ESSAYS ABOUT WILLIAM E. JONES’S BODY OF WORK
Nikki Columbus, “Past Imperfect: Home Works IV in Beirut,” Artforum, vol. XLVI, no. 10 (Summer 2008) pp. 179-180, 462, 464.
Given the preponderance of works dealing with regional history and politics, one segment of the forum—also organized by Akram Zaatari—stood out from the rest. At the end of the week, he presented three evenings of video and film screenings, titled “Let It Be,” which consisted almost entirely of work by artists from outside the Middle East; the third—and by far the strongest—section featured only videos by Los Angeles–based artist William E. Jones. Although this series of events was billed as looking at “sex practices,” the program turned out to focus nearly exclusively on those of gay men. Beirut may be one of the most tolerant cities in the Middle East, but the second night of screenings in particular would have raised eyebrows anywhere, except at a gay film festival. Yet in the panel discussion after the last night of the series, Zaatari provocatively claimed, “The purpose of this program was not to be provocative.” His further statement “I was trying to avoid metaphors” made a great deal of sense, however: In the Middle East, he explained, sex in films is only alluded to poetically—with a shot of, say, water going down a drain. Much of “Let It Be,” on the other hand, was an in-your-face documentation of homosexuality. If the program seemed far from the concerns of the rest of the work shown during the forum, in opening up an archive and making visible the invisible, it was perhaps not as distant as it seemed at first sight.
Bruce Hainley, “This Charming Man,” Artforum, vol. XLV, no. 5 (January 2007) pp. 67-68, 276.
William E. Jones’s métier is homosexuality; his vernaculars, gay pornography and experimental documentary film; his landscapes, Southern California (where he lives and works) and suburban Ohio (where he was raised); his mode, dandyism. In eleven remarkable films and videos and countless photographs produced over the last fifteen years, building upon the cinematic inventions of both Californian and foreign artists—from Morgan Fisher, Fred Halsted, Joe Gage, and Thom Andersen to Werner Schroeter, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Daniel Cadinot, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet—Jones has rethought hackneyed categories of, as well as boundaries between, art and pornography, fandom and critique, Hollywood and other kinds of filmmaking. Focusing his lens on the intersection of Labor and Eros, Jones offers a study of the economy and legislation of the aesthetic as it is discombobulated by the erotic. Unlike so many artists and others of the moment who deploy porn images for moribund notions of “titillation” or “shock,” using imagery to reify or reiterate rather than to question dominant sexual and relational practices, Jones thwarts such unthinking, often by a moving renewal of what escaped or was lost, deemed beneath consideration.
Austerely but sinuously structured—not unlike his voice, used to hypnotic effect in all his films with narration—Jones’s work borrows part of its compositional finesse, often slyly, from what some would be sad to call recherché sources, not all of them cinematic. He learned his methodology as much from A. J. A. Symons’s queer biographical pursuit, The Quest for Corvo (1934), as from experimental documentary film. Abjuring documentary’s ubiquitous talking-head interviews, Jones shoots landscapes and buildings more frequently than people; when people do appear it is generally via appropriated still or moving imagery. But whereas the usual technique of appropriation today makes use of sources that are almost immediately accessible and recognizable, Jones inverts (with all the sexual consequence of that term) this process, incorporating the unlikely and syncopating, recontextualizing, and slowing down to the point of estranging the popular; this strategy creates a space for thinking about identity as well as about community. He acknowledges pornography and experimental film’s differences (despite their simultaneity), but he relishes the potential of their becoming each other, pancinematically—pornography turns into a kind of experimental cinema and experimental cinema into pleasure, recalling a moment when terms like foreign film and artistic purposes meant nudity and sex (as Anonymous, a. k. a. Mike Kelley, so eloquently put it in the title of one of his best books, Why I Got into Art). While many contemporary artists channel the visual so that it mimics mainstream entertainment, Jones mines film from a time, pre-AIDS, when experimentation and liberation were mirrored by cultural production—a heyday of American cinephilia coterminous with sexual freedom.
