I am Brandon Jones, which is an aggressively generic name. There are a lot of us. I am the one behind LOUCHE.art and most of the things orbiting it, although exactly what that means has changed often enough that I have mostly stopped trying to come up with a tidy answer.
My dad converted our laundry room into a darkroom when I was little. He took my brother and me around Claremore with cameras, or we would get in the car and drive across Oklahoma looking for grain silos, old buildings, landscapes, whatever made him decide it was worth pulling over. Then we came home and he disappeared behind the curtain to develop what we found. I did not know anything about cultural heritage or archives or vernacular photography. I knew there were ordinary things all around us that became interesting if somebody bothered to stop and look at them. I still have that problem. I adore the vernacular. I care about photographs people almost threw away, badly labeled boxes, old receipts, ordinary objects and people who begin an oral history by insisting they have nothing important to say.
By the time I was about eleven I was volunteering at Ark Animal Hospital with Dr. Brady, which apparently was something an eleven-year-old could simply do then. I helped with the kennel work and whatever else they let me do, including standing in the surgical suite. One day I was assisting with a spay that involved a catheter, and Dr. Brady accidentally poked a hole in the dog’s bladder, I think. Whatever he hit, the routine surgery stopped being routine very quickly and she needed to be opened up so he could repair it. I forgot to put the trash can beside him, and he did not exactly have time to stop what he was doing and discuss my job performance, so bloody gauze and assorted surgical debris started flying across the room. When everything was over, the dog was fine and I got to clean up what looked like a murder scene. I was not particularly traumatized by this. I mostly remember thinking I screwed up the trash-can part.
School was another story. I ended up in an alternative program and completed about four years of high-school coursework in a semester, whereupon I discovered that finishing all of the work did not mean I was allowed to finish high school. There was still a calendar involved. I took the GED in April 1998 instead and got a perfect score, which solved that problem, and then at some point I went to Claremore Beauty College. This really happened. I learned cosmetology and eventually became, in the most literal version available to me, a Beauty School Dropout. No Frankie Avalon appeared. I moved on.
After that came Rogers State University, then Oklahoma State, with graphic design, art history and international business somehow all belonging to the same education. It looks much cleaner written in a sentence than it did while I was doing it. I worked while I was in school, changed direction more than once, kept taking photographs, kept writing, and continued playing piano, which was going on for most of my life by then anyway. I played other instruments too because apparently I once possessed the patience for saxophones, mallet percussion, French horn, bassoon and whatever else somebody was willing to hand me. The piano stayed.
I never wanted to become a concert pianist. I like playing too much. I can disappear at a piano for hours without feeling as though I have gone anywhere, and turning that into a profession always struck me as a fairly efficient way to ruin it. This has not prevented music from inserting itself into parts of my life where it has no business being.
When I worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, I once went to the Austrian Embassy to deliver something for the National Council on the Arts. I assume it was paperwork because most of government eventually becomes paperwork, but I do not remember what I was carrying. I remember the piano. It was a Bösendorfer. I met the deputy ambassador, saw it, and asked some version of, “Oh my God, can I play it?” She said she thought so but needed to ask the ambassador. Then the ambassador came out too, and the two of them sat down to listen.
There was perfectly respectable music available to me. I could have played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor. I could have played the G-minor. Instead I played Tori Amos: “Cornflake Girl,” and then her version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” They listened, said lovely things about it afterward, and at some point I looked at the time and realized I was supposed to be back at work. Ah, crap. I found a cab and went back to the NEA.
I arrived there for a one-semester internship and somehow stayed long enough to end up running the operations of the National Council on the Arts, the presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed council that advises the chairman of the NEA. The work itself was much less glamorous than that sentence sounds. There were confidential records, briefing materials, meetings, databases, travel, shipping and a thousand little administrative failures waiting to happen unless somebody caught them first. At one point I figured out that we were spending far too much on shipping and cut roughly eight hundred dollars a month from the bill. I remain disproportionately pleased about this.
The museum world behaved similarly. I began at the Sheerar Museum as a volunteer and ended up doing a great deal more than volunteering. For the anniversary of the Stillwater-Kameoka Sister City relationship, I curated an exhibition of 111 objects. That involved the objects, obviously, but also the translations and oral histories and loans and documentation and transportation and installation and all the other things that happen before people walk into a finished exhibition and assume it simply materialized that way. I produced the catalogue too.
At Oklahoma State, a research position in the library eventually turned into rebuilding a website inside an extremely uncooperative Drupal installation and taking over a call-center team of eight. This sort of thing happened often enough that I eventually stopped being surprised when the job I was hired to do and the job I wound up doing were only distantly related.
Languages came into my life the same slightly sideways way. I studied some formally and picked others up because something I wanted to understand happened to be written in them. French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Latin, Ge’ez; some I know much better than others, and some have deteriorated considerably because languages are rude that way. I translated Turkish artist materials for publication. I once worked with Ethiopic liturgical scrolls and wanted to know what the hell they said, so I used interlibrary loan to get a Ge’ez dictionary from Harvard. I did not know Ge’ez. The scrolls remained in Ge’ez.
