whitehot | June 2011: Jameson Ellis: Death in Midsummer @ John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller Installation view, Jameson Ellis, Death in Midsummer @ John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton Long Island.
Jameson Ellis About twelve years ago, Jameson Ellis began making abstract paintings that evoked TV static, the contrails of combat fighters, and eventually empty, seemingly post-nuclear landscapes. These pictures were nevertheless vibrantly colorful. They read like Japanese prints by Hiroshige or Hokusai, but they also read like the toxic graphics of old boxes of Biz laundry detergent. Think Rothko or DeKooning, but on a broken TV. Think video art that is not on a screen but on canvas or paper. The work overtly references the past while tying it to a dystopic future. It manages to be quiet and loud at the same time.
In his new show, “Death in Midsummer,” at John McWhinnie @ GHB in East Hampton, Ellis has assembled eight works on paper that explore this unique terrain. Part of what makes them fascinating is Ellis’s process in making them. He masks off part of the ground with a frisket and moves the paint in a mechanistic way, using brushes attached to the movable arm of a machine he built specially for the purpose. Ellis started doing silk-screening in high school, and to a certain extent his technique is a derivation of that—silk-screening with a paint brush machine, razor blades, and squeegees. Over time, he has developed a personal vocabulary of signature shapes and designs that are repeated from work to work. This repetition of forms is reminiscent of a film viewed frame by frame, and also of the way a film can be damaged by the projector—how it can unspool, flutter, go up in flames.
Installation view, Jameson Ellis, Death in Midsummer @ John McWhinnie at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton Long Island.
“Ultimately this was a way of doing something that doesn’t look like other people’s work,” Ellis says. In an effort to avoid the clichés of painting, he found himself inventing a new way to paint. “This process is mechanistic but also allows input in the gesture,” he says. It’s abstract painting but without the “theater”—the precious minute tinkerings—that dog an art form often perplexed by the question “Is it finished?”
Ellis took the title of the show, “Death in Midsummer,” from a short story by Yukio Mishima. He chose it as a way of bumming out the summer crowd who flocks to the Hamptons, but also aware that nobody really cares. There is a private, obsessive aspect to the show. One of the most striking pieces is a quotation of one of Ellis’s test-pattern sizzles, only with a gap missing, a white slash of negative space—a close-up or detail of a signature image. By this point, the subject matter and its thematic undertones have been transformed by free play with a purely visual vocabulary that has evolved.
Repetition, the film jammed. No cliché is more cliché than the death of painting. Ellis’s images in “Death in Midsummer” can be seen as an argument against that cliché, or not. He points out one that he made with the end of the movie “Breathless” in mind. It’s a field of funereal black with colored dots around it, like a kitsch heaven in death’s background.
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Jameson Ellis, Improved M16 Prototype #1 in Progress, 7075 aluminum, steel, nylon, 38×6 × 1½ inches, on technical drawing, pencil on mylar, 2010.
It’s an actual machine gun—not a readymade, or a facsimile, but a fully operational firearm made mostly from scratch in the artist Jameson Ellis’s studio/workshop. He writes: “My understanding of pointability is that ideally both hands form a direct line from the shoulder to the target, something the M16 does not do. In mine, the hands are pretty much directly in line with the shoulder and barrel axis . . . In fully automatic weapons one wants to keep the muzzle from climbing, as this makes successive rounds progressively hit higher over the target. One way of negating this is to have the barrel axis go straight into the shoulder so the axis of rotation is into the shoulder, and not above it. The M16 does the second but not the first. Mine does both.”
Ellis, without assistants or a factory, has designed and built his own “improved M16.” It is a technical feat that must be seen to be believed, almost entirely made in the artist’s studio with a milling machine, including the trigger mechanism. Pulling that trigger for the first time required the courage of Ellis’s convictions—it was not theoretical. He fired the gun in order to activate it as an art work as part of the Hunt and Chase show at Salomon Contemporary in East Hampton, New York, this past July. Positioning himself on a ladder, he sited on a tiny red dot 30 feet away on the gallery’s opposite wall and hit it. Despite noise-cancelling earplugs, the shot roared.
As an art piece, the Improved M16 comes steeped in history. The original M16, still in use, debuted in Vietnam, where it came to emblemize that war’s diabolical hubris and the ensuing cultural and political fallout. Conceptual art erupted in that same revolutionary, toxic, and still reverberant era. Both the war and its art are paradigms now. As a sculpture, Ellis’s gun delineates space—it is a machine that makes a line from Point A to Point B with bullets. It also menaces, and more importantly, it seduces. The design, with its straight line from butt to muzzle, draws the eye from the customized stock to the shark-eyed cant of the trigger guard, the black- ridged cylinder of the upper receiver, the barrel with its slightly scorched flash hider. The piece is a rare opportunity to peer openly at a deadly object, contemplating just how much thought went into every element of its deadliness. Ellis, an abstract painter, is not interested here in any aesthetic beyond the stark one of pure functionality. As it happens, the pure functionality is mesmerizing. For all its lethal intent, the gun is something you can’t stop looking at.
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq—homicidal loners, war fetishists, the NRA. The gun is black. The whale in Moby-Dick is white. These are symbols we can think inside for a long time. Ahab hunts his whale. What do you think comes out of Ellis’s gun?
—Zachary Lazar is a novelist whose most recent books are Sway and the memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder.
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