AIDS shadows nearly all of Jones’s work, symbolically underlying his second film, Finished, 1997, which is almost entirely made up of appropriated images, mixed with his own radiant footage of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, and Montreal (resonant architecture, distant freeway views, ocean and cloud studies). The filmmaker narrates how he became “infatuated with someone I could never know”: Quebecois porn star Alan Lambert, who at age twenty-five—just after he came to glimmer in Jones’s consciousness via a phone-sex ad—killed himself in the middle of Montreal’s Square Saint-Louis, leaving behind appearances in twenty-some gay adult movies, a radical and obscure epistolary manifesto, and Jones fingering the puzzle pieces of his own desire. In the course of putting together the facts of Lambert’s porn star–cum–Marxist messiah existence, Jones discovers an unlikely film allegory in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), which he happens to catch on television after his final day of sleuthing in Lambert’s hometown winds up coldly inconclusive. Playing an off-camera Barbara Stanwyck to Lambert’s Gary Cooper, Jones strategically deploys Capra’s film to consider the joint and schism between person and persona; suicide as an inconclusive protest of social ills; and the possibility of political action in the face of corporate manipulation. Cooper’s beauty echoes Lambert’s, as Finished observes the toll of the virility of youth and its representations on a gay imaginary haunted by morbidity.
With Finished Jones bares a trenchant philosophical essay on beauty’s give-and-take with the economic and the legislative: Desire is embedded, coaxed, and performed at exactly the sites government would place its limits and injunctions. These loci become evident not only as the beauty of the pictures of Lambert’s body and of Los Angeles bewilder the narration’s stern inquiry into the commodification of the body in pornography but also in a climax early in the film, when Jones shows a photocopy of Lambert’s California identification card, revealing the porn star’s real name. This official ID, issued by the government, itself becomes a site of subversion against authority—Lambert’s name hints at the card’s true usage, as proof that he was over the age of eighteen and thus legally allowed to participate in porn films; the young man’s beauty is, quite literally, his very identity: Alain Lebeau.
This is the kind of strangely naked revelation of Jones’s Corvo-like quests. Although constructed almost entirely from parts of the porn movies in which Lambert performed, Finished, tellingly, does not feature any actual pornographic segments, instead seducing into use porn’s often superfluous interstitial narratives and setups, including resonant title frames, and relegating hard-core “action” to description in sonorous voice-over. Jones’s decision to absent the straightforward depiction of gay sex acts complicates what pornography is “for” or “about.” He reeroticizes sexual imagery, as omnipresent as it is corporatized, by analyzing a mortal narrative paradoxically hidden within a pornography that bares all.
Jones’s next full-length film, Is It Really So Strange?, 2004, also focuses on an object of infatuation: Morrissey, and the singer’s fans in Southern California. As Jones states in the narration, the idea for the work arose when he noticed an ad “for a club in Los Angeles called London Is Dead, which exclusively played Morrissey and Smiths music, and I thought to myself, I’ve got to see this.” To his surprise, the club’s “atmosphere was quite joyous and belied the popular perception of Morrissey as a poet of doom and gloom. Another surprise was that most of the crowd was Latino.” Jones began a black-and-white photographic project, taking pictures of the young, Latino fans in all their glory, the complexity of their punk-Mexicali style intensified by a seemingly incongruous British working-class flair (National Health–like spectacles, sturdy black Doc Martens). He had recently completed a series in vivid Kodachrome color titled The Golden State, 2001, a study of cities in Southern California with recent Latino majorities. Photographs from both series find acute purpose in the movie.
To gain access to fans and to try to understand more somatically the phenomenon of how one of Manchester’s favorite sons came to flourish with a fan group comprised not only of people not even born while the Smiths were still a band but also with Spanish surnames, Jones became a participant in the culture—contributing to Morrissey fan websites (and even winning an essay contest); attending Smiths and Morrissey conventions and other events; catching numerous concerts of a Los Angeles tribute band, Sweet and Tender Hooligans, notorious as much for an unerring sound as for their fans’ intensity, often duplicating the raucous camaraderie swooning around their British progenitors; and, crucially, sporting his own pompadour, one of the favorite coifs of SoCal fans. The do became his tonsorial open sesame. As Jones relates in voice-over: “It was great fun, though some of my friends referred to it as my midlife crisis expressed in a hairstyle.”
