Inside Dream City

A week before Ulysses Jenkins created Dream City, a one-time, 18-hour performance in a storefront on South Robertson Boulevard in L.A., he found a dead cat.

It was the fall of 1981. Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan was in his first term as president, after a landslide victory. In June, the Centers for Disease Control had published a report about a mysterious case of pneumonia that had infected five patients in L.A., all gay men. Meanwhile, MTV debuted in August with an image of an astronaut spiking a phosphorescent flag on the surface of the moon against the raucous riff of a guitar. The fusing of politics, popular culture, and mass media would become the backdrop for the ensuing culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s.

Produced during “a wild moment in the history of American video,” as scholar Tiana Reid writes, Dream City was a rejection of “Reagan’s Hollywoodization of politics and instrumentalization of ‘diversity,’ against the backdrop of state neglect and the AIDS crisis.” “We wanted a hero / We wanted a scenario / and all you did was some real bad variety show / Nothing with guts / nothing with soul,” a poet intones, as a video recording of the presentation cuts to a psychedelic shot of a fast-turning carousel.

Jenkins, who was the subject of a recent retrospective at the Hammer Museum, called Dream City and the subsequent video a “ritualized performance” in an oral history with the Getty Research Institute (GRI). Hosted at Espace DbD, an art studio run by performance queen Rachel Rosenthal—and inspired by conversations with Happenings creator Allan Kaprow—the production was a surrealist mash-up of music, dance, poetry, and performance art by a large cast of collaborators.

The dead cat, Jenkins said in the oral history, was an apt metaphor for “how we disregard nature.” Through the hallucinatory performance, which ran from six in the morning until midnight, he hoped to evoke not only the destruction of the earth but also the absurdity and gloom of civilizational decline. As part of his production, Jenkins unwrapped the deceased animal, crawling with maggots, and later buried it near Ballona Creek between rituals.

At the time, video was a radical new art form. If broadcast television was equated with the dominance of mass culture, then video artists like Jenkins transformed the same technology to break free from the long history of negative stereotypes portrayed in film and television, creating new stories through art.

As part of the performance, a 15-minute ritual was enacted, videotaped, and replayed every three hours before a revolving audience. After the presentation of the cat—whose “heavy smell of death was a prophetic essence,” as Jenkins wrote in the production notes—two fish were gutted. Audience members were also encouraged to discuss their dreams.

At midnight, the performance ended, and Jenkins turned 35 years old. Jazz musician Don Cherry and filmmaker Barbara McCullough brought him a cake. In the piece, Jenkins appears naked except for a headwrap and shell necklace—literally in his birthday suit, Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale says.

Merging Black storytelling traditions with emerging technology, it was in Dream City that Jenkins first developed the persona of the “video griot,” after the storytellers in West Africa who sang their culture’s histories. (Among Jenkins’s many influences was his professor Betye Saar, who combined racial commentary with mysticism.) Over the next several decades, Jenkins, as the video griot, would deliver poetic incantations about mass media, race, sexuality, environmental degradation, the history of colonization, and the corporate takeover of the United States.

In the early ’80s, Jenkins developed a quick experimental style of montage he called doggerel (or doggereal) as part of an editing exercise for his undergraduate students at the University of California, San Diego. The term, which is part of the title of his memoir, would become as much a philosophy of life as anything else. The idea, he says, was inspired by reading an interview with Marlon Brando about his role in the 1978 film Superman. The actor said he liked the film’s “doggerel moments,” referring to a form of bad verse.

“I looked up the word, and it means ‘irregular measure,’” Jenkins said in an interview. He assumed Brando meant those moments in the film that didn’t advance the narrative, or the strange in-between passages without any dialogue or understandable gestures. “I thought, ‘That’s what it’s like to be a Black person in society. Sometimes things are irregular, and you can’t figure out what’s happening.’”

At the same time, Jenkins was involved with the collective Studio Z, founded by artist David Hammons. The experimental group, which included Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, often improvised ceremonial happenings inspired by Afrodiasporic cosmologies. Excluded from the white art establishment, the group made its own spaces in abandoned buildings and vacant lots. “We were creating our own infrastructure, our own validation, knowing that what we were doing was important to us,” Nengudi said in a group oral history conducted by the GRI in 2008. The artists supported one another in creating a new avant-garde. “I would go at 4 am to smell a cat, whatever I was supposed to do,” Hassinger remembered. She, Hammons, and Nengudi all appeared in Dream City.

In 1983, the year the video for Dream City was released, Jenkins formed Othervisions Studio with the same experimental and collaborative ethos. When budgets for the arts were being slashed, he used a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to pour resources back into L.A.’s creative communities, establishing opportunities for Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino artists to work together. “In understanding the deficiencies of those mainstream forces who referred to status as ‘otherness,’ we became ‘Othervisions,’ an artists’ communal studio workshop, a place to become ourselves, our work, our dreams, our futures,” Jenkins wrote in his memoir.

Dream City (1981) - Ulysses Jenkins from UCI Studio Art on Vimeo.