ART REVIEWS : Jones’ Collages Resculpt Images of News

Collage was invented at the beginning of the century to bring a little bit of life’s grittiness back into an art that was becoming so specialized that it seemed to be losing its connection to the rest of the world. Picasso and Braque inserted newspaper clippings and other odds and ends from the urban environment into their abstract pictures in order to revitalize their formal experiments.

What resulted were complex improvisations that played the uncertainties of modern living against the ambiguities at the root of artistic representation. A precarious balance was struck between the possibilities embodied by art and the fast-paced attention elicited by the burgeoning print media.

Ronald Jones’ four sculptures at Linda Cathcart Gallery update the idea of collage by turning its multiple meanings and shifting ambivalence into a paranoid vision of manipulation and maliciousness. Jones’ slick, sensationalist constructions often verge on being glibly nihilistic. Whether you believe they tell the truth about contemporary living or only one side of the story depends upon your own beliefs about art’s relationship to life.

A typical piece by Jones consists of an extravagant refabrication of some object from the news, a similar recreation of something in a famous image from art history, an over-designed pedestal and a placard displaying photographs along with the work’s title, which can exceed the length of this review.

In “Faded Giant . . .,” a shiny replica of some debris from the 1986 nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl power plant contains, we are told, 10 milligrams of Haldol, a drug used to manage psychotic disorders. Both sit atop a beautifully crafted table based on the one that appears in Giorgio de Chirico’s 1917 drawing, “The Faithful Wife.” Its legs rest on an apparently random arrangement of wooden beams and irregularly cut sections of expensive plywood.

Jones’ juxtaposition of unrelated elements returns to one of Surrealism’s founding tenets: that the chance encounter of unrelated objects liberate thought by disrupting rationality’s logic. However, his three-dimensional collage could not be less concerned about generating such free associations. His sculpture channels every response through its daunting title.

Reading Jones’ dissertation-style title fleshes out details of the Chernobyl disaster, informs us of the legal battle between the state of Louisiana and convicted killer and certified schizophrenic Michael Owen Perry, and relates de Chirico’s drawing to his writings on metaphysics, in which he speculates about prehistoric man’s wonder at the irrationality of the universe.

It’s obvious that Jones’ title is not an innocent description. Still, it isn’t what it pretends to be. After providing, in a matter-of-fact manner, information about a horrific disaster and a difficult legal problem, Jones’ writing turns--in its measured, authoritative tone--not to de Chirico’s drawing, but to five sentences from a 1913 essay titled “Mystery and Creation.”

This jump from art to language is significant because it summarizes the impulse underlying Jones’ whole project. His work is based on the belief that art is nothing more than a pale reflection of more important struggles that go on in the rest of society--that the less time we spend with aesthetics the more time we have for dealing with “real” issues.

A fundamental mistrust of art’s ambiguity, perhaps even a hatred of its unaccountability, underlies Jones’ need to control visual meaning through the use of words. Instead of multiplying meaning’s possibility, or creating, like collage, a two-way negotiation between form and content, his sculptures transform art into an empty container into which he inserts his own arguments.

These arguments are often simplistic stereotypes. From “Faded Giant . . .” we draw the same conclusions as when we read the paper or watch the news--that Soviet officials are ruthless and inhumane, that the U.S. government is foolish and hypocritical, and that de Chirico was silly to think you had to go back to prehistory to prove life’s absurdity.

If art at the end of the 20th Century has exhausted itself, then Jones’ sculptures offer an incisive illustration of that fact. If, however, art is not just a faint echo of the news, then his works are arrogant and terroristic attacks upon a realm he does not understand.

* Linda Cathcart Gallery, 924 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 451-1121, through March 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.