Ulysses Jenkins sadly passed away at the age of 79 this past February. Though relatively obscure, he was, for decades, one of America’s most poignant avant-garde artists. Primarily working in video and performance art, Jenkins’ took on the role of a griot (a storytelling and communal history tradition originating in West Africa). The griot became a lens with which he could critically examine the racism embedded in American mass media culture and create a more nuanced vision of black identity. His mission as an artist was best stated in an interview with Bomb Magazine: “What I was trying to do in my work was to say that we all have to live together, and we need to stop placing each other in circumstances that don’t make sense to anybody except the people who are doing the discrimination.”1 Jenkins’s life was devoted to building community and solidarity, frequently collaborating with artists like David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Betye Saar, and more. In addition to being a member in a multitude of collectives like Video Venice News, Othervisions Studio, and Studio Z, alongside a long tenure teaching at the University of California, Irvine.

        Inspired by Melvin Van Peebles’s radical independent film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, as well as the work of Nam Jun Paik, Jenkins purchased a cheap consumer camcorder and began filming his performances. Deeply critical of how television had begun to influence the cultural perceptions of minorities through the racist stereotypes being broadcast, his video works functioned as a counter narrative to these images.

        Works from this period, like Mass of Images, were satirical critiques of racist pop culture references—uch as Bert Williams dressed in blackface or Allen Hoskins from The Little Rascals—that had become engrained in the American psyche. Garbed in an eccentric outfit consisting of aviator glasses, a plastic mask, an American flag scarf, a blazer, and an Adidas shirt, and wielding a sledgehammer and a smirk, he repeats a haunting mantra condemning mass media representation: “you’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know, from years and years of TV shows.”2 Even as Jenkins’s demeanor becomes more frantic, he never actually destroys the televisions and liberates himself from these images. Elaborating upon the works of Frantz Fanon, Fred Moten presents an ontological issue inherent to black identity “a function of a making that is not its own, an intentionality that could never have been its own.” 3 Scholar Aria Dean raises the interesting concern that Jenkins ends the video where he began—he has the power to destroy the television images. Jenkins cannot bring himself to destroy the media representations of blackness because they are a central part of his identity, in spite of how detrimental and imposed this part of his identity is.4

        Jenkins would comically expand upon the paradox raised by Dean in another early work, Two-Zone Transfer. The piece features two performers wearing Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford masks painted in blackface dancing alongside Jenkins, reminiscent of minstrel shows. There is a cut to the two parodic presidents sitting on either side of Jenkins while a Baptist minister gives a sermon about representation and verbal expression until suddenly exploding into a James Brown imitation, dancing and singing fervently. The video ends with a cut to Jenkins waking up in his bed declaring “after a dream like that I have direction, I know what I’m up against.” 5 Jenkins realizes that the images projected onto him by mass media only partially define him as a person, but they must be recognized in order to be processed and overcome.

         Across the decades, Jenkins experimented with all kinds of emerging digital and video technology. 1983’s Z-Grass utilized early computer-generated animation, filtering digitally rendered drawings through a video processor to create a disorienting and garish abstraction. Similarly, Notions of Freedom superimposed motion capture animated figures dancing over archival footage as a way of discussing the historic development of jazz music. The work is a dense palimpsest of cultural references and personal expression, combining the past with the present to sketch an outline of future possibilities. In my opinion, Jenkins asserts that technology is a tool which can sketch the nuance of his identity; it can incorporate the many facets of his history and personality into layered composite images throbbing with meaning.

        The Video Griot trilogy presented an expansive vision of the potential of video to rewrite a racist history of exploitation into a history of resistance, survival, and global interconnection. Self Divination described the geographic and cultural origins of the African Diaspora. Mutual Native Duplex outlined the ongoing mutual aid alliances discovered between the Indigenous peoples of America and the African Diaspora brought to the country under the cruel auspices of the North American slave trade. Jenkins traced the cultural ruptures and transformations brought on by colonialism.

        The final part of the trilogy, The Nomadics, frames the many communities of color living across the world as part of an extended multicultural whole. The trilogy of works encapsulates Moten’s conception of the ontological experience of blackness as an identity which resists assimilation through its multifacetedness. Across his diverse body of work, Jenkins prophetically drew out the contradictions of mass media culture, issues that have only grown more pressing over the past several decades. His attempts to create a more inclusive and expansive idea of identity amidst our media dominant culture points towards a path of using technology to better our society.

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.

Notes

1. Jareh Das, “Ulysses Jenkins,” Bomb Magazine, Oct. 30, 2023. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2023/10/30/ulysses-jenkins-jareh-das/

2. Ulysses Jenkins, Mass of Images. 1978, Video transferred to DVD, black and white, sound. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/art/mass-of-images

3. Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism, vol. 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218.

4. Aria Dean, “Written and Bitten: Ulysses Jenkins and the Non-Ontology of Blackness,” X-tra, vol. 19, no. 2 (2016). https://www.x-traonline.org/issue/winter-2016

5. Ulysses Jenkins, Two-Zone Transfer. 1978, Video transferred to DVD, black and white, sound. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/art/two-zone-transfer