Craft Work

The cover of the March 2002 issue of frieze is bluntly fetishistic: a pornographic close-up of a section of a Tony Smith sculpture set within a crisp white vacuum. Signifying up-to-the-minute Modernist nostalgia, the auratic presence of the burnished steel object is hard and uncompromising. The glamorous authority of the modern Sublime never seemed so alluring, yet the sophisticated self-referentiality of this system of desire – plain surfaces packed with complex codes – never seemed more banal. frieze itself is an object charged with authority, with what Gareth Jones would call the ‘magazineness’ of magazines.

Jones has recently completed a work entitled Seven Pages from a Magazine (1975–2001): 23 November 1975 (2001). It consists of seven pages of Lambert & Butler cigarette advertisements selected from colour supplements of the British Sunday newspaper The Observer between January 1975 and September 1976. The ads elucidate the development of ‘The World of Lambert & Butler’: a world populated by handsome sophisticates, elegantly draped over classy designer furniture in chic metropolitan interiors, smoking. It is a toned down (beige, white and silver) precursor to the more lurid sterility of Stephen Meisel’s Versace ads. But, whereas Meisel’s ads scream expensive, corrupt, Postmodern sex, the world of Lambert & Butler tinkles with expensive, clean, modern promise.

The attention to detail and arrangement in the adverts’ vernacular is remarkable: men wear polo neck and jacket ensembles; women wear low-cut evening gowns; there is art on the walls; there are cut-glass decanters, tubular-steel furniture, palms and wall-to-wall carpets. The ads set a very particular tone of 1970s good taste and understated luxury; as enduring as an Eames chair and now as popular as the Habitat retro-repro-version. Perhaps there should be a copy of frieze on the Perspex and aluminium coffee table. Although there is no irony in Jones’ collection, assemblage and presentation of these aspirational environments, there is irony in the fact that Lambert & Butler is currently one of the cheapest and most popular cigarette brands in Britain; the sting is that no one who desires to inhabit this fictional zone would be seen dead smoking one.

Seven Pages from a Magazine is ‘complete’ when it is presented as a single room installation according to Jones’ specific requirements. Framed and hung on the wall in a neatly spaced line, these pictures exude ‘magazineness’, asserting themselves as objects and conjuring a world of interiors. An earlier piece, Peacock Room (1995), deploys a single peacock feather attached to a wall in a semi-tumescent pose. Although Peacock Room permeates its surroundings with a limp Beardsleyesque aura, like Seven Pages it stubbornly signifies an equally hardcore enquiry into the politics of display, the fetishistic and iconic status of material and the physical and conceptual possibilities of sculpture.

In the Lambert & Butler adverts the contemporary penchant for the kitsch recycling of Minimal sculpture as a stylistic device is prefigured in the use of the grid and cube for decorative visual effect. In one ad the thoroughness of the mise-en-scène reaches epic proportions: the black and silver/white binary motif of the Lambert & Butler cigarette box is replicated in everything from the chequered cube table and the black square cufflinks of the blonde man in the foreground to the reverse reflection of a couple in a side-view mirror. There are an infinite number of associations you could make – from a Robert Morris cube to a Duchampian chess set via Kit Williams’ Masquerade (1979) – but the claustrophobic self-referentiality might already have driven you totally insane. The apparent slightness of merely choosing to represent these ads belies the intellectual contortions of the world of Gareth Jones.

Jones’ attraction to the Lambert & Butler advertisements becomes obvious in Sliced Cube (2000). Constructed from card, wood, tape and black and white Fablon, the work consists of 81 geometric permutations stacked together to form a diamond-shaped cube. The optical and perceptual illusion is resiliently self-contained. This is a stoic object, asserting physical and conceptual weight through its pretty smart black and white variations. Sliced Cube, a medium sized object not taking up too much room, sits on a wooden structure a little like a bird table. Jones’ preoccupation with exploring a formal vocabulary is developed in Open Plinth (1995–2000) and Stacked Plinth (2001). Open Plinth consists of a dissected, white emulsioned chipboard construction; its hollow insides are fitted with a mirror, which reflects both the object’s interior and a section of its immediate surroundings. Stacked Plinth is constructed from 40 pieces of equally cut timber arranged in a block to create a free-standing form.

