The program includes screenings of two William E. Jones’s films and a reading from his new book, followed by a discussion and Q&A with the visiting artist:

America, Hail Satan, 2-screen video projection with live narration by the artist, color & b/w, 12 min, 2015. William E. Jones’s America, Hail Satan is a video installation reflecting upon the decline of the American empire, which the artist believes began in 1973, with the official US military withdrawal from Vietnam and the economic slump following the period of great post-World War II prosperity. The audio accompanying the projection is a 12 minute voice-over narrated by the artist. This text is a satirical short story in which Satan dressed as an aging hippy comes to the talks leading up to the Paris Peace Accords, which ended formal US involvement in the Vietnam War. Satan attempts to convince National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to extend the United States’ contract with him. The original agreement, initiated by George Washington in 1773, stipulated world domination, and after a 200 year term, it is about to expire. Satan warns of dire consequences and points to signs of the United States’ decline. After a brief interruption by another man with a Satanic contract, Pol Pot, a skeptical Kissinger dismisses Satan as a fraud, although he is disturbed by the predictions, which are a description of contemporary US society.

Fall into Ruin, high-definition video, color, sound, 30 min, 2017. Fall into Ruin tells the story of artist William E. Jones’s relationship with Alexander Iolas (1907-1987), a Greek art dealer from Alexandria active in New York and European cities from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. Iolas had close connections to the Surrealists, to artists associated with Nouveau Réalisme, and to American artists such as Ed Ruscha, Harold Stevenson, and Paul Thek. At the height of his career, he maintained galleries in New York, Paris, Madrid, Geneva, Milan, and Athens.

I’m Open to Anything (We Heard You Like Books, 2019).  A 6-8 minute reading from the new book by William E. Jones.

ABOUT THE ARTIST. William E. Jones is an artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer whose practice involves appropriating and recontextualizing imagery from archival material. His work is highly researched and tackles a range of topics including uses and abuses of power, the production and counterfeiting of currency, gay subcultures, and the materiality of film and photography as mediums.

Jones has made the experimental films Massillon(1991) and Finished (1997), videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography(1998), the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004), and many other works, including the essay film Fall into Ruin (2017), about the Greek art dealer Alexander Iolas (1907-1987) and his abandoned house in Athens. Jones’s films have been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern, London (2005); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2010); Austrian Film Museum, Vienna (2011); and Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2011). He participated in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials, the 2009 Venice Biennale, and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. He has been exhibited at Musée du Louvre, Palais de Tokyo, and Cinémathèque française, Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; St. Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

William E. Jones has published the following books: Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), Heliogabalus (2009), Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (2009), Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), Halsted Plays Himself (2011), Between Artists: Thom Andersen and William E. Jones (2013), and Imitation of Christ, a catalogue for the exhibition he curated at UCLA Hammer Museum in 2013. Recent books include Flesh and the Cosmos (2014) and True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (2016). His first novel, I’m Open to Anything, has been published in early 2019.