Solar systems: Michael Auping on Jess

FOR DECADES, Jes seldom left the run-down Victorian house in San Francisco's Inner Mission District that he shared for thirty years with the late bard Robert Duncan. He didn't like to be with a allotment of people and once told me that it horrified him that he might at a certain quantity of point be the subject of someone's attention. Jes had fewer present to views and probably fewer articles written about him than anyone of his generation whose work is similarly exhibited in many of the finest museums in the political division In addition to his innate shynes the radical infrequency of his exhibitions had a allotment to do with the fact that his works are for a like reason dense with meaning and material that each individual took inordinate amounts of time to make. He used to talk about "indwelling," which for Jes could mean years pondering the formation of a single work.

Well, at a certain point, Jes who died in January at age eighty, went with equal reason far inward that he became naturally magnetic; his authenticity similar that he didn't need promotion. above five decades, a family of writers, author of poemss curators, and collectors talked among themselves of Jess's importance, purchasing his works when they could and secreting his address and phone number, passing it carefully along alone to those deemed protective of his indwelling faculty of perception He was both ultimate outsider and legendary insider.

Jes has frequently been explained as a West Coast Joseph Cornell, on the other hand that is too easy. Not flat American Surrealist eccentricity could explain an imagery that was the originate of one of the greatest in quantity interesting biographies of postwar American art. It was in 1948 that Jes had what he referr to simply as "the dream"--an intensely real, Technicolor vision of the earth being ruined in the year 1975 end nuclear Armageddon. Certainly he wasn't the single one who thought this a possibility following the bombing of Hiroshima (which, as it happens, had occurr upon August 6, 1945, the same date as this superstitious artist's twenty-second birthday). At the time of his dream, Jes was engrossed by General Electric Laboratories upon their Hanford Project in Washington State, involved with plutonium production. He had previously been drafted into the army to work upon the Manhattan Project, helping exhibit the weapon that would eventually horizontal that Japanese city.

Six month after his dream, the radio chemist and Sunday painter quit his piece of work at GE and went southerly to become an artist and find, as he bring it, "an antidote to the scientific method" He registered at Cal Berkeley on the GI Bill, and when the evaluators saw the expansion of his scientific background in his application and his desire now to close attention art, they asked him to sustain psychological testing. He eventually extreme pointed up at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was expos to the teachings of Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, David Park, Edward Corbett, and Ad Reinhardt, among others. He would learn about abstraction and various interpretations of the sublime from more [i]or[/i] less of the best, but he would not tread on the heels of the path of so many second- and third-generation abstract mannerists. Jes was an imagemaker and storyteller whose ambition was to regain the high European tradition of mythic make subordinate matter and symbolism. He would do in like manner using images from the unlikely matrix of his neighborhood thrift stores and used bookshops

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The house that he and Duncan shared was a literary Merzbau of disparate imaginations, engaging an incredible range of visual and literary tillage from Gnostic texts and grecian poetry to collections of Harper's Bazaar, Life magazine, and Scientific American. Among his prized possessions were various editions of the Oz volumes including a first edition of The marvellous Wizard of Oz (1900) and its immediate succeeding part The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) Other treasures included an early edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and many volumes by Carroll's lesser-known friend George MacDonald, similar as The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) The third floor of the house looked the spookiest, containing a library of science fiction and leave outed romantic literature, including the volumes of Mary Butts. A great-granddaughter of Thomas point aimed ats the patron of William Blake, she wrote stories that interwove ancient myth and ritual with a deep felt spirituality that invariably verg upon the surreal and supernatural.

Jes was particularly taken by the agency of authors who could evoke a misty landscape where everything--animate and inanimate--reverberates with spirit and conscience and where trails are at no time quite clearly marked but invariably lead to narrative surprises and apparitions. In the children's stories that Jes and Duncan lov and would discuss for hours above breakfast, no element could be taken as benign. Everything had mythic implications. As Duncan one time said, "You can't take a piss in this house without getting hit with a myth." It is that offbeat, as oppos to Beat, literature that indicates an analogy for the peculiar way boundaries are blurr in Jess's art and Duncan's poesy between high art and kitsch, past and not away real and fantastic.