Untitled Structure (2001) is even more dry. It comprises three bits of timber glued together at right angles, with one section fixed to the floor to enable it to remain upright. Starting from the most basic premise of construction, Jones asks: ‘How could this thing stand up?’; ‘What is it made of?’; ‘How does it form itself?’; and, more importantly ‘Is that enough?’. As if aware of your growing ennui at the formal gymnastics and the biscuit-toned palette that provoke the irresistible desire to kick one of these objects over, Jones introduces works such as Cork Box Plus Ingredients (1998). Placed on the floor with its lid propped against its side, the box contains all the hobbyist materials – polystyrene, Fablon, audio tape – of the contemporary master craftsman. The work oscillates between referencing the authority of the Minimalist cube and serving as a dustbin. The laborious machinations of Sliced Cube are turned in on themselves with self-deprecating humour. There is something charming about Cork Box Plus Ingredients that could make it simply cute. However, within Jones’ oeuvre both this sculpture and Untitled Structure serve as a very necessary support; they elucidate a self-conscious dialogue between the works and highlight the performative role of the artist.

The introduction of a narrative element stems from Jones’ ongoing fascination with the iconic status of material. However, it is precisely when Jones includes more culturally resonant elements, when the personal informs the auratic Minimal model (when Seven Pages animates Sliced Cube, for example), that he begins to establish his own language and opens up a space packed with wonder and delight for the observer. With Iconography (2001) – in which three Gordons Gin bottles support a metal tube, which in turn carries a wooden shelf that bears an Elnette hairspray canister – Jones displays the same basic formal preoccupations, but the functional, utilitarian signifier of timber has a different charge to the consumer branded status of Gordons and Elnette. Thinking about how things stand up while under the intoxicating influence of gin and hairspray is somehow infinitely preferable to contemplating the timbre of timber.

The regal glamour of the Elnette Lady always reminds me of dead grandmothers; Gordons will always smack of mother’s ruin. The raffle tickets attached to Cape (1995) conjure up all the pathetic aspirations of a 1970s Middle England tombola (where winning a can of Elnette is a bonus) – an era long before a digitized lottery harnessed the unregulated desires of a nation and Pantene ensured that everyone had Jennifer Aniston hair. Cape consists of a curved piece of card feathered with numbered tickets. Hanging on a piece of string from the wall, it is a fetish imbued with all the hopes and dreams of chance desire; there is magic here and the imaginative space created is beautiful. A similarly slight but powerful artwork, Detail (2000) consists of the waistbands from Jones’ old Calvin Klein pants dropped in a pile on the floor. With an almost comic lightness of touch, Jones conflates all the spectacle of the American superbrand – resilient even in its impoverishment through use – with a very knowing reconfiguration of the Minimal object. Yet Jones’ gesture is shaped by your recycled memories of every single piece of furtively discarded underwear.

In 1994, long before his West Coast contemporaries were fiddling about with foamboard, Jones made David Bowie Memorial Carport. Presented like Sliced Cube on a small table structure, David Bowie Memorial Carport serves as a modest tribute and establishes Jones’ personal iconography. Bowie is represented by a faded cut-out from a magazine. Stuck on to a polystyrene plinth-cum-billboard, he still exudes ‘David Bowieness’ as he perches above a cluster of leaves, themselves resting on top of an inept polystyrene model of a modern machine for living. You don’t often find carports in Britain, as our climate requires a garage rather than an open shelter, but you might see one in Milton Keynes. A new town built in the 1970s, Milton Keynes is a combination of utopian post-1960s social engineering and American imports. Built on the premise that by the turn of the century everyone would own 2.5 cars its development was immediately scuppered by the mid-1970s oil crisis. Milton Keynes is now enjoying a boom as a haven for call centres and light industrial manufacturing.

If you spent your formative years in Milton Keynes – as Jones did – you too might have a skewed relationship with the Modernist ideal. Your world would have been a poor imitation of the Lambert & Butler lifestyle, one already compromised before it was complete; the authority of the utopian dream tarnished by economic reality. In 1988 Peter Schjeldahl wrote of the show ‘Contemporary Sculpture’: ‘The best modern sculpture always expresses some sort of existential gawkiness, capitalizing on the same intimacy of shared space that makes most sculpture irritating. It can have the spooky and loveable effect of reminding us of what, in gruelling modern times, it is like to be a person – or just try to be a person, in an inevitably losing battle that some of us fight with more honour and aplomb than others.’1 Before he was schooled in the history of art, listening to David Bowie and flicking through the pages of a Sunday colour supplement, Jones could only have dreamed of one day joining the circus as a Harlequin and finding himself on the pages of a magazine.