While writer and director John Waters is open about his childhood, movies, and the causes he supports, he remains private about his personal life.
From Waters’ books, interviews, speeches, and more, fans know that he is gay and who his longtime friends are. They know he has residences in three locations: Baltimore, New York, and San Francisco, and spends his summers in Provincetown. They know where and with whom he will be buried. But Waters has revealed little about his closest relationships.
“You have to talk about your movies. You also have to do interviews to promote what you’re doing,” he once said. “But no one really knows about my private life. And I feel sorry for you if you don’t have a private life.”
So it was a little surprising to hear Waters talk about the “roommates” he lives with this fall as if they were college students in a freshman dorm, or as if they were renting rooms to cope with inflation.
At a press conference about a new exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Waters volunteered to have roommates in each of the three residences. In many cases, these roommates have been together for years. And they are not part of his biological family. He chose to live with them.
But for those who want to know a little about Waters’ private affairs, they aren’t necessarily romantic roommates. The museum event is a preview of “Coming Attractions: The John Waters Collection,” an exhibition featuring 83 contemporary works of art from Waters’ personal collection, which runs through April 16, 2023. And “roommate,” as Waters explains in the “Go Mobile” narration that accompanies the briefing and show, is the term he uses to refer to artwork in another home.
“My roommates, that’s what I’ve always called my art collection,” he said at a media event.
“I call Art my roommate because we live together,” he explains in a recorded voiceover. “I see them every day…We live in a commune.”
Waters’ concept of artwork as roommates is not new. He wrote about this in a chapter of his 2010 book Role Models, in which he describes the art in his home as a roommate, saying it has characteristics he likes and wants in every home. He said he preferred hanging out with his art room roommates over his real-life roommates.
“No, real people won’t share my bathroom or read the newspaper in front of me!” he vowed. “Instead, I live with an artist. Mike Kelley is one of my roommates.”
Visitors to Waters’ home, including guests at his annual Christmas party in Baltimore, were lucky enough to see what he was talking about. The BMA exhibition is the first time he has shown his colleagues on such a large scale.
For Waters, part of the fun of the exhibit is seeing roommates from three different homes in the same space for the first time, sometimes side by side, he said during a walkthrough of the show.
“They’ve never met before,” he said. “As if [the curators] I was introducing different artists that I should have met a long time ago. ”
Waters, 76, perhaps best known for films such as “Hairspray” and “Pink Flamingo,” bestsellers such as “Role Models” and “Karthik,” and nicknames such as “The Pope of Trash” and “Prince of Vomit,” is a visual artist and noted art collector.
He was the subject of a retrospective entitled “John Waters: Indecent Exposure” at the BMA and Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio in 2018 and 2019. Two works, “Beverly Hills John” and “Shuda!,” are on display in the inaugural exhibition at the recently opened Loubell Museum in Washington, D.C.
The 83 works on display in “Coming Attractions” were selected from a larger collection of about 375 works that Mr. Waters, a Baltimore native and BMA trustee, agreed to leave at the museum upon his death.
Waters’ gift to the BMA includes 288 works in a variety of art forms by 125 other artists. Waters also donated 87 prints, sculptures, mixed media and video works he created. His gift will enable the BMA to become the largest single repository of his visual art works, permanently providing a comprehensive view of his vision and approach to making and collecting art.
When Waters’ gift was announced in 2020, curators promised that the museum would preview what was to come while Waters was still alive, and that’s exactly what happened. All pieces in the show are on loan from Waters and will be returned to Waters when the show ends.
In return for his gift, the museum’s board said it would name the restrooms and rotunda after him. It wasn’t an accusation. Mr Waters, known for his vulgar humor and outlandish ideas, specifically asked for his name to be placed on the BMA’s first “all-gender” toilet.
The John Waters Restroom, which transgender artist and activist Elizabeth Coffey named last fall for her “first pee,” is located right next to the Nancy Dorman Stanley Mazaroff Print, Drawing, and Photography Research Center, where “Coming Attractions” opened on Nov. 20. The museum also agreed to prominently display five works from its collection, including Waters’ work, at all times.
“Coming Attractions” is one of two Waters-related museum exhibits opening next year at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in 2023, along with career retrospective “Pope of Trash.” The dates for the retrospective exhibition have not been announced.
Unlike Indecent Exposure from three years ago, Coming Attractions does not include Waters’ work. Instead, by focusing on the work of others he has collected and displayed in his homes in Baltimore, New York, and San Francisco, we get an inside glimpse into his taste in contemporary art and how he lives with it.
The guest curators are photographer Catherine Opie and multimedia artist Jack Pearson, both of whom are longtime friends of Waters and have participated in his collection. Like many of the artists featured in the exhibition, both identify as queer. The show is curated by Leila Grote, the museum’s associate curator of contemporary art.
