Creator of the notorious film Flaming Creatures, Jack Smith astonished an international audience with his work in film, photography, theater, performance and the written word. Example and antagonist to generations of artists and performers'revered by Robert Wilson, denounced by Kenneth Anger, imitated by Andy Warhol?Jack Smith is ready for his close-up, on location in the streets and ruins of the world. This volume recognizes Smith's seminal contributions and the need for a significant rethinking of the history of the American avant-garde.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Jack Smith-New Paintings, held at Flowers Central, London, May 2-26, 2007.

Your first draft is a work of imagination, but that doesn't mean it's a work of art--not yet. With Jack Smith's technical and inspirational guidance, you can turn your initial draft into a compelling story brimming with memorable characters and a page-turning plot. As Jack states inside Write and Revise for Publication, writing is a complex act, one that calls upon all the powers of our creative resources, imagination, and intellect. Top-notch storytelling is not achieved the first time around, nor should it be expected so soon. But it is possible. Through Jack's detailed instruction and precise methods, you will learn the revision techniques and fine-tuning skills needed to create powerful, polished works ready to submit to magazines, agents, and publishers. "As inspiring as it is practical...combines great advice, apt examples, and a can-do spirit that will excite and improve any aspiring writer." --Ron Hansen, author of A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford "I believe Jack Smith might have written THE BOOK on writing and revising for publication. Clean, direct, succinct--a book that is full of pure wisdom and truth, but also amazing technical advice." --Virgil Suarez, author of Latin Jazz, The Cutter, Havana Thursdays, and Welcome to he Oasis

'During thirty years ... as a filmmaker, photographer, and performer, Jack Smith produced a body of creative, antic writing that intersects and transcends the genres of hothouse fantasy, criticism, and social comment. Bringing together long unavailable essays, performance scripts, interviews, and other material, [this compilation] reveals the ideas and personality of an artist whose distinctive vision has influenced generations of filmmakers and performance artists"--Provided by publisher.

Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, Jack Smith's incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause célèbre of the New York underground. This study of Smith's magnum opus explores its status as a cult film that appropriates the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.

Examining Tony Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art. Tony Conrad has significantly influenced cultural developments from minimalism to underground film, "concept art," postmodern appropriation, and the most sophisticated rock and roll. Creator of the "structural" film, The Flicker, collaborator on Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Normal Love, follower of Henry Flynt's radical anti-art, member of the Theatre of Eternal Music and the first incarnation of The Velvet Underground, and early associate of Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and Cindy Sherman, Conrad has eluded canonic histories. Yet Beyond the Dream Syndicate does not claim Conrad as a major but under-recognized figure. Neither monograph nor social history, the book takes Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art. Such an approach simultaneously illuminates and estranges current understandings of the period, redrawing the map across medium and stylistic boundaries to reveal a constitutive hybridization at the base of the decade's artistic development. This exploration of Conrad and his milieu goes beyond the presentation of a relatively overlooked oeuvre to chart multiple, contestatory regimes of power simultaneously in play during the pivotal moment of the 1960s. From the sovereign authority invoked by Young's music, to the "paranoiac" politics of Flynt, to the immanent control modeled by Conrad's films, each avant-garde project examined reveals an investment within a particular structure of power and resistance, providing a glimpse into the diversity of the artistic and political stakes that continue to define our time.

Glorious Catastrophe presents a detailed critical analysis of the work of Jack Smith from the early 1960s until his AIDS-related death in 1989. Dominic Johnson argues that Smith's work offers critical strategies for rethinking art's histories after 1960. Heralded by peers as well as later generations of artists, Smith is an icon of the New York avant-garde. Nevertheless, he is conspicuously absent from dominant histories of American culture in the 1960s, as well as from narratives of the impact that decade would have on coming years. Smith poses uncomfortable challenges to cultural criticism and historical analysis, which Glorious Catastrophe seeks to uncover. The first critical analysis of Smith's practices across visual art, film, performance, and writing, the study employs extensive, original archival research carried out in Smith's personal papers, and unpublished interviews with friends and collaborators. It will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the life and art of Jack Smith, and the greater histories that he interrupts, including those of experimental arts practices, and the development of sexual cultures.