Jim Pomeroy (artist)

Jim Pomeroy
Born (1945-03-21)March 21, 1945
Died April 6, 1992(1992-04-06) (aged 47)
Nationality American
Other names James C. Pomeroy
Occupation artist

James C. "Jim" Pomeroy (March 21, 1945 Reading, Pennsylvania – April 6, 1992, Arlington, Texas) was an American artist whose practice spanned a variety of media including performance art, sound art, photography, installation art, sculpture, and video art.

Early life and education

Jim Pomeroy was born March 21, 1945, in Reading, Pennsylvania. The family moved to a small town in Texas when he was three, and then to Montana when he was sixteen. Pomeroy developed an early interest in model airplanes and electrical machines, and his science-related interests were encouraged in high school.[1]

Pomeroy went to the University of Texas, Austin, initially planning to go into physics but discovering that he wasn't very good at it. He switched his major to art and studied stone sculpture, ceramics, and painting for five years, leaving with a B.A. in 1968. He began working in an Abstract Expressionist style before migrating to Minimalism and Conceptualism and bringing industrial processes, materials, and methods into his work. Under the influence of artists like Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, and Tony Smith, he left Texas in 1968 and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his M.A. (1971) and M.F.A. (1972) in art from the University of California at Berkeley.[2] To support himself in graduate school and for several years afterwards, Pomeroy worked as a preparator at museums and galleries in California and Texas.

Career

In the 1970s and 1980s, Pomeroy was a prominent figure in the performance art and installation activity associated with Bay Area conceptual art.[3] He disliked the rigid separations between media maintained by most art schools and referred to himself as a "general practitioner"[4] and is now considered a pioneer in the field of new media art, developing an anti-spectacular, witty aesthetic that fed on his lifelong interest in popular mechanics, informal science experiments, garage invention, and home-brewed technology. Among his friends and collaborators are such artists as Perry Hoberman, Paul Kos, and Paul DeMarinis and the curator Suzanne Foley. DeMarinis describes him as a quintessential artist-tinkerer, one of a generation of artists who, growing up in the era of the first space program, "had been inculcated with the codes of science and technology, but who had reterritorialized them to identify technology with culture."[5] Two of his best-known pieces of the mid 1970s, Mozart's Moog and Fear Elites, used music-box mechanisms to raise questions about the role of the human performer in an era of increasingly automated and synthetic forms of music production. Other works, such as Newt Ascending Astaire's Face and Turbo Pan, are partly inspired by 19th century technologies such as the zoetrope. He also created a pair of works, Composition in Deep/Light at the Opera and Clear Bulbs Cast Sharp Shadows, based on 3D technology of the period and requiring anaglyphic (red-green) glasses for viewing.

Pomeroy co-founded the artist-run space 80 Langton Street (later renamed New Langton Arts) in San Francisco. In 1999, on the occasion of New Langton Arts's 25th anniversary, the space organized a posthumous Jim Pomeroy retrospective, catalogue, and website.[6] He also exhibited and performed at numerous museums and galleries around the United States, including the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, the San Jose Museum of Art (California), the Dallas Museum of Art (Texas), the Walker Art Center (Minnesota), and the Albright-Knox Gallery (New York). He published essays in a number of art magazines, including Afterimage and High Performance. At the same time, he remained highly critical of the way in which the mainstream art world depended on—but often failed to credit—the work being done in alternative spaces like his. Most famously, for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's influential 1980 exhibition of conceptual and performance art entitled “Space/Time/Sound–1970’s: A Decade in the Bay Area", Pomeroy contributed a piece entitled Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog, consisting of his scathing article “Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog” (which had been commissioned by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art two years earlier), together with enlarged reproductions of his correspondence with exhibition curator Suzanne Foley pursuing further reflections on the subject.[7]

Pomeroy was on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute for a while before moving on in 1987 to become a tenured faculty member in the Media Arts Department at the University of Texas, Arlington. When the desktop computer emerged towards the end of his life, he taught his students that computers were "as important a tool for an artist as a pencil or a camera."[1]

Pomeroy died unexpectedly of an acute subdural hematoma two weeks after suffering a concussion from a fall.[8] The Jim Pomeroy Archive is located at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.[9]

Selected Works

References

  1. 1 2 Jim Pomeroy memorial website, "Interview" page
  2. ↑ Jim Pomeroy memorial website, "Resume" page
  3. ↑ Loeffler, Carl E.; Tong, Darlene. Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art. Last Gasp, 1987 (Google Books). ISBN 978-0-86719-366-4. Retrieved 2010-09-19.
  4. ↑ Grant, Susan kae. "One Man's Museum". In For a Burning World Is Come to Dance Inane: Essays by and About Jim Pomeroy, Timothy Druckery and Nadine Lemmon, eds. Critical Press, 1993.
  5. 1 2 DeMarinis, Paul. "The Boy Mechanic: Mechanical Personae in the Works of Jim Pomeroy." In For a Burning World Is Come to Dance Inane: Essays by and About Jim Pomeroy, Timothy Druckery and Nadine Lemmon, eds. Critical Press, 1993.
  6. ↑ Jim Pomeroy memorial website, "Retrospective" page.
  7. ↑ Zimbardo, Tanya. "Jim Pomeroy–Viewing the Museum: The Tale Wagging the Dog". SFMOMA website, Oct. 5, 2009.
  8. ↑ Jim Pomeroy memorial website, "Notes on Jim's Death" page.
  9. ↑ Center for Creative Photography, index to the collection

Selected writings

Selected bibliography

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