William E. Jones
David Kordansky Gallery, New York
By Paul Moreno
Before seeing “Survey,” a selection of films by William E. Jones, at David Kordansky Gallery, the word “survey” conjured a vision in my mind of a warren of small, partitioned spaces, each with a monitor of some sort showing a piece of video art that one would stand and watch, at least in part, before shuffling on to the next nook of the warren. I was rather surprised, then, when I arrived at the gallery and parted the heavy black velvet curtain that shielded the exhibition space from the light and sound of the lobby.
The exhibition took place in one large open space. Three Nelson benches were strategically placed throughout. On the right side of the gallery, a wall-height projection played a silent, black-and-white film that took the entire day to see in its entirety. On the far wall, opposite the velvet curtain, played a programmed series of films, with sound, each about five to 20 minutes in length, taking about an hour. When it was complete, another one-hour series of films began on an adjacent wall. When the second sequence was complete, the whole thing started again. This presentation allowed the viewer to enter at any moment, and, if they were willing, to sit and watch all two hours of work and leave when they had completed both loops. In all, there were 12 film works in the show.
The daylong video, Rejected (2017), consists of a montage of more than 3,000 images commissioned—and later “killed”—by the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Each image has a visible hole punched in it that the camera zooms into. For a split second there is only darkness, and then we zoom back out to a different image with a black circle where the photo has been punched. The images change, but the black dot maintains its size and position, and immediately the zoom into darkness reoccurs; the visual swooping repeats and repeats, always providing glimpses of new images, sometimes in full, sometimes in part, determined by where the image has been punched.
The grand size of this moving image on the wall, the tension between the viewers’ desire to spend time with the images and the images’ fleeting quality, and the playground swing movement of the film, all create an exhilarating experience. This video exemplifies two important elements in the show. One is the work’s reliance on found material that the artist manipulates in ways that displace the found material’s intents. The other is about how one experiences an art film and how it functions in the art space.
The film work Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012) is one of the films in one of the one-hour sequences. The film is derived from a law enforcement training film intended to teach officers to determine when to fire a gun at a suspect. A voice-over describes variations on an evolving scenario, involving the observation of a man who fits the description of a “known wanted felon” as he crosses a city street and heads toward a movie theater box office. The voice-over, at moments, asks the viewer if they should shoot the man in question. The man in question, it is important to note, is Black. The suspect moves down a sidewalk through a small crowd of white folks. This was a choice made by the creator of the original film. We are immediately struck by the implicit racism of this choice made some 50 years ago. We know the choice was made some 50 years ago because of a detail the original creator probably didn’t consciously choose: the theater across the street is playing Watermelon Man, Melvin Van Peebles’s 1970 film about a white man who overnight becomes Black and suddenly experiences what his whiteness has protected him from. In one sequence of Jones’s Shoot Don’t Shoot, the suspect does turn and fire a gun at the viewer. It is hard to know if this isn’t just a fear fantasy within this make-believe scenario. In the final sequence the suspect just buys a ticket and enters the movie theater. The voice-over never says it is okay to shoot.
It is notable that Jones’s Shoot Don’t Shoot was made the same year as the 2012 Aurora, CO movie theater shooting— one of a long series of mass shootings that fueled the hamster-on-the-wheel discussion about gun control in America. I do not mean to imply that the video was made in reaction to that shooting—I don’t know if that is true or false. That context, however, provides an opening for consideration of an important quality of Jones’s work. It does not pander to simple ideas but lays out complex cultural phenomena. For example, Shoot Don’t Shoot does not simply moralize that guns are bad. Rather, Shoot Don’t Shoot exemplifies how issues of public safety serve only certain members of the public. It does not ask, are you racist? Rather, it asks, what is your relationship to race? It asks us if, in some way, guns in the hands of certain people make us feel safe. It presents a discomforting notion that America’s problem with guns is a problem rooted in us, if we are American.
