Last Friday, Kim Jones performed as Mudman for our opening celebration. The performance and exhibition opening was a provocative event that brought a range of visitors to the museum to enjoy themselves while exploring the fascinating sculptures, drawings, photographs and videos of Kim Jones: A Retrospective in Mudman’s presence. Jen Graves examined the performance at the Henry in the Slog on Monday, raising interesting points on the evolution of Mudman/Kim Jones with the passing of time and in relation to the audience dynamics at play on Friday.
Among one of the groups that approached Mudman, I found myself asking him questions about the context of the performance. However, as expected, a sculpture doesn’t want to put definitive answers on such things (though he did lift his pantyhose mask at one point in the conversation). But I was most interested in how Mudman was in a museum (not on a 12-mile walk in Los Angeles) surrounded by a group specifically there to see a retrospective of his work, rather than strangers on the street.
While being inside of the museum, surrounded by Jones’s art may have made meeting Mudman less of a surprise, watching the Henry audience interact with him very much emphasized that he was a walking, talking sculpture inside the same white cube structure that similarly affects the way we look at and interact with a painting or a photograph. Although Mudman held the attention of his audience longer than the 3 seconds some studies claim museum visitors spend on average with a work of art, the dynamics seemed similar: most people kept their distance, weary of fully engaging with Mudman through conversation, while a few boldly entered the 3 ft-radius surrounding this sculpture. While this is avoidance of interaction is likely always part of experiencing Mudman, I couldn’t help but wonder if on the street or the beach would be different, if people would be more willing to “touch”, or interact with this figure in unexpected ways that are not as possible within museum walls. Or, if Mudman himself would be different elsewhere, perhaps lie a bit more, without museum prestige in the air.
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