# Jack Smith [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Smith_(film_director)) ( 1932 – 1989 ) ## Description American filmmaker and performance artist whose 1963 film *Flaming Creatures* became a landmark obscenity case, and whose subsequent decades of unfinished, endlessly reworked live performance ("Exotic Landscapelessness") shaped downtown New York's queer avant-garde and its later theorization around ideas of queer failure. ## Key Tags #performance #ny-underground #queer #queer-failure #queer-theory ## Essential Works - *Flaming Creatures* (1963) - black-and-white 16mm film of costumed, gender-fluid performers; seized and prosecuted for obscenity, becoming a free-speech cause célèbre - *Normal Love* (1963–65, unfinished) - large-cast color film shot but never formally completed, screened only as work-in-progress - Live performances ("Exotic Landscapelessness") - improvised, hours-long, endlessly revised slide-and-performance events staged in his own loft ## Details Worked almost entirely outside completed, distributable film form after *Flaming Creatures*, instead staging durational, perpetually unfinished performances for small audiences — an aesthetic of deliberate failure, delay, and excess later taken up as a touchstone of queer theory. José Esteban Muñoz devotes a chapter of *Cruising Utopia* to Smith ("After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity"). ### Concepts and Theories - [[Queer Theory]] - his practice of deliberate unfinishedness and "failure" became a touchstone case for queer theory's turn against productivity and completion ### Creative and Technical Practices - [[Performance Art]] - decades of live, improvised, never-finalized performance work ### Collaborators %% none yet %% ### Institutional Affiliations and Associated Movements %% none yet %% ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography %% none yet %% ### Secondary Sources Bibliography - [[Cruising Utopia]] - Muñoz, José Esteban. *Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity*. NYU Press, 2009. Chapter 10, "After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity," is a sustained analysis of Smith's performance practice. - Tartaglia, Jerry. ["The Interminable Examination of the Work of Jack Smith."](https://jerrytartaglia.wordpress.com/the-interminable-examination-of-the-work-of-jack-smith/) - ["Jack Smith's Theater and Performance Works."](https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/237006/jack-smith-s-theater-and-performance-works) *e-flux Criticism*.