Ronald Jones
Sonnabend, New York, USA
Me and Mr Jones got a thing goin’ on, a thing where I take his many clues and start stepping. Ronald Jones’ work needs a return from the viewer: good faith in the facts and conditions that accompany each single piece (and sometimes even its constituent parts as well). With the requirement of good faith, a certain suspicion of authority and a grudging memory of heinous events, you’re set up as Jones’ ideal public. Still, once among the artworks, there’s some stretching to do. Jones’ oblique association of the Techno-Political, the Medical-Industrial, the Socio-Military, girded to the Cultural can be taxing. The multiplex concerns of art are well treated in this show.
Jones’ approach seems to take off from a Kosuthesque objectivism as regards each element of a work: consequential elements insist upon a reading of the whole as a sort of Cubist Allegory. In previous shows, a sculpture was often a hierarchical stacking of components - a baboon heart on a hangman’s board or Rietveld chair, say, accompanied by a ponderous title card. Monster is to be walked through with a cassette recorded docent and small pamphlet containing photo-portraits of victims of the Nazis, the KKK and the Khmer Rouge. Identifying itself in a husky female voice as the lunar probe, Ranger 7 (which lost trajectory and impacted on the moon’s surface in 1964), the tape directs us through sculptures of portrait busts and concrete planters. The planters contain rambling-branched Castor bean plants, which can yield the poison Ricin, possibly the most toxic substance found in nature. The narrative introduces the busts in turn - each is a reconstructed likeness of the people in the photographs as they might appear today. Deployed within the work, or hovering above, they are the silent Chorus in this drama of State terror, forensic artifice and poison Castor beans.
The tape begins, appropriately, at a sculpture featuring an inverted and decapitated Picasso, Study for Head, and weaves a humourless narrative driven by quotes like ‘terror is in all cases the ruling principle of the sublime’. The facts surrounding these murders, or lack thereof, as well as a description of the strategically insipid function of the planters as anti-terrorist barricades, are presented in a montage of paranoid scenarios: A Patriotic femur bone seems to be, rather than a Broodthaers trope, the clue to a Pentagon cover-up; terrorists mash up Castor beans and poison the water supply, while an elite Cabal controls the antidote.
The multiple actions of revealing crimes and schemes, and the salvaging by recall of the stolen years of victims of genocide, occur in a unilateral space. The precedent is Guernica. Such monstrous events evade rationalisation or organisation. Jones’ motif of the fortification planters allows for the intervening 50-something years since Picasso’s masterpiece. The metaphor is of suspicion and the poisonous tolerance of murder that’s not seen as monstrous or aberrant but rather is insinuated into the course of our histories.
Bob Schefferine
