Nomad Codes

which Berman and his fellow friends and artists worked: a life authentically rooted in the noncommercial margins of bohemia, a magic circle of art and fellowship and esoteric romanticism that transmuted the objects and images it embraced.

TRANSLATIONS

    Berman was by no means the only spiritual bricoleur on the West Coast. The godfather of California collage was Jess Collins, who went by the artist name Jess. Abandoning his career in atomic chemistry in the late ’40s, Jess pursued abstract expressionist painting at the California School of Fine Arts until he gave himself over to making “Paste-Ups” out of pop ephemera. 1954’s Goddess Because Is Is Falling Asleep— whose regal central figure sprouts a huge foot beside a lobster bouquet surrounded by text like “Of Nature and Art and a Puppy Pilgrimage”—is halfway between Max Ernst and Terry Gilliam. At the time Jess also made seven Dick Tracy comic-strip collages called Tricky Cad ; by placing odd text in the dialogue balloons and mocking the authoritarian slant of a comic he had loved as a kid, Jess anticipated not only the Situationist detournement of comic strips but the vital postwar strategy of scrambling high and low art.
    By the 1960s, Jess’s earlier, more satiric and disjointed Paste-Ups had evolved into fantastic landscapes assembled from hundreds of puzzle-like fragments. Dense and fluid, and with an architectural sensibility lacking in many later pothead collages of this type, these worlds are chock full of visual puns, curious correspondences, and shining denizens of the archetypal otherworld. Even in reproductions, which make large-scale collages look flat and busy, Jess’s work still radiates an intense, hallucinogenic suggestibility. Many, like his incomplete Tarot series, directly engage esoteric themes; others pursue a hermetic homoeroticism that reaches its apex in his late work Narkissos . In light of later hippie excesses, such esoteric subjects may seem banal, but in the late 1950s the material had not yet gone the way of mystical kitsch. Jess engaged the mysteries with a romantic intelligence both modern and anti-modern. On the one hand, he was an appropriation artist celebrating the possibilities that arise when art world hierarchies are inverted and fragments torn from the passing surfaces of modern life are slammed together. At the same time, these possibilities also suggest the old romantic heresies of magick and transcendence: faced with a jumble of resonant and juxtaposed images, our minds inevitably start playing the game of analogies and correspondences. As we connect fragments into hidden networks, the logic of those connections becomes dreamlike, even erotic. Such subconscious montage, which is what authentic magick entails, was well known to the Surrealists, but by using appropriated materials, Jess moves even closer to a direct enchantment of the ordinary fragmentary world.
    For all their immersive intensity, many of Jess’s collages are marred by the giddiness inherent in such dense and richly colored overlays, and they largely lack the clarity and power of his Translations. This series of oil paintings, which he began in 1959, are based directly on images Jess would lift from old yearbooks, alchemical tomes, bubblegum cards, or moldy stacks of Scientific American . Strictly adhering to the outlines (though not the colors) of the original images, the Translations gesture towards Warhol’s later by-the-numbers paintings. Though they are tinged with a similarly tart sense of belated irony, the Translations more closely resemble the internal theater of creative memory, which remakes—or translates—random but resonant snapshots of the world into internal phantasmagoria. When Jess reproduced the Translations in books, he paired them with texts from sources as wide-ranging as Plotinus, the Popul Vuh, and the American John Uri Lloyd’s 1895 proto-psychedelic fantasy Etidorpha . Oftentimes these parings juxtapose modern and mythic, as when a somewhat bilious image of a nineteenth-century grinding machine is paired with a scene from Celtic lore where the hero Fionn mac Cumhal asks the druid Finnegas for the craft of poetry. These pairings deepen the question of what, exactly, is being translated: is it the images, the words, or some more ineffable spirit behind such markers and correspondences? What fuses fragments when they remain, for all intents and purposes, fragments?
    Like the Paste-Ups and his later Salvages