Art
We should consider ourselves quite fortunate that Kim Jones, an artist internationally
recognized for his performance art, installations, sculpture, and drawings, is
having his first full retrospective practically right in our own backyard.
The California-born Jones came of age as a young man, as an
artist, during the crucial coalescence of the Southern
California performance and conceptual art movements of the 1970s.
Not only had artists already been playing with alternative, non-traditional
media, such as felt, nylon, rope, and foam rubber (Barry Le Va, Richard Tuttle,
Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman), but also assemblage art had likewise come into its
own. And in California,
the “last stand” for the American Dream in the post-World War II economic boom,
assemblage art was created by individuals who didn’t share, or felt alienated
from, the middle-class values of their parents. However, as pointed out by
Sandra Starr, director of the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica,
“Assemblage was the only art form that consistently reminds us of the processes
that brought it into being, as the use of real objects and materials of daily
life evokes the activities we … [pursue] in order to live.”
Enter the work of Jones, who brings to the bright, white
modernist space of a university art gallery a selection of works chronicling
his use and reuse of objects and motifs — an ongoing act that ultimately
produces a series of interconnections between all his various artistic
emanations. For starters, when you first enter the gallery, you encounter a
large, dirty but clearly tangible vestige of an early body-based performance, a
sculptural “contraption,” if you will, that enabled Jones to become his alter
ego, Mudman.
Mudman evolved from Jones’ earlier stick sculptures that were
tightly wrapped with nylon, rope, electrical tape, and foam rubber, materials
that would become a kind of “signature” for Jones. Often nearly nude and
covered in mud, Jones attached to his back this latticed appendage of sticks,
added a headdress and nylon (as in pantyhose) mask, and then went out walking
the streets of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Venice, California. (When he moved to New York City in 1982, he continued to appear as
Mudman, showing up not just in the streets but also in galleries, museums, and
subways.) Jones became a walking sculpture.
Anongoing timeline features photo
documentation showing Jones in situ,
as it were. Among the photographs are images of Jones while in Vietnam — a
young Marine, sometimes shirtless, often very muddy. The allusions to
camouflaged soldiers, peasants on pilgrimage, or even the homeless are not
accidental.
Over the past 30 or so years as an artist, Jones has developed a
personal language comprised of biomorphic forms and hybrid creatures. Much of
this language as imagery has come about through his reuse of actual materials
and motifs. For example, “Untitled #9” (2002) is a color photograph taken of
Jones as Mudman sitting, waiting on a New York City subway platform to which
the artist has added ink and acrylic line drawings as if they were emanating
from the figure itself. The boundaries between media, between temporal
divisions, have blurred, so much so that it is typical for Jones to be
constantly reworking the surface, to change the objects and drawings in his
possession. Indeed, his tendency to “revisit” his own works of art is not only
evident in their titles, where dates can range from the 1970s to the present,
but is also quite literal: after New York art gallery Exit Art bought one of
Jones’ works, five years later the artist asked if he could come back and draw
on it. (The gallery ownership allowed it.) It should thus come as no surprise
that Jones sees his work as a “form of process art because it’s always
changing.”
The notion of ceaseless transformation is perhaps best — and
most obsessively — illustrated in the “War Drawings.” Here is a 35-foot high,
floor-to-ceiling pencil drawing of a battlefield map covering three walls and
depicting x-men and dot-men forever battling against one another while
maneuvering men and equipment. Included in the massive drawing is a fortress, a
church, streets and walls…it’s like mapping an archaeological site, complete
with pentimenti or erased lines, like
a ghost image of an attack. Even the artist admitted that the more he worked on
it, the more complex it got. “I’m like Zeus, a minor Zeus…and these are my
rules,” he says.
Jones’ work is remarkably consistent. And it’s not just because
we recognize subjects and/or materials, but also the thematic layers, the
motifs, whether the violence of war, the pain of confinement, or trauma and
ritual remembrance — all very powerful and timely.
Kim Jones: A Retrospective, through December 17 | UB Art
Gallery at the University of Buffalo, Center for the Arts, Buffalo | Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.-5 p.m.,
Thursday until 7 p.m. | (716) 645-6912, www.artgallery.buffalo.edu.
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2006.
