Return to Sender
John Waters American
Not on view
The director of such classics of camp cinema as Pink Flamingoes (1972) and Polyester (1981), John Waters is also an accomplished artist whose photographs and drawings evince the same iconoclastic wit as his films. At first glance an elegantly arranged abstract collage of pastel-colored papers, Return to Sender shows an assortment of envelopes sent by the artist to a perverse pantheon of has-been performers (Pia Zadora, Joey Heatherton), cult leaders (Reverend Jim Jones, Charles Manson), and once-notorious, now-forgotten headline makers (Madelyn Murray O'Hare, Virginia McMartin). Each envelope is covered with the cryptic memento mori of anonymous postal workers, from "DECEASED DIE" to "EXPIRED. LOCATION NOT KNOWN." Using the same deceptively sunny palette as his darkly humorous films, Waters makes a trenchant comment about America's fatal attraction to celebrity by retracing the now-familiar route from anonymity to fame (or infamy) to oblivion, using the U.S. mail as
his collaborator.
