SMack SMack

SMack SMack refers to Sado-Masochism (S&M) and the sound of spanking. Jim Nutt’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s parallels the countercultural “underground comix” movement heralded by the publications Cracked and Mad in the 1950s, which challenged the strict standards of representation established in the 1954 Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America. (Misspellings were acts of linguistic deviance.) A version of SMack SMack also appeared in one of the comic books that Nutt and his Hairy Who collaborators produced for their art exhibitions (See Smart Museum 2001.588j). Their artistic exploration of deviant visual communication escaped censorship because art editions were not regulated by the comics industry.

Ideogrammatic titles within images typically play on the boundaries between personal expression and shared language, like the inset featuring either a band-aid, or belt, and rope. (See also 2001.657). The large central figure—a body marked by sex, gender, and mutilation (or self-mutilation)—and the crude humor are also conspicuous features of Nutt’s work. (See 2001.337 and 2001.345.) His grotesques call to mind the social criticism of Weimar-era artists like Otto Dix (1891‒1969) (1984.66) and George Grosz (1893‒1959) (1994.101u), yet Nutt is interrogating the moral codes of fine art and mass communication of his own time.