot between subject and object. He couldn’t settle on one or the other, and it drove him. Most of us pick. He wouldn’t. He was neither Batman, the hero, the free agent or Dracula, the bloodsucking villain (he played both in his one filmic collaboration with Warhol)—it’s clear that Warhol chose to be a vampire, an undead object who fed off of the lives of subjects.

What did he invent?

Everyone in Greek Theatre knows what this look means. He didn’t splinter the disclosure of thinking but some people think he did. But he wasn’t expressive. It wasn’t about the outpouring of emotion. The beauty of Smith’s Hamlet is that emotion is rendered through objective correlatives, and it connects you to the subject through a skewed view. You directly feel it through indirection, as T.S. Eliot has explained of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Nowadays all intimacy is delayed through parody and irony…but for Smith there was no deferral. The indirect was always already directed at the viewer. It was an instantaneous transferal through spontaneous yet effective bodily hieroglyphics.

Famed experimental artist Tony Conrad was originally Smith’s intern. Of course, Conrad is a straight, minimal artist. Conrad was using drugs to control his emotions: to go from happy to sad, the two faces of theatre—all very simple, controlled, framed. Jack Smith, Conrad thought, was so corny and emotional. And this helped him reduce emotions to stark symbols. Maximalism became minimalism. In turn, it is true that Smith invented minimalism. And he turned away from Kant’s subjectivism towards a new paradigm: the subject-as-object or the subject as thing. 

For someone like Jack Smith, what’s the boundary of an artwork?

To be or not to be, to be art or not to be art, hard or soft dick, wavering, stuck in wavering, because phallic authority is dead. That lack of resolution became what others manufactured in their attempts to claim his legacy. Even Warhol.

Jack Smith didn’t hate all proper names. He always hated the one, who led the chain gang of signification: Jonas Mekas, that was the master signifier he abhorred. Smith was always playing the crazy polymorphous signified. That was Jack Smith, or Jack Smith was that thing. Mekas uses his subjectivity to interpellate and determine, Smith was always the interpellated thing. Young performance artists and queer academics always say with a smile, “that was Jack Smith.” But perhaps the “that” that was Jack is really just the stab in the back caused by the reclusive and elusive referent. So it is not wrong when everyone says “that was Jack Smith,” the one who sent me that strange and hostile letter. That was him since he was always that thing, and we were always determining him through such anecdotes.

We’ve talked about the reptilian technique. How did Jack Smith convey his own technique?

Interns became baroque apprentices. You can never master baroque art but you can at least be told about it. The student can never be more than a subjective creature; only he was ever really an object; and so he remained better than us. We would decorate or be “flaming,” he would watch us then morph based on what he saw us seeing. Like Warhol, he was a voyeur not a “flaming” participant, like the modern gay/queer artist. But unlike Warhol, he would become what he watched the watcher watching. Thus, Warhol’s cruel glare was more than just a subjective standpoint for Smith—but rather, it was also an internalized compass for designing selfhood.

What do you think about his legacy?

John Waters said about Jack Smith: that he bit the hand that fed him. He’s wrong. Jack Smith was never even fed. Rather, he fed the hand that bit him. Not to over-emphasize the point, but Jack Smith’s dad died at sea. He was untreatable and unfeedable, because you cannot treat someone who does not accept, as an ontological premise, the supplement of health—he was the living embodiment of what Richard Foreman termed the Ontological Hysterical Theater.

Can Smith be anything more than a dodo? What does Jack Smith mean for productivity?

Plenty of people will say, Jack Smith is a real artist, but Rent the musical is superficial. They are wrong. Gay Marriage is neoliberal fantasy and so is Rent but your critique is just as neoliberal. Protesting gentrification is gentrification. Jack wouldn’t have cared about Rent: it would’ve been as good as anything else. Idina Menzel might even be our Maria Montez.

Funny story—a budding hip gay artist blocked me from all his social media accounts after I wrote a critique of his safe aesthetics—an hour later, he shared a glossy ArtForum essay that praised Jack Smith for being an aggressive trailblazer. “Never conform,” he tweeted as a caption. Jack Smith is rolling in his grave. Or anyway, Jack Smith is the thing that rolls in a grave.

Bieber Bathos Elegy will be presented in the Whitney Museum’s theater on January 15th & 16th at 9PM. Advanced tickets will be available. More information is forthcoming.

