In the June 23 issue of The Nation, Barry Schwabsky has an excellent piece on the collage artist Jess. (You can read the first several paragraphs here.) Narkissos, never finished, "its innumerable details so palely indicated that the "well of symbols" (as the poet Michael Palmer once called it) seems to be in a constant state of vanishing before one’s eyes, and the work imperiously stakes its claim: as if the naked young man who is its central figure were lost in contemplation, not of his own image as the Narcissus myth would have it but of the dissolution of all earthly things. Among the questions in [Jess’s] notebook is one from the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who says of Narcissus, ‘He does not know that the image he admires is his own.’"
— DL
Jess’s "Narkissos" (1976-1991)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art