Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Kim Jones at Bridget Donahue

(link)

We, cargo cult, attempt to reassemble meaning in the wasteland, our culture. The artists become shamans, build totems, we look to them to create something that we could relate. Finding some lovely in the filth over here. Jones is proof that these inclinations are not recent trends, the muck has been around a long time, and the senselessness we attempt to coalesce otherwise in. Was going to say Jones is the missing link in lineage from Keinholz or Bruce Connor to the psychic mire of Rachel Harrison (the above was made somewhere between 1973-1999) - and then today's David Lieske and the Berlin ontologists - but you start to worry that artists are proleptic, that this is some time continuum goof, because while Jones is obviously working out some trauma of his time in Vietnam, unfortunately, trauma is intergenerational, actually encodes itself in DNA, at least in rodents, which Jones has a uncomfortable history with. So it tends to reappear. And you worry it will in the future. Heading towards mud.