(Transcription by Julien Nguyun)

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Born in 1941, in Sharon, Pa., Leffingwell took art classes as a teenager at the nearby Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, stimulating the interests in art making and museums that would eventually define his life. Arriving in New York in the mid-1960s, he became a regular at Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory, enthralled by the iconoclastic spirit of Lower Manhattan. His friends at the time ranged from the likes of political activist Abbie Hoffman to Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Warhol superstar Ultra Violet to sculptor John Chamberlain (who became a lifelong friend). He was equally at home in the art world of Los Angeles, also spending much time there. In 1978, he returned home to care for his mother and to finish his schooling, earning a B.A. at Youngstown State University in 1982 and an M.A. in art history from the University of Cincinnati in 1984.

In 1983, he presented “Chinese Chance: An American Collection” at the Butler, his first curatorial project, featuring the collection of Mickey Ruskin of Max’s Kansas City, who had recently died of a drug overdose. It was followed by an exhibition by Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner at the University of Cincinnati. In 1985, Leffingwell returned to New York as the program director, then chief curator of P.S. 1, hired by Alanna Heiss, its founding director. Heiss said that Leffingwell preferred artists of “extreme vision” whose work his own vision would make coherent. He curated shows of James Rosenquist, Neil Williams and Michael Tracy. One of his most notable exhibitions for P.S. 1 featured John McCracken, the first comprehensive survey of the Californian minimalist sculptor on the East Coast. Leffingwell often introduced little known artists from California and elsewhere to New York. It seemed natural, then, when in 1988 he was appointed director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park. His most ambitious venture for the gallery was “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition” in 1992, a seven-venue biennial installed throughout the city, conceived as a model for future exhibitions.  He returned to New York in 1992 after his job was eliminated due to budgetary cuts. In 1997, he curated an important, critically acclaimed exhibition of Jack Smith at P.S. 1, renewing interest in the provocative artist who is now acknowledged as a major influence in the history of performance art, experimental filmmaking and queer cinema.

In 1989, Leffingwell became a contributor to Art in America, writing hundreds of reviews and articles over a 20-year span. He also began to visit Brazil with increasing frequency as his interest in South American art and his love of the country deepened.  He was named the magazine’s corresponding editor from Brazil, reporting on six of the São Paulo biennials and becoming an authority on contemporary Brazilian art. Elizabeth C. Baker, former editor-in-chief of Art in America, credited his curatorial experience and acumen for his ability to write on “an unusually broad range of artists. He brought us things we didn’t know about and he was willing to tackle almost any subject we might suggest.”

He wrote numerous essays and monographs; one of his last published essays was a contribution to AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE (1960-2007), a catalogue documenting more than 40 years of the work of Lawrence Weiner, co-published by LA MOCA and the Whitney Museum in 2007.

For much of the time after he returned to New York from L.A., Ed lived in a tiny walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street, elegantly jam-packed with ornate and curious objects, artworks, books and the memorabilia he had acquired during an eventful, multifaceted life. It was his castle, where he cooked bouillabaisse for friends and entertained them with endless, often digressive, sometimes scandalously humorous anecdotes about the art world—true and not—enjoying himself immensely.

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The facts are more or less clear. Invited by the architect Philip Johnson to propose a public artwork for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, Andy Warhol chose as his subject a set of mug shots from a New York police department bulletin of 13 Most Wanted Men. Silkscreened on a 20-by-20-foot grid, the resulting work was installed high above the fairgrounds on the oval Circarama building—an oversized rogues gallery canonized by its reverential placement. Once the pre-fair media buzz had reported the public’s objections over what was essentially a series of massive wanted posters in a setting meant to celebrate civic achievement, Warhol, seemingly immune to the controversy he’d set in motion, wrote a letter to the Fair’s organizers suggesting that the work be painted over in a color “of the architect’s choice.”

After the silkscreened panels were covered over with silver paint, the large monochromatic grid remained for the entirety of the fair, an enigmatic blank in a place that had been designated to glorify New York’s vibrant cultural life. In an interview 10 years later, Johnson confessed that it was not Warhol’s displeasure with the work that inspired its erasure (as Johnson stated publicly at the time) but a bow to pressure applied by Governor Nelson Rockefeller who was concerned that the work would alienate his large Italian-American constituency (the ethnicity of the majority of the mug shot subjects) during the initial stages of his campaign for the presidency.

