‘I always like it when there’s something wrong with contemporary art,’ says John Waters. The Baltimore, Maryland-born filmmaker, artist, writer, and Queer icon favors work that flaunts convention, ‘tries to wreck what came before it,’ or simply pisses people off. Known affectionately as the King of Camp and the Prince of Puke, Waters first made his name in the 1970s with cult-classic films like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Desperate Living (1977).He has since entered the mainstream. In addition to seeing his 1988 film Hairspray adapted into a popular musical, the auteur has made appearances on hit TV shows (‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’), billboards advertising luxury brands (Saint Laurent), and the Hollywood Walk of Fame (coming this year).
Since the 1990s, Waters has added the title of fine artist to his resumé, exhibiting his photographs and installations internationally. What’s lesser known is Waters’s serious investment as an art collector.
Over his decades in the spotlight, Waters has amassed an impressive collection that includes pieces by the likes of Kathe Burkhart, Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool. Ever loyal to his hometown of Charm City, Waters finalized a promised gift of 372 works of art to the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in 2020. The John Waters Bequest contains works by 125 artists – including 89 pieces created by Waters himself.
The BMA’s exhibition ‘Coming Attractions: The John Waters Collection’ (on view through April 16, 2023) features around 80 works from Waters’s collection. The show was guest-curated by the artists Catherine Opie and Jack Pierson – friends of Waters, and major contributors to Queer culture in their own right. Opie and Pierson began working on the show in 2021, selecting from pieces that Waters displays in his residences in Baltimore, New York, and San Francisco.
‘I couldn’t have broken the rules if I didn’t know them,’ says Waters of his choices as a collector. In his homes, he pairs boundary-busting art with formal furniture – antiques he inherited from his family. One strain of his collection includes trompe l’œil sculpture designed to fool – or infuriate – viewers. These include a faux light socket by Douglas Padgett (Untitled, 2011), a combination of a smoke detector and air freshener by Paul Gabrielli (Untitled, 2011) that Waters says ‘look like they had sex’, and a toilet-tissue roll with blue chiffon ‘paper’ by George Stoll (Toilet Paper, 1997) – a brother of actor Mink Stole.
Waters chose to install the latter work in his New York living area. ‘I had to get permission from the super in my New York apartment to drill a hole in the wall,’ Waters recalls. ‘He probably thought: “What is this scat queen doing, putting toilet paper in the living room?”’ Another prized piece is a pile of fake tools and debris, made in 1991 by the Swiss duo Peter Fischli & David Weiss. ‘They’re so droll and so deadpan,’ Waters says, naming them, and Cy Twombly, among his favorite artists. ‘When I leave, I have to put [that sculpture] away, or else the cleaning people will throw it out.’
The BMA show pays homage to one of Waters’s monikers, the Pope of Trash, with Peter Hujar’s photograph of an overflowing garbage bin in New York (Trash, New York, July 2, 1985, 1985). ‘I hung it in my very formal living room [in Baltimore] because that’s what my empire is built on: trash,’ says Waters. He first met Hujar through the journalists Lisa Robinson and Fran Lebowitz. ‘We hired him to do the reshoot of the dead rat picture for Desperate Living,’ his film that involves a mariticide, lesbian prison sex, and the antics of an evil queen presiding over the shantytown Mortville. ‘I love all his pictures of animals because they look like porno.’ A 2012 installation by the Austrian collective Gelitin nods to his delight in destruction. Resembling a Frankensteinian arrangement of stuffed toys, ‘It has a lever on it and, if you step on it, it throws the artwork onto the floor,’ explains Waters.
His penchant for shocking art ranges from the scatological and the sexual to tabloid fodder to squiggles. The late artist Mike Kelley, another friend of Waters, is represented by works including Outtake from Nostalgic Depiction of the Innocence of Childhood (1990). The photo features nude actors, stuffed bunnies, and strategically smeared chocolate syrup. Waters recalls one horrified response to Eric Luken’s quadriptych 4 JonBenét Ramseys (2000) – Warhol-esque silkscreen paintings featuring a child beauty queen murdered in 1996. ‘I had them hanging in my walk-in closet in New York and, when The New York Times did this big photo shoot [at my apartment], they were outraged and didn’t want to run it. They thought that was in poor taste.’
Twombly has a place of distinct honor for Waters. ‘He holds the title of pissing off the most people who have contempt against contemporary art. They get infuriated to see scribbles,’ he says. When Waters met Twombly in the 1990s, he framed the piece of paper on which Twombly wrote his address as an artwork. It appears in the show. So does a drawing called C-R-A-Z-Y (1991) that Waters’s father made to mock Twombly’s signature scrawl. ‘It looks very much like a Twombly piece. He didn’t realize that he understood [the work],’ says Waters.
The BMA show also evinces Waters’s longtime support of fellow Baltimore legends. A mid-century Baltimore art star – Betsy the Chimpanzee – is represented by a watercolor finger painting, A Betsy Painting (c. 1955). ‘It is believed to be the first piece by an animal to enter the Baltimore Museum’s collection,’ says associate curator of contemporary art Leila Grothe.
Once owned by the Baltimore Zoo, Betsy was perhaps the most successful monkey artist of the 1950s. ‘I wrote a whole chapter in my book Mr. Know-it-All [2019] about collecting monkey art,’ explains Waters. ‘They were set up to make fun of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism, but they became these huge celebrities.’ He advises burgeoning collectors to cash in on the primate art trend. ‘To me, it is the one price-ready, entry-level scale market that has not been discovered. And we started it in Baltimore.’
Several works point to aspects of his career as a fine artist. Colin (de Land), a 2018 lithograph by Elizabeth Peyton, features the beloved, roguish New York gallerist, who died in 2003. ‘Any success I have in the art world is due to him,’ extols Waters. De Land mounted Waters’s first-ever commercial gallery show at American Fine Arts Co. in 1995. ‘The most hated thing in the artworld is any kind of celebrity that does art. He was the only one who could get me past that.’ Waters also treasures Larry Clark’s picture of teenage Satanists, shot directly from four TV screens (Untitled, 1990).
He, too, snaps photographs directly off television screens. ‘I try to be a failed public-relations person from the movie industry when I’m making photography,’ he explains. ‘I save souvenirs of the way I want to see something. I jump into a movie and take something out and put it in a completely different context, and then redirect it so it becomes, hopefully, my movie.’
Waters keeps up with art in galleries and fairs, but the one category he avoids is ‘art for the people.’ ‘I like the elitism of the art world,’ he says. ‘It’s a magic trick. How did Mike Kelley turn those dirty stuffed animals from the thrift shop that cost a nickel into something that costs two million dollars? That’s magic, and that’s what art is. It gets you to see something in a different way that you will never see in the old way again.’
John Waters is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York) and Sprüth Magers (Berlin, London, Los Angeles, and New York).
Wendy Vogel is a writer and independent curator based in New York. She contributes regularly to Artforum and Art in America, among other publications. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.
Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. John Waters at the Baltimore Museum of Art, January 2023. 2. Waters at the Baltimore Museum of Art's John Waters Restrooms, named in his honor on the occasion of his bequest to the museum. 3. Waters next to Cindy Sherman's Untitled (Unwed Mother), 2002, printed 2004.
All images by Matt Grubb for Art Basel.