Ned Sloane
1978
Telephone Pole Piece, Los Angeles: Photograph of Kim Jones
Source requested
© Ned Sloane, Courtesy Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles
 
Photo Synthesis
Colin Westerbeck
 
"Kim Jones: A Retrospective" will be on view at the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, March 24-May 19.
 
Though crippled by a disease similar to polio as a boy, Kim Jones joined the Marines at age 22 and was sent to Vietnam. It was a miraculous recovery, the sort from which superheroes are made, except that Jones later turned himself into an anti-superhero he called Mudman.
 
He was a pioneer of performance art, of which the only surviving records are often documentary photographs. Mudman was Jones' reincarnation as a primordial or posthistorical being. He was a creature from the swamp who arrived slathered in mud, carrying on his back a fretwork of sticks held together with wire and foam rubber. Mudman was a "madman" who first attracted wider attention while walking the length of Wilshire Boulevard on a day in 1975.
 
When a reporter asked about the crazy get-up, he said, "I've been thinking about becoming a tree." This was the least sinister association he evoked. He was a fallen angel with exoskeleton wings, a model of the atom, a little boy held up by leg braces that were the burden he bore every day. In this photograph, he is the power grid gone awry, a reminder of how primitive our high-tech civilization is.
 
[Originally published in West Magazine : March 18, 2007, p.13]
 
LL/18160