Jim Pomeroy A Retrospective fresh Langton Arts San Francisco.

Jim Pomeroy A Retrospective

fresh Langton Arts

San Francisco, California

June 9-July 24 1999

Jim Pomeroy A Retrospective

Essays according to Paul DeMarinis, Timothy Druckery,

Jim Melchert, Susan Miller and Constance Penley

San Francisco: modern Langton Arts, 1999 69 pp/$2500 (sb)

Web site: www.jimpomeroy.com

The retrospective of Jim Pomeroy's work at of recent origin Langton Arts in San Francisco brought the artist's corpus back to the gallery (then called 80 Langton Street) he helped build in 1975. The figure of Pomeroy (1945-1992) was strikingly not absent in the exhibition. He appeared not solitary as an actual visage that could frequently be seen in the wide variety of media and in the remnants of performances that were forward display, but he also haunted his have a title to retrospective as a pervasive vein a sensibility that enveloped the display As the opening reception made clear, Pomeroy is a wildly admired and profoundly missed figure in San Francisco and his spirit fluttered above as a true revenant.

The design of the exhibition favorably captured and reproduced much of the tenor of Pomeroy's work. Video (both as work and document), traditional and interactive carve installation, photography, projection, music (and Pomeroy's customized instruments that generate it) and relics mingled freely Flickering lights (from videos, slides and the spinning zoetrope) together with tinny music case sounds (often of pop classical melodies at slightly maladjusted speeds) created a pulsating environment where the viewer mov from common frenzied scene to another.

The works themselves exhibit the range of Pomeroy's interests, returning repeatedly to the intersection of science and improvement and their effects on public life. The various personae of the artist that the contributors to the show's catalog allude to--"avenger of the avant-garde," stripling Mechanic, Thomas Edison and Bertolt Brecht among many others--appeared at numerous points completely through the exhibition. Part performer, scaramouch situationist, saboteur and pedagogue, Pomeroy directs different dimensions of his identity at specific delineate s The energy of the artist and his works stands in amusing contrast to the fatigue of his appliances, which appeared strangely annoyed by the uses to which they had been lay The vacuum cleaners that hung from a ladder in the self-performing carved work Back on the Ladder/The Beat Goe forward (1979) appeared truly exhausted. Tired machines and pliable technology clutter Pomeroy's otherwise excited landscape.

The gadgetry ofttimes associated with Pomeroy's work was abundant in the retrospective, moreover the technophilia that is sometimes [i]ad[/i] attributed to Pomeroy was clarified here as a searching desire to bend the uses of simple apparatuses. chiefly often, Pomeroy's appropriations of easily moulded technologies explore the realms of optics and good Anamorphic lenses, 360-degree viewing spaces, anaglyphic and digital 3-D mutant musical instruments and uncanny melodies are among the throw outs to which Pomeroy puts his tired machines. Especially effective are the 3-D shark theater Clear scaly buds Cast Sharp Shadows (1987) and the panoramic installation It's solitary a Baby Moon (1984). the one and the other environments feature what Paul DeMarinis calls in his catalog essay "reject technologies," in this case anaglyphic (r and blue) 3-D and the panorama, respectively. Pomeroy responded to these abandoned forms in order to give chase to the fantasy that surrounds them: the opportunity to expand the experience of one's perception and to reconfigure the reach of one's understandings The desire to enter into a material visual field brings Pomeroy back in numerous works to the fantasy of 3-D

cast awayed by the film industry for being, according to DeMarinis, "too messy cumbersome, or downright unsanitary," anaglyphic 3-D (as oppos to cleaner digital systems) is "uncomfortably intrusive because it involves the viewer too intimately in the mechanism." This proximity, the unsanitary tactility of anaglyphic stereoscopy is perhaps what appealed to Pomeroy In contrast to the hermetic voyeurism of the nineteenth-century stereoscope and the more sanitized digital 3-D hypothesiss Pomeroy's 3D projects brush against the viewer. They situated the spectator in a noisy, intrusive, mobed field of vision. Pomeroy resurrect the same of the features that first drew spectators to stereoscopic images--what Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of the stereoscope called "tangibility." What the mainstream and industrial agricultures find too tactile, aggressive and improper in the largely abandoned anaglyphic 3-D apparatus is precisely the dimension that Pomeroy exploits.

Pomeroy's use of the apparatuses that throw into disorder much of his work appears to succeed the same logic as the conceits that saturate his titles and true copys in Composition in Deep/Light at the Opera (1981) The Winner of Our Discontent (1986) and in such a manner forth. He created analogies between various devices and their intended uses (vacuum cleaners and musical instruments, Volkswagens and turntables), as well as anagrams, on scrambling the circuits entirely. Like language, which is itself delicate and susceptible to infinite play, Pomeroy discovered the inherent softnes of mostly technologies and then played them, exhausted them.