Ulysses Jenkins: Video Griot
12 Episodes
There has never been another artist like Ulysses Jenkins. For over fifty years, the Los Angeles–born and –based polymath has produced an expansive and unclassifiable body of work that tackles, in idiosyncratic and often wickedly humorous ways, thorny issues of race, gender, national history, and their intersections with pop culture. An early adopter of, and staunch advocate for, video and digital technology, Jenkins minted a jagged, jolting style in confrontational short works like MASS OF IMAGES, INCONSEQUENTIAL DOGGEREAL, and TWO-ZONE TRANSFER, all of which feature him as a performer. Jenkins has never stopped innovating and experimenting in the ensuing years, and recently became the subject of his first major career retrospective—a joint venture between Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art and LA’s Hammer Museum. Jenkins’s work is timeless, blazingly contemporary, and, once experienced, never forgotten.
Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation is on view at the Hammer Museum February 6–May 15, 2022.
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04:31Episode 1Mass of Images
Episode 1
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1978 • United States
Performance artist and video visionary Ulysses Jenkins lays bare the psychic trauma wrought by the media’s stereotyped portrayal of Black Americans.
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24:07Episode 2Two-Zone Transfer
Episode 2
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1979 • United States
Ulysses Jenkins—alongside fellow Otis Art Institute student Kerry James Marshall—stages a surrealist minstrel show in this dream-vision exploration of the history of Black representation.
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55:59Episode 3Remnants of the Watts Festival
Episode 3
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1980 • United States
In 1972 and ’73, Ulysses Jenkins and the collective from Venice, California, known as Video Venice News documented the Watts Summer Festival—a major Black cultural event established in 1966 to commemorate the Watts Rebellion that jolted the Los ...
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15:27Episode 4Inconsequential Doggereal
Episode 4
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1981 • United States
Ulysses Jenkins continues his investigation of mass-media saturation in this kaleidoscope of VHS-recorded TV flotsam, menacing lawnmowers, footballs, and the artist’s own waggling butt.
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Cake Walk
Episode 5
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States
This video documents “Cake Walk,” an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant’s pioneering New York gallery Just Above Midtown. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance that develo...
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05:36Episode 6Dream City
Episode 6
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States
A video companion to a twenty-four-hour group performance organized by Ulysses Jenkins, DREAM CITY collages live music, poetry, and dance into a pulsating kaleidoscope of color and sound. Frequent Jenkins collaborators Maren Hassinger, Senga Nen...
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14:08Episode 7Without Your Interpretation
Episode 7
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1983 • United States
Featuring the artist-filmmaker’s regular collaborators Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, this 1983 performance by Ulysses Jenkins issues a forceful condemnation of American indifference to the crises faced by the developing world.
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12:11Episode 8Self Divination
Episode 8
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1989 • United States
The first part of Ulysses Jenkins’s VIDEO GRIOTS TRILOGY—a series of video meditations on history and culture in the which the filmmaker uses archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack to construct an “other” hist...
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12:09Episode 9Mutual Native Duplex
Episode 9
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1990 • United States
The second installment of Ulysses Jenkins’s VIDEO GRIOTS TRILOGY—a series of video meditations on history and culture in the which the filmmaker uses archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack to construct an “oth...
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12:42Episode 10The Nomadics
Episode 10
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 1991 • United States
The third work of Ulysses Jenkins’s VIDEO GRIOTS TRILOGY—a series of video meditations on history and culture in the which the filmmaker uses archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack to construct an “other” hist...
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Planet X
Episode 11
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 2006 • United States
Ulysses Jenkins looks at the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans through the lens of the Planet X doomsday myth and a proclamation of coming disaster to African Americans issued by avant-garde jazz prophet Sun Ra.
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15:54Episode 12Notions of Freedom
Episode 12
Directed by Ulysses Jenkins • 2007 • United States
In NOTIONS OF FREEDOM, Ulysses Jenkins charts the history of jazz—what he calls “the first true American art form”—from its beginnings in New Orleans and the American South to the classic work of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and through th...
