Ex Libris: Rat Piece, by Kim Jones

I wonder if Kim Jones might be better known if he didn’t share a name with the far more famous designer and artistic director of Fendi and Dior fame. I don’t wonder for long – Jones’ work was never destined to be popular, it was practically impossible to recreate outside of a live setting and was so radically, intentionally and violently confrontational, that it’s a wonder he was ever allowed to exist in an art world at all. His contemporaries were Chris Burden, Barbara Smith, Paul McCarthy and Suzanne Lacy, all of whose work softened as they aged, becoming commercially viable, part of a contemporary lexicon of ‘left field’ but wholly digestible artists. They achieved this by moving away from the performance works that had established their careers and neutering the violent themes they once dealt with into something more implicit. They also never had the shadow of Rat Piece to deal with.

Before 17th February 1976, Jones was mostly known for his Mudman works. A veteran of the Vietnam War turned art school graduate deeply interested in Eastern mythologies and philosophies, Jones created a strange shamanic character called Mudman. He would pull pantyhose over his head, cake his body in thick mud and carry a huge latticed wooden structure on his back. Mudman appeared across cities, streets, galleries, private and public spaces, on pre-ordained 12-hour walks along the spine of metropolises. A disquieting, ominous figure, at once a pagan effigy and disguised mercenary, who seemed to be a harbinger of something, though the bad news he brought was never clear. Mudman became iconic – his costume now resides in the Smithsonian – and a figure of anti-Vietnam War art.

Without Rat Piece, Jones would be defined by Mudman; still an important footnote in the world of ‘70s American protest work, occasionally referenced in academic work and popping up in group retrospectives of the time. However, Rat Piece did happen, and it came to permanently define his career, and the lives of some of those involved.

It began when Jones was invited by Frank Brown, gallery director at the California State University of Los Angeles, to perform a piece in the gallery. Brown was a serious person who valued art above all else. He saw his role at CSLA as serving a higher artistic power, not the student body or individual works, and as a result, he never interfered with or discussed at length the works artists planned to show after inviting them. He held a deep trust for those he worked with and saw his role as a facilitator rather than a collaborator. So it came to be that Brown didn’t know the details of the work Jones was to perform that day, to a crowd of 30 students. Receiving the same promotion as the other happenings at the gallery that week, Jones was no star name and the moderate audience he drew reflected that. Some were surely aware of Mudman and his work, but many would have been going in blind.

The piece began with Jones undressing, pantyhose pulled over his head until he was entirely naked. He began to cover himself in mud, don his wooden headpiece and latticed back structure, and walk around the gallery reciting reflective poetry about performing as Mudman. He then pulled a tarp from a metal cage containing three live rats and doused them in lighter fluid, lit a match and dropped it into the cage, setting the rodents on fire. The flaming rats ran around the cage as Jones methodically poured more lighter fluid until audible screams could be heard from the rats. Jones screamed along with them, his pain and complicity in theirs one and the same. Several members of the crowd left and by the time the rats died, only half the audience remained. Jones covered their dead bodies in stone and mud, draped the tarp back over the cage and slowly and solemnly got dressed, the mud still on his body and pantyhose still on his head. From the 30-odd people who saw the piece, word spread through campus and the city and within a few days, Rat Piece had become an incident; Frank Brown was put under review by the university and Jones had criminal charges filed against him.

Rat Piece, Feb 17 1976 is Jones’ answer to the endless questions Rat Piece started, though his own voice appears sparingly throughout. Rather, the book is a compilation of perspectives, exploring the conception, reception and fallout of the performance through newspaper clippings, court filings, letters of support and condemnation. It opens with his artist statement, a typewritten, rambling prose poem moving between abstract experiences in Vietnam to childhood encounters with death. It’s an almost automatic piece of writing, with rats and animal murder at its heart. He moves from the childhood pain he felt when his father killed a squirrel to the feeling of being a rat in the Vietnam trenches, drawing an injured pigeon in MacArthur Park to ancient druids burning wicker men filled with live cattle. It is only a page long and there is no reference to Rat Piece, yet it’s clear how he ended at that point. Jones takes death seriously, but he is not precious about it, as few who have confronted death can be. The artist’s statement is followed by four pages of poor imagery of the event – xeroxed scanned half to death so we get strange anthropomorphic silhouettes against starch white. If you did not know the context, and opened this book on a whim, the first five pages would not give you any information at all. Only when it becomes a visual scrapbook is a picture pieced together, one of fury, controversy and dialogue. Brown contributed the letters from the University Board relieving him of his duties, and the saga played out, like a game of telephone, through reported fragments of a wider story.

Mostly, though, the conversation is around death, violence and the role of art. Jones does not hide the criticism of his piece but presents every perspective, from the who’s who of Fluxus and Mail Art artists writing letters in support, to angry college columnists condemning his torture and murder, to academic art criticism exploring the morality of death and pain for art’s sake. Rat Piece, as a work of performance art, was meant to elicit reaction and spark conversation, but the visceral nature of burning live rats overshadowed any possible nuance, as it well should.

Jones was reportedly devastated after the piece, feeling the weight of his actions and the guilt of killing the rats. He believed, it seems, that their death was worthy of the point he was hoping to make. That they would die not in vain but to alter people’s thoughts about our own complicity in murder, about the violent world we live in, and, knowing the reaction would be violent and visceral, he hoped that people would examine why they felt so strongly about the torture and death of rats, but not of countrymen dying in a pointless war halfway across the world. It is hard to say that Jones succeeded – his action perhaps was too visceral, too violent, and too shocking for those who witnessed it to not feel an animalistic pain.

With Rat Piece, the book, the original intention is reclaimed as Jones quietly guides you through a world of thoughts. They feel like thoughts worth having. The most provocative page sees a letter to the editor in a local newspaper scanned in. ‘Animal Killings Still Continue at CSLA’ the headline reads, going on to share that the biology department killed 400 mice, 16 guinea pigs and eight rabbits in just one class over one quarter. Yet, there are not 100 pages of sourced writing about this incident. Art is seen as entertainment, and murder is acceptable only for science.  Yet, we are wrong to impose this hierarchy because art, and Rat Piece certainly, can reveal and examine our morality, how we see the world and what we strive for, and can prompt discoveries of the self and of the culture, just as science can. So why does context matter for death? Why do we rationalise some actions as necessary and others are superfluous? The once-removed nature of this book, documenting a performance piece, allows it to be more effective than the piece ever was. And yet, without the piece, without the death, without the controversy, it would be little more than a thought experiment, and if thousands of years worth of philosophy have taught us anything, it is that thought experiments don’t change anything.

Jones was charged with animal cruelty, and never got the $50 fee he was owed by CSLA. His career is still defined by Rat Piece, and it is not a particularly good definition to have. I neither endorse nor vilify the piece – a coward’s way out – but for the millions of rats that get killed every year by landlords, tenants, sewers, traps and foxes, at least the three Jones killed have a legacy that has lasted 50 years. Better to die a martyr and a hero than live long enough to be seen as a rat.