Remnants of the Watts Festival

Remnants of the Watts Festival

1980 · 60 min · Documentary

The Watts Summer Festival is one of the oldest African American cultural festivals in the United States. The Watts community founded the event in 1966, one year after the Watts uprising. Ulysses Jenkins's film captures moments from the festival, including footage from a performance by the band War. This California funk band—famous for songs such as "Low Rider," "The Cisco Kid," and "Why Can't We Be Friends?"—was also well known for its multiethnic membership. The 1972 Watts Festival was one of the first events that Jenkins filmed, and he captured the underlying issues of community and commemoration that defined the annual event. At the time the local news media would, in Jenkins's opinion, misrepresent the festival by issuing warnings about it, and the artist's own footage served to counteract the media's negative view.

Directed by Ulysses Jenkins

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Cake Walk

Cake Walk · 1983

This video documents Cake Walk, an installation and performance piece by artist Houston Conwill, staged in November 1983 at Linda Goode Bryant's pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), at its second (downtown) location on Franklin Street. The piece refers to the cakewalk dance which developed in the mid-eighteenth century among enslaved African Americans as, among other things, a way to covertly ridicule slaveholders. The dancers in Cake Walk move amid Conwill's sculptures and paintings, one of Conwill's cosmograms painted on the floor beneath them.

Dream City

Dream City · 1983

MovieDocumentary

Ulysses Jenkins composed "Dream City" from documentation of a twenty-four-hour performance he organized in collaboration with David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. A discordant, absurdist, and poetic montage, the video weaves together jazz and punk shows, recitations by Jenkins, and shots of the Los Angeles skyline and oil wells to comment on power and nation in the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Notions of Freedom

Notions of Freedom · 2007

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 the major innovations of Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis. Also included are clips of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, explicitly linking the development of jazz to the Civil Rights Movement. Motion-capture animated figures are seen dancing, superimposed, over the archival footage of the musicians. Wearing colorful costumes, they perform Jenkins’ original choreography. The dancers exert a powerful influence over the historical documentation as their movements extend across the decades and, finally, into the future.

King David

King David · 1978

MovieDocumentary

This is a documentary of David Hammons prior to his leaving the Los Angeles arts community. This video covers the artist's creative strategies at that time. It served as both an interview and video performance by David Hammons.

The Nomadics

The Nomadics · 1991

In his Video Griots Trilogy, Jenkins creates a series of video meditations on history and culture. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack, he pulls together diverse strands of thought to construct an "other" history. "The Nomadics" takes a sweeping overview of peoples from across the world and develops an intuitive and aesthetic sense of history which can posit a global identity amongst people of color.

Two-Zone Transfer

Two-Zone Transfer · 1979

Two-Zone Transfer

Director Ulysses Jenkins calls his film a "dreamscape in which the dreamer awakens to a visitation of three minstrels who tell the story of the development of African American stereotypes in the American entertainment industry."

Self Divination

Self Divination · 1989

Self Divination

In his Video Griots Trilogy, Jenkins creates a series of video meditations on history and culture. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack, he pulls together diverse strands of thought to construct an "other" history. "Self-Divination" speaks poetically about origins and the realities of the African diaspora.

In The Midnight Hour

In The Midnight Hour · 2010

In The Midnight Hour

MovieDocumentary

A studio visit by David Hammons to John Outterbridge's studio. Recorded by Ulysses Jenkins as Hammons proclaims an arts affliction.

Mass of Images

Mass of Images · 1978

Mass of Images, a recorded performance that does indeed engage black stereotypes perpetuated by the American media. In the work, Jenkins appears on a set accompanied by a stack of televisions, his face obscured by a plastic mask and sunglasses, neck wrapped in American-flag-print scarf, and sporting an Adidas t-shirt underneath a bathrobe, arranged such that only the “ID” of Adidas is visible. The video cuts between this scene and examples of blackface and racist stereotyping from American films and TV. Jenkins repeats a mantra as he settles into a wheelchair and wheels himself toward center stage: “You’re just a mass of images you’ve gotten to know / from years and years of TV shows. / The hurting thing; the hidden pain / was written and bitten into your veins / I don’t and I won’t relate / and I think for some it’s too late!”

Z-Grass

Z-Grass · 1983

Experiemental video using Datamax graphics software. This piece is a very early example of the use of computer animation in video art. ZGrass refers to the programming language used to create the images.

Planet X

Planet X · 2006

MovieDocumentary

Writes director Ulysses Jenkins: "This video takes the 'Planet X' myth and interfaces it with the Katrina tragedy in New Orleans, LA, based upon their similar natural disaster principles. With a proclamation of prophecy spoken by avant garde jazz musician, Sun Ra, predicting a coming disaster to African-Americans."

Mutual Native Duplex

Mutual Native Duplex · 1990

Mutual Native Duplex

In his Video Griots Trilogy, Jenkins creates a series of video meditations on history and culture. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and an elegiac soundtrack, he pulls together diverse strands of thought to construct an "other" history. "Mutual Native Duplex" is a video essay on the mutual alliances between Native and African Americans which celebrates the "neo-American model" of inter-cultural cooperation that grew out of these encounters.

Inconsequential Doggereal

Inconsequential Doggereal · 1981

Inconsequential Doggereal

Initially created as an editing exercise for his students at UCSD, Jenkins’ Inconsequential Doggereal mixes poetic narrative fragments of self-shot footage with moments ripped from the unending flow of TV news, advertising, and entertainment. The images and sounds of mainstream television are jammed, freeze-framed, looped, overlaid and rewound—clips of science documentaries, movies broadcast on TV, nightly news commentary on the minimum wage, and a 60 Minutes style interview with the actor Peter Sellers are all jumbled together. Jenkins interjects several original threads, which show pickup football games gone wrong, a young white couple doing chores and hanging out at home, and Jenkins himself laying on a green suburban yard as a lawnmower moves perilously close to his body.

Without Your Interpretation

Without Your Interpretation · 1983

Without Your Interpretation

This performance took place in 1983 at the Art Dock on Center Street in Los Angeles. Like much of Jenkins's other work, it involved multiple performers, including Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi. Here Jenkins addresses social and geopolitical issues—specifically the "insensitivity of middle-class attitudes towards the Third World"—often using an invented language referred to as "doggereal." Jenkins confronts Americans' indifference to events outside their own country, particularly to crises and need in poorer nations.

Secrecy: Help Me to Understand

Secrecy: Help Me to Understand · 1994

Secrecy: Help Me to Understand

An investigation of the American media portrayal of black men as misunderstood tragic figures throughout recent history. Secrecy is an African concept which is a ritual element of understanding. The art that conceals and reveals. Which defines an individuals perception of recognition. Therefore, if you know the source of a premise you are the informed. If you don't know the concept of that premise, when you are confronted with it........ it bypasses your understanding.

Peace and Anwar Sadat

Peace and Anwar Sadat · 1985

Peace and Anwar Sadat

This composition provides a tribute to the world's most formidable peace activist, Anwar Sadat. The video paints visions of issues concerning Earth's flirtation with the apocalypse. Composed in four movements, featuring images and text interwoven with contemplations for inner and world peace.

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