IF VIDEO HAS A GODFATHER ...
IT’S ULYSSES JENKINS. AN EARLY ADOPTER, HE IMAGINATIVELY PUSHED THE FORM, AS REPLAYED AT A HAMMER EXHIBITION.
IN 19 81, artist Ulysses Jenkins was teaching at UC San Diego when the media faculty was asked to stage a demonstration for open house. The initial idea was to set up a VCR and play a video. Jenkins had other ideas: “I said, we’re supposed to be the media department, let’s do something more advanced.” ¶ So he established a live video link between two campus locations — a student lounge and the media studies complex — and created a two-way broadcast between each site. The feed included student performances as well as a live lecture by media theorist Gene Youngblood (an early video art proponent), all against a backdrop of found footage and lo-fi ’80s graphics.¶ Without his own personal satellite, this was no easy task. “Everyone who has
Zoom can do this today,” says Jenkins. “But this is 1981.”
To achieve a live link, he borrowed a microwave unit from a local cable company. To get the feed from the student lounge on one end of campus to the communications complex on the other, Jenkins had to place metallic blankets on top of two buildings so that he could bounce the signals back and forth. More than two decades before Skype helped make two-way video calls part of everyday life, Jenkins had improvised his own teleconferencing system to make art.
The work, “Televiews and Cable Radio,” was prescient.
Youngblood’s talk, “The Electronics Revolution and the Arts,” examined the ways greater public access to broadcast platforms might revolutionize communication — a topic still resonant in the age of social media. Moreover, Jenkins’ twoway video feed was predictive of the ways we now employ FaceTime and Zoom. But what makes “Televiews” enjoyable is that it is absorbingly weird.
Youngblood’s silhouette materializes over random images, including Latin American market scenes, a baby absorbing light beams into its open palm and what appears to be a tragic educational video about a pill-popping mom. At times, Youngblood’s words sync uncannily to the images; at others, you’re left scratching your head. Are you looking at scenes from a stage play? Or a Central American
uprising? It’s hypnotizing.
“Televiews and Cable Radio” is now at the Hammer Museum retrospective “Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation.” The show was organized by Hammer associate curator Erin Christovale and curator Meg Onli, formerly of the ICA Philadelphia, where it went on view last year.
Jenkins was not only an early adopter of video,but a nexus between various ecologies of artists in L.A. and beyond. He has teamed with conceptualist David Hammons, sculptor and performance artist Maren Hassinger, painter Kerry James Marshall, various members of the art collective Asco, as well as Gary Lloyd, a figure whose preoccupations have included technology and surveillance. Yet Jenkins’ work, as a body, has been largely unexamined. And it is an extensive body of work. (A dozen of his videos are streaming on the Criterion Channel for the duration of the show.) These take the form of straightforward documentaries, as well as hybrid performance-video works that push the boundaries of technology as they deconstruct images and narratives, particularly, those that pertain to race.
“Mass of Images,” a 1978 short, shows the artist next to a stack of TVs reciting a bitter refrain: “You’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know / from years and years of TV shows / The hurting thing, the hidden pain / was written and bitten into your veins.” This is cut with degrading images of Black people from minstrelsy and movies such as D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”
“Those early images of Blacks in film, a lot of them were buffoonery,” says Jenkins in his Inglewood studio. “It was servitude. If they weren’t a butler, they were a maid . ... It’s heartbreaking. You finally get Black people in Congress and he puts them with their feet on top of their desks eating chicken. That movie is the encyclopedia of stereotypes on Black people.”
“Mass of Images” ends with the artist wielding a sledgehammer as if he might smash the TVs, but he sets it down again, and states: “Oh, I’d love to do this, but they won’t let me.”
There is no resolution or release — perhaps in acknowledgment that getting rid of the ideologies will take more than simply busting up a few TVs.
In “Two-Zone Transfer” (1979), a man, played by Jenkins, reckons, in hallucinatory ways, with the legacies of minstrelsy.
This was followed in 1981 by “Inconsequential Doggereal,” which shows footage of Jenkins grimacing as he sits naked in a room, spliced with video of newscasts, lawnmowers and a ridiculous advertisement for Valvoline that shows a chimp changing the oil on a car. At moments, it’s as if Jenkins is being force-fed; at others, he stands up and wags his naked butt at the camera. As Onli writes in the exhibition catalog, “It’s the kind of taunting scene one encounters at the end of a Looney Tunes sketch when the Road Runner has outwitted Wile E. Coyote, yet again.”
It is poignant and absurd. And like so much of Jenkins’ work, it looks like what it feels like to be Black or a person of color in the U.S., and to see yourself reflected in film and media as if through the distortions of a fun-house mirror.
