some of JACK SMITH’s 12 Big Ideas
from ‘what’s so underground about marshmallows?’

-The assemblage of character.  A collection of brilliant detritus, sequins, and metallic fabrics create the silhouette of a spectacle. No one sees the glue if the light flashes back bright in their eyes. All character is an assemblage of found objects, found gestures, playing dress-up.

-The onion on the candelabra. The form casts a silhouette as if it possessed the solidity of a rock—the myth of a pure homogenous substance.  In fact, it represents a quintessential multiplicity, the aggregation of hundreds of translucent layers.  The onion is not a thing, rather a series of filters, a glass flower, a hand in a glove.  There is no core to the onion as there is no core to the Jack Smith we see before us, the Ron Vawter under his countless shawls and scarves.

-The onion under the knife.  The signs of normative emotion, tell-tale products like tears and grimaces, are fabrications by which the audience reads a moving story.  A climax is signaled by its ejaculation.  (Thus the two small onions and one large one)

-The repertoire of gestures (replacing the shawl, adjusting his shoulders). One always attempts to regain the composure that one is always in the process of losing in order to approach that idea of a stable identity that is only approachable, tapped lightly on the shoulder before she coyly steps away.

-Vawter gets burnt by the light, the candelabra topples, the arm piece tilts askew, etc.  These accidental ruptures in the fabric of representation seem to offer access to the unmediated figure of the Real.  But what is it that remains or peaks through the gash?  Who is it that gasps in pain?  Smith, Vawter, or something else?

-The fantasy.  Smith’s tale is a series of suspended moments and digressions.  His long drawn out voicings are a microcosmic representation of this larger phenomena of anticipation.  Nothing ever arrives.  The fantasy is like a musical phrase that never quite resolves itself.

-There is a difference between the endless repetition of Uncle Jonas’ film duplications and the endless representations of Jack Smith, though this distinction gets confused in the double mediation of Smith taped voice and the filmed recording of Vawter’s performance. Somewhere caught up in there is the ubiquitous elephant of “the live.”  This must be the safe place that Smith refers to towards his tale’s conclusion.  The onion has no core real “Jack Smith”, but it is being cut, falling open.   The frightful reminder that these representations are not simulacra ad infinitum is the fact of Smith’s death.

-Another safe place.  The story ends before meaning is revealed—Uncle Jonas gets away—and thus refuses to stay in the duplicating room.  Instead of that singular culprit, meaning is scattered across the surface of the production, in the cracks and crevices of the minutiae.

-Jack Smith’s voice.  Its reproduction or reincarnation from ghost box/tape recording to the organic instrument of Vawter’s speech only marks the contours of the other’s breath, repeats the gesture turned hollow.  The question remains whether the original speaking had a different substance, more assignable to that which we call Smith, or whether it, too, was sugar and syrup, a glazing… Where is the Barthesian “Grain of the Voice”?

-Why twelve? Because twelve is two too many to count on both hands.  Too many to keep track of.  And it is this getting lost along the way that is precisely the point.