Telephone Pole Piece, Los Angeles (1978)

“Kim Jones: A Retrospective” will be on view at the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, March 24-May 19.

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Though crippled by a disease similar to polio as a boy, Kim Jones joined the Marines in his early 20s and was sent to Vietnam. It was a miraculous recovery, the sort from which super heroes are made, except that Jones later turned himself into an anti-superhero he called Mudman.

He was a pioneer of performance art, of which the only surviving records are often documentary photographs. Mudman was Jones’ reincarnation as a primordial or post-historical being. He was a creature from the swamp who arrived slathered in mud, carrying on his back a fretwork of sticks held together with wire and foam rubber. Mudman was a madman who first attracted wider attention while walking the length of Wilshire Boulevard on a day in 1976.

When a reporter asked about the crazy get-up, he said, “I’ve been thinking about becoming a tree.” This was the least sinister association he evoked. He was a fallen angel with exoskeleton wings, a TV antenna manque, a little boy held up by leg braces that were the burden he bore every day. In this photograph, he is the power grid gone awry, a reminder of how primitive our high-tech civilization is.