M. Henry Jones

{{Short description|American artist and filmmaker (1957–2022)}} {{third-party|date=September 2022}}

'''M. Henry Jones''' (1957–2022) was an American visual artist,<ref>{{Cite web|title=M. Henry Jones|url=https://www.andersoncontemporary.com/m-henry-jones.html|access-date=2022-09-19|website=andersoncontemporary.com}}</ref> filmmaker,<ref>{{Cite web|title=M. Henry Jones|url=https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1307469/|website=imdb.com}}</ref> and animator.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Innovative provocations: Meet the new art-world rebels|url=https://spearswms.com/innovative-provocations-meet-the-new-art-world-rebels/|access-date=2022-09-19|website=spearswms.com}}</ref> who lived in New York City's East Village neighborhood,<ref>{{Cite web|title=Art the Garbage Man Can Appreciate|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/nyregion/08trash.html|access-date=2022-09-19|website=The New York Times}}</ref> and ran SnakeMonkey studio.<ref>{{Cite web|title=On Avenue A, a 'Mad Scientist' of 3-D Animation Watches His Studio Vanish|url=http://localeastvillage.com/2011/12/19/28480/|access-date=2022-09-17|website=localeastvillage.com/}}</ref> He was known for his film "Soul City" (1977–79) which features the New York City band The Fleshtones.<ref>{{Cite news |date=March 3, 2011 |title=Arts & Entertainment: When Video Frightened the Radio Star |work=The Wall Street Journal |url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/854570602 |access-date=September 19, 2022 |id={{ProQuest|854570602}}}}</ref>

== Early life == Jones was born February 16, 1957, in Louisiana and spent early childhood in Gulf Coast oil-industry trailer parks there and in East Texas behind Galveston. His family graduated to a yard and hand-built trailer addition, made from Hurricane Carla dump salvage,<ref>Normal Bob Smith, "M. Henry Jones Explains Slatherpuss Lenticular & Fly's Eye 3D Show NYC 2018," filmed on May 15 and 18, 2018, edited in 2022, video, 22:02, mins. 17:40–19:42, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajm_PmIeRio, posted September 4, 2022. For more on Normal Bob, see Jesus Dress Up on this site.</ref> before moving to a tiny fruit-farming town on Lake Ontario, Wilson, N.Y., on March 4, 1966, within range of his father's engineering work in the chemical hive surrounding Niagara Falls. Nikola Tesla, who advised on the hydro-electric system on which that industry was based, became a favorite figure.<ref>Penny Jones and Tom Marsan, eds., "Legends of M. Henry Jones" (New York, 2022), pp. iv, 1–5, 101; https://snakemonkey.com/Legends.pdf.</ref>

Jones began his model animation in 8th grade, after seeing a Zagreb animation reel, encouraged by both his family and a group of young teachers at Wilson Central High School.<ref>Penny Jones and Tom Marsan, eds., "Legends of M. Henry Jones" (New York, 2022), pp. 6–11; https://snakemonkey.com/Legends.pdf.</ref><ref>"Wilson Central Senior, 17, Is a Talented Film Animator," "Niagara Gazette," April 6, 1975, p. 3-B.</ref> He watched the pivotal PBS "Film Odyssey" series of 1971–72 with his school film club and was most taken with the stop-motion in Jean Cocteau's "La belle et la bête." Jones rode his ten-speed 33 miles to spend weekends in the then film hotbed of SUNY/Buffalo. The quintessential autodidact, he also read through the 18 volumes of the Life Library of Photography (published 1970–72), procured through inter-library loan by the small town library, and began landscape and portrait photography, learning to develop and print in a neighbor's home darkroom.<ref>Interview, "Disclosures through Dialogue: M. Henry Jones," produced by Filo Sofi Arts, New York, March 1, 2021, video, 1:50:47; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HtugVFvaMo&t=4s.</ref> He spent three summers as construction assistant to Land Art creators at Artpark on the Niagara River.<ref>Jones and Marsan, eds., Legends of M. Henry Jones, pp. 12–13.</ref>

