INTRODUCTION TO JME by Kevin O'Sullivan Mon/o/syb/le   n. (Mono <Gk.<monos, single, alone + syble refers to: 1. syllable<Gk. sullable<sullambanein, to combine in pronunciation 2. sibyl<Gk.<sibulla. a woman prophet or 3. syble< in American pop lexicon, to have multiple personalities.) The reconfiguration of text into one and / or many characters. As a child JME moved frequently, traveling from rural to urban settings, never establishing deep roots in any one place or school. To alleviate the monotony of these moves, he and his sister would invent and play 'highway games'. The games were built around the road signs, mileage markers and billboards communicating, demarcating and, some would say, commercially exploiting the natural landscape. The abecedarian games of childhood, in retrospect, were a tutorial for the myriad ways in which meaning is conveyed through text and symbols. JME's fascination with visual language no doubt stems from these early experiences and has become central to his work as an artist. In the early 1980s JME settled in Minneapolis, positioning himself artistically and physically between the two coasts. It is during this period that the first stirrings of what would become a longstanding project were felt. Previous work in film and video left him with a desire for something more spontaneous and intuitive. He returned to studio art and began incorporating the logos, images and iconography that blight or enrich our present culture, predicated as it is on the promulgation and valorization of consumerism. The wall mural Fast Food Vegetarian, for example, utilizes a stylized Jolly Green Giant to comment on the practices of irradiating food. 1988's Theme Park is a successful cohabitation of personal mythology and social commentary. Using his initials as the foundation, JME overlays three pictorial icons. On one side of the canvas we see a graphic silhouette of a castle, representing Disney's Magic Kingdom. This fantastic space formally mirrored and ironically counterbalanced by the twin spires of an incinerator, also in graphic silhouette, on the opposite side of the canvas. Above and between the two is a block graphic of a house and car, connoting domesticity. In contrast to this trinity of images, is a fourth element, nestled between the three symbols: a space helmet with the acronym NASA extrudes from the canvas, creating a symbolic presence of both advanced technology, somewhere between the fantasy of Disneyland and the toxic reality of refuse disposal. Together these elements conjure a multiplicity of interpretations. It is, in effect, an open book, as redolent of potential meanings as a Surrealist poem or a Japanese haiku. Yet, it is also one of the most personal and specific of JME's works. At the most banal level, it is a sailor's scrimshaw commemorating ports of call on JME's passage through childhood: as a boy he lived, briefly, next to Disneyland then, as if a fairy tale gone awry, was banished to a house next door to an incinerator. In 1990 JME moved to Los Angeles and decisively embarked upon what has become a thorough interrogation of the physical properties of text, privileging the signifier, as it were, over the signified. Meaning is, more often than not, incidental. Unlike the precise language of advertising which, after all, knows exactly what it wants to say and has mastered the economy of means. 1990's Yes No, designed as wallpaper creates, in effect, a double-bind for the viewer. As a message it offers neither clarity nor confusion, but self-cancellation and has become, in its 'uselessness' mere wallpaper. At this time JME, perhaps harking back to the games of his childhood, began to articulate the rules that were to govern the creation of his future work. The game, as it were, was to create a pictographic 'language' which he coined Monosyble, utilizing five basic principles. In 1993 JME wrote, "Simply stated, Monosyble is a reconfiguration of text, compressing single words or word sequences into a new single form. Visually abstract but legible, it bears a resemblance to Chinese characters, Arabic calligraphy or Mayan script. This simple construct challenges the artist and thereby the viewer to look deeper or think twice into the content and form of words, images and ideas". 2002's Mind Body, included in this catalogue, is a reworking of an earlier piece, from 1994, that lays out the ground rules. It is, in effect, a primer on how to read JME's work albeit somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The title itself betrays JME's longstanding love of binary opposition that goes back at least as far as Yes-No but is neither as absolute nor as nullifying. The viewer is invited to consult the work, to understand the method, but the rules themselves are far more important to the creation of the work than in the appreciation of the end result. One of the most striking elements, and a welcome surprise, is the sheer variety of forms JME is able to produce while staying within the self-imposed boundaries of Monosyble. 1994's New York School is a somewhat oblique nod to the 'heroic' period in American art and is at once painterly, with its underlay of drips and drools, and a culmination of his textual interrogations. The text consists of phrases and buzz words evoking the 1950s and, especially, the milieu of the 8th Street Painters (Pollack, DeKooning, et al.) and the scale and vertical orientation is evocative of both the Manhattan skyline and the oversized easels -and egos- of the above mentioned painters. 1999's Truth is, perhaps, the most marked departure stylistically from the other work in this catalogue. It consists of four panels, exhibited as two pairs, each panel consisting of a solid color field upon which a raised element of similar or identical hue is superimposed. On the purely visual level, this piece encapsulates the range of JME's formal explorations of text. JME indulges, once again, his fondness for binaries, in this case Truth/Beauty and, less obviously Nude/Skull (which can be read as Eros/Thanatos). The first panel employs JME's 'trademark' compression of letters using stretched, but standard, typography. The second panel is a bit more expressive, with the constituent elements creating two 'meanings'; the word 'beauty' and a stylized flower. This is an example of what JME has coined onomatographikos, a neologism derived from the Greek, used to describe words that look like what they denote (or connote). The latter two panels, that comprise the second binary, are much looser in form, the result of JME's gestural experiments with the limits of 'legibility'. In fact, the text is on the verge of breaking up. The lines are sinuous, sensuous and veer away from abstraction and towards figuration. 'Nude' is, in fact, a nude. 'Skull' is a skull. While much of the pleasing effects of JME's work has come from the use of patterning and color, using repetition and variations as a virtual visual fugue, Truth suggests new pictorial possibilities while remaining within the guidelines of Monosyble. JME's work reveals his own contradictory relationship to language and signification. He has marked out his own turf as a 'text based' artist, eschewing the primarily cerebral or coldly formal uses favored by other artists who have used language as a motif or the medium of their work. JME is, in the final instance, a painter. While he has rigorously adhered to a set of visual principles he has, like a poet using the sonnet form, used these self-imposed limits to create with great freedom. By exploring text's physicality, palette, nuances, and its capacity for metamorphosis JME has developed a new form of communication, one capable not just of capturing an experience, but creating one. KEVIN O'SULLIVAN Los Angeles 2002