THE AVENGER.

Jim Pomeroy A Retrospective

New Langton Arts

San Francisco, California 

June 9-July 24, 1999

Jim Pomeroy A Retrospective

Essays by Paul DeMarinis, Timothy Druckery,

Jim Melchert, Susan Miller and Constance Penley.

San Francisco: New Langton Arts, 1999 69 pp./$25.00 (sb)

Web site: www.jimpomeroy.com

The retrospective of Jim Pomeroy's work at New Langton Arts in San Francisco brought the artist's corpus back to the gallery (then called 80 Langton Street) he helped found in 1975. The figure of Pomeroy (1945-1992) was strikingly present in the exhibition. He appeared not only as an actual visage that could often be seen in the wide variety of media and in the remnants of performances that were on display, but he also haunted his own retrospective as a pervasive mood, a sensibility that enveloped the show. As the opening reception made clear, Pomeroy is a wildly admired and profoundly missed figure in San Francisco and his spirit hovered above as a true revenant.

The design of the exhibition successfully captured and reproduced much of the tenor of Pomeroy's work. Video (both as work and document), traditional and interactive sculpture, installation, photography, projection, music (and Pomeroy's customized instruments that produce it) and relics mingled freely. Flickering lights (from videos, slides and the spinning zoetrope), together with tinny music box sounds (often of pop classical melodies at slightly maladjusted speeds), created a pulsating environment where the viewer moved from one frenzied scene to another.

The works themselves exhibit the range of Pomeroy's interests, returning repeatedly to the intersection of science and culture and their effects on public life. The various personae of the artist that the contributors to the show's catalog allude to--"avenger of the avant-garde," Boy Mechanic, Thomas Edison and Bertolt Brecht among many others--appeared at numerous points throughout the exhibition. Part performer, jester, situationist, saboteur and pedagogue, Pomeroy directs different dimensions of his identity at specific projects. The energy of the artist and his works stands in amusing contrast to the fatigue of his appliances, which seemed strangely annoyed by the uses to which they had been put. The vacuum cleaners that hung from a ladder in the self-performing sculpture Back on the Ladder/The Beat Goes On... (1979) appeared truly exhausted. Tired machines and soft technology clutter Pomeroy's otherwise excited landscape.

The gadgetry often associated with Pomeroy's work was abundant in the retrospective, but the technophilia that is sometimes wrongly attributed to Pomeroy was clarified here as a searching desire to bend the uses of simple apparatuses. Most often, Pomeroy's appropriations of soft technologies explore the realms of optics and sound. Anamorphic lenses, 360-degree viewing spaces, anaglyphic and digital 3-D, mutant musical instruments and uncanny melodies are among the projects to which Pomeroy puts his tired machines. Especially effective are the 3-D shark theater Clear Bulbs Cast Sharp Shadows (1987) and the panoramic installation It's Only a Baby Moon (1984). Both environments feature what Paul DeMarinis calls in his catalog essay "rejected technologies," in this case anaglyphic (red and blue) 3-D and the panorama, respectively. Pomeroy returned to these abandoned forms in order to pursue the fantasy that surrounds them: the opportunity to expand the experience of one's perception and to reconfigure the reach of one's senses. The desire to enter into a material visual field brings Pomeroy back in numerous works to the fantasy of 3-D.

Rejected by the film industry for being, according to DeMarinis, "too messy, cumbersome, or downright unsanitary," anaglyphic 3-D (as opposed to cleaner digital systems) is "uncomfortably intrusive because it involves the viewer too intimately in the mechanism." This proximity, the unsanitary tactility of anaglyphic stereoscopy, is perhaps what appealed to Pomeroy. In contrast to the hermetic voyeurism of the nineteenth-century stereoscope and the more sanitized digital 3-D systems, Pomeroy's 3D projects brush against the viewer. They situated the spectator in a noisy, intrusive, crowded field of vision. Pomeroy resurrected one of the features that first drew spectators to stereoscopic images--what Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of the stereoscope, called "tangibility." What the mainstream and industrial cultures find too tactile, aggressive and improper in the largely abandoned anaglyphic 3-D apparatus is precisely the dimension that Pomeroy exploits.

