Existing comment:
Kim Jones
born San Bernardino, CA 1944
Mudman Structure (large)
1974
sticks, mud, rope, foam rubber, shellac, and acrylic; shown with chair, boots, and bucket of mud
Courtesy of Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
Jones created his "Mudman" persona in the years following his service as a marine in Vietnam. Of his time there, he wrote, "sweat like pigs work like dogs live like rats red dust covered everything." In his performance Wilshire Boulevard Walk, Jones marched eighteen miles across Los Angeles, first from sunrise to sunset and, a week later, from sunset to sunrise. He traveled with a structure of bound sticks strapped to his back and his body slathered in mud, evoking the "red dust" of Đông Hà. Both imposing and vulnerable, Mudman speaks to the challenge of reconciling wartime and peacetime lives. Nine months after the North Vietnamese victory, Jones in Wilshire Boulevard Walk confronted passersby as a phantom of a war just ended -- but a war that, for many veterans, was still marching on |