Joseph Bueys and Howard Hughes

I recently saw Leonardo Dicaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. The decimation of Hughes’ life and psyche after his accident caused me to wonder if there are some catastrophes of such magnitude that life becomes inappropriate for the victim. By escaping death in impossibly narrow terms, the survivor is thrown into a rift between what should be and what actually is. The survivor was conscious for their own physical deconstruction, and must go through a period of psychological fissure during which rituals are performed that constitute “rebirth.”

The circumstances of near death and ritualistic rebirth that Hughes underwent are strikingly similar to the story of Joseph Bueys. Both suffered a single-man plane crash. Both burned. Both survived only by the heroic intervention of another. Oddly, both accidents were in the mid-1940's. And afterwards, both were pretty crazy; but there were distinct methods to their madness. Bueys’ obsession with the felt-and-fat agents of his salvation is comparable in purpose to Hughes’ OCD quarantine regiment. Hughes patted around naked in a locked room for several months with a looping plane crash reel and fastidiously consumed nothing but glass bottled milk that he then used to organize his own urine. By covering themselves in rituals that in some way signified their death, both men sought a fetal state and a cleansing. The difference between them is mainly contextual. Bueys’ semi-psychological break ran its course in the name of Art while Hughes declined from (business) competency in shameful secret. The fact is that had Hughes chosen to inflict his quarantine in a glass box instead, his symbology would be a ripe performance vocabulary to go along with that of his kindred contemporary.




for nice anecdotes on Hughes:
http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/howard_hughes.htm
scroll down to the Time mag cover

Ben Jones at Deitch Projects

A context for Ben Jones’s media room snaps into focus strolling through Times Square on any night of the year. Reality filling digital planes are a hyper-reality in the urban epicenter, behaving with the tacit normalcy of a brazen heterotopia— a city built not from concrete but a rapacious pixel takeover. Screens are in the air and in the seams, blending and dominating from silent totemic towers. In the frigid months Jones gives us a much warmer telematic embrace. The body heat helped with that. The blinking helped as well. And the tangling with projections streams to navigate the room. But above all it was the whirrr of holy noise in white that tinged the consumption with pleasure. If Times Square could emanate holy holds on the upper end of a key board in the same way then we would probably all blank out like incinerable moths. Concentric patterns in op-art colors with moving projections laid over top! Ancient mystics wish they could have gotten hold of such a trick. But without the mystical ‘path of the warrior’ to precipitate the mind altered moment, does sensation have any meaning? Of course not, unless we invest it with meaning. The Gumby Buddha of Jones’s shrine has parallel characters in Times Square that give us a shift to consider about meaning. I nominate Bruce Springsteen. After his utterly embarrassing ax-swinging Boss antics for the Super Bowl half-time show, the current Rolling Stone cover and his giant likeness on 42nd and 5th, it is apparent that our emblematic exaltations are a purely malleable rouse, although sadly not always so easy to render with a nostalgic vector. Gumby is one ounce more meaningless than Bruce Springsteen as a banal mascot of the telematic sensory (and the puffy dalliance of sensory with its cousin the spiritual). Gumby is drained of corporate interest and so his banality bears the strength of an orphaned blank slate, created and perpetuated by the entertainment-media mechanism that alone wields the strength to culturally glue us, but whose likeness is now free to be appropriated as a means of identification alone. And so Ben Jones gives us a generation’s plasticine identity index coupled with the quickest route to affects of a mystical vision, or the warm hug that someone should call Roy Ascott about so he can come a little closer to telematic coitus.