Jack Smith — Padronismo di Pastacrosta, Galleria L’Attico, Rome, 1975
In 1974, Jack Smith arrived in Rome with his pet penguin Inez, known also as Yolanda La Pinguina. Over the course of many months, the pair walked the city together — Yolanda trailing Smith on her leash through ruins, gardens, and public spaces that recalled the near-ancient, artificial jungle landscapes he had assembled from trash in his New York loft. Across Rome, Smith staged scenes for a rotating cast of amateur photographers, and occasionally for passing strangers. He would eventually organise these pictures into a one-night slideshow: Padronismo di Pastacrosta, presented on 24 June 1975 at Galleria L’Attico, the space run by Fabio Sargentini at via Cesare Beccaria 22.
The title is not a movement. It is one of Smith’s invented theatrical systems: a mock doctrine, an absurdist proposition, an anti-authoritarian structure that sits close to pataphysical logic while remaining entirely his own. Padronismo — landlordism — was Smith’s recurring arch-enemy. The extraction of rent, the passive executive, the sacrifice-betrayal context: these were the forces he identified as squashing life and art alike. His props made the argument concrete. A rent cheque addressed to “the lobster”. A gilded hand mirror. A glittery crab. A red plastic lobster. Objects-as-co-stars, each carrying symbolic weight, each suggesting the possibility — and inevitable failure — of creative transformation.
By the time of the Rome slideshow, Smith had largely abandoned the idea of the static, finished artwork. His last completed feature, Flaming Creatures (1963), was behind him. At the Plaster Foundation of Atlantis — his loft at 36 Greene Street, a twenty-four-hour film set, theatre, living space, and trash heap — he had refocused on stagecraft, performing improvised theatre for a dwindling but devoted audience. Evicted in 1972 for unpaid rent, he moved his practice outward, into the world, with a more portable cast.
Yolanda was central to this period. Smith identified with her. A communitarian species by nature, penguins live in exile; their remote Antarctic home is constantly threatened. They are flightless birds. Yolanda experienced a double inertia reinforced by her stuffed animal status. In her role as performer, she was, like Smith, subject to the cannibalistic forces of art ambition. Her cult stardom had exceeded her agency. Smith obsessively referenced her in titles and depicted her in hand-drawn renderings — some tender, others menacing — from her Roman debut until her death in 1985.
The slideshow format suited him. Unlike film, it allowed flexibility: images could be arranged and re-sequenced as they were projected, threaded through loosely scripted narratives that shifted according to mood. Smith described the slideshow as a “one-time-only, do-it-yourself movie” — an assembly kit, an accelerated and expanded form of filmmaking.
The mailed poster for Padronismo di Pastacrosta belongs to this logic. Offset printed in black on thin folded paper, addressed to the Roman artist Roberto Dionisio, stamped by Galleria L’Attico, sent through the post, received, retained, and eventually cut — a rectangular incision where a postage stamp was later removed. It is not simply an announcement. It is a circulated support: printed, folded, posted, received, altered, and returned to circulation. The incision is part of its record. The address is part of its meaning.
Smith’s shadow looms over the development of avant-garde film, performance, photography, and critical discourse in New York between the 1960s and 1980s. He remains, nonetheless, an outlier — resistant to clean-cut narrativisation, recalcitrant in history as in life. Since his death from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1989, his work has continued to exceed the contexts that attempt to contain it. Padronismo di Pastacrosta is one instance of that excess: a slideshow that existed once, on one night, in Rome, and a poster that has survived it.
