Oral History: Philip Mallory Jones (Part #1)
We are thrilled to publish the first 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 initial section, facilitated by EAI’s Communications and Special Projects Associate Tyler Maxin, covers Jones’s introduction to the medium, his collaborations with Gunilla Mallory Jones, his interest in comic books, the relationship between video and activism, and more. It has been edited for content and clarity.
Read part two here.
Read part three here.
This conversation is presented alongside Etudes & Riffs: Selected Works by Philip Mallory Jones, an online screening program co-presented with the Maysles Documentary Center, available to view through June 17th.
Philip Mallory Jones (right) holds a Sony Portapak in Haiti. Courtesy the artist.
Tyler Maxin: How did you first get involved in video?
Philip Mallory Jones: I literally stumbled across a Sony Portapak in 1969 and made my first electronic edit in late 1970. And that was that. I remember the night well. I could see the path in front of me with that one crash edit. Since 1969 I’ve been following my nose in terms of exploring media and have moved in various directions and modes.
Tyler Maxin: What was that first encounter? How did that lead to your increasing involvement in the emerging video culture of that time?
Philip Mallory Jones: In 1969, I was writing fiction in the MFA program at Cornell. I unleashed my interest in film animation and photo-chemical photography at the same time. I was attempting to produce a 16mm film while I was in grad school and I ran around that campus trying to generate funds to make a film from a short story that I’d written—with no luck. In the process of trying to raise support, I went to the fine arts library at Cornell and was introduced to the librarian, David Shearer. David was the nexus and catalyst for what developed as the new media community in Ithaca. It was David who suggested that I try this new thing called small-format video.
I stumbled over a box on the floor of the library and in it was the Sony Portapak. It was a record-only deck with no rewind and no play head. Open-reel, half-inch black and white. There was no edit capability for this format at the time I started shooting. When I started shooting my storyboard and shooting script, I knew nothing about film or video production and learned on the fly, and I loved it. It was consuming.
In the process of becoming a part of this group of avant-garde filmmakers and people interested in visual art production around Ithaca—and there were many—a community coalesced around mutual interest and excitement and basic compatibility. And out of that came the Ithaca Video Projects in 1971.
Tyler Maxin: Tell me more about the first student work you made, III: A Black Videodrama (1970).
Philip Mallory Jones: III derived from a short story that I wrote in 1969–70, The Parable of Ramon. Two primary sources informed this piece of fiction writing: my experience living and working in the Mississippi Delta in 1968, and Richie Havens’ composition, “The Parable of Ramon.” (1968) The two are related only in my imagination. It was the haunting sound of the Havens piece that touched something about my perceptions of that place, and one particular person that I had encountered there. In the graduate Writers’ Workshop at Cornell, this story became a screenplay, then a shooting script, and launched an ambitious media production project.
The project became its own exploration and adventure in electronic composition. I did a lot of experiments with different kinds of visual effects. I tried to exploit on the idiosyncrasies of the technology. Sometimes it would do some very strange things to the image. When Sony introduced the first half-inch edit deck the fun really started.
III was my MFA thesis, and it caused a bit of upset. That is, the thesis librarian wanted a bound text to go on a shelf with a catalog number. I had problems with that requirement, in that I considered the video work itself to be the thesis. I came to understand years later, the validity of the thesis librarian’s insistence, but I wasn’t seeing it at the time. I insisted that the videotape itself go on the shelf or in a drawer or whatever they want to do with it.
Jones discussing the making of Omen (a 16mm animation) with Susan Glowski at Ithaca Video Projects, 1972. Courtesy the artist.
Tyler Maxin: You co-founded Ithaca Video Projects, an influential media art center, and helped run it for over a decade. I recall reading that it came together at a Thanksgiving dinner in 1970. What were the next steps? I know it eventually had a storefront?
Philip Mallory Jones: Our starting point was as a collective. In the experimental/alternative media community and in the broader social environment at the time, the collective was a viable, familiar mode for a small group to get organized and do something. This group of seven people decided at Thanksgiving dinner that, yes, we’re going to do this. We will pool our resources, our time and energy, our creativity and we will do this thing called Video Storefront. And via that vehicle each of us would be enabled and empowered in our own interests and our own creative paths. By coming together, we could put all our various talents into collective efforts, and in so doing, we could contribute to the social movement of the day—with its long list of things to do.
