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Untitled (the tyranny of distance)
...At first glance it may appear to us that Jones has an attachment to, or a pronounced interest in, the symbolism, tools, and aesthetics of modernism. But we must look deeper, or closer, if we wish to avail ourselves of a broader grasp of Jones’s practice. A few years ago Jones created an exhibit titled blue poles 2004, echoing, none too subtly, Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism, and the consequences and the implications of Pollock’s Blue Poles 1952 being a foundations work in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of twentieth century American art. We might also consider that Jones’s blue poles resonated with wider musings on art history, Australian art practice, and ever-relevant, ever-present dualities of inclusion and exclusion. It seems clear that in knowing art history, in referencing, in such explicit and implicit ways this art history, Jones has sought not so much to make work that merely or simply stands outside of, or alongside that history. Instead, Jones has, we might conclude, sought to make work that intelligently critiques the problematic nuances of that history, whilst simultaneously demanding for himself a place and a space well within it.
As Blair French has written: ‘Jones deploys certain materials and forms associated with Euro-American modernism to draw upon the seductive familiarity of its aesthetic conventions while subtly critiquing its broader historical purview. The formal construction of Jones’s work should alert us to the manner in which, rather than simply being conditioned by or located within a space of play or dialogue (or indeed a gulf) between cultures, the work itself animates that space, encouraging reflection upon that space, but also acting to destabilise our experience of it.” Abstract expressionism (together with jazz, blues and other forms of music) may indeed be amongst America’s gifts to the world. But within Australia, the ways in which the country has received, embraced and understood abstract expressionism in particular and modernism in general cannot, as far as Jones is concerned, be kept separate from the politics of Aboriginal experience and identity (and what is, for him, an attendant quest for artistic independence). The art historians and curators of America, Australia and Europe have tended to interpret and present modernism in decidedly blinkered ways that have steadfastly refused to embrace wider concerns and wider constituencies of peoples and artists. Yet within Jones’s work we see an artist who is intent on using the aesthetics of modernism whilst attempting to subtly and quietly disrupt what rapidly became its dominant ethos or the hegemonic meaning historically and traditionally attached to it. In other words, Jones (much like British-Chinese artist Anthony Key) is ‘interested in minimalism with lots of meaning’. This is important because art historians traditionally describe modernism as being void of what might be referred to as socio-political inferences. It seems to me that both Key and Jones take issue with this, seeing modernism in much more animated, pertinent and engaging terms. Katrina Schwarz posited the view that ‘Jones… finds in appropriation a means of empowerment – a challenge to the representation of indigeneity as “other”.’ It seems to me that reading Jones’s strategy as being one of appropriation as a means of political empowerment and a rebuttal of the prejudices associated with indigenity is, at the very least a misreading and is perhaps insufficiently nuanced. Jones is after all utilising a set of aesthetics available to all artists, irrespective of the artist’s perceived or actual identity. We need not regard Jones’s way of working as being somehow symptomatic of attempts to sidestep or challenge otherness. As a contemporary artist, Jones is free to make good use of whatever influences he chooses, from whatever quarter those influences emerge...
The full version of the above text was published in the catalogue for Jonathan Jones, untitled (the tyranny of distance), Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Paddington, New South Wales, Australia, 2008.
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