Nomad Codes

(thrift-store canvases reworked on the easel), Jess’s work relies on his own resonance with largely marginalized pre-existing images. “I salvage loved images that for some reason have been discarded and I come across them. I’ve, at times, found wonderful things on the street, just thrown away. If you find something that you really respond to that someone else has thrown away, it’s a kind of mini-salvation.” This is the alchemy of trash. Though recognizing his high-art predecessors (the Translations quote Kandinsky and Gertrude Stein, and Surrealism looms large), Jess also tipped his hat to the popular and folklorish dimension of the art of appropriation—an affirmation of premodern sources that set the West Coast apart from Europe and New York. When discussing influences, Jess would place San Francisco’s Playland-by-the-Beach and John Neill’s Oz illustrations alongside Ernst and Gaudí. Today this kind of hip populism is tediously de rigueur (“Margaret Keane and Esquivel are geniuses!”); in the 1950s, before the self-conscious ironies of Pop, it was scandalous, visionary, romantic, and, perhaps most importantly, rooted in the ordinary truth of modern experience. Jess, who grew up in LA, talked about visiting old mining towns in the Mojave Desert with his dad. The fabled prospector Old Sourdough was still alive, and Jess remembers the slapdash collage of calendars, posters, and ads that graced one of his ramshackle cabins: “a little palace assembled from scrap wood, pieces of aluminum, junk, tins, almost any type of found object you can imagine.”
    Jess was no gutter artist, though, and his most profound work of mythopoetic collage achieves a high tone of lyrical and philosophical intensity. Narkissos is an immense Paste-Up assembled from hand-drawn copies that Jess made, in pencil, of bits and pieces he had cataloged over the decades. Based on a sketch first made in 1959, Narkissos stands almost six feet tall and took Jess over twenty years of obsessive work to complete (and then only after he gave up the plan to execute a mirror image of the work in oils). Narkissos is a masterpiece, perhaps the single greatest work of collage by an American, and, for my money, the high peak of spiritual plastic art in California. It is a dark and playful palimpsest of fairy tales, homo-eroticism, and heavy gnostic truths, a hall of hieroglyphic mirrors that reflects on the myth of Narcissus until the reflections—and the desires that motivate them—melt into the empyrean. Narkissos drips with allusions, inside jokes, puns, and echoes (including Echo). The figure of Pan, for example, is a composite figure drawn from a Panamanian flute player. Similar, if less corny, gotchas await those who contemplate the woman on the tricycle, or the ergot of rye that lies near the pool, or the figure of Eros himself, which Jess assembled from a Hellenist bronze, a hunk from The Young Physique , and a trippy design from the Post-Impressionist painter Charles Filiger.
    Behind all this archetypal ping-pong lies the mystical real deal: an elusive and many-layered invocation of the romantic imagination based on Jess’s deep study of the hermetic, Neoplatonic and Romantic transformation of Ovid’s classic telling of the Narcissus myth. Of course, Jess doesn’t hand you such meanings on a platter, and not just because he wants you to do your own conceptual and spiritual work to make the meanings real. In Jess’s romantic conception, meaning itself is infinite, not in the endlessly deferred sense of the deconstructionists, but in the excessive, almost carnivalesque sense of dream’s endless labyrinth. But even as Jess’s esoteric reading resonates in the primal Platonic cave of myth-making and desire, its echoes can also be heard in the clamorous din of commercial culture. Metropolis and a Maurice Sendak frog both make an appearance in the work, and the figure of Narcissus prominently clutches a strip of Krazy Kat panels (whose creator, the brilliant George Herriman, lived and worked in Los Angeles). Myth-time is always ready to burst through modern time, or even the personal mythology of the individual, countercultural artist. In other words, if Jess’s romance is true, then the forces he evokes are much larger than the individual artist: the imagination we discover working in this hermetic cartoon does not, as he once said, “stop where my imagination leaves off.”
    As with Berman, Jess wove together his work and his