We actually did it for 14 years. At a meeting of the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) in the mid ’80s, Mary MacArthur made some cogent remarks as she was leaving her leadership role in The Kitchen. One moment has stuck in my mind: she said that the media art centers are like stars. They have a lifespan. They shine bright for a while and then they go out, and that’s just the nature of things. A penetrating and personal remark, as many of these founding media organizations were looking at very dire futures. That was a very poignant moment for everyone in the room because it was true and beautiful and sad and what we needed to deal with.
Tyler Maxin: You mentioned how the collective also emboldened people’s personal interests. What were some of your own artistic interests at the time? I know that animation was a really key interest for you as you developed videomation.
Philip Mallory Jones: I started making animation in 16mm in 1969, and I built animation stands in order to make projects. That was a lot of fun and very energizing with myriad problems to solve and things I needed to learn. Everywhere I lived, in every studio or apartment, I built some sort of animation rig and would continue to work in that way. I also had an optical printer. It was a great little device—like a tinker toy with a very nice Bolex Cine Special, a nice lens and bellows with gears and stepping motors. It allowed me to do step printing, motion effects, and multiple exposures.
These jerry-rigged devices enabled me to pursue my interests in making images. And in particular, making images that move. Those passions have been central throughout my career. So has an interest in collage. Finding things inside other things that can be used to fashion something else. To me, making art and particularly collage has a lot to do with the fundamentals of the alchemical philosophy, which is that within every substance is the potential for transformation into any other substance. The whole thing about lead to gold is a very questionable framework for looking at what alchemy really is.
Since I’ve been old enough to use hand tools, I’ve built models and miniatures and still do to this day. When I got access to digital modeling tools, I was Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch.
Tyler Maxin: I know that you were interested in the comic book form in the early seventies. In The Avengers Issue Number 76, they print a critique that you wrote on the Black Panther character and his introduction and arc in the previous few issues. You criticize Marvel for their lackluster depiction of a Black superhero and for peddling a narrow “middle American myth bag.” Were you involved in other types of criticism of this sort?
Philip Mallory Jones: The year and a half prior to entering the MFA program in writing at Cornell, I was writing a lot, both fiction and non-fiction. It was interesting for me to dabble in literary criticism, particularly the social-political world that I was in and the rising Black consciousness in art and criticism. These things all fell together with that particular issue of The Avengers. It featured a character called the Black Panther. I was struck by, what I considered, the distortion and subversion of contemporary Black consciousness critique expressed by this character. It was a kind of whitewashing of Black political thinking—the same onerous presumptions that dominated the media presentation of so-called radical Black activities.
I wrote a textual and visual critique of the issue and submitted it to the magazine’s fan letter page—the first time I had done that. I was very surprised, and delighted, that the editor chose to make my letter/critique the sole entry on the following issue’s letter page—no other commentary or letters. The next issue was solely devoted to story editor Roy Thomas’s response to my critique. What I read was disappointing, but not surprising. Thomas put up the same tired rhetoric that was behind the comic character’s portrayal. I recognized that further discourse was futile, and this was driven home by the fan responses to our exchange in the subsequent issue. We were all talking past each other.
Letter from Philip Mallory Jones to Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, printed in its entirety in The Avengers issue #76.
Tyler Maxin: Were your film and animation aspirations related to your interest in comic books?
Philip Mallory Jones: My interest in comic books goes back to when I was old enough to cross the street by myself. I would go to the corner store on Saturday morning and sit by the rack of magazines and read all the new ones that came in before I decided on which one I’d spend my nickel. Part of that process was looking at the pictures and the way pictures were organized on the page. That’s what interested me. I would very systematically go through the comic book, only looking at the pictures and filling in my own narrative. Later, I would go back and read the words. I did that because I was such a slow reader, and it was such a labor to be reading all those words.
I’d follow the pictures through the book, finding the narrative in the way the composition flowed on the page, and also from page to page. My favorites were when the artist broke those frames and flowed image-elements across the fold-out spread. That attraction to the visual narrative and controlling the viewer’s eye in the frame is central to my approach as an artist. How do you first fix the viewer’s eye and then how do you encourage it to move in the frame? That investigation goes to my interest in Russian and Byzantine iconography. Those artworks are really about the composition and how foreground, midground, background relate narratively in the frame and how the size of an object or character is a narrative component as well as a visual component. A symbolic language system.
