JIM JARMUSCH:“some more collages” at James Fuentes

by LAWRENCE GIPE April 17, 2025

   On the shelf in my Los Angeles art studio are two dusty volumes left over from my MFA days in the 80’s: “Mythologies” and “Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes. Of the theory trafficked in those years, these two books always struck me as the most comprehensible and personal. They came back to mind, as I was elbowing my way through Jim Jarmusch’s opening reception for “Some More Collages” at James Fuentes Gallery - it occurred to me that if Monsieur Barthes was still alive and theorizing, he’d find some grist for his mill in this thoughtful and quietly provocative exhibition.

   Just wild speculation, I know. But, I think Barthes would be entertained by Mr. Jarmusch’s myth-busting, and also how he tweaks the genre itself. These are not “collages” in the usual assembled sense. The term is – no surprise - French (to glue  - “coller”). A collage is generally composed of multiple images clipped (and, ultimately, dislocated) from media sources like newspapers and magazines. The pieces are arranged, layered and eventually glued together to create a new composition, one which – in the case of famous collage artists like John Heartfield or Hannah Höch – often critiques the “bourgeois” sources from whence they came.

   In the pieces that comprise this latest series, Jarmusch works this notion backwards. New meaning is achieved by taking away, rather than adding. At the origin, Jarmusch chooses a newspaper image that contains figures; with a small pick, he burrows out a hole where the faces and bodies are exposed, and essentially erases the identities of those pictured. Then – significantly – he glues them down on black paper, creating ominous voids where once was life. This technique separates him from kindred spirits like John Baldessari, whose use of dots and shapes involved stacking and blocking out, rather than an erasure process.

Jarmusch probably selects his collage images intuitively, but their “mythological” content is apparent and fair game for re-evaluation – no more so than when he takes a crack at Picasso. The decision to use black as the background functions differently in each piece, but in his deconstruction of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” this combination bristles with semiotics resonance. While no doubt a canonical masterpiece, Jarmusch implicates its nevertheless problematic fit within current views on colonialism. Picasso was, of course, “inspired” by African art, and masks in particular (in one memorable photo of Picasso in his apartment, pieces nicked from the Louvre were prominently displayed on his mantlepiece). When Jarmusch scrapes away at the mask-like faces of the prostitutes of Avignon St., their abstracted (and colonialized) identities are erased. Ironically, by pasting these voids onto blackness, he references the “otherness” that inspired the art and still haunts us today. 

Having blown the dust off of “Mythologies”, a good finish for the Barthes-Jarmusch connection is “Camera Lucida” - the theorist’s very personal look at photographs. In it, there are two concepts proposed for discussing vernacular pictures, which Barthes gave the Latin names: studium and punctum. The studium describes the overall stance of the image within the frame of politics, culture and linguistics.  The punctum, which refers to a puncture or wound, is what he calls an incident in the image that creates an anecdotal reaction in the mind of the viewer (for instance, reacting to a portrait photo, Barthes obsesses on one of the subject’s fingers, which is wrapped in a small bandage). 

Placing this template on the “Some More Collages” series, one could say that Jarmusch roams the studium freely - with curiosity and abandon - in a non-hierarchical search for the “right” clip to erase into. My favorites are the group photos, like a symphony orchestra or a political rally, where the multiple identities look as if they were riddled out by BB-gun practice. At any rate, be it Picasso or baseball players, all of the images chosen for final détournement are given a literal punctum by Jarmusch in the form of ragged little wounds. These delicately rendered holes reveal only darkness - empty spaces that once were inhabited by a specific narrative and identity. In the end, Jarmusch leaves it up to the viewer to fill the voids, which is what a lot of great art does. Roland would be proud. WM

All images:

Untitled, 2023
Initialed recto, numbered and dated verso
Newsprint collage on paper 

11 1/8 x 11 1/8 x 1 inches (framed)

JIM JARMUSCH

"some more collages"
March 29—April 26, 2025

at James Fuentes Gallery, Los Angeles, CA