When John Waters Met The Art Grannies

By Ben Walters, guardian.co.uk

At the Marianne Boesky gallery in New York’s Chelsea art district, the open-plan office zone is separated from the exhibition space by a wall with an open end, so shoptalk can be overheard from the public area. An unsuspecting patron browsing the catalogues on Monday night couldn’t have helped overhearing passing mentions, delivered in a playful Baltimore lilt, of transsexual hookers, child-molesting town criers and the difficulty of finding good pictures of dead celebrities. John Waters was in the house.

Although best known as the director of films such as Pink Flamingos, the original Hairspray and Serial Mom, Waters has also been exhibiting as a fine artist for more than 15 years; his latest show, Rear Projection, has just gone up at Boesky.

Many of the works are condensed narratives – or “little movies” as Waters calls them – comprising a handful of wickedly juxtaposed images from films and television shows, captured by the artist photographing his TV set as they play. Santa Molester, for instance, reworks an anodyne kids’ movie into a tale of voyeurism and fetishistic impulse, while Necro collates shots of stars in coffins (in character). The show also includes images doctored to show, say, child actors smoking or give A-listers cleft palates; a brace of tongue-in-cheek self-portraits; conceptual pieces on fandom and framing; and outré outsized sculptures of roach traps, tubs of moisturiser and the like.

On Monday, Waters, wearing a red scarf and black pea-coat over a buttoned-up white shirt, dark, striped trousers and soft black ankle boots, was preparing to lead a walkthrough of the show. Around 30 distinguished arts patrons were circulating, drinking wine from plastic cups and eating Cuban pulled-pork sandwiches from shocking-pink paper plates. They seemed, on average, to be in their early 60s – Waters’s own age – and had taken enough turns around the aesthetic block not to be shocked by Rear Projection’s knowing sensationalism. When told of the artist’s movies’ reputation for bad taste, one lady with a walking cane noted nonchalantly that “these are in quite bad taste too”. Still, there was a mildly scandalous frisson to the imminent encounter between the pope of trash and the art grannies. What, for instance, would he say about the three-foot bottle of poppers that seemed to be spilling all over the gallery floor?

Waters began by explaining the evolution of his approach, which originated with the desire to retrieve stills from his own movies and developed into an appreciation for the overlooked and misrecalled. “I’m convinced that people don’t remember movies, they remember stills that they’ve seen over and over in books so I try to photograph things in movies that you are never supposed to see,” he said. “Really, it’s about writing and editing. I think up each of these pieces and then I have to go find the images [to make] a new narrative which many times is the opposite of or nothing to do with what the director really began with.”

As the show’s title suggests, the movie industry and its various sleights of hand are a common target. The piece entitled Rear Projection interpolates buttock shots into such famously processed scenes as Tippi Hedren in her little boat in The Birds, or projects them in turn on to bum cheeks. “To me this is what the whole show really is about, taking insider knowledge about the film business and completely turning it around, making it into something it completely isn’t,” Waters says. “My assistant had to look at so many ass porno movies. And there’s a lot of them, too.”

Moving around the exhibit, he defused any lingering trepidation about his subject matter with a stream of anecdotes. On a series of shots in which branded products have been inserted into iconic movie scenes: “I’m probably the only director where no product wants to be in my movies. They’re more likely to threaten to sue. I stopped asking.” On his fixation with the Satanist cult known as the Process: “I liked it because all the little devil-worshippers looked so cute in their black outfits. Plus I like to have creepiness in my house. It keeps people from staying too long.” And on trying to track down Catholic-school imagery he recalled from childhood: “I finally called the church and they said, ‘Well, this is from 1956. You shouldn’t show that, we don’t teach that any more.’ I said, ‘You taught it to me and I’m crazy because of it!'”

After touching on the two works in which Waters himself is the subject – one a version of a childhood portrait to which he has added his trademark pencil moustache, the other a recent photo in which he wears the garb of a town crier (“I never once made eye contact with a human being in that outfit. I would have been mortified”) – we came to the poppers. “If you don’t know what it is,” Waters told the audience gathered around the oversized Rush bottle, “well, they sell it in sex shops. You take a sniff of it and get real high for about three minutes. You should try it – it actually does work. And if you get addicted, how bad can it be? It only lasts three minutes.” The art-grannies cooed their approval.

After the walkthrough, in the office zone, Waters described the problems he’s been having because of the recession. The musical adaptations of Hairspray and Cry Baby have closed – “My Broadway career is over!” – and his latest cinematic project, Fruitcake, is in the balance. “It’s a terribly wonderful children’s Christmas adventure about a very functional family of meat thieves. We have them in Baltimore,” he says. “I’ve got a big meeting in LA about it this week. Who knows?” He takes a moment to ponder his options should the economic situation worsen. “I could always be a thief again,” he muses. “I was good at it. I never got caught. And now they really wouldn’t suspect me.”