PROFILE: JONATHAN JONES

: : Jasmin Stephens

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Last year’s Primavera, the MCA’s annual exhibition for Australian artists under the age of 35, is often referred to by the shorthand phrase “the new media Primavera”. The artists who were selected by Julianne Pierce, ANAT’s Executive Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), are notable for their technical facility and their fluency in the languages of high-tech simulation and play. Pierce’s inclusion of Jonathan Jones’ light map, 68 Fletcher, 20:20, 8.6.03, might have been unexpected for some viewers, because it appeared so low-tech in comparison to the work of his peers. Jones traced the Bondi skyline viewed at night from the sea by hanging a long, white frieze of domestic light bulbs on extension cords.

Jones’ patterned installations, in which light bulbs may be draped on the floor, suspended on or inserted into a wall, have a diagrammatic sensibility. There is a sense of the work existing in the artist’s mind before being executed in material form. Whether dissecting space or sewn into paper, his line accentuates connections woven deep in space and others threaded by the fall of light and shadow. For Jones, light is a metaphor for the transmission of knowledge and purpose from one generation to another. As the unifying element in his composition, the unbroken nature of light – that we cannot tell where light begins and where it ends – is a reminder of things in common, that overlap and that forge a sense of community and culture. 68 Fletcher… gave visible expression to Jones’ social relations, inflected by a sense of Port Jackson’s topography; Bondi’s joie de vivre; and his Kamilaroi and Wiradjiri heritage.

Jones’ struggle to gain access to the collection of the British Museum while undertaking research about the repatriation of stolen ancestors has become bitter inspiration for two subsequent works. The Sound of Objects, a collaboration with Panos Couros and Ilaria Vanni, was shown at the Performance Space, Sydney in 2003. Earlier this year behind the mountain by Darren Dale, David Page and Jones was commissioned by Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) for 2004 Australian Culture Now. The title behind the mountain is derived from the words of Truganini: “Don’t let them cut me up, bury me behind the mountains”. Video of six crouching naked bodies was projected into cardboard boxes. Jones answers criticism that the work is too beautiful by arguing that the sensuality of the Bangarra dancers’ bodies resists the historicisation of this issue.

Jones is highly persuasive about the benefits of collaboration and not easily discouraged by its pitfalls – surely an asset in both his work as an artist and his practice as a curator. At times Jones ventures the term collaborative to describe, not only his working processes with fellow artists, but also his relationship with dealer Barry Keldoulis – an association founded on swimming at their beloved Bondi as much as business. From the beginning Jones has also been drawn to work with colleagues from the Pacific. He is attracted to the vivacity of many Pacific artists’ negotiation of their post-colonial and diasporic histories and believes that we have much to learn from the confident engagement by artists with the politics of Aotearoa New Zealand.ra is also upside down, so that he looks like he is hanging in space), also document Gladwell’s athleticism, but each has a distinctive style, here invoking the weightlessness of zero gravity.

Jasmin Stephens is Senior Manager Education and Access at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.