Oral History: Philip Mallory Jones (Part #2)
We are thrilled to publish the second installment of a three-part conversation with media artist Philip Mallory Jones. Working in video technology for over five decades, Jones has carved out an expansive and idiosyncratic body of work that has ranged from impressionistic portraits of Black American life, to experimental works made in Burkina Faso and Angola, to explorations of digital technologies such as the optical disc and the virtual environment Second Life. He co-founded and directed Ithaca Video Projects (1971-1984), an influential media arts center, and its accompanying annual video festival, one of the first of its kind. His recent work has focused on using 3D modeling software to reconstruct Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood circa 1940.
This second section, facilitated by EAI’s Communications and Special Projects Associate Tyler Maxin, covers the Ithaca Annual Video Festival, the development of Icono Negro: The Black Aesthetic in Video Art, Jones’ travels abroad, his transition to digital media, and more. It has been edited for content and clarity.
Philip Mallory Jones at the opening of Icono Negro: The Black Video Aesthetic at the Long Beach Museum of Art, 1989. Photo by Elizabeth K. Jackson, Ph.D.
Tyler Maxin: As I understand that there was another element to Ithaca Video Projects: the festival, which originated in Ithaca and then traveled at a certain point, as well. Could you talk about how that began?
Philip Mallory Jones: The Annual Ithaca Video Festival started in 1974. The first was just one night. We had eight to ten entries, and selected five to show at an alternative art/media event happening at Cornell. I think it was part of the Looking for America conference. The Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, were key organizers. It was the time of the Pentagon Papers, and they were stars of the anti-war movement. Several people came from out of town, like Lance Wisniewski, Bob Burns, and Carl Geiger from Syracuse University’s Synapse program. After that experience, we said, “Never again. This is a real crazy thing to do, running a video festival.” A couple weeks later, we decide, “On second thought, this is a good thing. Let’s do this again. But we’ll start planning now for next year.”
We also said: “One aspect that will distinguish what we’re doing is that it will travel. It’ll travel to large venues, but also to very small venues. We will charge $25 a week for the whole package. We will provide posters so they can put their own information on it, and we'll have a unified image for the festival.” The idea that it would be annual and affordable was central to it. The Annual Ithaca Video Festival grew enormously over nine years, and toured nationally and internationally.
By the last three or four years, it was touring throughout the year, and in Europe as well. I took it to France and Belgium in 1985, and I spent weeks touring around cities in France and Belgium and Luxembourg, showing these tapes and talking, as much as I was able, about the work and about video art. There was a lot of interest at the time in Europe.
I came to a point where I really had to decide if I was going to return to the US or if I was just going to cash in my ticket and stay. I had friends in Paris. I could find a place to live cheap, and I was getting paid very good money to travel around Europe, showing this program of video. That gig could have been extended indefinitely, through my base of operations at the American Center in Paris. Ultimately, I decided to return. There were people who were expecting me to come back. But that could have gone on. Like the song says, I was a free man in Paris.
Tyler Maxin: I know that throughout the eighties you were really pursuing this interest in a global African diasporic culture and traveling a lot. When did that interest start?
Philip Mallory Jones: I have always had a compulsion to go and see for myself. Whether it was some other part of Chicago, or this country, or the planet. It’s the adventure, and the opportunity. I made a 2D photo/graphic collage expressing this, Bus Stop at the Edge of Town in 2002 from bits and pieces of images I had captured in the Caribbean and Central America, West and Southern Africa, the South Pacific, and India. The idea being that when one steps off the bus in a new place, myriad opportunities, for good or ill, spread out in front of one.
In 1975, I had the opportunity to go to Haiti through my good friend and running buddy, Fred Mangones, one the founders of Ithaca Video Projects. That was my first truly foreign travel and location production experience. It was also my first hard lesson in recognizing how much I didn’t know about the world and African diasporic people. It was revelatory, jarring, and deeply informing/transforming. Following that, Gunilla and I made the video portrait, Beyond the Mountains, More Mountains, and also mounted a mixed-media gallery installation. Also contributing to this work were several Haitians living in Ithaca, including Louis Massiah. Louis was also instrumental in my first journey to Africa.