Jones deftly navigates the muter impasses of desire swirling around and within the Morrissey community, sexualities brushing up against sanctioned categories (gay, straight) and, at times, evading them, not the least because of Morrissey’s own savvy, charmeuse elusiveness and the complications of Latino machismo. By entering the lives of the fans, Jones reveals a tenderness subterranean in his earlier work. Here the meticulous acolyte of the European avant-garde lets drop a few crucial hairpins: that he was reared by wayward uncles (Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, George Kuchar) who continually used the pursuit of “making a movie” to get people to remove their clothes and let their inherent sexiness amaze; their experiments, simultaneous to that of the French New Wave, extended (returned?) art’s notion of the popular and “real” to include varietals of point-blank, wallflower, and even deliciously “sexploitative” conjugation in Flaming Creatures (1963), Couch (1964), My Hustler (1965), Bike Boy (1967), and Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966).
Engaging the vernacular of the behind-the-scenes music docudrama, Is It Really So Strange? is the first and only film in which Jones filmed and photographed living people, and it is the only work in which he himself appears. At least one critic has called Finished the antithesis of So Strange, and yet they operate prismatically to each other: A light beam of solitary, soliloquizing infatuation with someone Jones will never know splits into the rays of communal, multivocal fandom. Although Jones gets to talk to the man himself, when he “assists” artist Jeff Burton on a photo shoot of Morrissey for a Japanese music magazine, the meeting is shown only through a sequence of Burton’s still photos, with Jones narrating the tale.
Both Finished and So Strange consider the difficulty of documenting knowledge of anyone and the dependence on the inanimate and mute narratives of thingness—collections (albums, pictures, autographs), background mise-en-scène—as well as the anecdotal. Yet something eludes vision and documentation, which doesn’t mean the way its absence appears shouldn’t be looked at again and again. Jones traces this conundrum—how the seen suggests the unseeable, how pictures convey different meanings, contrary even to the narratives to which they are synched. Although Lambert’s facial expressions while being fucked galvanize a final sequence, neither he nor anyone else is actually seen fucking or sucking in Finished; neither Morrissey’s voice nor the Smiths’ music is ever actually heard in So Strange, until the last still photograph almost fades to black and “This Charming Man” jangles in. That photograph depicts a postperformance stage, mics, guitars, and Fender amp; it’s titled Aftermath, 2003, naming precisely what Jones pursues—bodies, their consequence, and the systems and ideologies in which they participate, consciously or not.
Never forgetting desire’s dependence on what is wanting, Jones, like some Kama Sutra master, keeps things in constant expectation, edging ever closer. It’s not that including the “money shot”—whether it be Lambert going at it or Morrissey’s voice—would overwhelm his examination; rather, by redistributing the currency of ideas, energy, and critique within his sources, Jones reveals a new center of attention: fandom, the totemic record sleeve or autograph, the tissue of looks cruised, things out of mainstream distribution.
As if to intensify or even thematize the experience of these discontinuities between picture and sound, montage and meaning, past and present, critique and love, one of his most recent works, v. o. (a title that refers both to voice-over and to version originale, the term for a film shown theatrically in its original language with subtitles), 2006, consists of splices of film set mostly to unrelated sound clips. Jones combines subtitled sound segments from foreign films—including Manoel de Oliveira’s Amor de Perdição (1978), Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950) and Susana (1951), and Werner Schroeter’s Der Tod der Maria Malibran (1971)—with “nonsexual” scenes from gay porn films produced no later than 1985, including William Higgins’s Delivery Boys (1985), Ignatio Rutkowski’s Nights in Black Leather (1973), Tom De Simone’s Confessions of a Male Groupie (1971), Ian McGraw’s Subway (1980), key works by Joe Gage and Fred Halsted, especially L. A. Plays Itself (1972), and Christopher Rage’s Sleaze (1982). How and what produces sex as well as the affects of sexuality may depend less on bodies commingling than on location, the decor and choice stuffs around them, not to mention the nonce narratives in which they perform. Pleasure, both sexual and aesthetic, may be foreign and, at base, untranslatable.
