JESSE WAUGH: Portrait of an Artist and His Strivings for Pulchrism

By Waugh, Jesse

Book Id: WPLBN0002827639
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 57.14 MB
Reproduction Date: 5/21/2012

Title:	JESSE WAUGH: Portrait of an Artist and His Strivings for Pulchrism
Author:	Waugh, Jesse
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, Fine Arts, Artist Monograph
Collections:	Authors Community, Art
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Carpophage Press

Member Page:	Jesse Waugh
Citation APA MLA Chicago Waugh, B. J. (n.d.). JESSE WAUGH: Portrait of an Artist and His Strivings for Pulchrism. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.us/

Description
Spanning periods spent in a vast range of locations, an identifiable style begins to crystallize, which links seemingly disparate expressions, heedless of media employed. A forthright, earnest, and earthy vein courses through the works of Jesse Waugh, as he endeavors to deliver pulchritude manifest. The compendium concludes with The Pulchrist Manifesto, which should serve to define the art movement which has been inaugurated by Jesse Waugh.

Summary
Illuminated in this monograph are over six hundred illustrations demonstrating the results of Jesse Waugh's attempts to create beauty. Beginning with an overview of his film and image works, and expanding into an encyclopaedic survey of his efforts in a variety of genres, JESSE WAUGH: Portrait of an Artist and His Strivings for Pulchrism offers a complete guide to the accomplishments of an emerging artist.

Excerpt
I first noticed Jesse Waugh as a young student at L.A.City College in 1995. He would sit in the History of Cinema class, on the right hand side of one of the front rows of the college movie theater, with his roaring twenties-style, buzzed-on-the-back-and-sides, neatly-combed-on-top haircut. When I saw him working at the Temporary Contemporary Art Museum downtown I approached him to model for some photos, not realizing how well my offer fit into his particular style of self-expression. The intention behind Jesse’s art, while it can’t be pinned down in a few words, has a lot to do with exploring—or a more precise word might be celebrating—the self and the ego. His work is informed by his religious upbringing in a California church with a doctrine based in Hinduism. While riffing on the church’s mythology and iconography, Jesse’s art is in part a howl of dissent against its core ideas, or at least the way they have become codified. There’s a concept I once heard expressed by Guru Singh of Yoga West—one of the pre-eminent American teachers of Kundalini Yoga—that rather than suppressing the ego, we should work to expand it out to infinity, so that it encompasses the entirety of the universe. And that is probably one of the defining principles behind what Jesse strives to express. He doesn’t interest himself in popular culture, or arguably even in the temporal human experience. His work operates in a dimension populated by gods, angels, the bending of light; a dimension where the beating of a butterfly wing is connected to a nuclear bomb explosion. A piece of fruit, the L.A. River, or Rice, his late, beloved pet dove, are all seen as sort of Biblical entities. His work also seems—heretically for the times we live in—to have little need for an audience. He makes it available to the public, but beyond that it could be seen by thousands of people or one person or no one without causing him much concern. He operates for the most part well outside of any tradition or movement. He takes his ideas to their—often extreme—logical conclusions on his own, as in his philosophy and practice of fruitarianism. He also doesn’t invite or particularly enjoy dialog about his art, believing principles of truth and beauty (as outlined it his “Pulchrist Manifesto”) to be fixed, or in any case knowable. There is, in fact, no sense of relativism in Jesse’swork: one of his classic expressions is “Beautiful!”The word shoots out of him like fireworks, withchildlike wonder as well as authority and conviction. - Paul SbrizziFeature Film Programmer, Slamdance Film Festival

Table of Contents
FOREWARD 4 INTRODUCTION 5 FILM 7 OBJECTS 23 IMAGES 43 PERFORMANCES 63 MUSIC 71 ARCHITECTURE 79 GALLERY 93 LOGOS 113 PUBLICATIONS 115 PRODUCTS 125 THE PULCHRIST MANIFESTO 141