Michelle Grabner on Jennie C. Jones
“Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics,” an exhibition of recent work by the up to date American artist, was a Minimalist providing conceived to buttress “Vasily Kandinsky: Across the Circle,” a concurrent present on view till September 5, 2022, that includes works culled from the Guggenheim Basis’s personal holdings. (One other presentation by Etel Adnan, which closed this previous January, and an upcoming one by Cecilia Vicuña are a part of the museum’s program of satellite tv for pc exhibits organized across the Kandinsky exhibition).
In distinction to the exuberant visible vocabularies that permeate the Russian artist’s photos, Jones’s hard-edge and material-rich geometric compositions punctuated the museum’s first two lower-ramp galleries. Topping off the proud parade of iconic Kandinskys lining the Guggenheim’s center core was Jones’s immersive sound set up on the uppermost stage. As a programming conceit, the pairing of Jones’s artwork with the modernist icon’s is a now-common legacy-institution technique that’s being practiced by many museums as a way to diversify their huge twentieth-century European cultural investments. Jones’s present supplied a possibility for a Black American Conceptual artist—who, like Kandinsky, has a deep curiosity within the sonic and formal relationships summary artwork has to music—to grab the Guggenheim’s concave partitions and supply a type of dialectical counterpoint for a traditionally entrenched avant-gardist.
The institutional proximity of those two exhibitions, nonetheless, did reinforce an organizational idea that buildings a lot of Jones’s work. Her work’ central compositions, which frequently appear rigorously austere, function contra the scrupulous consideration she provides to the works’ outermost areas and sides. The artist’s method metaphorically underscores the important political and aesthetic work, typically accomplished by girls and members of marginalized communities, that occurs at a tradition’s periphery. However the determination to make Jones—and the opposite girls artists concerned on this program—aspect dishes to the principle course felt greater than just a little shortchanging. For example, in turning Jones’s sound set up Oculus Tone, 2021, right into a type of ambient-noise relaxation space on the museum’s prime ground—full with white modular seating models and containers bursting with quite a lot of houseplants—the present’s organizer, Lauren Hinkson, undermined the artist’s work and her total imaginative and prescient. Actually we will all use a second to unwind after taking in a hefty chunk of Kandinsky’s wild and infrequently ersatz formalism, however the curatorial determination to make Oculus Tone right into a glorified break room was a poor one.
Thankfully, Jones’s work has the ability to solid off the dour gloom of unhealthy curation, as we noticed within the number of the artist’s acoustic panel work, which have been put in on the touchdown of the museum’s entrance ramp. Take Delicate, Pitchless Measure Oxide Edge, 2021, an almost sq. composition with a topography sparsely textured by viscous white acrylic that has been rigorously pushed and pulled over a flat-white floor, embodying a refined painterly manipulation of medium that challenges Minimalism’s industrialized homogenous planes. But the true drama takes place not within the work’s central composition however on the outer contours. A bloodred vertical band delineates the fitting edge, whereas a skinny strip of felt in mild grey subtly articulates the left. The work’s sides are additionally detailed with slender bars evoking musical staffs and ledger traces—moments of quiet cerebral music.
Inserted amongst Jones’s current works was “Gray Rating (for Agnes),” 2012, a collection of three paper diptychs that honor the centennial of Agnes Martin’s beginning. Each bit consists of collaged bits of printed line paper—a Jonesian twist on Martin’s grids—that collectively operate as a type of lyrical homage. Within the left panel of one other paper diptych, Graphite Motion #3 (Guggenheim), 2021, we noticed 4 teams of exactly curving parallel traces, which characterize the rotational energies of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic structure. In distinction, the right-side drawing layers thicker, extra slapdash traces that obscure a single delicate musical employees. As in all of the work right here, the artist expands upon the vocabulary of Minimalist abstraction with deftness and crafty.
In an interview from 2015, Jones said, “My method is revisionist and neomodernist within the sense of utilizing the filter of postmodernism as a way to unearth and reposition.” Her exhibition reminded us that there’s nice energy in appropriating histories, rerouting cultural heritages, and imbuing reductive visible programs with new units of penalties and interpretations. On this mild, the curiosity in music that she shares with Kandinsky is generally incidental.
— Michelle Grabner