Featured works include paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints by Diane Arbus. Nan Goldin; Mike Kelley; Cindy Sherman. Cy Twombly; Andy Warhol. Christopher Wool, Gary Simmons, etc.
The museum calls the exhibit “a cutting-edge expression of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity and freedom of expression.”
“As a young queer person, everything about John was my go-to,” said Opie, whose portrait of Waters appears in the show. Grote said the works “represent a type of contemporary art that museums don’t actually have.”
In a joint statement, Opie and Pearson said Waters’ collection reflects his personality and imagination.
“Our hope is to share with audiences another side of John’s creative vision by giving them a glimpse of what he values: an artist who is unafraid to take risks, uncompromising, and creates art on the last minute.”
The reference to roommates may have been a one-liner, but Waters took the idea and ran with it, building on what he wrote in the roommate chapter of “Role Models.”
“I thought they made me happy, made me angry, made me laugh, did something in a new way,” he said of his peers. “They just challenged me and I wanted to live with them because art is your roommate. You live with them forever.”
Waters talks about his “roommates” as if they were sentient beings with their own minds, emotions, and personalities, and perhaps even when the museum is closed.
He paints a picture of Roommate as an art world equivalent to the robot “hosts” on HBO’s “Westworld” or the exhibits in the film “Night at the Museum” and its sequels, which bring works of art to life.
Waters says his roommates hung out together, knowing it was home to the Cohn Collection, which houses rare paintings by Henri Matisse and other masters. He thinks about how they are adapting to temporary housing. He reflects on how they developed a relationship and became friends that they could not have formed in their separate residences. He imagines his roommates plotting against each other. He fantasizes about them sneaking out of the gallery they’re in and exploring other parts of the museum.
When asked at a donor event how his roommates were getting along in their new environment, Waters was quick to respond: “I think they’re very happy to see each other,” he replied. “And they all want to band together and scare the blue nudes.”
Many of the works in Waters’ collection are images of his friends (the late Cookie Mueller), his friends (Vincent Peranio), or both (mink stoles painted by Susan Lowe), so it’s not too far-fetched to think in these terms.
Curators are also following this trend and are talking about ways to “introduce” various works and to “converse” with each other.
“John loves the fact that these pieces, all from different homes, are meeting for the first time,” Grote said at the press preview, pointing to a wall of pieces from three different homes.
“How amazing is this wall with the Richard Tuttle sculpture on the left, the Vincent Fecteau sculpture in the middle, and the Gary Simmons sculpture on the right?” she asked. “There is so much I want to say about each piece, but for now we should just be thankful for the new friendships that are forming between them.”
The curators placed certain works to show how they were “starting to speak to each other in different ways,” Opie said. “Throughout the exhibition, you’ll notice these little groups… that we’ve put together in the end so that we can have a conversation.”
Was someone left out of the party?
In a nod to her character Edith the Egg Lady in Pink Flamingos, Pearson said she was disappointed there was no “Edith Massey moment” on the show, so her voice could be part of the mix. “I’m sure I could have found it,” he said.
“The only piece that reminds me of her [is one] “I didn’t buy it, but I wish I had, by George Stoll,” Waters said. And you forget that you even have them. And when I was looking through an old drawer, I realized, oh! I have a piece that I bought! ”
During a donor event, Gross asked Waters what it was like in her home, where much of the art is on loan. She said people at the museum were worried about him living without a roommate. Waters said her home looks and feels empty.
“They haven’t taken everything away, so I’m kind of moving everywhere,” he said. “There are big holes in the walls and dirt is collecting.”
Waters said he always thought Louise Lawlor should come, referring to the artist who has made a career of researching and documenting art installations. “This is a great installation for her.”
In his recorded narration, Waters went further, likening his residence to a chaotic crime scene.
“They came to all my houses and took away half the things in the walls,” he laments. “So now I’m living in an abandoned squat where it looks like there’s been an art robbery in the house.”
At the same time, he admits that his roommate suits the museum atmosphere well.
“I can see better,” he said. “The lighting is not very good. They also cleaned the lights. Some of them were dirty.”
Even though the show has just begun, Waters is already thinking about what will happen after the show ends.
“That’s strange,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to put them back together after seeing them here together.”
Taking inspiration from the exhibit, Waters said he thought about preserving some of the new “relationships” formed at the museum and bringing the roommates back together in a different way. He said he was grateful to the curators for coming up with “a whole new way” to display them.
“We’ll probably never be able to go back to how we were.” [and] We have to put it back together,” he told curators at one point.
But in the end, he said, he decided not to change everything.
“Oh, that would be really complicated,” he said. “We’ll have to move all the furniture and change everything. Then they’ll go back lonely.”
Waters said she knows it’s not as much fun for her roommate, who won’t be hanging out with new friends. But he says this won’t be the last time they’ll see each other, as he plans to eventually return to the museum.
After all, he said, “I know that later on, after I die, they will get together again.”
Source: Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News – www.washingtonblade.com