Shoot Don’t Shoot is one of the shorter films in “Survey.” I have taken a deep dive into it because it demonstrates how I feel Jones’s films reframe our forgotten or disposable media to provoke thought. It is also a good example of how his work formally activates the art space. This is a distinguishing criterion for video art. We often look at painting or photography without thinking about the space it is in. Sculpture and—even more so—installation ask us to consider the art’s environment. I feel that film, in the gallery setting, often has the burden of having to be an event in the space, to fill the space, to not just be an art object but to make the viewer its subject, to entertain you like TV, to swallow you like cinema. In this way, “Survey” was quite successful.
William E. Jones in recent years has been producing a trilogy of novels about the sexual and artistic development of a young guy attending art school in Los Angeles. In the second novel, I Should Have Known Better, the young man has a studio visit with a fictionalized version of the late artist Jack Goldstein, who explains, “I’m a filmmaker and writer, and I did performances. I don’t know how to paint, either. I made paintings anyway, and it worked too.” The young protagonist asks, “Is being a painter the only way to be an artist?” Jack Goldstein replies, “It’s the only way to be the best.”
As I stepped back from viewing the individual films and looked at the room, William E Jones’s work quite beautifully filled the space. Shoot Don’t Shoot casts a warm blush across the room with its dark pink hues, and the composition of these found images are actually quite beautiful at moments, like a William Eggleston photograph come to life. Model Workers (2014), which consists of a montage of paper currencies from around the world, is simply quite lovely to look at, as it explores the monetization of labor, the enslavement of indigenous people, and the blind, tone-deaf cruelty of colonialism. Psychic Driving (2014), a film about experimental use of hallucinogenic drugs, vacillates between images of floating squares of color and scratchy distorted images that evoke an old, very distressed VHS tape. In a way, these images also evoke the painting of Jack Goldstein but with a calmer, soothing, more elegant use of color. At many points throughout the exhibition, the films are just a pleasure to look at—dare I say, painterly. In all, the large projections, outsized images, and singular film works filled the space with washes of color, flickering light, and displaced voices, which made for an exciting experience.
The challenge inherent in “Survey” is that you know William E. Jones does the work. These are researched, informed, and thoughtful films that, even when as short as five minutes, a viewer might only lazily peek in on, stroll through, or abandon. I saw this happen several times as I watched “Survey.” Or worse yet, I saw one viewer sit in front of an image of a billowing American flag in Jones’s film Midcentury (2016), a sort of jazz-like visual poem about the American condition in the 20th century. As the viewer sat there looking ponderous, his companion made a video of him watching it, and then split once the proof of the viewer’s viewing was viewed. Jones was giving this guy so much to take in, but, as they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think. I actually felt a little angry on Jones’s behalf and wondered what Jones might think of the current state of art viewing.
What Jones seems to be asking is that we view more carefully. Perhaps this happens especially poignantly in his film, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998). This twenty minute film is made by carefully selecting and arranging clips from Eastern European gay porn films, which became popular in the ’90s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his voice-over, Jones mentions “consumers who pass over the boring parts.” Jones makes a film from the boring parts that not only exposes the uncomfortable place where fetishization rubs against exploitation but also implicates the viewers, both of the original porn, and of Jones’s film, in the seedy economic and political power the U.S. and western allies hold over developing nations. It implies that these may in fact be not dissimilar actions. In one snippet, as the hands and forearms of a producer of the original porn reach into the shot to inspect the head and face and mouth of the porn’s young actor, one could assume a prescient point was being made about Ukraine’s omission from NATO. The boy is pretty, valuable, usable, but still, let’s keep an arm’s-length for now.
Lastly, I would like to mention that in a back room of the gallery, Jones installed three examples of a years-long project called Gutter Collages. I am not sure they were technically part of the show, but if you knew they were there they were so worth spending time with. Jones starts with full spreads taken from magazines. I am guessing these were from Artforum. He then collages an elegant selection of other images onto the spread with noteworthy technical skill. These compositions express a powerful understanding of history, art, semiotics, and emotion. You also know that the source material is, in its own way, precious, but not so much that Jones will not take it apart to give the viewer something truly meaningful. This same trope exists in his film work—destruction as a form of creation.