Jones’s queer juncture of things categorized as different nonetheless palpates their samenesses, the artistry as well as the melancholy archive that film can become: In his dandy’s connoisseurship of pre-condom (i.e., pre-AIDS) porn, Jones uses appropriation to document the texture and verismo of bodies, places, cityscapes gone—from unsteroided muscle, location shoots that capture “Gay Power” graffiti, and street hustlers to interior shots noting the little amber bottles of Locker Room poppers lined up in the freezer. v. o.’s foreign-film “sound track” to these images further comments on absence and obsolescence, both in its uncanny melodrama and in the fact that all its cinematic sources are now out of distribution in the United States.
In one of the few segments of v. o. in which the footage remains synched to its original sound track, a commanding naval officer in a brig puts a sailor through his paces. During most of the sequence voices speak in French (and, as throughout, subtitles appear over the images), derived from an excerpt of the notorious 1985 BBC interview with Jean Genet. While we see the sailor nervously slide his T-shirt over his head and the officer stare, we hear the interviewer pose a question to Genet (“Did love begin for you with a boy?”). The British interviewer’s French accent, however, is imprecise, and Genet responds, noticing questions his interviewer did not even consider he might be inflecting: “Did you say ‘love’ [l’amour]? I heard ‘death’ [la mort].” The interviewer laughs, “No, I wasn’t talking about death.” The sound track immediately switches to its original source, and the officer barks: “Lick my shoes, Jones.” When Jones hesitates, the officer barks again: “A court-martial’s a sticky business, Jones. Lick ’em!” As Jones licks the officer’s shoes, Genet continues talking, saying that his love began not with one boy “but with two hundred boys.” The other Jones, the filmmaker, is too deft a semiotician to have to point out how, in the aurora of AIDS, Genet is already attuned to something, the most recent inflection of une petite mort.
Jones, by the quasi-Rousselian device of his mash-up method, finds his work and himself interpolated between an earlier era of gay life and of cinema and the present moment. Jones’s art attempts to bridge connection. The last words we hear spoken (in Portuguese) and read (in English subtitles) suggest the challenge, the translation, inherent in this mourning work: “Remember me. Live, to explain to the world, with your loyalty to a shadow, the reason why you led me to this chasm.”
Stuart Comer, “Emerging Artists,” Frieze, issue 104 (January/February 2007) p. 136.
Los Angeles continues to add to its embarrassment of riches with artists Lisa Anne Auerbach, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Lecia Dole-Recio, William E. Jones, Mark Flores, Erika Vogt, Stephanie Taylor, and Fritz Haeg.
Bill Horrigan, “Center to Coast,” Is It Really So Strange? (Los Angeles: David Kordansky Gallery, 2006) pp. 8-9.
One of the occupational secrets (is it a secret? does it matter?) of being a film programmer is that sometimes a title will be scheduled and booked before he or she has actually seen it. That’s not ideal, but the day in, day out pressure to fill the institution’s schedule, combined with calendar and press deadlines, combined with the overall job of assembling a program hoping to engage the various constituencies the programmer wants to reach, all but guarantee that research, intuition, and word of mouth sometimes have to stand-in for having arrived at a judgment via direct experience. That’s how we happened to have programmed William Jones’s Massillon, back in 1991, for our program at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus.
I’d learned about Massillon from reading the catalogue for that year’s Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and decided without hesitation that it had to be shown in Columbus principally due to its connections to Ohio: Massillon is the city in the northeast part of the state where the filmmaker grew up, and as Ohio remains then as now underrepresented as a film location, I believed that virtually any professionally or artistically-rendered representation of it ought to be given a place within the program we offer to our public.
Paired opportunistically with another documentary called American Fabulous (a portrait of a local, much-beloved and deeply eccentric gay man soon to die of H.I.V. complications), our screening of Massillon that night was the first time I’d seen it. Aside from being corrected by someone in the audience that I was, in my introductory comments, mispronouncing “Massillon” (I’d never before heard it said aloud), my most vivid memory of the film was in the set of complications it produced in my thinking about the issues it addresses, complications produced by the steady accumulation of confession, empirical data, and clear intellectual ambition Jones’s voice-over narration provided, set to a series of unpopulated still landscapes, first of Ohio, then of national destinations, and then of the reclaimed, resistant landscapes of Southern California.
