LAND OF JONES

The name of the game for contemporary art fairs is diversity of selection. Most contemporary work garners a love or hate response, so the exhibition of multiple artists protects against that pressurizing of the hate-response risk. Contemporary art tends to work best within an overwhelming context of skillfully, reverently composed work. At Frieze, that context is blatantly absent and the affect is rather tasteless I have to say. As installation progressed I noticed several disgust-ridden faces (belonging to other install workers, many of whom are artists) really more than I’d ever seen before. For gallerists, the game seems to have shifted into maintaining the old glamor at any cost. Art sales contrivances have evolved to become extremely complex and values are far beyond material. There is a Richard Tuttle work I know intimately… It’s a cardboard scrap painted on one side with pink tempera and cut into a spiral, a work that would take longer to burn than it took to create, a work that takes much longer to install and light even though it hangs by one nail. Plainly, artwork today has exchanged intrinsic and/or transformation visual power for a different kind of sublimation of curiosity, “Art” has professionally suggested that it now prefers oddity to mystery. The immediately meaningful or not, the confrontation of methodical living in a world where few actually live methodically. Instead of risking human exception, we’ve defaulted on caricaturing convention. I see this trend as reflecting a general capitulation of faith in humanity; without curiosity there is judgment.

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—	My thoughts after installing at Frieze New York 2012

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March 2012

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Natural History Museum Diorama

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky

In art making, as in life, elaboration eventually becomes too risky and we fall back on abstraction.

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky

Beauty is compelling, so much so that we forget ourselves and attempt to understand its power. We do all we can to interact with it, to cultivate it, desperately seeking epiphany, but none come. We repeat ourselves, continuing to be impressed. Unlike other sensations, diminishing in the wake of repetitive exposure, beauty’s affect builds upon itself. We want very much to cross it with our egotism, our achievements, our “successes”, but these ventures are in constant retrograde, insatiable, always seeking balance; the two spheres are immiscible, like oil and water. ..But pair beauty with conscientious humanity it skirts across permanent memory and into ultimate mythology. Large or small, we do not forget what is good and true.

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—	Landon Jones 02-11-2012

The Practical Role of Conscientious Objects & Architecture:

In expressing grace (through object quality and conscientious composition) the truly spiritual craftsman creates a conjoined abstract, the evocation of grace in others.

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—	Landon Jones 12-14-2011