Jennie C. Jones
FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES, Jennie C. Jones’s interdisciplinary practice has encompassed painting, sculpture, installation, and sound. Frequently working with industrial materials like fiberglass acoustic panels and architectural felt, Jones has developed a visual language that draws on the aesthetics and concepts of Minimalism. Her works often materially reference audio culture, but are noticeably quiet. In the 2000s, she began using acoustic ephemera such as cables, tape cassette cases, and CD racks to create sculptures that pun on sound production and increasingly obsolete analog formats. By 2011, Jones was painting commercial acoustic panels like monochromes, suggesting visual as well as sonic absorption. Her first outdoor sculpture, These (Mournful) Shores, a colossal riff on the ancient aeolian harp, a self-playing instrument, was appended to a Tadao Ando–designed wall extending from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2020. Rather than presenting discrete sounds, these works are containers for aural attention, delineating spaces where the viewer can reflect not only on their own sensory encounters but also on the varied histories of art, architecture, and music that the works invoke.
Jones’s Minimalist forms emerge from a desire to map other histories of modernism––and to trace her relationship to those histories, most notably the silenced, or muted, history of Black avant-garde producers of visual art and music. Jones’s latest work, Ensemble, is her second foray into outdoor sculpture. This installation for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cantor Roof Garden comprises four sculptural elements that explore the sonic and formal potential of simple stringed instruments. On view through October 19, Ensemble is the final commission for the roof garden, which has served as a vivid setting for site-specific installations since it opened in 1987. A new series of commissions will begin in 2030, when the Met will reopen a transformed wing for modern and contemporary art.
—Caitlin Woolsey
AS PART OF conceptualizing Ensemble, I created preparatory “scores”—works on paper using collage and acrylic—as a primer to start considering what the scale and volume would look like. These studies were also really an investigation of color, thinking of the way graphic scores can work and trying to convey a mood or tone through color theory. I struggled a lot with color for this project: The color needs to have gravity and hold space in a different way because there is so much visual competition up there—and because the work is sitting on top of five thousand years of art. Early on I was thinking about Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” [1992–93], but then I decided that I’m going to give myself all the freedoms that the white guys get. It’s not my responsibility to address the history of the museum underneath me, but instead to hold space on a rooftop and be forward-thinking.
These are the biggest sculptures I’ve ever made. The scale was challenging; I kept making the joke that I’m an inside cat, and here I am, working on this large outdoor commission. It’s hard to think about scale when the scale that you’re comparing the work to is the sky. An element that feels really huge at a foundry could be totally dwarfed once it’s up there on the roof.
Since the roof is a platform and a plinth, there’s no architecture for me to respond to. Instead, the architecture of the city was part of my vernacular. The sculpture composed of twin vertical panels, which recalls a one-string instrument, has a relationship to the skyline more than it does to Central Park. I have been concerned about making sure that the pieces don’t go down these rabbit holes where my research and my history overtake the tremendous courage of this shift for me. It’s a shift in scale, but also a shift in terms of formalism––the way I want my work to bridge different histories. Ensemble is in conversation with Minimalist sculpture by Richard Tuttle and Fred Sandback, asking, What might it mean for their string pieces to be activated, or able to become sonic? At the same time, my work is also in conversation with blues musicians like Louis Dotson and Moses Williams and their one-string guitars. In both cases, it’s a wire on the wall, but they come from different places.
My heartswell was to find my own origin story to Minimalism, instead of constantly struggling to overexplain my position—particularly in a field that tends to reward figuration and easy storytelling, and often favors revisionist history and educating the audience over complexity. But I have my own story, my own way to this work, which has involved art school and personal listening and intellectual listening and conceptual thinking.
I think about human bodies in relationship to my sculptures. The sculptures are not proxies of the body so much as objects that are able to hold space in multiple ways. Musicians Luke Stewart and Tomeka Reid are going to activate Ensemble, and we have been figuring out what that means in terms of the works’ frontal positioning. What it means for a body to wrap around, say, a cello, versus being confronted with something that you can potentially pluck or activate but that is frontal, like a wall harp.
While the work will be activated, it is also invested in quiet. Interior richness is a part of quiet, part of one’s own interiority creating a vernacular that’s not overtly storytelling but is about the unspeakable, the silence, the quiet that Tina Campt and Fred Moten and others speak about.
There are clichés that go along with Black performativity and expectations around that. I was able to go directly to the Met and say that I have some anxiety about the expectation that these works are going to be active all the time. Whereas from day one, I started with a picture of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field [1977]. I talked about site and location, and weather conditions and environment—and how the beauty is in anticipation, in presence, in patience. This is another way to say that Blackness is not always performing for you. Sometimes it’s holding court, and holding stillness, and holding power in ways that are not performative.
I think about my work as site-responsive rather than site-specific. Ensemble is in a sense a continuation of my studio practice, how I work first on the floor, and how I think about the floor itself as a place of site-responsiveness. The final sculpture, the floor piece, is kind of the conductor. This was a pleasurable breakthrough. This element is corralling all the sculptures into a sort of listening zone by giving the space parameters that aren’t the same as the building’s parameters. The floor piece is almost like making a rubbing or an etching of that part of the footprint of the museum. Once the Met’s modern and contemporary wing is transformed, this listening zone will still carry over. In that sense, it’s different from simply saying that the project is a siren song. It’s more of a fingerprint on that location.
