Inside Man

Photo by Poppy de Villeneuve, grooming by Susie Sobol

John Waters

Andy Warhol Donald Judd Cindy Sherman John Waters Mike Kelley Ansel Adams Diane Arbus Vincent Fecteau

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"I love impenetrable art," John Waters tells me over the dining table in his New York City pied-à-terre. It’s a funny thing to hear from a man whose name for almost 40 years has been associated with art that is anything but abstruse. Though his movies have made him an international symbol of all that is rib-ticklingly subversive in American culture, his gallery art has remained relatively under the radar. And he seems to prefer it that way.

Since his first gallery show, at American Fine Arts in New York in 1995, Waters has been creating work that shares a sensibility with his ingeniously vulgar movies — among them Pink Flamingos (1972), Hairspray (1988), Serial Mom (1994), and, most recently, A Dirty Shame (2004). He says he finds the art world’s small audience liberating. "I don’t ever have to say, ‘Oh, they’re going to love this in Omaha,’ he tells me. "Although now Omaha and New York are not that different, if you want to know the truth."

Much of Waters’s artwork consists of film stills that he photographs off his TV and arranges into narratives of his own invention. (The images’ imperfection is important to him; he usually shoots from VHS and doesn’t press pause.) He refers to them as "my little movies." In Santa Molester (2009), 10 frames from a children’s Christmas movie become a very short story in which the interaction between Santa and a little boy is amusingly sordid. Sometimes he digitally alters the images, as in Children Who Smoke (2009), in which the youthful faces of Shirley Temple, Elizabeth Taylor, and other cute actors of yesteryear have cigarettes Photoshopped between their lips.

Waters’s work has appeared in galleries all over the United States and Europe. In 2004, a year after the Broadway musical version of Hairspray won eight Tonys, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York gave him a midcareer retrospective that traveled to three other cities. Last spring, his exhibition "Rear Projection" showed concurrently at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York and the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills; 10 works from that show are on view until September 15 at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. (Waters lives and works primarily in Baltimore, his hometown, but keeps homes in New York and San Francisco and rents an apartment in Provincetown every summer.) Much of his work pokes fun at the art and film worlds he inhabits, allowing him to be at once an insider and a heckler.

One work in "Rear Projection" combines parts of four film-title stills to spell out: contemporary art hates you. The work’s title is ...And Your Family Too (2009). The art world "is a secret club," Waters says. "It is a language; you have to learn everything. You have to learn how to dress, you have to learn how to see it, you have to learn how to talk about it, you have to learn how to read about it. All of it is impenetrable to a newcomer, and it was to me too." In his 1998 film Pecker, when the laundromat worker played by Christina Ricci tells her photographer boyfriend, played by Edward Furlong, "I don’t understand any of that art crap," he replies sincerely, "You could if you just open your eyes." But as his feelings about impenetrability suggest, Waters has no problem with elitism.

In fact, some of his works seem geared exclusively to members of the art world. The 2003 poster Visit Marfa presents that Texas town, known to cognoscenti as Donald Judd’s mecca of Minimalism, as a carnivalesque family attraction. (It made the cover of Artforum in 2004.) Mamas (2009), part of "Rear Projection," juxtaposes three stills: the title screen of the 1972 women-in-prison film Black Mama, White Mama; an image of Pam Grier, the Amazonian star of that movie; and Agnes Gund, president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art. The similar gestures of the two women — one black and gun-toting, one white and matronly — make the work funny to anybody, but the real joke is lost on anyone who doesn’t recognize Gund.