I went to the African continent for the first time in 1987. Just before departure, my friend Ellis B. Haizlip advised: “Leave everything you think you know about Africa at the departure gate, because it is nothing like you think it is.” The best advice I could have gotten.
Left: Philip Mallory Jones, Bus Stop at the Edge of Town, 2002, graphic collage. Right: still from Gunilla Mallory Jones & Philip Mallory Jones, Beyond the Mountains, More Mountains, 1975; Philip Mallory Jones, Wassa, 1989.
Tyler Maxin: Some of your works, like the video Wassa (1989), were produced abroad. Were you coming into your travels with specific projects and ideas about what types of videos you were making? Or were you just going with equipment and seeing what happens?
Philip Mallory Jones: Remote location shoots always began with a set of intentions, a starting place. This might be thematic and topical, as well as aesthetic. But there was also always an openness to the real-time situation, and the unanticipated surprises and opportunities that are always present, if not immediately apparent. Any location presents images, moments and interactions that, once captured, might find relevance in other compositions. Central to my approach to location shoots was making opportunities to be still, taking the time to watch and listen, and allow the place and people to reveal themselves. Qualities of light and mist at dawn in rural India, figures emerging from dust clouds in Burkina Faso, movement of soldiers’ shadows on dusty roads in Angola, the piercing gaze of an old woman at the market in Port-of-Spain are all potential elements of future work.
Another aspect of remote location work was the imperative to get the shot. It was always the case that it was very unlikely that I would be coming back. I have one chance, I succeed or I don’t. Consequently, I have on occasion pushed my own boundaries of personal space and sensibilities, and intruded on others, to capture a moment. Sometimes I was aware of these transgressions, sometimes I am made aware by the actions of others, like the vendeuse in Ouagadougou who threatened me with a machete. In either case, the scars on my psyche persist. I’m sure this is a common condition among makers who venture beyond their studio walls.
Tyler Maxin: So then let’s go towards the later ’80s. How did Icono Negro, the exhibition you curated in 1989, come about? I understand that it was at the Long Beach Museum of Art, but then there was also maybe some participation from Schomburg?
Selected pages from the exhibition notes of Icono Negro: The Black Aesthetic in Video Art (Long Beach Museum of Art, June 24th - July 23rd, 1989), including curator’s notes by Jones and a program of the included works.
Philip Mallory Jones: The initial impetus for Icono Negro: The Black Aesthetic in Video Art came from a conversation with Louis Massiah, and his interest in documentary video. Also present at this gathering at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia was Ellis B. Haizlip. Altogether one of the most impactful moments of my life. Louis brought together the people and an idea, and Ellis helped give it form and substance. Ellis was an events producer at the Schomberg Library. It is not an overstatement to say that Ellis changed my life, as he did for numerous others that had the good fortune to move in his orbit.
My take on the idea was more expansive, including work of an aesthetic and non-fiction nature. We solicited submissions and convened a panel of judges that met at the Schomberg. From the pool of submissions, a program of works was selected. Icono Negro premiered at the Long Beach Museum of Art, and then toured to several venues in the US, UK, and Europe.
Ellis was a prodigious figure in American arts and culture. His 1960s PBS TV show, Soul, was ground-breaking and launched the show business careers of many stellar talents. The now-playing film treatment of this phenomenon, Mr. Soul, by his niece Melissa Haizlip, is a brilliant and moving examination of that short-lived program and its impact on American television and culture. I wept several times when I viewed it, and am honored by inclusion in the credits as a contributor.
Tyler Maxin: I haven’t seen it yet, though it seems great. So Icono Negro was in ’89, and then, as I understand it, around 1990 is when you started to more fully embrace emerging digital tools.
