The art world loves a clean obituary. They want to package Ulysses Jenkins, who passed away at 79, as a "pioneer" whose "discovery" by the mainstream was a triumph of justice over time. It’s a comfortable narrative for curators who spent forty years ignoring him. They frame his recent retrospectives at the Hammer Museum and ICA Philadelphia as the crowning achievement of a long, patient climb.
That narrative is a lie.
Ulysses Jenkins didn't need the institution to validate his work; the institution needed Jenkins to validate its sudden interest in "diversity" after decades of systemic exclusion. To call him a "pioneer" implies he was clearing a path for others to follow into the white cube. In reality, Jenkins was building an entirely different city while the art world was still obsessed with the aesthetics of the gallery wall.
The Problem With the Pioneer Label
When we label an artist a "pioneer" only after they hit 70, we are admitting that we were too blind to see the fire when it was burning at its hottest. Jenkins was working with portable video—the Sony Portapak—in the early 1970s. He wasn't just "experimenting" with a new toy. He was weaponizing a medium to dismantle the televised image of Blackness.
The "pioneer" tag is a backhanded compliment. it suggests that the value of the work lies in its chronological priority rather than its ongoing disruption. Jenkins wasn't just "first." He was right. He understood that the television screen was the primary site of psychological warfare in America. While his contemporaries were painting canvases that would eventually hang in corporate lobbies, Jenkins was performing Mass of Mixture and Two-Zone Transfer, pieces that interrogated the very soul of how we consume "truth."
The Institutional Capture of the Radical
The sudden surge of interest in Jenkins in the 2020s wasn't a discovery. It was a capture.
I’ve seen this cycle repeat in the art market for twenty years. A movement or an artist operates on the periphery, creating a language that is raw, urgent, and inconvenient. Then, the market matures. The curators need fresh "historical" meat to satisfy the demand for social relevance. They reach back, pull an artist like Jenkins into the light, and pat themselves on the back for their "discovery."
It’s a classic case of survivorship bias. We celebrate Jenkins now because he lived long enough to be useful to the current political climate of the museum industrial complex. We ignore the hundreds of his contemporaries whose tapes rotted in damp basements because there was no "Dogtown" or "Othervisions" collective to preserve them.
The nuance that the obituaries miss is that Jenkins’ work was designed to be ephemeral. It was performance. It was community-based. It was the antithesis of the static, high-value object. By turning him into a "canonical figure," we are sanding down the sharp edges of his critique.
Video as Voodoo: The Tech They Ignored
Jenkins famously described his work as "video voodoo." This wasn't some mystical fluff. It was a precise technical and cultural strategy. He used the electronic signal to "cast a spell" or, more accurately, to break the one the media had already cast.
Standard art history tries to link Jenkins to the white video art canon—Nam June Paik or Bill Viola. That’s a lazy comparison. While Paik was playing with the formal qualities of the cathode ray tube, Jenkins was using the scan lines to perform an exorcism of the "Sambo" and "Zip Coon" archetypes that haunted the American airwaves.
The tech was the message. The low-resolution, grainy, feedback-heavy aesthetic of 1970s video wasn't a limitation; it was a choice. It was a rejection of the "polished lie" of network television.
The Myth of the "Patient" Artist
There is this patronizing idea that Jenkins was "waiting" for his moment. This suggests that the goal of every artist is to eventually be traded like a commodity at Art Basel.
Jenkins spent years teaching at UC Irvine. He wasn't in a waiting room; he was in a laboratory. He was training the next generation to think outside the frame. The "slow burn" of his career wasn't a tragedy of missed timing. it was a deliberate choice to remain unbought and unbossed.
When people ask, "Why did it take so long for him to get a solo museum show?" the answer isn't "the world wasn't ready." The answer is "the gatekeepers were protecting a status quo that Jenkins was actively trying to destroy."
Challenging the "Legacy" Narrative
What do we do with a legacy like this? Most critics will tell you to go to a museum and look at the digitized versions of his tapes.
I’m telling you to do the opposite.
If you want to honor Ulysses Jenkins, stop looking at the screen as a window and start looking at it as a mirror. His work demands that we question the "meta-image"—the layers of construction that define our identity before we even wake up.
His death isn't a time for somber reflection on a "pioneer." It’s a time to acknowledge that the battles he was fighting in 1972 with a 20-pound camera are the same ones we’re losing today with smartphones in our pockets. We have more "video" than ever, yet we are less aware of how it’s being used to program our reality.
The industry wants to turn Jenkins into a statue. We should keep him as a ghost—something that haunts the edges of our perception and reminds us that the image is never neutral.
Stop calling him a pioneer. Start calling him a warning.
The work isn't finished just because the artist is gone. The screen is still on. The spell is still active.
Turn off the museum lights and look at the static. That’s where he’s actually living.
Pick up the camera and break something. Would you like me to analyze the specific technical evolution of the Othervisions collective or deconstruct the specific "meta-images" Jenkins targeted in his 1978 masterpiece?
