The strange tensions brought to the foreground by Jess, the enigmatic collage artist and partner of the more widely known Beat poet Robert Duncan, are present in To and From the Printed Page (running through Sept. 24) from the moment you step from the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art's open glass stairway into the darkened main gallery.
The lights, as museum director of public information Katie Kazan explained, are set low because Jess' materials are among the most transient conceivable, though it soon becomes obvious his work is not. The pieces, which seem to swing with the artist's mood from such mediums as traditional oil on canvas (revealing his recurring obsession with pairing a modern emphasis on motion, technology and mass media with classical subjects), to oil on canvas on plywood (the medium of "Petals of Paint" and "Fig. 3 — Ida, Duncan, and I: Translation #18," whose psychedelic coloring subversively twists the ordinary poses of Jess and his closest companions), to his signature "translations," as he called them — the newspaper collage.
Perhaps it takes seeing the process firsthand, but the careful arrangement of pieces of meaning it takes to create a newspaper is a highly technical and subtle art. Jess, informed by but separated from the Beats, admired their love of disparate elements and assemblage, but his arrangement differs in that it comes mostly from others bits of art and text. In his recombination, Jess seeks not, like Ezra Pound and the modernists, to "make it new," but to create nonlinear connections between an often chaotic array of faces, stock photographs, war propaganda and, above all, headlines of all kinds.
Jess, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, was born Burgess Collins in California in 1923. He was educated in chemistry, saw the Beat movement take shape after he broke off contact with family, became an activist for gay rights and enrolled in the California School of Arts in 1949. He seems to latch onto this contradictory project of the newspaper: the meticulous piecing together of a disposable text.
Jess' most arresting work is undoubtedly his apocalyptic penny arcade series "Didactic Nickelodeon," the first of which can be viewed set to snippets of "Also Sprach Zarasthustra," and the second frame-by-frame in the gallery.
But nowhere else is his project of testing intrinsic meaning better exemplified than in "Goddess Because Is Is Falling Asleep" (1954). The seemingly arbitrary title of the work is, according to the exhibit placard, a play on the slogan "Moddess… because," a "long-running campaign for sanitary napkins that promised to gird a girl's loins no matter the occasion — or the time of month." The headlines here, unlike Jess's other works, are unusually abstract, calling the viewer to examine whether "IS IS," is, out of its context, a typo or profundity. But Jess warns against reducing his work, even if made of texts, to a narrative. As one headline, placed next to a photograph of malcontented pool loungers subverting their 1950s utopia, puts it, "You cannot say some things as well as you can show them."
On the other side of the wall, past the guestbook, which as always is an insightful and quintessentially postmodern companion piece to the exhibit, lies California Context, which pairs Jess's work with artists from the museum's permanent collection. What is startling about this side is not how Jess does or does not fit into his surroundings, but how timeless his fragile scrapings seem, set against the work of artists beholden to the multicultural, the abstract, the natural, and all such schools that stifle the artist in a way Jess was not.