Proceeding from autobiographical reflection on his emergent sexuality, into reflection on the then-recent Supreme Court decision upholding Georgia’s anti-sodomy laws, into a provocative connection made between the state-sanctioned regulation of sexual behavior and the implicitly repressive assumptions built into the oxymoronic “planned communities” continuing to occupy our republic’s landscape, Massillon remains a uniquely demanding viewing experience, the serenity and moderation of its pacing tied to what by any measure would qualify as a learned, hard-nosed critique in its narration, and narration, at that, wry, patient, and eminently companionable. Visually, “nothing happens” – all those landscapes, and where are the people? – and yet it delivers nothing less than the world as Jones saw it at that time.
As a filmmaker coming of age in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Jones was hardly alone in his interrogation of received assumptions about identity, whether that would lead him to view those assumptions in relation to sexuality, citizenship, or even consumerism and fandom. But what has distinguished him among other practitioners in the independent sector is his commitment to and mastery of the visual essay form, his inscription of first-person commentary on subjects both personal yet exterior to himself. While it’s true that his scripts can be read with pleasure on their own literary terms, it’s only when he marries written and spoken commentary to the sequential argument made by his imagery in its painstaking counterpoints that his achievement becomes as singular as it has become over the past fifteen years.
A key to Jones’s method comes in what he visually withholds. Massillon’s landscape without figures has its complement in Finished (1997), a personal detective story about Alan Lambert, a suicidal, messianic porn star, in which the central enigma’s claim to the filmmaker’s attention – that is, footage of him actually being a porn star; that is, porn footage – is never revealed; just as, in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), what’s seen is not gay pornography (much less the epochal events of 1989 and 1990) but the gruesome recruitment and audition sessions of hapless Eastern European teenage boys as prelude to their entry into the global sex trade; just as, in Is It Really So Strange? (2005), young Southern Californian Latino fans of Morrissey profess rapturously-invested testimonies to his power without the viewer hearing the evidence of that musical allure.
Both Finished and Is It Really So Strange? begin in Jones’s acknowledged uncertainty as to where his pursuit – which through a circuitous route the final form of each comes to embody – will lead him, an avowal of his own bafflement: why do I care about this gay porn star? why do these kids worship Morrissey? His own ignorance hence forming the bedrock of his ensuing investigations, Jones is, from that minor-key paradox, a filmmaker of ideas, and one given to pondering them quite unlike anyone else. There are, naturally, resemblances and affinities: his work in landscape inevitably recalls the influence of Cal Arts in general and James Benning’s ongoing project in particular; the idiosyncrasy of his interests and the unexpected angle of approach often bring to mind Gus Van Sant; and Jones himself has invoked Chantal Akerman and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet as ongoing inspirations. These artists have nothing in common other than the conviction to find a filmic form appropriate to the ideas they are compelled to make tangible. As one is obliged to say of these filmmakers, and of others, and of Jones, this is personal filmmaking or it is nothing.
It’s a strange, strong effect Jones produces: out of fascination, he circles around the thing itself – American citizens, gay porn, Morrissey – and visually discloses it only in fragments, in refracted fashion, yet produces voice-over commentary of inimitable precision and nuance, letting the viewer in at every step he takes on his route to figuring out, aloud, how he’s come to be where he’s found himself and is taking us. You can’t ask much more from a guide.
Olaf Möller, “The Unmarginal Love: Pornopotsherdology”
Note: The following text is an earlier, more extensive draft of this essay. For the published version, see “Olaf’s World: The Maximal Minimalist,” Film Comment, March/April 2006, pp. 19-21.
