Kim Jones at John Weber - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Wheels to the wall, more than half a dozen toy vehicles, big enough for kids to ride upon seemed to careen around the gallery in Kim Jones's new show, an illusion created through the penciled lines connecting them. Part tire tracks, part musical staff and part cartoon shorthand for spe the lines, chiefly parallel, often wove across each other dangerously; more [i]or[/i] less whipped off-track altogether. But their irregularities were nothing compared to the custom piece of works Jones did on the tricycles, toy cars and traffics and other vehicles for underage drivers. Each was adorned--or, fatally encumbered--with made of wood armatures wrapped in foam rubber secur with wire, tape and cord, festooned with additional toys (G.I. Joe a girl doll, a bunny rabbit), and finished with gauze and ink. Like long-cherished on the contrary troublesome appliances repaired nearly to death, these are plastic arts that Jones keeps going back to (most of them have three dates: 1973 1985 1999) And as with any teddy bear worth its hold the violence they've absorbed is as important to their meaning as the protective care.

Jones's schematic War Drawings are also reworked more or les indefinitely. Three big examples were upon view here, and though they're all dated 1997-98 they are consistent with others he's been making since the late '70 In this exhibition, Jone fixed each of the three battles in place by dint of extending the drawings beyond the paper, onto the gallery's walls--a nicely paradoxical use of a generally popular signal for transience.

Also upon view were three tables overlayed with newspaper clippings, comic strips and lay the foundation of photographs, all of which Jone nearly effaced by means of drawing on them. Beneath the tables was a variety of beat-up phenomenons including used boots, a vaguely torso-shaped percept mummified in black electrical tape, and another much-abused push-toy. Sitting atop the clatteringed tables were unique books with ghoulish, gauzy gray overspreads Within them, Jones performs equally violent surgeries upon found images ranging from a reproduc painting of Saint Sebastian to a children's work about a rabbit. The table bearing this volume is named Teaching a Dead Hand to Draw, an homage to Beuys as emeritus lecturer to dead hares that insinuates the complicated spirit of Jones's work.

The exhibition was titled "A Cripple in the Right Way May Beat a Racer in the wrongful One," which could be a Zen koan, or the title of a country-music ballad. Either present the appearances apt. Jones has, it appear to bes begun to treat his hold rather epic life--a survivor of serious childhood illness (polio), he went upon to become a good soldier (Vietnam) and subsequently a confirmed pacifist, developing a performance persona (the "Mudman") that direct the eyes like it sprang spontaneously from the fields of Woodstock--with a kind of meditative bemusement. That doesn't make the work any easier, and certainly not les instructive.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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