The French poet Rimbaud once said he wrote “to see the invisible, hear the inaudible”. Jesse’s works similarly aim to transform an abstract idea into a physical reality. From a sensory perspective, Jesse’s playful abstractions at first appear to pay little attention to form. But we do react to it in a physical way. For example, Jesse’s video installation places a television with a recording of his bust dressed in a balaclava looking over his other video work on a television below. We are first reminded of an art thief. Is the thief surveying his stolen cache or is he contemplating stealing from himself? What is the meaning of this work? At first glance the intent may not be clear but the work does not fall into a propensity to mystify. The signifiers demand our participation. This is where Jesse’s work differs from early conceptual artists such as Bruce Nauman, Sol Lewit and the Art Language crew, whose ideas were crystalline but who expressed those ideas in a more insular way.

The idea is still God in Jesse’s art machine. There is an incredible optimism in his experiments with sculpture and installation. Jesse romances the ‘60s, following Clement Greenberg’s announcement of the death of painting. His ‘failed’ experiments, which will be mentioned in the coming paragraphs, all question the dominant materials of contemporary art. Neon’, polymers and perspex are all on trial here, in lieu of the primary question Jesse asks: if realism and abstract art are now dead, might formalism and its associated materials also be killed off? There are obvious similarities between the formal qualities of Jesse’s sculptures and installations and those of his contemporaries, though Jesse’s works are far more playful and offer a gallery of puns and ironies. For example, his installation titled ‘The last EVER neon peace’ is a play on the ‘60s, when ‘the idea became the machine’.  Is this the last neon piece? Probably not! He mentions Giles Ryder and the formal concerns that have to do with a  compaction and abstraction of space. Jesse, however, insists that form is an accessory to meaning. He is more interested in demonstrating the failings of pure form. To Jesse the idea is primary, but the idea expressed through humour.  ‘It’s not that serious.’  This is not, however, a flippant notion.

Through his works Jesse presents images of failure in a literal sense. He explores the notion that there can be no perfect master artist in the contemporary post-structuralist period. Things move too fast. Jesse’s idea of an artist isn’t hinged his or her ability to represent a physical world, nor is the role of an artist to master the pure psychological automatism of abstract painting by hypnosis, and most significantly it is not the meaning of art ,according to Jesse, to be read as an illogical pseudo-reality; “X is really--or, really means--A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?”(A formula taken from Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’). 

Jesse the artist is playful. A hand crafted coffin on small table legs is entitled: ‘Here in this moment where all our memories collide’. Constructed from wood, perspex, felt, fabric, plastic bags, urethane and enamel, this coffin is an analogy for the numerous deaths of art through oblique reference to the `Death of the Hippie’ march in 1967. The perceived end of  ‘peace and love’ in October of that year was mourned by the residents of Haight with peace signs, flowers and other hippy memorabilia filling a processional coffin. This was also a time when  the pervasive influence of realist and abstract art declined. In his re-imagining of the Rorschach ink blot test, loose images cut from perspex resemble the inkblots. Assembled on a table of random objects and bric-a-brac, the reference is to Rorschach and his failed experiments in psycho-analysis. The objects allude to the dormant holograms that dwell in our subconscious and our visual automatism that induces these images to life. Jesse gave me the example of a nymphomaniac, someone who is plagued by sexual imagery who is presented with a mess of black ink on paper and instantly sees a vagina before his eyes. The reference to the failed experiments of Rorschach isn’t an idle fancy, it is essential to the development of his ideas. 

Jesse doesn’t delude himself into pretending he is doing something inestimably original. He builds his work like the majority of installation artists, friends and contemporaries, such as Matthew Hopkins, by using materials as popular as polystyrene.  However Jesse does not ask you to enter the artists hallucinogenic fantasy as Hopkin’s works do, they remain bound up in the notion of materialising the idea. In the process of making is where an automatism emerges. It is a reflexive response to the process which gives birth to another process, and hence you end up with something original from something unoriginal. . Such was the case with the Rorschach homage, which was intended to reflect the failure of the Rorschach Tests. Although the idea evolved into using the negative cut outs of perspex to explore the ambiguous unfinished nature of the ideas. Jesse consciously leaves his work to remain in the fray of ideas.  

Jesse does address form while expressly neglecting it. This paradox is achieved by departing from the  effort to find beauty in form, and ignoring the avant-garde tradition of avoiding issues of meaning by experimenting with form. He pokes fun at his own processes and forms when he   performs tasks. In the video piece ‘ Blindfolded Man Juggling’ Jesse wittingly fails to juggle balls. He knows full well this is beyond his ability, with the added difficulty of having his head sheathed by a plastic bag, another dalliance with the idea of a failed experiment. However, Jesse edited the video to reverse the failure. In the revised version it seems that Jesse is a magician, somehow harnessing magical power to gather the balls from the floor, juggle them, and place them on the desk. He plays with the notion expresses in the ironic quote , “Difficult things can be achieved, the impossible takes a little longer.” (Paris Graffiti that referenced Spanish Philosopher Santayana, May 68) 

Jesse Hogan  shared with me a maxim he coined about himself: “The Jack of All Trades is the new specialist.” His material all recyclable and renewable,  wink at the suggested repetitious, or auto-plagiarism that is typical of conceptual art. This isn’t cynical (or is it?).  

Primarily Jesse represents an optimism born of cynical reality. You don’t know what you’ve got till you hit rock bottom and so on. In the sculpture titled ‘Brain Mountain’ Jesse re-imagines the acid experience of the ‘60s, from within the context of his own new millennia experience. When showing me this sculpture, made from Polystyrene,  I saw a mound vaguely resembling a mountain, painted in lurid neon acrylics with a flag mounted atop. He explained that it is meant to be a hazardous attempt at materialising the feeling of enlightenment, or satori (just off the back of a trip from Japan with his wife and new born), that can be reached when under the influence of mescaline. Aldous Huxley stated that when “ martyrs go hand in hand to the arena, they are crucified alone”. Huxley’s aphorism might also describe the uniqueness of every individual experience. And as each life is unique, so is each moment within that life despite our longing for the one transcendent moment that brings us together.  Now for the hitch, the uniquely original element of this particular work. This void, or singularity described by Huxley is bridged by Jesse’s reference to the experience of hallucinating, he asked me while we gazed over the sloppy mound, “you tripped before right? You know the epiphany you can reach after hours of laughter and psychedelic visions!” This universal epiphany Jesse describes is the experience that Brain Mountain is meant to symbolise. The whole idea being the apotheosis of the hallucinogenic experience, as a symbol, an art signifier, and boy does it fall short. It is literally a mound of polystyrene with a poor attempt at psychedelic colours painted on it with a flag mounted at the top.  But imitation isn’t the  point, it still gets the message across, it unites us because we have hallucinated before, or we haven’t and it unites us because we haven’t. Again Jesse’s art is parody, while uniting us it divides us,  It touches us it fails us  And that is the point with this work, it is anti-teleological because it doesn’t suggest a final truth. Everything is subjective.   

Jesse isn’t trying to answer a question about the next death in art. He isn’t even asking a serious question about whether the materials used will be cadaverous in the next couple of years. Nor is he suggesting he can encompass the meaning of all of human experience in Brain Mountain. He re-imagines a transcendent moment through a mound of polystyrene.  He is just having fun with the  festival of ideas. He’s dancing with himself. There’s nothing to prove, there’s nothing to lose: we can’t put it together, it is together.