SONNABEND Her voice restrained.

SONNABEND

Her voice restrained, flat detached, despite the terror of her tale, she expresse no interest in reliving the incident, in imparting the drama of final trices but, rather, gives a measured and factual account to guide the viewer from united site to the next. The planters, the ornamental bushes, the brass busts, the bones, the black and white "snow" patterns synonymous with interrupted electronic transmission are all memorials to those who have not survived. Having met a catastrophic extremity she is included among them. Her authority is insured in that she has known what each of us has besides to confront: the horrific white panic of living one's possess death. She is the voice of the Cyclop the satellite whose mission was abruptly terminated in disastrous collision with the lunar surface; whose first and final transmission was further a few seconds of grainy static and noise.

The quirk of Ronald Jones' installation, with its acousta-guide constituting and an accompanying text entitled demon 1993, is one in which fiction and fact, art and life be lost to the detriment of the normative boundaries that regulate like distinctions. The disembodied female voice that, along with the clause supplies a meditation on Edmund Burke's notion of the sublime, speaks for victims who can no longer speak for themselves; nevertheless metaphor is sharply curtailed. The characters who make their appearance in Jones' installation are surpassingly real, as real as the narratives concerning the circumstances of their deaths. Here we are introduced to Mala Zilberberg and Leo collect who perished at Auschwitz; to a young lad and girl, murdered by the Khmer Rouge at the "torture and execution center" known as Tuol Sleng; to Mark V Dennis, MIA in Vietnam; to Eddie Di Franco, who was killed along with more than 200 others in the terrorist attack onward the Marine barracks in Beirut; and to Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair, killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth road Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. in consequence of the expertise of forensic and information specialists, they are brought to life in the not absent either as bronze busts that approximate what they would be like today had they survived, or by the agency of fragmentary evidence of their remains. Meanwhile, the decorative forces of lush castor plants and their attractive containers, among which and zinc busts and human bones are arranged, disguise their sinister function: the plants contain a deadly toxin that could easily endue terrorists with the means to wage chemical warfare; the planters are designed as defensive barricades against terrorist attack. the pair of these, the text documents, figure into U intelligence contingency plans to be agreeable to to the ever-present threat of terrorist attack in this country

The offense that near have registered in relation to the realism of Jones' installation is that he not and nothing else profanes and exploits the victims and their families, whose stories he includes in prodigy but that he tampers with the "truth" of history in what amounts to an estheticized "docudrama" that toys, pointlessly, with real life. And, notwithstanding that seems to be exactly Jones' point. No redeeming message, no virtuous cause, no altruistic intent can be used to measure the succes of so-called political art, to create for late-20th-century art at a function that is verifiable in relation to the moral values of "real life," a function that at not past nor future it so desperately seeks while clinging to its hold sublime precipice.

...

Home