The World Craves Queer Ideas

New York in the early 1970s: when the cinemas and theaters of the city have long since gone dark, Jack Smith hosts his midnight performances. His loft in downtown Manhattan—affectionately called “The Plaster Foundation Of Atlantis”—is both theater and home. Here, art and daily life blur as a riotous stage set rises from junk, trash, and bric-a-brac: decaying Christmas trees, a toilet bowl, dolls, cans, bottles. “Trash is the material of the creators,” he writes in one of his texts. In what is ostensibly worthless, thrown away, forgotten, he seeks beauty.

One of those “most beautiful and naive evenings of theater,” Jonas Mekas the filmmaker recalls with his characteristic wit and keen observation. He describes the scratchy, wheezy music from the turntable, a small audience of ten, and Jack Smith standing amid his stage set, asking for volunteers and constantly barking directions to them. The memory of that summer night, when the lines between rehearsal and performance dissolved and the event became a hopeful “funeral of a capitalist civilization,” is one of the most intimate contributions in the Marc Siegel-edited volume “What’s Underground About Marshmallows?”—a comprehensive, bilingual (English/German) selection of texts by and about Jack Smith, published for the first time in a substantial German-language volume.

Creator of a Queer-Utopian Aesthetic

Jack Smith (1932–1989) was a performer, filmmaker, photographer, author, a guide— and one of the most influential figures in New York’s queer underground scene from the 1960s through the 1980s. His work influenced artists such as Andy Warhol, John Waters, and Robert Wilson. The queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz labeled him the creator of a queer-utopian aesthetics. Smith crafted immersive, uncompromising, opulent visual worlds that refused heteronormativity and gender binaries. Although after his death—he died in 1989 from AIDS-related illness—exhibitions, retrospectives, events, and festivals in Germany and elsewhere kept his work in circulation, Smith remains largely unknown to a broad public.

Fortuitously, readers can now encounter him again across approximately 300 pages (revisited, expanded, and newly organized). The anthology “What’s Underground About Marshmallows?” approaches his work and thought from multiple angles. Alongside photographs (magnificent: Smith in blue glitter makeup, dancing with his glittering fabric penguin Yolanda), drawings, documents, essays, and contributions by Susan Sontag and Stefan Brecht—the son of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel—the focus is above all on Smith’s own writings.

Fortunately they appear in both the original English and in German translation. They resist every form of co-option and are, at the same time, wonderfully funny, stubborn, sometimes provocative, perplexing, rebellious, grotesque, and combative. In them, he positions himself against the commodification of art, develops a revolutionary acting method, advocates for film as a visual experience, and dedicates himself to a lifelong obsession with the 1940s film star María Montez, a muse who threads his entire oeuvre. When he writes, “Those who trust in dreams become their fans,” it is not only a gay motif of the diva as projection and identification figure; it is also a deep love and tenderness for opening up to grander visions of beauty.

His Film “Flaming Creatures” Was Banned in Several U.S. States

Smith is best known for “Flaming Creatures.” Created in 1963—six years before the Stonewall riots and at a moment when queer life faced massive state and social repression—today it is regarded as one of the most important works in American avant-garde cinema. It marked the film debut of Mario Montez, an icon of early queer cinema who would later be honored with a Special Teddy Award for lifetime achievement in 2012. The film combines camp, sexual ecstasy, quivering earth, Latin American ballads, a vampire, naked bodies, and blurred gender boundaries—yet it was banned in several U.S. states on charges of obscenity. Susan Sontag wrote a brilliant essay in defense of the film, a fiery defense against censorship and moral indictment.

Even if one might wish for a bit more editorial context in places, the selection of images and texts still sketches a surprisingly intricate portrait of Jack Smith. The volume is by no means limited to readers who have long engaged with avant-garde or performance art. “What’s Underground About Marshmallows?” invites everyone to explore queer art and its key players, and to bridge its histories to the present day.

And therein lies a significant strength: in an era when queer history is being challenged or forgotten, Smith’s work reminds us that queer life and queer art thrived under harsh repression. His voluptuous play with gender as an inherent part of his vivid, baroque imagery remains an acting of aesthetic devotion, a queer provocation, a form of resistance. Queer history is not only a tale of persecution and oppression but also one of humor, beauty, culture, and utopian imagination. Perhaps that is why one of Smith’s lines—spoken in conversation with Sylvère Lotringer—still lingers: “The world hungers for ideas.” This anthology is full of them.