ABSTRACT
In reintroducing experimental filmmaker, writer, actor, photographer, illustrator and performance artist Jack Smith to a twenty-first-century public, curators and critics have positioned Smith's art as the sort of camp inspired by Orientalist fantasies in classical Hollywood film. Smith's films and theatrical productions were indeed glorious expressions of "camp Orientalism", given his pleasure in and mimicking of the visual pleasures he found in the decorative, exotic pre-1960s films of Hollywood. Too often, curatorial and critical emphasis on Smith's camp and Orientalism focuses on Smith's artwork as if he were driven to produce a seamless and finished camp performance. Smith's source material, process and performance style bring his films, collages, drawings and photographs into a different place than camp Orientalist fantasies. Smith's performative space sits outside the economic and ideological apparatus of the culture industry and emblematizes queer struggle, desire and self-fashioning.
