In Jenkins’ hands, they are dissected and revealed as wicked absurdities. Video works like “Mass of Images” (1978) and “Inconsequential Doggereal” (1981) use the artist’s individual Black body as a conduit through which the social and cultural stereotypes relied upon by mass media flow. Jenkins - an early adopter of video as a tool for artists, back when the technology was brand new around five decades ago - pressed his homemade electronic media against oppressive corporate standards set by commercial television. ‘Without Your Interpretation’ is the first major retrospective of the L.A.-born Jenkins, whose prescient videos touch on race and other the issues of our age. It feels especially flat in the vicinity of the retrospective of artist Ulysses Jenkins, also currently on view at the Hammer, which sets off sparks.Įntertainment & Arts Art godfather Ulysses Jenkins finally gets his close-up with a Hammer show of his video art The synthetic heave is a wan sight gag, a self-reflexive expression of one’s own artificiality. The exhibition’s pneumatic tube busting through digital walls is its own such raucous canal, although here it backs up and barfs with a decidedly cynical edge. artist Mike Kelley began developing a robust, often funny body of work based on metaphors of a human body’s alimentary canal - the path from the esophagus through the intestines where food goes in one end, nutrients get extracted and waste comes out the other end. Like the digital decals of a smashed wall, inner fakery is fundamental.Īnd I suppose regurgitation could be a credible theme, although it feels rather old-fashioned now. The wall label reveals that what’s periodically whooshing over and around your head, unseen in capsules hurtling along inside this pneumatic tube, is artificial vomit. You could send a memo, a medical directive or an invoice from one floor to another in no time flat. A sort of industrial carrier pigeon, popular long before email and Amazon, pneumatic tubes used to be common in office buildings, hospitals, department stores and such. A small capsule gets pushed along inside the cylinder. The plastic conduit is a pneumatic tube, a device for transporting an object from here to there using compressed air. What was the passing blur? To find out, locating the wall label was necessary. Each architectural encounter between tube and wall was framed by a large decal - a wall-papered digital image of a white gallery torn open, its constructed innards of bricks and mortar exposed, as if the wall had been smashed with a sledgehammer. Midway through my recent visit to see “Lifes,” an eccentric exhibition in one large gallery at the UCLA Hammer Museum, a clattering sound accompanied by a visual blur rocketed through the room.Ī long, fat, clear plastic tube, suspended on wires from the ceiling, emerged from a wall, dipped and disappeared into another wall, burst out of another wall, then disappeared back into a wall again.
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