William E. Jones
Filmmaker William E. Jones edits together sequences from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn to create a discursive arena in which to consider the desires implicit in sexual imagery. His short films are at once explorations of the complexities of homosexual identity and nostalgic recollections of an erstwhile gay culture drastically altered since the onset of AIDS. For the most part editing out hard-core scenes, Jones allows his pieces to focus on the language of body movement and even landscape as sites for subtler fantasy and romanticism.
Earlier works, like his 2004 music documentary Is It Really So Strange?, contextualize Jones’s more pornographic, cinematically experimental pieces as highly specific fascinations with fetish and style in popular culture. Formally, his shorts retain some of the camp qualities inherent to the films they were cut from, with awkwardly staged situations, bad acting, and diverse sexual settings. In this they’re akin to Jack Smith’s and George Kuchar’s filmic experiments. For more recent works, however, Jones has downplayed the camp aspect by showing found footage without soundtrack or splicing in ironic audio alternatives to lend layers of cultural reference to footage rooted firmly in a specific time and place.
His work has been …
Filmmaker William E. Jones edits together sequences from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn to create a discursive arena in which to consider the desires implicit in sexual imagery. His short films are at once explorations of the complexities of homosexual identity and nostalgic recollections of an erstwhile gay culture drastically altered since the onset of AIDS. For the most part editing out hard-core scenes, Jones allows his pieces to focus on the language of body movement and even landscape as sites for subtler fantasy and romanticism.
Earlier works, like his 2004 music documentary Is It Really So Strange?, contextualize Jones’s more pornographic, cinematically experimental pieces as highly specific fascinations with fetish and style in popular culture. Formally, his shorts retain some of the camp qualities inherent to the films they were cut from, with awkwardly staged situations, bad acting, and diverse sexual settings. In this they’re akin to Jack Smith’s and George Kuchar’s filmic experiments. For more recent works, however, Jones has downplayed the camp aspect by showing found footage without soundtrack or splicing in ironic audio alternatives to lend layers of cultural reference to footage rooted firmly in a specific time and place.
His work has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, and at the Oberhausen Film Festival; and has been shown at shown at the Louvre, Palais de Tokyo, the Cinémathèque française in Paris, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Walker Art Center, St. Louis Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. He was included in the 1993 and 2008 Biennial Exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and his work was on view in the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.
Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan, Italy
The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Scotland
