Jack Smith : Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis

About

Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis marks the first time that many of Smith's performances—composed and chronicled in drawings, scripts, film fragments, "boiled lobster color slideshows," audio recordings, and costumes—have been articulated. It is the most comprehensive gathering of Smith’s work since the 1997 exhibition at MoMA PS1 and focuses particularly on the largely overlooked period of the 1970s and early 1980s. It frames Smith’s time “in exile,” as described by film historian and Smith archivist J. Hoberman. This period was marked by the artist's eviction from his legendary SoHo loft, the Plaster Foundation of Atlantis in 1971 and, consequently, by a movement towards performances staged in ad-hoc theater spaces, clubs, and notably in the literal outside of a morphing urban environment, as the artist found himself at the margins of a professionalizing art world, with the city of New York transformed by a bullish real estate market.