Searching, finding, filing

Jess, A Western Prospect of Egg and Dart, 1988. Printed papers and jigsaw puzzle parts mounted on board, 56 1/4 x 79 3/4 in. (142.8 x 202.6 cm). Gift of the Marion L. Ring Estate, by Exchange, 1989. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

 Jenny Odell in an article about collage artist Jess: article-https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/13-ways-jenny-odell?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Odell article on collage artist Jess

Not that I think anyone who looks at Jess’s more complex paste-ups would believe they were easy to make, but as someone who works according to a similar logic, I know the unseen periphery of time required of each composition. Some of Jess’s paste-ups took years to make, and his unfinished project Narkissos took decades. This would have included not just cutting and pasting, but noticing, first of all. In one interview, Jess told the curator Michael Auping that he salvaged most of his imagery from books, magazines, and postcards wasting away in thrift stores, but that images could also be salvaged from “a possible obscurity” if they had “spoken up out of the matrix of images that surround them.” Auping reports that Jess treated his scraps like family heirlooms and would sometimes hold on to a clipping for more than 20 years. While 90 percent of his filed-away scraps never made it into a piece, Jess would “ritualistically continue the process of searching, finding, and filing.”