Philip Mallory Jones: I turned another corner in my artmaking in 1990. In that year, Arthur Tsuchiya, whom I had known from his time with the NEA media program, introduced me to the Amiga computer, an animation platform. Previous to that, my experience with digital computers was the Altair 8080, in the late 1970s. It was a kit. Operating programs and applications were stored on magnetic cassette tape, and start-up commands were entered manually with a bank of analog switches. The Amiga had a more accessible UI, and it did things. It had a host graphics applications that interfaced with my interests in animation and graphic collage. The Amiga had the capacity to rotoscope frames of video, paint them individually, manipulate duration, layer visual tracks, etc. I loved it and worked on Amigas for several years until its graphic capabilities fell too far behind the Mac.
The Amiga also had the first real-time video capability in the Video Toaster device. In the early 1990s this was revolutionary. I used it extensively in developing Paradigm Shift (1992) and First World Order (1994). There might be fragments of my early work on the Amiga still residing on the several crashed hard drives around my studio. Someday, with proper funds available, I might be able to recover some of that work.
Stills from Philip Mallory Jones, First World Order, 1994, a multi-layered work that weaved verité sequences of arts and cultural expression with interviews and animation.
Tyler Maxin: Can you talk a bit about the First World Order project? What was it and how did it come to be?
Philip Mallory Jones: In 1987, at the Saint Augustine Church, in DC, Dr. Charles Finch III gave a lecture on hieroglyphic in the Nile Valley civilization. It was mind-blowing. It was also affirming and confirming, as I had long suspected there was a lot more to this visual language and these symbolic language systems than the simple-minded interpretations I had read. Interpreting depictions of oxen and corn stocks and a person with a plow as describing peasant life is nursery-rhyme thinking. This is on a temple wall, and it’s supposed to be simply a depiction of ordinary life! No, there must be a lot more going on with that, and many other symbolic language systems, such as Kabbalah and the Hebrew texts, Incan and Maya texts, the Quran, petroglyphs, etc.
Dr. Finch’s clear elucidation and explication of the hieroglyphic texts gave me the grounding to begin my own exploration and research. It became the First World Order project. I thought, I will go and see. I will find the evidence that, in fact, the ancient knowledge systems were useful, productive, sustainable, and persistent. They still exist in the world; you just has to know what you’re looking for. In the Caribbean, for example, in Vodun and Santeria, and Candomblé in Brazil, there are color codes in the religious traditions and knowledge systems that migrated from the African continent to the New World. If you know the code, you can read the story. It’s all there. The same with hieroglyphic: if you know the code, there’s this enormous, profound treatise inscribed on walls that explains how things work, why things are the way they are, and how to live correctly on the Earth.
That research impelled a lot of travel, discovery, and adventure. The first thing that I learned was that I didn’t know anything. That was the first thing. Encountering Africa, India, Fiji, Central America, the Caribbean, I had to learn how to see anew. In doing that, in fact, I found what I was looking for: the evidence of the continuation of these knowledge systems.
I did find it. It is chiseled on the walls. It is on monumental sculptures in India. At Mahabalipuram and many other sites. Built into the architecture of a particular place, there it is. The architecture is a symbolic language. If you know what you're looking at, you know why the roofs curl the way they do, and what that means, and why it’s that way. To imbibe all of that and try to make some sense of it as a human and an artist was a very absorbing and consuming activity for a number of years. This took me to some very out of the way places and allowed me to experience and witness moments that, if I hadn’t seen it, I would have some skepticism about its veracity. There are more things in Heaven and Earth …
Tyler Maxin: Like what?