I got a solid grounding in this approach through reading Romare Bearden’s book The Painter's Mind (1969) as well as his essays published in many journals, interviews with him, and other pieces he’s written. In Bearden’s book, he discusses cave paintings and everything between then and now. He presents an illuminating discussion on traditional Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings and what he learned from studying traditional Chinese calligraphy from his acupuncturist in Manhattan. It really helped organize my thinking about the frame and composition, and about change in the frame as well. Also from Bearden, I got a solid grounding in a musical approach to visual composition, which had been bumping around in my mind for a long time. He describes his process of transposing music composition to the visual and he literally used music notation in his sketches to convey pace, rhythm, color, melody, tone. I’ve read that book at least three times, taking notes each time. I have other foundational guides, as well: Archibald J. Motley Jr, Edward Hopper, Langston Hughes, August Wilson, Charles Mingus, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Claude Debussy.
I’ve learned a lot from listening to Charles Mingus and his bass solos and piano solos, both improvised. Improvised music is something that really intrigues me. I never tire of listening to Mingus’ improvised piano solo, “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blues.” (1964) I love that organization and control. And basically at the heart of everything I do is that desire for control—that nothing in the piece is accidental or unintentional. There can be surprises and serendipitous moments, but if it’s in the piece, it’s intentional. That is foundational.
The other compelling force is the desire to “touch the hem of the angel.” That’s the way Gunilla Mallory Jones expressed it. For me, that’s the reason for making art. It’s not so much about the product, rather it’s that process, which is magical. The art piece is the membrane interface between the seen and unseen; between the tangible, mutable, and transitory, and the sublime Spirit.
Tyler Maxin: At the other end of the Ithaca Video Projects was that collective end of it. I was curious about some of the programs—like its lending libraries. What type of videos did the collective produce and what was the relationship between the collective form and the ongoing social and civil rights issues that were hanging over the sixties and seventies?
Philip Mallory Jones: We sought to work with other grassroots organizations that were moving, in their own way, towards social reform, change, and betterment of the community. For example, we made a piece on family dairy farms in upstate New York that were being decimated by the new rules requiring massive stainless-steel tanks to collect the raw milk. Farmers could only ship their milk to the processors in these huge tanks. Many of the family farms in upstate New York couldn’t afford the tank, so they couldn’t sell their milk. These were farms that had been in families for generations.
Another piece we did was on opera houses in upstate New York, in collaboration with the Finger Lakes Historical Society. We explored the tradition of the small-town opera house that was very strong in 19th-century upstate New York. We also did a piece with the Onondaga Nation during their dispute with the state of New York over the widening of I-81 that ran through Onondaga reservation. We got involved with the tribe in documenting their struggle. We also worked with numerous local arts organizations: dance companies, theater companies, individual artists who were doing things. It kept us quite busy, and we also pursued projects that took us all over the country.
Particularly impactful for me were the pieces that were designed and produced with Gunilla Mallory Jones, which was the most profound—and certainly the longest-lasting—collaboration that I have been part of. She and I were married at the time, which set up a really interesting work relationship. We lived together, worked together, traveled together, and so our conversations together went on all the time. We were constantly bouncing ideas of each other—I mean, around the clock. That whole collaborative relationship and period was based on our absolute mutual respect and trust in what the other had to say, and how the other saw the world, artmaking, and the particulars of the project we were working on.
Tyler Maxin: When did this collaboration begin? What were these works like?
Philip Mallory Jones: That began in 1975. We did a couple projects before then, but in ’75 we went to Haiti, and out of that came Beyond the Mountains, More Mountains (1975). After that, not necessarily in chronological order, we made In the Pictures (1977), a piece about a dancer friend of ours and her relationship with her partner. That was very fanciful, and moved into a speculative and interpretative approach to a non-fiction subject. Portraiture—we were really focused on portraiture. We looked at our work in terms that were similar to a portrait painter or photographer’s work, in that the portrait itself says at least as much about the maker as it does the subject—how the maker sees and interprets the subject. We enjoyed that attitude, and it allowed us a lot of latitude.
We made a piece called Jan Take 2 (1977), another portrait of a close friend of ours and her family, and her transition from child stage star on Broadway to a wife and mother of several living out in the woods in a very rustic setting. How she walked away from stardom and celebrity—she was on stage from the time she was six, and just went right on and on Broadway shows and such. We made Black, White, and Married (1978), which really pushed our experience—Gunilla being Swedish-born—looking, as best we could, at the subject of interracial marriage.