In a small but carefully organized show of paintings, films, and archival material, the Queens Museum, in association with the Warhol Museum, has reconstructed not only the details of the above incident, but the social and political context within which it took place. Addressing the homoerotic subtext of the “most wanted men” subjects (Warhol’s 1964 The 13 Most Beautiful Boys screen tests are shown in an adjoining room), the exhibition also includes archival support material that documents mainstream media’s reportage on a changing cultural landscape. Revealing an atmosphere of repressive “cleansing” in New York City leading up to the opening of the World’s Fair, along with concern about protests from civil rights groups, news articles describe police raids on “underground” film screenings of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), as well as a fear of a planned “stall-in” (a group of protestors in cars that planned to collectively “run out of gas” to block the main highway to the fairgrounds) by the Congress for Racial Equality.

With pavilions sponsored by big business offering branded optimism accompanied by ethnic caricatures at the national pavilions, the fair merged a corporate futurism with Disney’s “It’s a Small World” motto, shrinking difference and locality into a cartoonish internationalism that spoke to America’s post-war ambitions of empire while dissent and “difference” were being bottled up at home. While outwardly fun and carnivalesque, the 1964 World’s Fair was a massive propagandistic effort and financial risk, with a great deal at stake for organizer Robert Moses (whose 1939-40 fair at the same site had gone bankrupt) and Governor and presidential aspirant Nelson Rockefeller. Any controversy that might compromise the fair’s success had to be dealt with quickly and decisively. With public pressure mounting, the 13 most wanted men were visible for a mere 48 hours before being covered over with silver paint (and, briefly, a black shroud for good measure).

There’s a beautiful irony in the idea that a set of (mug shot) portraits commissioned by the state, presumably with the public’s welfare in mind, are appropriated by an artist to fulfill a public art commission which is then censored by the state over concerns of alienating the public. While it’s true that the subject of criminals is clearly out of step with the laudatory atmosphere of a World’s Fair, Warhol’s coy literalism (he said he was asked to do a piece that had “something to do with New York”) threatened to distract from the orgiastic mingling of a rising corporatism with national and regional pride so prominently featured at the Fair. On the floor of the Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion, adjacent to where the mug shots-turned-monochromes remained on display, was an enormous terrazzo road map of New York sponsored by Texaco, indicating all the locations of their gas stations across the state. In keeping with the Fair’s agenda, which collapsed distinctions between business and everyday life, the “walkable” map realized a new scale of corporate paternalism within the public realm. With Warhol’s (brief) elevation of the marginalized and feared now safely muted under the all-purpose glimmer of silver paint, visitors below wandered across a map of the “new world,” a place where, the Fair seemed to promise, all their needs would be taken care of, as far into the future as they could imagine.

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Rachel Harrison, Hirsch Perlman, Dieter Roth, Jack Smith, Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks Gallery until September 13 (523 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-243-0200)

“A working facility when Stankiewicz was there, this is now part of Seattle’s Gasworks Park.”

Thus reads the caption to a text illustration in the fulsome catalogue that accompanies a new show reassessing the modern American sculptor Richard Stankiewicz (1922-1983). The picture shows a disused oil and coal conversion plant, fenced in, arrested in what British neo-romantic painter John Piper liked to call “a pleasing state of decay.”

The gasworks are now part of a riverside park, to be savored for their weird and inadvertant sculptural beauty. I wonder whether in some degree the efforts of artists like Stankiewicz, who was stationed in the town during his military service, has informed our culture that we can now appreciate industrial detritus. Go to the old printing factory that is now the people’s art palace Dia:Beacon and you can see a room of unsentimental yet aestheticized photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher of similar facilities.

As surely as decaying plant can transmogrify from social scourge to aesthetic marvel, so can the value and impact of an appropriated medium. The overall impression of the nicely installed show of around 40 pieces at the AXA Gallery is of elegance. This is interesting as Stankiewicz’s material of choice was junk – tools, implements, machine parts, engine parts, unidentifiable scrap.

The rusty surfaces are always in an advance stage of atrophy, but there isnt a hint of threat in the mottled textures or jutting edges. On the contrary, the evenness and consistency of the metals, with their treacly blacks and earthy browns, has the glowing aura of classical sculptural materials like bronze or marble. “The Miracle of the Scrap Heap” is how critic and sculptor Sidney Geist termed Stankiewicz’s achievement, in a phrase that serves as the exhibition’s title.

The problem is that the “miracle” was unfailing. There is barely any ambiguity in Stankiewicz’s choice of medium, although that choice was a defining feature of his career. Rarely has the hackneyed term Midas touch had such pertinence: By so truly transforming junk into an art material, he lost any *double entendre*. In achieving such rich surfaces from poor materials, he smoothed away the very *frisson* that should have given his creations edge. The triumph of art was too complete.

