PBS NewsHour: This weekend, a major retrospective of filmmaker John Waters' work, titled “Indecent Exposure,” opened in his hometown at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Often satirizing violence, celebrity and sexuality, the cult film director has long pushed limits of cinematic decency with hits like Hairspray and Cry-Baby.
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I have seen art by John Waters before without knowing who he was. Watching this news story definitely gives me a sense of who is is, what he stands for, and why he creates art. I think a lot of it is quite thought provoking, actually. The piece where he talks about the flying saucers crashing into the Capitol building juxtaposed with 9/11 really plays with shock factor. It made me think about how something so destructive was once portrayed purely as science fiction in a movie, but the world eventually reached a place where it became reality. It was an interesting comment on the progression and destruction of human society. His other art is very diverse. Some is taboo, some is funny, some is so abstract it is completely left to the viewer. I enjoy his playful spirit when it comes to art, and his philosophy of taking art with a grain of salt and humor in mind. I think it makes his art all the more interesting.
I really enjoy hearing about John Waters, and his eclectic lifestyle, art, and visual style. He truly is a groundbreaking artist, but also I feel like I have a special connection to him, since he lives half in Baltimore, his hometown, and half in San Francisco, my hometown. I recently read a book written by him about hitchhiking across america. which offers a really sincere look into how the man views america, and his experiences, turning them into kind of caricatural vignettes. The book is composed half of real stories from his road trip from Sn Francisco to Baltimore, and half of these kind of bizarro world stories where he travels with an obese woman obsessed with junk romance novels, or in the car of a deadbeat gigolo. It is really endearing, in a way, to see into the way he rationalizes and interprets this experience of hitchhiking across america, and to see how playfully he deals with kind of semi-dangerous experiences he may have had along the way.
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