== Career in New York City == Jones arrived in New York in 1975 as a film student at the School of Visual Arts. In his first years in the East Village he was a central figure at Club 57, and he created the two animated rock videos for which he is best known, "Soul City" and "Go-Go Girl," immediately before MTV's start in 1981.<ref>Ronald S. Magliozzi et al., "Club 57: Film Performance and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983" (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2017).</ref> He also shot "Brand New Cadillac," which was finally edited in 2006. During his freshman year at SVA he began to spend time with Harry Everett Smith at the Chelsea Hotel.<ref>Interview, "Henry Jones, 26 October 1995," in "Harry Smith: American Magus, a Modern Alchemist," edited by Paola Igliori (New York: Inandout Press, 1996), pp. 204–14.</ref> In 1983 he was hired by the Globus brothers to be the technical assistant to Marquis André Roger Lannes de Montebello, who was perfecting CrystalChrome, a form of 3D photography.<ref>Normal Bob Smith, "M. Henry Jones Explains Slatherpuss Lenticular & Fly's Eye 3D Show NYC 2018," mins. 3:53–4:59. Marc H. Miller, "Roger Lannes de Montebello (1908–1986): An Artist's 40-Year Quest for 3-D Photography," in Gallery 98: Art Ephemera 1960s–1990s, New York, 2018; https://gallery.98bowery.com/2018/integrated-images-roger-de-montebello-director-of-research/.</ref> His encounters with these two very different characters merged with his already considerable experience with animation to shape the rest of his life.

From 1988 to 1995 he directed a series of nationally broadcast animated commercials for the America's Best eyeglasses chain. At the same time he began work on animation in the form of lenticulars as a member of the Depthography group. In the '90s that lenticular work would morph into the Fly's Eye photography that had been in development by Roger de Montebello until his passing in 1986.<ref>Normal Bob Smith, "M. Henry Jones Explains Slatherpuss Lenticular & Fly's Eye 3D Show NYC 2018," mins. 0:44–16:20.</ref> Jones also experimented with hand-built stereo pinhole cameras.<ref>M. Henry Jones, "Stereo 3-D Photography," "Proof," no. 1 (1999), pp. 29–35.</ref> His storefront studio SnakeMonkey, on Avenue A in the East Village, became a magnet for fellow artists and their children.<ref>Jones and Marsan, eds., "Legends of M. Henry Jones," pp. 56–57, 66–67, 70–71.</ref>

From 1993 to 2006 Jones built and toured "Harry Smith: A Re-Creation," a tribute in which he realized Smith's dreams for the elaborate projection of his animated films. The show was an embroidered compendium of Smith's films shown in the manner intended by Smith—as performances—using stroboscopic effects, multiple projections, and magic lanterns.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Robogeek reports on a local cool cinema event in Austin...|url=http://legacy.aintitcool.com/node/4689|access-date=September 19, 2022 |website=aintitcool.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=A Waking Dream in situ Spotlights Harry Smith, Avant-Garde Filmmaker|url=https://www.austinchronicle.com/screens/1999-11-12/74669/ |access-date=September 19, 2022 |website=austinchronicle.com}}</ref><ref> [http://citypages.com/databank/20/958/article7464.asp Reconstructing Harry] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050911022222/http://www.citypages.com/databank/20/958/article7464.asp |date=September 11, 2005 }} (City Pages). </ref>

During 1988–92 Mark Austin Brady and Jones were cinematographers on Rachel Amodeo's film "What About Me," which was favorably reviewed by "The Wall Street Journal"<ref>{{Cite news|title=Home Is Where the Park Is: Downtown Creative Community Nurtures Film on Displaced Couple in East Village|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703992704576305921127468658|access-date=2022-09-19|newspaper=Wall Street Journal|date=7 May 2011 |last1=Bennett |first1=Bruce }}</ref> and "The New Yorker" as "a hidden masterwork that brings grace and cosmic humor to the grimy streets of eighties New York."<ref>{{Cite web|title=A Drama of Survival in the East Village|url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/a-drama-of-survival-in-the-east-village|access-date=2022-09-19|website=newyorker.com|date=December 2017 }}</ref>