We got really loose with Extra Rooms (1979), from the late ’70s. It was based on and impelled by Gunilla’s dreams and poetry. We thought that was an interesting place to start for the production of a video broadcast. We really got experimental in terms of our narrative and visual approach to the subject. We emphasized the beauty of the composition, the movements of camera, and particularly stillness. Gunilla taught me a lot about a certain kind of aesthetic sense. It had a lot to do with her European upbringing. Her sense of time and timing, which was not so deeply influenced by television timing as mine was. We bumped heads about that over the years, but at the same time, I became more sensitive, aware, and loose about the duration of a shot or a transition, or so on. That has been a good set of lessons that has stuck with me over the years.
Title card stills from Gunilla Mallory Jones & Philip Mallory Jones, No Crystal Stair and The Trouble I’ve Seen (both 1976).
Tyler Maxin: What about The Trouble I’ve Seen (1976) and No Crystal Stair (1976), both of which are featured in the online screening program currently featured at Maysles?
Philip Mallory Jones: No Crystal Stair was another work from that period. Blondell Cummings came to town, and we worked with her for a while. I can’t recall what the initial impetus for the piece was aside from an abiding interest in Langston Hughes’s poetry and my interest in animation, collage, and fabricating illusion. That was in that period when we were consciously experimenting with narrative forms, conveying ideas in a poetic visual-sound approach. It’s quite eclectic—it was really this pastiche of inclinations and ideas. We built the whole piece around these experiments with animated sequences, sounds, voice recordings.
The Trouble I’ve Seen, a work of impressionistic non-fiction, began with the field research work that my mother, Dorothy Mallory Jones, was doing in central and south Georgia from 1974 to 1976. A writer of fiction and poetry, she conducted an independent research project in small towns and backwoods, recording the stories and memories of old Black people. She recorded the memories and songs of men and women, some of whom were over one hundred years old. They talked about things that happened in the early years of the 19th century that they had heard about directly from the people who were there then. It was a bicentennial ode to America.
Tyler Maxin: I wanted to ask about The Bust of Timothy Leary (1970) and how it came together. The tape depicts the house arrest of Dr. Leary, who had recently absconded from the United States, by Eldridge Cleaver, then in exile in Algeria. It involved sending someone to Algiers with a Portapak.
Philip Mallory Jones: In the early 1970s, I was associated with the Black Panther Party and was doing things in support of Panther activities. There was a lot going on in New Haven with Party members incarcerated. There was tension and confusion around the country due to the schism within the party thanks in some degree to the successful FBI infiltration and disruption program. Between the arrest warrants and intra-Party tensions, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver and Field Marshall Donald “DC” Cox relocated to Algiers, Algeria. There they established the Intercommunal Section of the Black Panther Party.
At the same time, at Cornell, I was part of the group that formed the Video Experimental Graduate Association (VEGA), which had a nice space in Uris Library and basic production and editing equipment. This was where I made my electronic edit. A main instigator in this founding group, Guy Pignolet, had the idea to go to Algiers and shoot video at the Panther Party headquarters. We managed to secure a Portapak, tape, and batteries. Guy traveled to Algeria, through Canada and a couple other places, and knocked on the door. They let him in and he was permitted to record only. Coincidentally, Timothy and Rosemary Leary were in-residence, also evading apprehension on federal warrants in the US. Plus, a Rolling Stone reporter was there, doing his now-famous interview with Timothy and Rosemary. Cleaver had two stipulations for Guy’s recording: the only narration would be Cleaver’s unedited voice and the video equipment would stay with him in Algiers. This tape would be Eldridge Cleaver’s policy pronouncement to the Panther Party in the US.
Once we had made this piece, we started to distribute it and show it to audiences, including Panther Party members. I went to New Haven to a rally to free some Panthers that were in jail. I showed up on the Yale campus that night and found my contacts in the Party. They knew that I had this material and had been screening it. My contact escorted me to a phone—there was someone on the line. It was the Minister of Information from the New York chapter, a fierce woman that I only knew by reputation. She ordered me to turn over all of the material I had to my contact whom I’d known for several years. I was to cease and desist all distribution and all commentary, and say nothing about this videotape ever again—this tape never happened.
