words GEOFF NICHOLSON
Kim Jones
walking
wounded
ONE DAY IN 1983, in Washington, DC, the artist Kim Jones walked Mudman is a living sculpture, one that invokes a whole raft of
from the White House to the Vietnam Memorial, a common enough visual associations. He looks grotesque yet vulnerable, sinister perhaps,
route, but Jones’s excursion was made extremely uncommon by the but not humourless. The idea of the man made out of mud is as old
fact that he had transformed himself into his alter ego, Mudman. This as the Golem or Adam, and certainly Jones’s creation has elements
involved coating his body in mud, pulling a thick nylon stocking over of ancient religion: part shaman, part witch doctor, part Wicker Man.
his head, putting on a sort of foam headdress and then strapping to his The structure on his back looks like broken wings, like a cross he has
back a large lattice structure made of wooden slats, tree branches, wax, to bear.
wire, tape and whatnot. He also had a glove on his left hand from which But Mudman also looks like something out of pop culture, a
a number of long wooden spikes protruded all the way to the ground. superhero, though one of the more blighted sort, like Swamp Thing
The effect was, and remains, visually and conceptually compelling. or the Incredible Hulk, and it’s not at all clear what superpowers he
When I talked to Jones about it, he said, “I was stopped along has, if any. The stocking, without holes for eyes or mouth, serves as a
the way by a reporter who seemed worried, and asked if I was trying to blank mask, more inscrutable than Batman’s or Spiderman’s, though like
get arrested. I overheard some cops say, ‘He’s OK. He’s the Mudman.’” them he definitely seems to be hiding something. At the same time
Mudman made his first appearances in and around Los Angeles this very blankness allows viewers to project their own fantasies and
during the mid-1970s; these, in turn, had evolved out of a series of interpretations onto him.
performances and installations, often in Venice, California, where Yet for all the mythic aura surrounding Mudman, some of his
Jones lived at the time. One of Mudman’s most famous walks was a origins are firmly rooted in Jones’s autobiography. Between the ages of
12-hour trek along the 18 miles of Wilshire Boulevard, from downtown seven and ten he suffered from Perthes disease, one of nature’s more
to the ocean in Santa Monica. Over the years he has also walked in savage little jokes, a condition that only affects children, restricting
San Francisco, Chicago, London, Rome, Germany and Switzerland. blood supply to the ball-and-socket joint at the top of the femur, and
Sometimes his own faeces have been added to the mud, while in Rome causing the thigh bones to soften and break. It’s not strictly curable, but
he didn’t use mud at all, preferring yoghurt and cottage cheese. it will pass of its own accord if the body is protected and allowed to
The walking artist is, of course, no novelty. In Britain we’re heal itself. Bed rest, leg braces and wheelchairs tend to be part of the
thoroughly aware of the exploits of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, process, and Jones endured them all. Like a number of artists before
and although Jones knows their work too, he says his own output him, long stretches of Jones’s childhood were spent in bed, where he
is more influenced by the work of Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci and drew, read comics, played with toy soldiers and let his imagination take
Joseph Beuys. him away from his troubling immediate circumstances.
ARTREVIEW eight.linsix.lin
p 86-91 Mudman AR May07.indd 86 30/3/07 00:21:14
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