Creating the world waiting to be created: Jack Smith and D. W. Winnicott performing themselves

Photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist Jack Smith enacted a particular performance of the self which, beyond content or ideology, both created who he was and aesthetically negotiated a new, not yet called queer, space for artistic practice and social change. This performance of self was not autobiographical in terms of narrative, although it was engaged intimately with the everyday details of his life, and was inseparable from them. It was a form of play, in the profound sense that child development psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott defines play, as the in-between, or transitional, space in which, under the witnessing eye of another (usually the good-enough mother) the self is made. The transitional area is a space of paradox, where no resolution of the distinction between inner and outer reality is required; in this space the world is, in health, as Winnicott says, actively created by each individual, and its realm extends into adult creativity and religious life. In this dissertation I outline Smith's development as an artist, and particularly the bearing on that process of his coming out, in the terms of Winnicott's idea of play. The critical reception of Smith's early work, read here in psychoanalytic terms as “interpretation” and “exploitation,” radically affected the work he made. Smith shifted his work from film to live performance, and by disallowing it to in any way become a product, or an object in the world, he kept it in the paradoxical, transitional realm of play. In playing out, in both film and live performance work, a world founded in his ‘secret-flix’, the films of the 1930 and 40s, films that provided meta-transitional images, or objects, that fed his entire oeuvre, Smith brought that world into being.