THE REAL WARHOL

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

He was doing just fine until he left Ohio and came to New York. That’s the verdict provided by the sister of quintessential avant-garde artist Jack Smith in Mary Jordan's inquisitive documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis. Her perception of his life, as someone far away from the Sixties counterculture that famously birthed Andy Warhol, serves to explain both the radicalism that fueled Smith's work and the futility that ultimately led to his undoing. Jordan pulls together a variety of talking heads and combines them with plenty of footage from Smith's eclectic creative accomplishments, resulting in a fairly tame collage masquerading as a movie. But to parse such abstract and frequently confounding forms of expression requires a certain amount of sobriety, which Jordan competently provides.

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