How would Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet react if they discovered that one of their most rigorous works, the 1982 Too Early, Too Late, served as a major inspiration for a treatise on the cultural implications of sodomy and its legal definitions? And what would Manoel de Oliveira say when faced with a raw video that juxtaposes sound quotes from his 1979 film Doomed Love with images lifted from contemporaneous gay porn? It’s a safe bet that the French couple and the solitary Portuguese master would be a little bewildered and none too happy, but so what? They should be grateful for being saved from the living death of useless and unproductive veneration—by a gay, pornophile intellectual who’s taken up and contemplated their aesthetic and political considerations and drop-kicked Modernism into the 21st century. After all, Diderot launched his Enlightenment project with a porno novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets, a thoroughly moral work that William E. Jones—maker of the aforementioned works, titled Massillon (1991) and v.o. (2006) respectively—would probably love to adapt, by any means possible.
Like several other remarkable U.S. avant-garde documentarians who came to the fore in the 90s —Travis Wilkerson and Lee Anne Schmitt come to mind—Jones studied at Cal Arts. Before film school, he stayed for a while in Paris trying to study film theory but always ending up in cinema instead – he didn’t finish his studies but saw a lot of films (quite a few of which ended up in v.o.); some rumours have it that Jones studied law at Harvard which he says is not true – he only had a major interest in law but no interest in practicing it. Not finishing his studies didn’t bother Jones too much, as didn’t want to toil in that particular field called theory anyway. Returning home to figure out what to do, he came to the realization that the last place he wanted to spend the rest of his life was in the Ohio town where he grew up. In a certain way, Massillon, which takes its name from his hometown, is the culmination of his life up to that point. It’s a meditation on everything that made him who he is, i.e., a gay, radical artist.
Massillon is divided into three chapters: “Ohio,” “The Law,” and “California, ” with “The Law” functioning as a fulcrum between Jones’s Midwestern past and his West Coast present. With its images of empty landscapes and city scenes accompanied by finely crafted voiceover narration, the aesthetic is lean and Straubian. The straight-on autobiographic approach of “Ohio” would be just as effective were it pure fiction, but it isn’t: It’s an account of Jones’s boyhood in a small industrial town amidst salt-of-the-earth-types who have little conception of change—a familiar story of discovering that one is gay and therefore socially ostracized. One guy distances himself after Jones drops hints that he’s queer, another tears into him during wrestling practice with a ferocity that perhaps masks desire. The core of the next section, “The Law,” focuses on anal-sex statutes. Back in the early Nineties, when Jones made the film, sodomy (under terms ranging from “buggery” to “unnatural act”) was still illegal in most of the U.S., although the majority of states that prohibited it did so without directly linking it with homosexuality. (The 2003 Supreme Court overturn of one such statute renders the film, in Jones’s words, “a strictly historical curiosity” – but only to some extent.) “The Law” develops out of the end of “Ohio” as a long car ride through terrain so barren and desolate that it barely deserves to be called a landscape. With dark clouds rushing by and hard rain starting to fall, the voice of a “Christian” radio preacher (with fascist overtones) praises President Reagan, rants against gays, and drones on and on.
The cinematically soothing calm of “Ohio”—the emptiness of the hills and factories, the silence of unemployment and economic devastation, the unquestioned traditions, and the trains just passing through—is counterposed with the film’s final section, “California,” where Jones went to study, create, and become. Here he finds a setting to situate the problem within an historical perspective, uncovering the etymological roots of words like “buggery,” and contemplating the ways in which planned communities like Santa Clarita, with their self-styled and ever-up-gradable images of straight, moral sanitization, mirror the way American society has developed—pretending to be an ever-changing yet unchangeable home, but one to which you can never return.
Jones’s films have to be thought through carefully: they rarely disclose what they’re up to initially -- no hermeneutics here, at least overtly. Well, Massillon is actually structured as a kind of hermeneutic circle, but that only becomes apparent at the conclusion, which returns to images first seen at the start—Niagara Falls, Capitol Hill, Dad’s home movies, etc.—but which have now come to mean something different and therefore must be represented accordingly. If the Capitol dome—after which so many other official buildings in the U.S. have been modeled, as “The Law” demonstrates—is a worn-out cultural cliché in the beginning, by the end it’s loaded with connotations of oppression rather than freedom.
