When Merleau-Ponty writes ‘Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism,’ he sets into conversation the private body with the public exterior, suggesting that the individual is constructed through interaction and not as a self-contained object. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology infused artistic practice of the 1960s by enlarging the very notion of experience to suggest that art objects require an audience for their completion. As Robert Morris summed up in 1970: ‘a certain strain of modern art has been involved in uncovering a more direct experience and it has not achieved this through static images, but through the experience of an interaction between the perceiving body and the world that fully admits that the terms of this interaction are temporal as well as spatial, that existence is process, that the art itself is a form of behaviour...’ The ethos of Minimalism sought the viewing individual as interlocutor. Yet such interaction, as Morris underscores, occurred strictly through notions of perception and sensual experience, which often left behind the structural envelopes of social, political and cultural pressures. The work of Conceptualism politicised such relations by suggesting that the perceiving body is always embedded within ideology – to view is to construct meaning according to the powers of knowledge. History, language, class, sexuality, etc. all lurk behind the gazing body, infusing the appreciation of art with political values.
The work of Ronald Jones stands out as an extended engagement with negotiating the question of identity and its place. Working as an artist, writer, curator, professor, lecturer and critic over the last 20 years, Jones is a self-styled Conceptualist, spanning the worlds of academia and art, opera and garden design, and acting as paternal spearhead of contemporary critical practice. Explorative and provocative, Jones creates work that demands attention that is both perceptual and political. His garden design for the Aussendienst project in 2001 took its form from a similar garden planted by a Catholic woman in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Situated near Hamburg’s main train station, Jones’s garden turns the serene beauty of floral life into a contemplative reservoir of history’s bleaker moments.
Such strategies run throughout Jones’s
work. His sculptural works from 1988 echo Brancusi’s sleek and elegant
aesthetic, displaying sublime beauty in the form of bronze amorphic shapes
poised on wooden pedestals. Such historic reference is self-consciously
mobilised in order to rupture high Modernist legacy and any lingering
effects. Jones’s forms turn out to be magnified cells related to cancer and
the AIDS virus, hauntingly making us aware of the body by turning the
sensual perceiver into a voyeur on death.
The theatricality Michael Fried notoriously blasted in the work of
Minimalists is staged in Jones’s work so as to uncomfortably situate us
within history’s parade. His 1998 exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York,
consisted of three austere sculptures of beds, each making reference to
pivotal moments in American history: The bed Neil Armstrong slept in his
first night back from the moon,1969 (1998), The bed Jack Ruby slept in the
night before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald, 1963 (1998) and The bed Ethel
Rosenberg slept in the night before she was executed for espionage,1953
(1998). Reduced in scale and tinged with moral uncertainty, the beds bring
to the fore, through absence, the body as caught within the mechanism of
history. The beds function as signs, indexing personal stories as fragments
that nonetheless displace the certainty of history’s meaning. What we read
is a play of signifiers reminding us that our position in the world is
granted through others.
Jones’s sculptural works embody a critical glance backwards through art history, cultural legacies and political events, while looking ever-forward. He positions art as a continual investigation performing across a spectrum of disciplines and within a multitude of contexts. His current work housed under the office o-b-o-k (along with partner Laurie Haycock Makela, an established graphic designer), manifests Jones’s ambition: to develop a public cultural platform for the possibilities of a practice that has real effects. o-b-o-k have been commissioned by Magasin 3 Konsthall in Stockholm to redesign part of the existing Royal Grounds in the city by integrating exhibitions and events with graphic and landscape design. Their Samlingspunkt project functions as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in which a visitor may wander through Strindberg’s Garden, dip into the cabinets of information (CNN and the Cartoon Network alongside artefacts of history, such as the sofa on which Oscar Wilde and August Strindberg first met) or visit the cafe and exotic flower shop. Like Jones’s previous sculptures, Samlingspunkt weaves together history with its interpretation: objects and artefacts, information and stories, set each other into relief by implicating the visitor into a complexity of readings, underscoring how the specifics of places are grounded in temporal understanding. By pointing to the operations at work within the found environment, his work asks the question: what is our relationship to the real?
While Conceptual art functioned not so much as a code of meaning, but rather as an analysis of how these codes operate, Jones’s current version addresses how knowledge is publicly put to use. His move towards the built environment may place him in an optimum position, for, as Bernard Tschumi suggests, ‘the built environment is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users’.