Investigations, Meditations, Lamentations
By Bill
Jones
Excerpt from artistÕs statement in
the catalogue for Investigations, Meditations, Lamentations, Bill
Jones Selections 1970-1990, Presentation House
My parents
died when I was a teenager. An only child, by1974 I had no cousins, no
relatives left. Then it happened, like a messenger from the past, I received a
box in the mail with pictures of my lost family, spanning a hundred years. A
personal history in photography dropped in my lap. There were family portraits
as far back as my great-great aunt on my motherÕs side. A weathered bone-thin
man in little tin type portraits taped together to stand up on a make-shift
mantle. A letter dated August 1869 told the story.
ÒFather
Shedrick, I take pen to paper at this time to tell you of the death of your
daughter Sarah. She worked for two hours in the field and died at nightfall.Ó
There were hundreds of tintypes and paper prints that chronicled my family as
they migrated across the great American continent. I began to piece together a
history as the photographs told the story of my grandparentsÕ farm at the turn
of the century. The huge horse-drawn bailers, the family
portraits like Little House on the Prairie. And the many pictures of my
grandfather throughout his life.
I pieced together
this history of a lost family but I tried in my art, to divorce myself from my
family relations. That is, I attempted to use the nostalgic charge as just
another facet of photographic saying. I this allowed myself
complete access to the antiquated images set within my conceptual systems of
numbers and manipulations. I played the science off the subjective qualities of
the image. I made works which were formal studies of the mounting and the
framing of the old photos. I never considered that I might be using the
conceptualism to hide my feelings. It never occurred to me either that this
work was in any way autobiographical. The romantic images of my mother as a
teenager with roses were no more than formal exercises in my determination to
order the photographic system into a rendered state. Pictures.
I had already
completed a number of works in the early 70s, investigations of the photograph
as object: folding a large sheet of paperÐthe drawing support--photographing
it, then folding the enlarged photograph. A kind of series
procedure reminiscent of a Kaprow happening, drawn out of his rarified theories
of assemblage, except that what I made was the illusion of two folds. The
exposition of the photograph as both paper object and illusionary rendering was
a simple start to my dual role as iconoclast--demystifying the paper object--and
iconodule remystifying with a another illusion.
The path taken
lead to three images, the window, the book and the table, All
of which were photographically two-dimensional, one transparent, one opaque,
one a support. In my metaphorical world the table held the book which was
illuminated by the light from the window.
In an effort
to enhance or challenge the object relation of the image, I covered mural
photographs of a picture window, reflecting a distant
My iconoclastic
quest to test the photographic image by drawing it into the third planar
dimension led me to the photo as table in Elevations, Levitations, and the
Twist, which revealed two characteristics of the photographic illusion: photograph
as literary narrative and photograph as object. The prop table, itself a
four-foot-by-six-foot photograph with legs was shot from seven angles, from
overhead to an elevation side view. The idea was to show the table in varying
degrees of representation from an image that copied the tables two-dimensional
surface to one that was simply ÒaboutÓ the table and its settingÐÐan image
whose ontological relationship to the sculptural table mount for each of the
seven photographs shifted progressively with each succeeding table. At the same
time colour photographs were taken of magazines lying on the prop table. These
colour photographs were enlarged to register with, and blend into the black and
white ÒtableÓ backgrounds and were attached to the surfaces of each table just
like real magazines might lay there, except that these image/objects became
progressively foreshortened as the angle of the camera shifted. It was at this
point that I discovered a strange mystical place in the photographic process
where a photograph of a photograph became both a representation and a copy of
the photographic information contained in the original image. The photographic
information, i.e., the document, remains while the paper object disappears or
becomes a representation, in my case a snapshot with a scalloped paper boarder.
A language problem thus arises wherein what was seen on these Òphoto-tablesÓ
could not be clearly described, without prefacing what was ÒinÓ or ÒonÓ the
table. It was the space between these two positions that I explored for much of
the next decade.
I actually
had the audacity to think that I could break the ontological link between the
photograph and its referent. This pride, and lack of
humility is tantamount to the audacity of the iconoclast at meeting the
idolater. My search was always toward the abstract, the non-representational
within a medium predicated on realism. I carefully followed the procedures
carried out by painters in the early twentieth century as they challenged
representation with the emphasis on surface and scale.
With Casino
Royale I took my tidy system, put together to dissemble photographic reality,
and put it to the test against another more ancient system, the Tarot. Yes I
was a cynic, a disbeliever, and thought such systems as the Tarot or astrology
were nothing more than fortune telling. I had little more respect for these
traditions than I had for photography itself.
In Casino
Royale, 1975, there are four photo card tables with cards; sixteen52-card decks
which are in fact colour photographs. They are playable, and have been played,
but not since the work became the property of the National Gallery of Canada.
Each table represents a different player whose booty is seen in the photograph
along the tableÕs edge. The four players, the King, Queen, Jack and Nave were
based on real people. This was the subject of the piece, as well as the Tarot,
of which I understood little at the time. The game itself would involve the
players in a ritual photographic association (placing them in that liminal
space between copy and representation) wherein the roles of the four characters
were taken on literally and metaphorically.
The window, the book and the table. The
representation of realityÐÐthe picture, the acquisition of knowledgeÐÐthe word,
the object, the process of ritual, in essence the game. These were the
tools of my investigations. The window and the book signify the two opposing
strains, iconodule and iconoclast, which since the Renaissance have existed in
one personÐÐthe artist. But the table on which the book lies is illuminated by
the light which falls through the window. That is the light which illuminates
the dark room in which the table with its book resides.
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