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FacultyTimothy Emlyn Jones, Dean and Graduate DirectorA Review by James ElkinsTimothy Emlyn Jones is an unusual kind of artist. (He is also an unusual artist, but that is a subject for another essay.) By "kind of artist" I mean two things in particular: his working methods or strategies; and his intellectual genealogy. Jones's method is to work with an extremely exhaustive and occasionally exhausting experimental protocol. He sets himself a problem-to draw a sphere, a box, a sheet of folded paper, or a certain swirling line-and he gives himself parameters and instructions-to draw using double hatching, or using a stream of ink ejected under pressure, or to draw at such-and-such a scale. Within his self-imposed "problem set," in the schoolbook phrase, and within his self-imposed strictures of medium and technique, he works with tremendous diligence, organization, and persistence. His studio, when I saw it in 2004, was piled high with hundreds of oversize drawings that comprised a certain series. Page after page of closely similar drawings were stacked in neat piles. He had been working as a mathematician might work on a problem-doggedly, systematically-or as an inventor might work on a new idea-making incremental changes, producing dozens of partly adequate solutions. The method is experimental, in exactly the sense Picasso used when he said, famously, that he did not experiment but only found solutions. Jones's working method is the opposite. In place of unique "solutions" like the personages Picasso produced, each one unlike any other, Jones makes series that have minimal internal differences. The fact that he then chooses just one or two for an exhibition does not vitiate the fact that the works he chooses were initially unnumbered and unnamed attempts in a potentially infinite series of attacks on a single painstakingly determined problem. The very idea of setting a problem and working, experimenting, with it is inimical to those parts of modernism that Picasso's statement exemplifies. It is, however, integral to those parts of postmodernism that revel in repetition and reproducibility. Jones's method is part of both, and in that it is historically and ideologically unusual. Extracted from James Elkins, 2005, 'An Unusual History' in Drawing In - Drawing Out, Galway Arts Centre, Ireland Littoral Transcription 1 |
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