In the late '90s and the aughts he constructed his "stroboscopic zoetropes," large kinetic sculptures with model-animation "puppets." When a strobe light hit the sequence of puppets attached to a spinning steel wheel, they would animate.<ref>Robert Hicks, "Strobes, Wheels of Fortunes and 3-D Photos," "The Villager," New York, July 14, 1999.</ref> In 2007 Jones directed a final rock video, "Bangin' in my Head," with animation of drawings by his son Atticus. Following these major projects, Jones devoted himself exclusively to the development of SnakeMonkey Fly's Eye 3D photography until his untimely death on June 16, 2022, at the age of 65, from cancer discovered late during the COVID-19 pandemic.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Remembering East Village artist M. Henry Jones|url=https://evgrieve.com/2022/09/remembering-east-village-artist-m-henry.html|access-date=2022-09-17|website=evgrieve.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=The Mad Scientist of Downtown N.Y.C. Rest in Peace M. Henry Jones|url=https://legsville.com/the-mad-scientist-of-downtown-n-y-c-rest-in-peace-m-henry-jones/|access-date=2022-09-19|website=legsville.com|date=7 July 2022 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=M. Henry Jones (1957–2022): An Artist at the Cusp of the Digital Divide|url=https://gallery.98bowery.com/news/m-henry-jones-1957-2022-an-artist-at-the-cusp-of-the-digital-divide/|access-date=2022-09-19|website=98bowery.com}}</ref>

== Screenings, exhibitions, and museum collections == Jones was a continual presence in the independent film scene in lower Manhattan in the late '70s and early '80s. "Soul City" was circulated in the United States and Europe in the 1980s in short-film compilations assembled by Serious Business Company and by the American Federation of Arts. He exhibited lenticulars with the Depthography group from 1991 to 2003. "Harry Smith: A Re-Creation" toured from 1993 to 2006.

His work was the subject of retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives in 2011 and 2017.<ref>{{Cite news|title=When Video Frightened the Radio Star|url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704005404576176741028174076|access-date=2022-09-19|newspaper=Wall Street Journal|date=3 March 2011 |last1=Bennett |first1=Bruce }}</ref> He had large solo exhibitions at the Garner Arts Center in 2015–16,<ref>{{Cite web|title=Anthony Haden-Guest on Garner Arts Center's Stroke of Genius|url=https://news.artnet.com/market/garnerville-arts-center-review-anthony-haden-guest-434084|access-date=2022-09-17|website=news.artnet.com|date=25 February 2016 }}</ref> and the Burchfield Penney Art Center in 2017–18.<ref>{{Cite web|title=The Flying Slatherpuss and Other Portals into the World of M. Henry Jones|url=https://burchfieldpenney.org/exhibitions/exhibition:11-10-2017-02-25-2018-the-flying-slatherpuss-and-other-portals-into-the-world-of-m-henry-jones/|access-date=2022-09-17|website=burchfieldpenney.org}}</ref> During the Garner Arts Center show he was interviewed by Anthony Haden-Guest<ref>{{Cite web|title=M Henry Jones interviewed by Anthony Haden Guest|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArtUSlaFPt0|access-date=2022-09-17|website=youtube.com}}</ref>

Jones was included in the exhibition "Club 57, Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983," October 31, 2017 – April 8, 2018, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Haden-Guest |first=Anthony |date=2017-11-12 |title=At MoMA, New York's Downtown '70s Art Scene Just Came Back to Life |language=en |work=The Daily Beast |url=https://www.thedailybeast.com/at-moma-new-yorks-downtown-70s-art-scene-just-came-back-to-life |access-date=2022-09-19}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|title=Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983|url=https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3824|access-date=2022-09-17|website=moma.org}}</ref>

In 2021, he was interviewed in Filo Sofi Art's webinar, "Disclosures through Dialogue: M. Henry Jones."<ref>{{Cite web|title=Disclosures through Dialogue: M. Henry Jones|url=https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1293938940992938|access-date=2023-02-16|website=Facebook}}</ref> He discussed his body of work, from his trilogy of films documenting the New York punk scene to his "Fly's Eye" 3D photography technique, which enables 3D photography to be rendered and presented to audiences without the need for special glasses or viewing equipment.<ref>{{Cite web|title=VIDEO: Close up on Fly's Eye photography|url=https://scienceline.org/2014/02/video-close-up-on-flys-eye-photography/|access-date=2023-02-16|website=scienceline.org}}</ref>

His films are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City<ref>{{Cite web|title=M. Henry Jones, 1957 – 2022|url=https://www.moma.org/artists/67340|access-date=2022-09-17|website=moma.org}}</ref> and Tate Modern and the British Film Institute in London.

== References ==

{{reflist}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jones, M. Henry}} Category:1957 births Category:2022 deaths Category:20th-century American artists Category:21st-century American artists Category:People from the East Village, Manhattan