 |
|
Jim Pomeroy was an innovative artist/performer/teacher/scholar.
He was considered a leader in defining the realm of conceptual art
during the 1970s and 80s, and worked in a wide variety of media,
including photography, performance, installations, computer graphics,
video art, and stereography. Pomeroy performed and exhibited his
work all over the world and was the recipient of many honors, awards,
and fellowships. At the time of his death, he was teaching video
and new genres at the University of Texas at Arlington. The stereography
in Apollo Jest is an outgrowth of Pomeroy's fascination with
stereo, or "3-D," photography, as well as an outlet for his gently
satirical treatments of contemporary sociopolitical and cultural
issues. Apollo Jest contains 83 3-D bubble gum cards. Each
image can be seen through the stereo glasses provided. Pomeroy attempts
to demonstrate that pictures are not always what they seem, using
images as visual cognates, puns, and indirect referrals.
|
|
Gary Nickard (former director of CEPA Gallery, Buffalo), 1992
statement
I feel that Jim's artwork, while grounded in some of the conceptual
and performance ideas which emerged in the 70's, demonstrated a
distinctively unique vision executed with a delightfully absurdist
twist. His quick-hit punning always cut to the quick with a mockery
and humor always in harmony with the dimensions of his subject.
Jim's topics, as I fondly remember, would address everything from
the ridiculous antics of the military-industrial complex to the
more numbskull antics of the art world, and most often just the
all-too-common ignorance which he found so plentiful in American
culture. Jim's humor, while motivated by a deep anger, was seldom
harsh, usually muted by his good-natured, (and to use a Pomeroyesque
pun), "infernal optimism."
|
Ed Earle Riverside,
CA, 1992 statement
I recall one of Jim's performances with Apollo Jest in the title.
An elderly couple showed up thinking it to be a documentary on NASA
and the manned space program. They remained—thoroughly confused—through
much of the performance. I think they left when Jim took out three
LP records and mounted his little race cars with implanted phono needles.
As the cars danced around the records playing patriotic tunes while
Jim drew our attention to various undeclared wars, the elderly couple
just had to leave. But they left with something—a good story to tell.
- |
|
Richard Posner Culver City, CA, 1992 statement
Jim had a profound understanding of the relationship between levity
and gravity. His work is a journal of that creative tension. To
learn of Jim's death at the hands of a hound is not to know whether
to cry, or to laugh, or both. Only Pomeroy could conjure up such
a horribly bittersweet Rube Goldbergian demise. What a macabre case
of the tail wagging the dogma.
(The above statements are part of a massive fax tribute that took
place after Pomeroy's death. Many of Pomeroy's friends in the art
and academic worlds contributed by faxing in their remembrances
of the artist.)
Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle, 7/3/99
"The American space program came in for affectionate satire
at Pomeroy's hands. 'Apollo JEST: An American Mythology (in depth)'
(1978) is a 3-D black-and-white video version of a slide show purporting
to document the 1969 moon landing. It wavers hilariously between
gist and jest, looking now like a sincere, bungled effort to simulate
NASA footage, now like a bitter amateur expose. Some of Pomeroy's
contraptions are sheer silliness, such as the zoetrope 'Newt Ascends
Astaire's Face' (ca. 1975). The short video program shows a snippet
of the animation in action: true to its title, it has a small amphibian
wriggle up the dance master's face. The piece has unintended echoes
in the post-Gingrich era, but it was made in backhanded homage to
Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' and perhaps to Fred
Astaire as well, who could take stairs like no one else. The Pomeroy
show is a neat counterweight to the smooth technical magic of video
maker Bill Viola's current retrospective at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. Nothing in Pomeroy's show except his late, unedited
digital video pieces is more high tech than a music box or a slide
projector. Yet there was true ingenuity in many of his inventions.
In one video excerpt we hear playback that sounds like early wax
cylinder music recordings. As the camera zooms out, we see that
these sounds come from three toy cars, equipped with needles and
amplifiers, running in the grooves of three stationary LP records.
For 'It's Only a Baby Moon. . . .' (1985), Pomeroy took photographs
of reflections in a mirrored sphere. In the best of the circular
prints that resulted, we see him standing in a cemetery that seems
to cover the Earth, as if he were the last man alive. He also built
a walk-in projection screen that resembles an open, inverted parachute.
His answer to Cinemax — before it was invented — it makes his
spherical images look panoramic rather than distorted. Two photographs
hang at Langton above props and masks that Pomeroy used in performances.
They identify presiding spirits behind his work: Bertolt Brecht
and Mr. Wizard, the amateur scientist whose live, on-air experiments
made his show one of television's most suspenseful in the 1950s."
|
|
