Kim Jones,"Mudman Structure ," 1974. By Sebastian Smee Sebastian Smee Art critic Email Bio Follow Art critic March 18 at 2:42 PM Kim Jones was back from active duty in Vietnam eight years when, on his 32nd birthday, he turned himself into, as he put it, “a walking sculpture that’s eighteen miles long.”
“Sweat like pigs work like dogs live like rats red dust covered everything.” That’s how Jones described his time in Vietnam. For bystanders, “Mudman” — the persona he created for performances that led to “Wilshire Boulevard Walk” — was frightening, dissonant, uncomfortable. But it was still more uncomfortable for him.
African American and Latino populations bore a disproportionate load under a draft system that was patently unfair. Black and Latino soldiers returned from Vietnam in the late 1960s and early ’70s to a society still riven by discrimination. It’s no surprise, then, that some of the most explicitly activist art of the period was made by African Americans and Latinos, including Faith Ringgold, David Hammons and Malaquias Montoya.
The performance, at heart, feels feminist. But in a year that saw U.S. troop levels in Vietnam ratcheted up from 23,000 to 184,300, it was also easy to read as a comment on the war. Some commentators erroneously identified Ono as representing Vietnam.
If you find it obscene that an artist should do such a thing while “guys his age” were being shot at and killed in chaotic circumstances far from home, so do I. But Burden was picking up on a level of irrationality that no longer felt exceptional. It was ambient. But the pressure they felt to keep art and activism apart became close to unbearable for many of the most acclaimed practitioners of abstraction and minimalism. Some, including Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, moonlighted as makers of explicitly antiwar art. Others, like Rosler, completely changed the kind of art they made.
Elsewhere, painters kicked against the coolness of pop art and the mute elegance of minimalism by making work that was angry, hectic and hot: Jim Nutt and Peter Saul, members of the Chicago-based group the Hairy Who, represented torture and debauchery with paintings that were psychedelically vibrant even as they delivered up what Saul called a “cold shower” of “bad conscience.”
yokoono I remember learning about this in my Arts 101 class a few years back. 😊
yokoono Really? Forever is a pretty long time
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yokoono
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