Represented by the Marianne Boesky Gallery, over the years he has regularly exhibited his own works, as well as the work of artists he admires, at institutions including the New Museum, in New York, which premiered John Waters: Change of Life (2004), his first major museum exhibition London’s Sprüth Magers, which presented his 2015 exhibition Beverly Hills John and Kunsthaus Zürich, which exhibited John Waters: How Much Can You Take? ( 2015). Waters has long been collecting, making, and exhibiting art in a career that is quite separate from his moviemaking. Role Models, his book of essays on people he admires, pays tribute to outsiders like Bobby Garcia and David Hurles, two often-overlooked photographers who created obsessive and expressive bodies of pornographic work.ĭespite being a filmmaker myself, I am interested less in John Waters the filmmaker than in John Waters the artist and curator. Each year he writes a top-ten best-of list for Artforum, showcasing an unusually wide range of films that don’t appear on many other lists. A sequence in Polyester (1981) even goes so far as to show Divine’s character, Francine Fishpaw, reading a copy of Cahiers du cinéma, the esteemed French film magazine.Īs I’ve enjoyed Waters’s films, I’ve hungered for his insights into cinema and into the world more generally.
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From early work like Eat Your Makeup (1968) and Pink Flamingos (1972) to gentler but no less transgressive fare like Serial Mom (1994) and Pecker (1998), Waters’s films are rich with the same kind of playful details and references.
When you consider his own filmography, it isn’t surprising that Waters would watch movies this way. His attention was on details that are often overlooked, and for how smart and warm and sexual and scary and bonkers cinema can be. Instead of focusing on the macro, on hype and generalities, he embraced the films with an appreciation for single moments, glances, and thematic threads, like Ann-Margret’s energetic movement throughout Kitten with a Whip. His presence and presentation gave the screenings a context that’s often missing from cinema today. Watching him introduce two of his favorite films, James Wong’s Final Destination (2000) and Douglas Heyes’s Kitten with a Whip (1964), at New York’s Lincoln Center and Anthology Film Archives, respectively, were personal cinematic highlights.
J ohn Waters has always been a special kind of connoisseur.