Expanding on the aesthetics of Massillon, Jones’s best known and most widely shown film is Finished (1997), a research project-cum-fantasy about the suicidal Quebecois gay porn star Alain Lebeau/Alan Lambert. Again it features text over images of empty landscapes, but this time their relationship is far more ambiguous: for one thing, the landscapes here are not just rural and urban but corporeal as well. After all, pornography is, in part, the crass art of the body, displayed as a landscape of desire. Because Finished is an essay on images and clichés rooted in porn, certain boundaries of taste and meaning are refused. What might look like kitsch from one perspective may appear sophisticated from another, just as porn can often make the ridiculous seem sublime. In Massillon, there’s a decisive move from a landscape haunted by memories to one disfigured by political oppression. In Finished, things are less clear-cut: in the end, one might say that Lambert – part Mishima Yukio, part Dorian Gray – fearing the inevitable fading of his physical beauty, killed himself at the age of 25 because his dual identities—messianic revolutionary without a cause and sex worker—were incompatible. Not knowing who he really was or wanted to be, incapable of conceiving of himself as being both at once, he opted for the surface reality of the body, and therefore death.
Insofar as it deals with the ways in which an identity can be several things at once, Jones’s subsequent long-form work, Is It Really So Strange? (2004), is almost the antithesis of Finished. Here, everyone is a vessel of plenty and a carrier of meaningful transformation. The video begins innocuously as an investigation into the cult following that has developed amongst Southern California Latino youth around the English singer-songwriter Morrissey. With infinite subtlety, it develops into a meditation on the construction of cultural and sexual identity. While Massillon and Finished call attention to themselves via their stark, modernist aesthetics, Is It Really So Strange? has been largely overlooked, probably because, in formal terms, it plays around with an amateur approach (although few of them would be able to set one perfect image after the other…). In one sequence Jones receives a Morrissey-style haircut, and in several others, his boyfriend, artist Mark Flores, draws his own rendition of the Jim French photo that appears on the sleeve of the Smiths single “Hand in Glove.” Both illustrate the way culture develops and evolves through the appropriation and personalization of its artifacts—just as Jones deantagonizes and deintellectualizes sound and image to turn cinema into a tool for communicating with others as opposed to contemplating the nature of others and otherness.
Jones himself makes his living in the sex industry, editing porn compilation tapes for the Larry Flynt empire. This insider access has enabled him to develop a whole corpus of found-footage video. The first manifestation of this is the 20-minute The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), which presents the rage, confusion, and despair-filled faces of Central and Eastern European porn performers and depicts the way the region’s new go-for-broke capitalism has inscribed itself onto their bodies. It’s a transitional work, located midway between the essayistic concerns and structures of the earlier films and the cinephile desire that imbues the mnemonic video bricolages Jones currently makes. What unifies these two strains of work is the artistic rigor he applies to their creation.
Jones’s most recent 59-minute video, v. o., appropriates images culled from Seventies and Eighties gay porn classics from directors like Tom De Simone, Fred Halsted, and Joe Gage (in particular the latter’s 1976-79 proletarian trilogy, Kansas City Trucking Co., El Paso Wrecking Corp., and L. A. Tool & Die) and combines them with excerpts from an interview with Jean Genet and sound quotes (and subtitles) lifted from European art films ranging from the canonised (Renoir, Buñuel, Kaurismäki, de Oliveira…) to the certainly should be canonised (Werner Schroeter, Heinz Emigholz, Guy Debord…). Jones makes no attempt to conceal the incongruity of these elements; the violence of these relentless sound and image collisions is accentuated by the subtitles: the one thing that holds it all together. These layers of signification don’t so much question each other as play off one another to produce an awesome evocation of love and passion that crosses all boundaries without ever pretending that those didn’t exist.
Even more minimalist, another new short, All Male Mash Up (2006), likewise employs scenes from Seventies and Eighties gay porn. A series of vignettes of men playing around with different forms of masculinity culminates in a happy ending with a couple by the sea. Here, porn is transformed into art by the glances of a loving man—or perhaps by the reality of love that can be found in porn. It’s a remembrance of realities past, of an era that was more willing (and able) to indulge in ambiguity. As ever with Jones, it’s everything at once.
For contrary opinions, see “Refuse and Rubble.”