Tuesday, January 23, 2024 at 7:30pm
NO!art, No President
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented by J. Hoberman
Doomshow, Ray Wisniewski, 1962-63, 16mm, 10 mins
Song for Rent, Jack Smith, 1968-69, 16mm, 4 mins
No President, Jack Smith, 1967-69, 16mm, 45 mins
Alberto Moravia praised Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963-64) as “a protest which is violent, childish, and sincere,” illustrating “a way of life which consists mainly in the absolute rejection of life itself.” The same could be said of many 60s underground films and parallel developments in unshowable art. Ray Wisniewski’s Doomshow and Jack Smith’s No President conflate the two.
The Doom Show was organized by Boris Lurie (leader of the NO!art movement) in a 10th Street storefront basement in early 1962. Addressing the prospect of atomic annihilation, it was programmatically atrocious. (The “cellar has the ugliness of a mutant’s pornography collection or looks like the private gallery of one of the guards at Belsen,” the New York Times retched.) Wisniewski, an anti-nuclear activist, documents the exhibition’s de-installation as though it were a Happening. It’s possible to make out some of the larger, more grotesque artworks (e.g. the bomb-shaped, pendulous inflatable breasts of Sam Goodman’s Female Fetich), but basically the gallery serves as a stage for activity. People “walk” defaced dummies, a crutch appears to move by itself. One child plays with a toy rifle, another rides her tricycle into the assemblage. As people start tossing the artwork around, a Twist party breaks out mid-detritus to coalesce around a burning baby doll. There is also a soundtrack which Jonas Mekas compared to “the wailing of the air-raid sirens in the suburbs of Hiroshima-New Jersey-Lower East Side.”
Jack Smith’s response to the political tumult of the late 1960s as well as the legal travails that beset his first feature, Flaming Creatures (1962-63), No President celebrates the absence or negation of the state’s ultimate authority—its bluntly negative title resonating with additional force in the America of 2024. Like The Doom Show or Ken Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death (1956-60/2003-04) in which Smith appeared, it mixes original material with found detritus, including newsreels of the 1940 Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As with all of Smith’s post-Flaming Creatures films, No President is an unfixed work that, in all its iterations, was essentially performative. Over the course of 1968, a program called Horror and Fantasy at Midnight coalesced into The Kidnapping and Auctioning of Wendell Wilkie [sic] by the Love Bandit—starring Irving Rosenthal as the infant Willkie, abducted by a mustachioed pirate (Doris Desmond) and sold on the block of a slave market modeled on the one in the 1942 Maria Montez vehicle Arabian Nights. Less than two weeks after Richard Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969, an hour-long version, now titled No President, was shown at the Elgin, a revival theater in Chelsea which would two years later premiere the midnight movie El Topo (1970).*
By some accounts, the Elgin screening was preceded by the color short subject, Song for Rent. Here, Smith appeared as his red-wigged, plastic-jawed alter-ego Rose Courtyard. The film was accompanied by two renditions of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America.” Dressed in a red satin gown, clutching a bouquet of dead roses, Rose is finally moved to stand up from her wheelchair and salute.
Flaming Creatures and Normal Love are artful. No President is crude, even atrocious. Smith’s hothouse childhood fantasies merge with entropic, harshly lit glamour scenes wherein the garishly costumed hobnob with the brazenly nude. As befits a political scenario, the movie is rife with representations of the phallus—metaphoric and otherwise. Its critical vision might have been derived from the Hungarian psychoanalyst Geza Roheim, of whom it was said he “reduced politics to penis worship, warfare to the tantrums of a frustrated infant, and economics to a ritualistic exchange of feces.”
- JH
* Only one battered print was found after Smith died. The surviving version alternates scenes shot in Smith’s SoHo loft with found footage—including a Lowell Thomas travelogue of Sumatra, a clip from what seems to be a late 1940s soundie of an unidentified couple singing the sentimental hit “A Sunday Kind of Love,” and newsreel footage of candidate Willkie addressing the Future Farmers of America.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.