Philip Mallory Jones: One night, in Belize, Carlos de Jesus, Thomas Allen Harris, and I were sitting in the bar of the dive hotel where we were staying. A young man enters—very dark, with glistening ebony skin, a really fit looking person. This man was chiseled. He was known as “Rubber Man,” because he could turn himself into pretzels. He could dislocate shoulder and hip joints and go into the most amazing contortions. He did this for tips in a bar. He was doing this right in front of us, but we were too tired, at that point, to set up the video and record, just too totally exhausted. He does his “tricks” for a while, and we give him money, because this is amazing. He was basically ignored by everyone else in the bar—he was a regular in there, you know? So we give him a substantial amount, for someone who’s working for tips in a cheap bar in Belize City—and then start to talk to him.
He explained that this contorting of his body is a form of his worship. This is his prayer to and gift from the Creator. He explained that he can move fluids to different parts of his body, he can control his swallowing, and other functions. The man was a sadhu. In India he’d be called a sadhu. He was a holy man, and this was his worship. Listening to him, we could hear the power in his utter conviction and certainty in his practice. It was amazing. It was just amazing. And it was one of those things that came and went, but we were just too beat to get it on tape.
Another phenomenon that we did get on tape, in the same bar, was Miss Daisy. She was, at the time, in 1992, in her mid-eighties. She lived on handouts. She literally lived on the city dump. She lived in a shack at the dump. A neighbor had hooked up a line to a utility pole outside her little shack, so she could have one electric light and a hot plate. She had no plumbing inside. And she would come to this bar each day and they would feed her once or twice a day.
That was how she ate. Everything that she had was given to her. We sat down with her for hours, in the bar and her shack, with the camera rolling. She laid out her philosophy of life, and the worshipful life-practice in which she was engaged. It was the most amazing, beautiful, powerful thing to hear and see. She had no formal schooling, but she had deep knowledge of healing arts. She had one son who wouldn’t acknowledge her when he passed her on the street. The story she told about her life and about how she sees the world was utterly transfixing. We knew we were in the presence of a prophet. We have that on tape. Largely due to the persistence of Thomas, to whom Daisy took an immediate liking.
Investigating the thesis of the First World Order also took Thomas, Carlo, and I to the remote village of Hopkins, on the coast of Belize. There we sat down under a palm tree with a woman who was doing laundry, washing clothes in a tub and hanging them on a line, to dry in the breeze from the Caribbean Sea, a few yards away. We sat with a 9" color monitor and video deck, battery powered, and played Paradigm Shift, which has no spoken language. She watched the 60 second piece twice, and then she told us the story of the piece, in her own words. It was incredible. Listening to her interpretation of my work was, for me, going to church and being confirmed. This person, from a different culture, different native tongue, was telling me the story that I had made. She expressed the story with a poetry and profundity that was clear confirmation, the proof of concept, that the knowledge system persists. This person had read all the codes in the 60 second piece, and told me the story in her own words. That moment made the struggle to get there (and back) worthwhile. Those moments make the whole struggle worthwhile.
Tyler Maxin: Soon after, you started experimenting with interactive media, including CD-ROMs.
Philip Mallory Jones: In the early 1990s, coincidental with my early animation work on the Amiga computer, I became intrigued by the possibilities of the emerging CD-ROM format. I was Resident Artist from 1991 through 2000 at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, at Arizona State University. CD-ROM was the next step, after the laser optical video disc, and opened new vistas for composing, exhibiting, and distributing media work. In 1996, the interactive “game” Herbie Hancock Presents Living Jazz was released and I was enthralled. That piece was my first glimpse at what was clearly to be an abiding direction in my work. Other work by contemporary media artists that informed my thinking was done by Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, who were based in Amsterdam.
In 1995–96, I made my first digital 3D navigable environment, Alchemy. I made it with the Vertice Pro app, from France. Alchemy was the next project after First World Order, and a big step away from real-time video, though not the last. In Alchemy I was attempting to transpose the information and the insights gathered from the First World Order project into a three-dimensional, entirely modeled immersive environment.