Stankiewicz is being presented as a seminal figure in the emergence of a new aesthetic. He is certainly an undervalued link in the chain from cubist collage to postmodern appropriation. But the handsome, likeable, substantial work on view here reinforces the traditionalism of Stankiewicz, not his subversiveness.

Marcel Duchamp, the housegod of postmodernists, is recalled not so much for his strategy of *objet trouvé* – laying claim to an unmediated mass produced object as art – as for the symbolist allegories of such objects in his paintings. Even in Duchamp’s day, the cranks and wheels that also find favor in Stankiewicz were steeped in nostalgia. They were virtually Victoriana.

Stankiewicz trained in Europe with old-school modernists like Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger. In New York his name was linked with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and neo-dada. But Stankiewicz seems temperamentally incapable of any kind of aggression or brutalism, or even submission to chance – which is, in a way, passive aggressive. He was a classic modernist: a maker, not a breaker-down. He is far closer to Picasso than Duchamp. (In turn, his influence was more on Jean Tinguely, the Swiss kinetic artist, than on minimalism or arte povera. This show, appropriately, travels to the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel next Fall). In Stankiewicz’s hands, junk is merely stuff to the point of transparency, like paint. Rawness and rust are his patinas of choice, rather than signifiers of angst or anything portentous.

But this doesn’t detract from the pleasure or satisfaction of his work one iota. His wit is protean, and his sense of humanity enthralling. Often he recalls African art, especially when he goes for spiky, fiddly edges, as in “Tribal Diagram” (1953-5). His subtle transformations can turn, say, a gas tank and a cylinder can into a middle-aged couple, as in the 1954 work in iron of that title. More “grown up,” abstract pieces are masterful essays in drawing in space, which can stand their own next to a David Smith.

He seems happiest, though, intimating human or animal forms. Although his complexity is playful and invigorating, he is especially magical when intervening the least, in the untitled steel piece from 1963-9, for instance, where a moulded machine part affixed to a half-circle of tubing has the poise of a classical portrait bust.

***

“Miracle in the Scrap Heap” is definitely for all the family. For a nervy coda, check out the five-person summer group show at Matthew Marks. Curated by Jeffrey Peabody, a director at the gallery, this grouping gathers artists of different generations who extend Stankiewicz’s penchant for junk.

There is something of a misnomer, however, in identifying detritus as “materials immediately at hand.” Often, artists will have to scour unlikely places to find just the right kind of trash, whereas in a professional studio, marble or clay, the time-honored materials, really are just at hand. Two of the pieces in this show by the German Dieter Roth (1930-1998) actually count among their materials chocolate, yogurt and fruit juice. In his handling, the material is as remote from sweetness and luxury as Stankiewicz’s machine parts are from pollution or exploitation.

Two personalities of markedly contrasting sensibility dominate this show – Roth and Jack Smith (1932-89)- to the point where the presence of the three younger and living artists seems timid and tenuous. Artists of markedly contrasting sensibility, Roth and Smith represent dark and light, tragic and comic, with tellingly different relationships to the materials they use. Although Roth’s mixtures of drawing and collage are artfully put together, they have about them a sense of disintegration, chaos, entropy. In their deep-set brooding romanticism they cast gloomy, nihilistic shadows, whereas the garish, flamboyant, extravagant creations of Smith, the filmmaker and cross-dressing performance artist, are a riot.

Both artists found a use in their assemblages for the ubiquitous mass-produced pens of the era. In Roth, the familiar green Pentels are simply stuck to a surface, forlorn signifiers of impotence. In Smith’s “The Crab Ogress of Mu,” however, painted Bic pen bodies keep company with plastic flowers, glass beads, seashells, costume jewelry, tin cans, and other scrap to form a fabulous hanging fetish. Walking past it, one can almost hear it jangle like a skeleton in the cupboard.

A version of this article first appeared in The New York Sun, August 21, 2003

* Hirsch Perlman takes snail-pace exposure photographs in which he makes light by waving around various objects, but it is the light, surely, not the objects, that are the object. Rachel Harrison has a fondness for boring video and trashy toys, but these days, who doesn’t? Rebecca Warren’s work in (we are told) recycled artist materials are purportedly deconstructions of masculinity but that doesn’t register visually in her expressionistic sculptures.

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