Jenkins, 75, retains a performer’s magnetism, not to mention a sharp sense of style: On the morning we meet, he is decked out in a black shirt and hat bearing an African-style print. His sun-dappled studio in Inglewood contains a lifetime’s worth of ephemera: art catalogs, a flyer advertising “Two Zone Transfer” and a sculpture of a black panther seated between two potted palms.
On one wall are abstract digital drawings Jenkins recently completed; over the TV is a bizarre painting that chronicles an LSD experience. “On the left side is the people I see,” Jenkins tells me. “Then you have those stalagmites, those are the problems I was having.”
Throughout his career, Jenkins has taught: at UCSD, at Otis and, for the last 28 years, in the art department at UC Irvine. Christovale says, “I like to call him the godfather of so many artists that Meg and I admire, like Martine Syms and Aria Dean and Cauleen Smith,” referring to creators who often contend with the nature of images in their work.
The route that led Jenkins to video was circuitous. Born and raised in L.A., he is the son of a barber and a garment worker. He moved from South L.A. to the Westside as a youth and came to art at Hamilton High.
For his undergraduate studies, he headed to Southern University in 1964 in his mother’s home state of Louisiana, a historically Black institution that many of his relatives had attended. Following graduation, Jenkins lived peripatetically. A stint in L.A. included a short-lived marriage to a classmate from Southern University, during which he worked as a probation officer in the juvenile system. This was followed by a couple of years in Hawaii, where he worked at a hotel and lived that free spirit existence he had always desired: inhabiting a treehouse, cooking over volcanic lava and harvesting mangoes from a nearby grove. The experience of Hawaii — with its blend of Native, Filipino, mainland and other cultures — gave him a vision of multiculturalism that he found compelling, a view rooted more in a shared sense of solidarity than in gauzy notions about a melting pot.
In those early years, inspired by the mural movement in East L.A. and work that appeared on the Westside by the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad, he pursued mural commissions. In 1976, he painted a piece for the Department of Motor Vehicles titled “Transportation Brought Art to the People” that is still viewable downtown on Hope Street. He was also a collaborator on “The Great Wall of Los Angeles,” the epic series of historical murals in the San Fernando Valley organized by Judy Baca.
It was a fellow painter, Michael Zingale, who led him to video, suggesting they sign up for a workshop. Jenkins had been intrigued by the independent film of the era, such as “Easy Rider” and “Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song.” “And I was very curious about the notions of production,” he says. “This portable medium that you could do without having to raise up all the money you used to have to for movies.”
Soon enough, he had laid his hands on a Sony Portapak, the portable video camera that had been released in the 1960s and had already found a following among artists. Jenkins says it was revolutionary: “There had never been a piece of technology where you could record, erase and play back.”
After that, there was no looking back. By 1978, he’d enrolled in the intermedia department at Otis, where he pursued his master’s in fine art. There, he came into contact with artists such as Chris Burden, Nam June Paik and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, a sibling duo who were also intrigued by mass media. “The intermedia department,” says Christovale, “was one of the first departments in these art schools thinking about media and video in experimental ways.”
For Jenkins, the experience was formative.
His earliest videos, made before graduate school, take the form of guerrilla documentary. “Remnants of the Watts Festival,” which he began filming in 1972, chronicled the history of the Watts Festival and served as a rejoinder to mainstream media narratives about Watts.
“The media in general was putting out this message to other communities: Don’t go to the Watts Festival, it’s dangerous, they are going to kill you,” he recalls. “I’d been to the Watts Festival. I thought, this is ridiculous.” What he captured is a frank look at the struggles of a community event that had been born of organizing in the wake of the 1965 uprising but later found itself laboring under the strictures of corporate sponsorship.
In the subsequent “District F,” Jenkins tracks a redistricting move that allowed students from South L.A. to attend Santa Monica Community College, an insightful examination of the ways in which boundaries in our educational system are established and maintained. (It should be required viewing among students of pedagogy.)
“Early video art was about the problems with the media that we are still having today: the notions of truth,” says Jenkins. “To that extent, early video art was a construct that was anti-media ... a critical analysis of the media that we were viewing every night.”
Onli says that, in this way, Jenkins was also prescient. “Today we see the dash-cam footage and how that contradicts what is reported,” she says. Jenkins created his own footage, which told a different story from what played on TV.
And even as his work evolved and grew more artful, more performative, inspired by ritual and ever more surreal — it has continued to document stories that don’t always get told.
Jenkins likens what he does to the storytelling by West African musician/oral historians known as griots. “The histories and traditions come from the griots,” he says. “They reassert the history and the culture.”
They also connect the past to the future, linking old generations to the new ones. “What I’m trying to say,” he adds, “is that we’re going to have African Americans in the future.”