FOUND IN TRANSLATION
A Delightful Pamphlet
“Got Wallace’s Art Forum (tore out everything else) and made a delightful Berman pamphlet,” reported Jess in January 1966.[footnote=1] He had just reduced that month’s Artforum magazine to a four-page booklet comprised only of the pages featuring Wallace Berman’s mystical Verifax collages. It is a small gesture, but one that speaks volumes about the San Francisco artist Jess and his work. On its face, it was a tribute to the success of a friend and fellow Californian with whose work Jess’s was identified.[footnote=2] That very month, an exhibition would open in London, where Berman and Jess, together with Bruce Conner and Lyn Foulkes, were presented as avatars of a new, American West Coast approach to collage.[footnote=3] Funky with the residue of not-so-distant pasts (the Victorian era, the Depression) and uncanny visions of the present (the psychedelic and occult), the California Assemblagists used the stuff of scrap yards and scrapbooks to make art that often looked ready to return to being found.[footnote=4] Tearing up magazines was basic practice, and collage a language in which they were all conversant. On the other hand, Jess’s gesture was also a tacit act of reproach. Not against Berman, but against the contemporary art world represented by Artforum’s other sixty-one pages of features, criticism, and advertisements that Jess had discarded. Apparently he didn’t consider the rest of the magazine worth cutting up for collage material. Even given Artforum’s West Coast origins (founded in San Francisco, it moved from Los Angeles to New York in 1967), the content simply wasn’t part of Jess’s picture.
That said, Jess contributed significantly and imaginatively to the history of contemporary art. Born in 1923 in Long Beach, California, he turned to art and changed his name from Burgess Collins in the late 1940s. In the 1950s, using just a flick of the knife (and some glue), Jess subverted Dick Tracy comic strips into the series of Tricky Cad collages that became early icons of Pop art. During the 1960s, he transformed all manner of found black-and-white images into strangely gorgeous appropriation art in his series of paintings called Translations. Of the juxtaposition between these works’ illustrative imagery and lumpy molten surfaces, the poet John Ashbery wrote, “The neat, workmanlike transpositions ignore the anomalies of surface, as though a magic lantern slide were projected on a lunar landscape.”[footnote=5] During the 1970s, Jess achieved an ambitious new scale for collage, creating compositions—some measuring over six feet wide—that are as complex and clotted as they are whirling and baroque. Curator Michael Auping, the leading scholar on Jess’s art, sees in these grand-scale collages an “activated field of interlocked, free-associated images that vaguely resemble the painterly explosions and gestural coupling of action painting.”[footnote=6] They occupied Jess, who worked at an increasingly incremental pace, throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s.
Jess’s art is book-ended by abstraction. As a student at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), he studied with some of California’s leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, most significantly Clyfford Still. His move from painterly abstraction to collage was preceded by the emergence of pictorial and symbolic elements in his paintings.[footnote=7] Like Joseph Cornell, Jess worked from a studio archive, which he developed over years of collecting and clipping source material and filed according to subject.[footnote=8] He spoke of pulling images from the past into the present and working through a state of flux until the “collage takes over, it becomes the maker and I become the instrument.”[footnote=9] In the process, he attached hundreds of fragments to the support with pins, then stirred the composition like magma or energy, until it was resolved and ready to glue into place. He called the results “Paste-Ups,” a term he coined to set his art apart from Dada and Surrealist collage, which he felt an admiration for, but little affinity with.[footnote=10] Likewise, he called his assemblage objects ‘Assemblies.” Or, as if to kill any possible link with precedent or the California Assemblage scene, “Necro-facts.” The latter term also implied the redemptive angle of working with found images and forgotten materials, a small power that seems to have given Jess a great sense of purpose and pleasure. For one of his later series, Salvages, Jess recycled abandoned abstract paintings (his own old canvases and those found in his habitual trawling of junk stores) by inserting pictorial passages into the existing fields of brushwork. In “A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me”: Salvages II, 1963-1972, isolated figures dot an abstracted landscape to create a sense of uncanny incident. While previously Jess had abandoned abstract imagery for pictorial representation, the Salvages give equal footing to the non sequitur narratives of dream (or myth) that appear to be taking shape and to the hazy matrixes that envelop them. Not only had his art come full circle; Jess had, in a way that seems truly American in its resourcefulness, invented an ingenious means of recuperating for a postmodern age the glorious pasts of both abstraction and easel painting, using this clever gizmo called collage.
Despite these achievements, Jess’s reputation remains marginal. When he died in January 2004 at the age of eighty, his New York Times obituary called him “an artist whose idiosyncratic paintings and collages made him a cult figure in American art.”[footnote=11] Indeed, Jess’s following was limited, if devoted. So the question is: How might we access his work—which is so openly inviting—more fully? Consider once more Jess’s extractive gesture, this time not as a tribute to Berman but (to borrow Jess’s terminology) as an act of translation. Jess turned an art text into a literary one—for what is a pamphlet but a little book? Pay attention to the object at hand. A slim thing, it resembles a chapbook, the kind of volume once hawked by chapmen that contained such miscellany as a romance, a ballad, or the life story of a notorious criminal, an artist of the underground. It is by way of this rendition of Jess’s act that the “delightful Berman pamphlet” guides us in how Jess’s work might be most delightfully read: by focusing on its bookish aspects.
This interpretive framework bumps directly into a certain modernist art-historical prejudice against the literary to find meaning in the marginal. It is an illuminative one for considering the paste-ups that Jess created specifically for publication or reproduction, which are central to this survey. Turning printed matter into material to be printed, Jess made many of his works in collaboration with poets, most significantly his partner, Robert Duncan, recipient of the tell-tale January 1966 letter. He also made extraordinary collage announcements and brochures for his own exhibitions, suggesting that he valued the chance to increase his art’s “readership” by disseminating his work in print. But it is not only the literary work that this bookish framework illuminates, it is Jess’s work overall. When art as idiosyncratic as Jess’s is looked at with an eye for books and poetry, words and literature, stories and translations, it comes into plain view.…
The author would like to thank Chris Taylor for his accompaniment on so many of the journeys this Jess essay represents, and for his insights along the way.
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