That was basically the end of my direct involvement with the Panther Party. I was totally floored. I thought it was a good idea that Eldridge Cleaver got to say what he wanted to say, and that this was made known to the Party in this country. The Party didn’t see it that way. I understand that. I’ve run into that in other places, too, in Angola, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire. It hasn’t sat well in those places either.
But that’s the struggle, and that struggle was fundamental to the founding of Ithaca Video Projects. How do we as individuals, small groups, and communities seize control of the information about us: the information that we receive and the messages that we put out? That was always an important and fundamental part of what Ithaca Video Projects was doing. All of the early media arts centers, in one way or another, were dealing with that struggle.
Two stills from The Bust of Timothy Leary, shot by Guy Pignolet and featuring Eldridge Cleaver, 1971. Image description: left, black and white profile image of Eldridge Cleaver and Donald L. Cox in the Black Panthers international headquarters, Algeria; right, Timothy Leary smokes a cigarette on the floor of the Algiers headquarters. The video is available to view via Video Out Distribution here.
Tyler Maxin: Right, and that was a novel proposition at the time.
Philip Mallory Jones: An amazing scene happened in 1970. There was a large music festival called Sky River outside Portland in Washougal, Washington, out in the woods. But at the same time there was also the American Legion national convention in Portland. I went to the American Legion parade with my Portapak. I’d been living in the woods for several days—I literally had pine needles in my hair and beard. I’m in hippie garb, and I’ve got video equipment.
There were several moments in that event that really stick with me: the parade is going down the main street. and I’, just walking along, shooting the spectators. I got some amazing responses. A lot of very hostile, aggressive responses, a few mystified or amused—but a lot of animosity. I clearly didn’t fit this event.
When I got to the review stand, I was in front of a bleacher full of white men in uniforms with medals. I mean, these were serious officers up there, and their wives, and a few men in business clothes with the lapel pins and sunglasses. The men paid no attention to me. Several of the women did, and they were most cordial. They wanted to know, “What are you doing?” I had several conversations standing in front of the review stand with the wives of those officers. Then I went out in the middle of the street and laid down with my camera. Down the street, in single file, came the motorcycle drill team of the Indiana State Police.
As I laid in the middle of the street, they broke out all around me doing this drill on their motorcycles: loud, big machines, swirling around me. Then down the street came a corps of drum majorettes in their high white boots and short skirts and hats with the military strap under their lip, doing their drills. They came right down the street at me, and I was shooting rows of white boots marching by. And it was great. It was a great scene.
Tyler Maxin: Wow, does that tape exist anywhere? Sounds interesting.
Philip Mallory Jones: Most unlikely. I left all the tapes with Video Free America, San Francisco. That whole scene at Sky River was quite something from a technical, location shoot point of view. I mean, the stage was literally built during the festival. I helped build it the night before the festival opened.
The festival was, in fact, a bold experiment in community organizing. There was a clinic and a school. The plan for Sky River was that if you bought an 11-day pass, you owned a share in that property. The festival would buy the property from the farmer who owned it, and establish the community of Sky River, Washington. If you bought the ticket, you had a place to live for the rest of your life, if you wanted to, on that land. There were many people who participated but didn’t engage with the music festival. Instead, they went way up in the woods and started building homes. There were some amazing structures built in 11 days out there with what they could find around them. It was quite interesting.
That was just part of the excitement and the adventure of Ithaca Video Projects and collective action, feeling that we were 1) empowered to do something and 2) actually having the liberty to go somewhere with the technology in our hands to make something and then to be able to get it seen. We did things like going into the Fall Creek House Tavern at the shift change time from the Ithaca Gun Company, which was right overhead on the bluff. When the shift change happened at Ithaca Gun, the workers would come down the hill and roll into the Fall Creek House for their afternoon beer. We went in there one afternoon, and got the owner’s permission to place a small monitor on the bar in a corner. I played the tapes that we’d been making about dairy farms and other local topics.
We were mostly ignored. A few people paid occasional attention and some asked a few questions. But we wanted to see what would happen. We did a number of guerilla actions like that to see if there was a contact point. Do these very separated communities within this very small area of Ithaca and Tompkins County in the Finger Lakes ever come in contact? Do they ever exchange? Mostly, the answer seemed to be no, but we made an effort, in our small way, to catalyze engagement.
Jones flies a kinetic kite sculpture at the Annual Ithaca Kite Festival, 1987. Courtesy the artist.
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.
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.