Jack Early was part of the collaborative art team of Pruitt & Early that for some time skyrocketed to fame in the late ’80s only to split after they were harshly criticised and condemned for a project exhibition on blaxploitation, [i] accused of adopting a cynical, degrading and infantile approach to their subject.

Today Jack Early presents in his show six song-installations and a poster-wallpaper with his personal aspect on the Pruitt & Early unfortunate story. With bright vivid colours, using the very basic vocabulary of a pop aesthetic, Early is illustrating the space that his songs create, producing a different monochrome environment for each one of them. The songs’ themes and lyrics are simple and sweet, short stories and intangible verses. They are folksy melancholic ballads without being completely sad or gloom, personal tales of the past, resonant of a slight optimism and faith. The colour installation consists of a handmade coloured vinyl record playing on a coloured record-player on a plinth with its colours extending to a wall that carries pop illustrations such as clouds, Mae West, lips and the like.

Early finds a way to present his fascination with his music and his lyrics, by finding perhaps a new way to communicate with his audience, reaching for a different audience than when he was part of Pruitt & Early, maybe even reaching out to the same audience that rejected his ideas back when he was P & E, or, even more, reaching to his once collaborator/lover and now estranged Rob Pruitt, these songs could be verses of the imaginary speeches and dialogues Jack Early planned in his head.

In order to understand, it is necessary to briefly backtrack, also since in Jack Early’s exhibition the entry point, and in many ways the reference point, is his account of the Pruitt & Early collaborating team. In his attribution and his very personal recollection of that incident back then, we inevitably come across the traumatic encounter of rejection and loss that Pruitt & Early experienced. What was it like in their post-depression times, after the negative reception of the Leo Castelli project, and how did each of them cope? How did they deal with the fact that from one day to the next their successful team switched from being the art world’s darlings, with sold-out projects and commissions, to offensively cynical and infantile boys from the American south? They were rejected from a world in which they were once central figures and soon after they lost their relationship and working collaboration.

Today we can somehow identify who brought which elements into the team’s work by looking at Pruitt’s and Early’s artistic careers. Pruitt should have been the intellect counterpart providing conceptualised ideas, but also the fan of the ‘shock and awe’ tactic while Early should have been the one behind the juvenile vocabulary that provided that flair of innocence and irresistible charm in their works. Hence the critique and their work that was sometimes referred to as a publicity stunt and could be characterised in many ways as Warholian practice — justified since that is what was predominantly still happening at that time — and also referred to in some ways as naïve.

So couldn’t we say that Jack Early is making out of his own unfortunate historical moment a piece of work, in a show today, and in a way exploiting his own past? And since both his work and his once-partner, Rob Pruitt’s work are always viewed by taking into account their common past collaboration and fallout, probably he’s not only entitled to it, but even obliged to it. In some ways it looks like both artists somehow redeem their ’90s story of the rise and fall that followed them.

Should someone take Jack Early’s work out of his own personal historical context, what would be the assessment? Perhaps this exhibition is the simplistic illustration of his new found love in folk ballads and surplus sentimentality but also the expendable production of merchandise of his personal story. Could it be that after the exploitation of the ‘juvenile delinquent’ [ii] aesthetics and the Afro-American subject now it’s the exploitation and the commodification of their own story?

It’s true that they both refer to their past work and deeds and even long for their lost esteem. But each one of the Pruitt & Early team moved from that unfortunate exhibition in different ways. Rob Pruitt’s work addresses questions and comments on some subjects and ideas that rise from their notorious story in a critical, detached and ironic way, intellectualising it. He is commenting on the rules of the art market cruelties, human vanity and materialistic greed. On the other hand, Jack Early’s work guides us into what he became after the Leo Castelli exhibition in a more poignant and sentimental way. He’s narrating a series of invented stories and he’s depicting his vision of world, bravely exposing uncertainty.

But maybe in times of an imminent total meltdown and depression a simple set of colourful songs, nostalgic of the happy past and romanticising the present could be the answer. Or it could be that since Early’s work is not a series of massively spectacular works, it does have haunting qualities of a precious vintage artefact and that of the work of an artist that has a comforting value by itself.

And, in the end, Jack Early with his autofiction work presents us with phantasmagorical appropriations of his own life without extorting from his viewers sympathy but inviting them for a look into his melancholic mood, and only for a guessing about his and his songs’ origins.


[i] Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1992.
[ii] Artworks for Teenage Boys, Artworks for Teenage Girls, 303 Gallery, New York, 1991.