My visual education came from school, museums, photographs and a lot of staring at other people’s work until I could begin to understand what they were doing. Mapplethorpe, Goldin and Lange stayed with me. So did Easton, Susann and Thompson on the writing side, although I picked up several habits from them that would probably fail a respectable writing workshop. Respectable writing workshops and I were unlikely to have a long future together anyway.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Ex-Husband figured me out. We were never married. I started calling him Ex-Husband when we first met, and the name stuck. So did he, considerably longer than anybody else.
We were out one night and there was a group of straight guys talking football. I walked over, joined the conversation, somebody got me a beer, and within a few minutes I was standing around talking with them as though we all went to college together. Ex-Husband eventually asked whether I knew them. I said no. He pointed out that he never saw me watch football. I said I didn’t. Football was everywhere. Players and teams and rules and the kind of information that floats around you in America whether you asked for it or not accumulated somewhere in my brain, and when I wandered into a conversation where it was useful, there it was.
That was when Ex-Husband started calling me the Chameleon. I changed it to Le Caméléon because he despises France, and irritating him was part of the pleasure.
I eventually looked up what chameleons actually do, because the elementary-school explanation that they simply change color to disappear into the background turns out to be incomplete. Their skin contains specialized cells called iridophores with guanine nanocrystals in them, and changing the spacing of those crystals changes the wavelengths of light reflected through the skin. Color can respond to temperature, stress, social signals and environment. It is much weirder than camouflage, which is probably why I liked the nickname more after learning the biology.
The football conversation did not feel like pretending. That is the part Ex-Husband noticed. I can walk into very different rooms and genuinely know how to function in them. The museum person is me. The government person is me. The guy drinking a beer with strangers talking about a sport he does not watch is also me. I have never felt much obligation to pick one and declare the others fraudulent.
Claremore Beauty College came back years later, which I appreciate because life occasionally has decent comic timing. Roughly twenty years after I dropped out of beauty school and moved on to entirely different things, I wound up backstage doing theatrical hair and wigs for national Broadway tours. Suddenly I was dealing with lace fronts and human hair and synthetic wigs and quick changes and track sheets and continuity, getting somebody transformed and back onstage fast enough that an audience never knew what happened in the dark behind the curtain. Apparently Beauty School Dropout only took an intermission.
There were plenty of less photogenic jobs too. I have worked in places that have nothing to do with museums or embassies or Broadway, and I am glad I did. Life would be unbearable if every job came with a mission statement. There were also years when my body stopped cooperating with almost everything I thought I was doing. I went through serious illnesses, surgeries, and long stretches where my life became much smaller than I planned. I am not going to turn this into a medical chronology, partly because that story can eat every other story if you let it.
What I got out of those years was a ferocious interest in records. When somebody says one thing happened and the paperwork says another, I want the paperwork. Then I want the earlier paperwork. Then I want to know who created it, when, what they were looking at, what is missing and why two documents that should agree somehow don’t.
Eventually I found myself reading law because I needed to understand the rules governing some of what I was already doing. Then I kept reading it. Then I went to school for it. Museums already trained me to care about provenance, custody and ownership. Archives taught me what happens when a record disappears. Art comes with copyright, inheritance, authenticity, restitution and people arguing over who gets to own what. Law was already wandering through rooms I knew. I keep most of the legal obsession compartmentalized elsewhere.
The word “portfolio” has never quite fit LOUCHE.art. There is work here, but there are also essays, photographs, music, research, translations, oral histories, things I made, things I saved, things I found interesting enough to keep worrying at long after a reasonable person would have moved on. Some of it belongs together only because I am the person who did it, which is probably enough.
The first version of this page was written from a borrowed patch of gravel beside a French Benedictine abbey in Oklahoma. I was living in an RV with no air conditioning, using an old laptop that I keep alive through methods increasingly difficult to distinguish from séance. Outside there were bells and birds and gravel and stone and a great deal of heat. I brought a garden with me too, because moving into an RV apparently did not persuade me that hauling dirt around was stupid.
Brother Scheer noticed the plants, or I noticed him noticing the plants. I am no longer sure. Either way, we started talking, and the plants eventually led me into the ceramics studio. I worked in clay about twenty years earlier, enough to remember the wheel and the kiln and the glaze buckets and the feeling of a form collapsing because my hands got ahead of the material. The hands did not remember everything immediately.
Brother Scheer has a habit of asking a question and then waiting long enough for you to answer it honestly. After that he asks the part you hoped he missed. I can start out talking about a pot and, several questions later, discover that we are apparently discussing whether something is broken or unfinished, whether corruption is the same thing as destruction, whether evil exists in itself or as a privation of something that should be there, and how Thomas Aquinas managed to get dragged into a ceramics studio in Oklahoma. Somewhere in there, corruptio optimi pessima came back into my life. The corruption of the best is the worst.
At first I tried to answer it with restitutio. Brother Scheer wrote instaurare in my notebook. That changed the direction of the thing. Restitution kept pointing backward. Instauration could move forward. By then we were already talking about evil as privation, corruption as a disordering of the good, and the body as temple. I kept thinking about disease and cure: a body can be disordered, treated, and come through the illness knowing something it did not know before. The fruit has already been eaten. There is no innocence waiting behind us. There is still the question of what we do next.
I am preparing for the next thing. I am not going to tell you what it is.
CORRVPTIO·OPTIMI·PESSIMA
INSTAVRATIO·PESSIMI·OPTIMA