In 1995, I began a years-long collaboration with Katherine Milton, when she entered the Educational Media Ph. D. program in ASU’s School of Education. One of our earliest projects, The Negro Ensemble Company CD-ROM was a very early 3D interactive environment piece that combined a number of interests: hers in scripting, interactive media, and mine in 3D modeling and animation, and also in this institution, the Negro Ensemble Company, particularly in its original form. It was very limited but, at the same time, very exciting. That got some real interesting attention from the founding members of the NEC.
Stills from Philip Mallory Jones, Ralph Lemon, Katherine Milton, and John D. Mitchell, Mirrors & Smoke, 1999, a CD-ROM collaboration. On the left, a video of Lemon performing under water; on the right, a 3D environment designed by Jones.
Tyler Maxin: Then there is Mirrors & Smoke (1999), which is a collaboration with Ralph Lemon. What was that like?
Philip Mallory Jones: During my tenure as the only full-time Resident Artist at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, a central focus and research objective of ISA, as established by the Director, Richard L. Loveless, was the investigation of trans-disciplinary collaboration between art-makers and practitioners from other fields.
Mirrors & Smoke was such a project, involving Ralph Lemon, choreographer and performer; Katherine Milton, interactive media designer; and, initially, John Mitchell, sound designer.
We took as a starting point the journals Ralph had written during his extensive research journeys, spanning the globe, from the Caribbean, Africa, and Pacific Islands to remote locations in China. Ralph and I spent several weeks together, over the course of a year, recording his movement ideas in various locations, including the Arizona desert and under fifteen feet of water. Ralph recited journal entries, which were in themselves poetic and evocative. I created the performance space , and Katherine designed the interactive script that allowed the visitor to move around, and, in so doing, determine the sequence of the performance elements.
The performance environment was richly animated, blending video imagery from my research and production travels in Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, the South Pacific, and India. This worked well, because Ralph and I had trod some of the same ground. We knew what these places smelled like, the sounds, and qualities of light. We also shared impressions and experiences of being African American males of similar age in these foreign environments. These familiarities helped establish a rapport that served the collaboration well.
Important guides for my development of the performance space, entirely modelled in digital 3D, came from viewing Jean Cocteau’s film, La Belle et La Bête (1946). I found the minimalist set designs informing and inspiring. Fragments of interior spaces suggested spaces. What was not there was as important as what was there.
I find that idea again in music and painting. Romare Bearden wrote that he learned to paint by listening to Earl “Fatha” Hines play stride piano. Hines said of his style that it is the silence between notes that creates the rhythms. Void defining substance. And pushing that thesis even touches the Nile Valley civilization’s Esoteric knowledge system, which understands things and phenomena as complimentary rather than oppositional. In other words, night and day are not opposite but are aspects of the same thing. Without night, there is no day. Bearden wrote of his work, “Everything is part of something else,” Amen.
Tyler Maxin: It sounds interesting. Do you still have those discs?
Philip Mallory Jones: I do, but that CD-ROM and the software on it is so old that it crashes my system.
Tyler Maxin: Did your experiments in CD-ROMs feel intermediary, like you were playing with this new technology but constantly coming into contact with its limitations?
Philip Mallory Jones: Working with technology tools for as long as I have has taught me to not be frustrated by their limitations. The challenge to me is to be skilled with the tool, to know its capabilities and limitations, and to make work that is polished within those parameters. Also, to make work that is within the envelope of my own craft skillset. Within these bounds is more than enough room to stretch and experiment and invent.
As my long-time collaborator Gunilla Mallory Jones used to say: “You can great work with a stick in sand, if you’re good with a stick.”
The challenge is to make work that is engaging and interesting, and polished. It needs to be coherent, clearly expressing the ideas and intent of the maker. For me, a work of art should be deep enough that a viewer/listener is encouraged to return, and on returning discover something new that wasn’t apprehended the first time.
This project is funded in part by a Humanities New York CARES Grant with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the federal CARES Act. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this oral history does not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Special thanks to Michael Blair, whose editing work made this project possible.
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.