Pomeroy's use of the apparatuses that clutter much of his work appears to follow the same logic as the puns that saturate his titles and texts in Composition in Deep/Light at the Opera (1981), The Winner of Our Discontent (1986) and so forth. He created analogies between various devices and their intended uses (vacuum cleaners and musical instruments, Volkswagens and turntables), as well as anagrams, by scrambling the circuits entirely. Like language, which is itself soft and susceptible to infinite play, Pomeroy discovered the inherent softness of most technologies and then played them, exhausted them.

Among the most noticeable features of the retrospective were the comic edges--the puns, play, parody, sarcasm, satire, perversion and irony--that frame it. Pomeroy's 3-D video critique of NASA and the space mission, Apollo Jest (1979), concludes with a psychoanalytic pun, "the ego has landed." In her catalog essay, Constance Penley refers to the "groan-inducing" puns as typical of Pomeroy. In fact, the entire show groaned, inducing some strange mixture of laughter and another expression, something like a hybrid growl and moan. While many of the assembled pieces are funny (Pomeroy's zoetrope Newt Ascends Astaire's Face [c. 1974], for example), what makes the comic element in Pomeroy's work so compelling is the anxiety it induces. His is a form of adamant, even pathological joking that forces one to pay close attention to the details and textures of his work. This chronic joking threatens at every turn to spill into a kind of madness.

In 1905 Sigmund Freud attempted to analyze the psychic function of jokes insisting that "jokes have not received nearly as much philosophical consideration as they deserve in view of the part they play in our mental life." [2] Surveying the literature pertaining to the analysis of jokes, Freud lists the features that frequently define them. Uncannily, those same features that inform his ontology of jokes apply to Pomeroy's work: "activity, relation to the content of our thoughts, the characteristic of playful judgement, the coupling of dissimilar things, contrasting of ideas, 'sense in nonsense,' the succession of bewilderment and enlightenment, the bringing forward of what is hidden, and the peculiar brevity of wit." [3] In each of Pomeroy's pieces, one or more of these comic elements can be seen at work, perhaps most prominently "the succession of bewilderment and enlightenment," the dynamic force of chaos and pedagogy.

The final item in Freud's inventory of the comic, "the peculiar brevity of wit," resonates deeply within Pomeroy's work. The often antic, exaggerated, noisy and surfeit style of Pomeroy's art tends to distract the viewer from the understatements that inform it. Less a form of modesty than a form of economy, Pomeroy's brevity represents an ability, or perhaps a desire, to make a minimal degree of elements cover a vast distance. The simplicity of Pomeroy's apparatuses in Turbo Pan (c. 1985) and Quartet for Licorice Pizza (c. 1980s) for instance contrast the scope of their address. The soft technologies that Pomeroy puts into circulation caricature (another comic device) the most serious promises that science and industry have made. The peculiar brevity of wit that Pomeroy invokes, however, is nowhere felt more deeply than in the untimely death of the artist, who found irony even at the end of his life. During medical treatment shortly before his death, Pomeroy is said to have pointed out the incongruity of uti lizing CAT scans when dogs had caused his ultimately fatal head injury. [4] This final statement, which serves both as the artist's last words and a brief reflection on the languages of science, perhaps best characterizes the cutting brevity of Pomeroy's wit and life.

AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT is associate professor of film studies and critical theory in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Electronic Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press).

The author wishes to thank Tony Meredith, Program Director of New Langton Arts, for his generosity and assistance in the preparation of this review.

NOTES

(1.) Pomeroy did work with digital 3-D and some of his stereoscopic images (View of Art Park [1987]) were made available as Viewmaster slides. The impression that Pomeroy's prolific 3-D work leaves, however, adheres more persistently to the camp/fantastic sensibilities of the anaglyphic type.

(2.) Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, James Strachey, trans. and ed. (New York: Norton, 1960), p. 5.

(3.) Ibid., p. 11.

(4.) Susan Miller, Introduction, "Jim Pomeroy: Avenger of the Avant-garde" in Jim Pomeroy A Retrospective, p. 6.