Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation

In another caustic work, 2 Zone Transfer, 1979, framed as a fever dream, Jenkins performs first as a preacher and subsequently as James Brown while his fellow black students at Otis - Kerry James Marshall (Interview AM421), Ronnie Nichols and Greg Pitts - oversee these common representations of blackness by wearing rubber masks of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, which are in turn blacked up. 2 Zone Transfer ends with Jenkins waking and declaring 'After a dream like that I have direction, I know what I'm up against!', thus appearing to signal his resolution to cultivate visual representations of blackness which do justice to it and are not simply palatable to white audiences. Whereas Hammons attempted to do so with the ephemera of black life, Jenkins instead takes advantage of Hammons's observation that the black art form of music is already fully developed, turning away from explicit political didacticism in the early 1980s and developing the intuitive editing style of his documentary work in plenitudinous directions, guided by rhythm and often incorporating Jenkins's jam performances with various musical outfits. [...]whereas the title of Inconsequential Doggerel emphasises how the western world devalues black life, in the most recent work in the retrospective, Planet X, 2006, Jenkins envisages a world in which the black experience is not seen as inconsequential: the film juxtaposes a narrative about an imagined asteroid on a collision course with the Earth alongside news clips of the apocalyptic devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.