Nick Zedd taught me that repulsion can be a form of fidelity—to feeling, to failure, to the parts of the self culture prefers blurred. Born James Harding in Takoma Park, Maryland in 1958, Zedd landed in the Lower East Side at the tail end of its most combustible era. There, he summoned what would become the Cinema of Transgression—not just a genre but a permission structure, a dare, a method for leaking rage and ecstasy through the eye of a Super 8 camera. His films—They Eat Scum, War Is Menstrual Envy, Geek Maggot Bingo—didn’t entertain so much as infect. Shot with no money and maximum intent, they collapsed the distinction between satire and wound. He dignified the grotesque. His collaborators weren’t cast, they were kin. Watching his work, I felt like someone was finally speaking in the language of my own nervous system: glitchy, leaky, funny, pained. I return to Zedd when I need to remember that ugliness can be devotional, that failure is fertile. His Underground Film Bulletin was scripture for a different kind of belief system—one that rejected polish, narrative, the art market, even coherence. There’s love under all that slime, love for what doesn’t fit. That’s what moves me. I make work now—images, writing, gestures—that fumble toward that lineage. I don’t want to clean things up. I want to dignify the mess. Zedd never transcended it; he dug in, and that’s what made his films holy. He died in Mexico City in 2022, still making, still refusing. For me, he remains a patron saint of ecstatic failure—of disgust as intimacy, and of art as a place where shame becomes ceremony. Where the wound stares back and laughs.
-Jane Balfus