7.4.25 — Relishing the Quiet
Ever tempted to dismiss Minimalism as a little too quiet and a little too apart? Jennie C. Jones is listening. She takes her silent music to 2025 New York summer sculpture, as Ensemble, through October 19. As the rubes in Shakespeare’s The Tempest say to one another, in hope of reassurance, “this isle is full of noises.”
Rather than approach her from scratch, I invite you to read my review of her at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022, some of which follows but her command of music, geometry, and silence has only grown. But let me introduce her with the details of her latest. Tall slabs, a trapezoid, and a V-shape seem to change in proportions as one circulates. 
Their colors run to a deep red that could pass for Minimalism’s dark steel, but with accents white concrete and blood red that evoke soundproofing, the museum’s travertine tone, and a scream. Pins and wires allude to the bridge of a violin or the single string of Mississippi blues. If one part of her trilogy makes her think of an Aeolian harp, its melodies celebrated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1796 and driven by the wind, this is Minimalism as poetry waiting to be heard.
Jones prefers quiet noises, just as her mixed media nurture the quiet. At the Guggenheim, she worked not with paint on canvas, but rather the materials to eliminate unwanted noises, felt and acoustic panels. You may never have noticed before their contrasting texture or their similarity to Minimalism itself. Jones titles one work for Agnes Martin, and her influence is unmistakable in the simple divisions of a work between panels or along horizontals—and the gradations of dark and gray. When a red panel or gray diagonal intrudes, it is all the more resonant. When a red slice tops a panel, where you can barely see it, its “aura,” as she puts it, is the visual equivalent of the hum.
Jones had the lower floors of the Guggenheim ramp, just after another woman with a feel for quiet, Etel Adnan. A musical score, the form of her works on paper, is for her what landscape is for Adnan. Music has long had a place in Minimalism as well—an entire genre of music with such composers as John Adams and Philip Glass, also the subject of portraits by Chuck Close. While most definitely not a Minimalist, John Cage recognized the visual potential of a score, and he will always be famous for less than five minutes of silence. Cage also embraced chance, while Jones leaves nothing to chance, and she is not one to count off the seconds. Still, the staff lines in her scores are compositions in themselves.
Is the parallel between art and music only a metaphor? It may be only figurative language, but it has entered English. One does speak of a quiet composition or go to a museum in search of quiet. Jones finds the parallels in technical and informal language alike—most often in digital music and analog art. Titles speak of Soft, Pitchless Oxide Edge and Toward the Pedal Point, while a bright red painting is a Tone Burst. The show’s title, “Dynamics,” refers to music’s gradations in volume, but dynamics in physics (as opposed to statics) is the study of forces and motion. And she does think of her paintings as “active surfaces” and the “physical residue” of sound.
Panels like these are also elements of architecture, and their interdisciplinary art extends there as well. The view down from the ramp onto the two-level High Gallery offers a glimpse of red accents on the top of paintings that one might otherwise have missed. When (rarely) curves enter a drawing, they pick up on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim. Quiet being what it is, one might find oneself talking around another point of reference, too. Jones is black, and past shows have been eager to find markers of African American identity in her art. They have also featured objects that this small show takes pains to omit.
She contributed a SONY Walkman to a show of “conceptual art and identity politics” and looped audio cables to a tribute to Romare Bearden, both at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She appeared there among the emerging artists in “Freestyle” as well. One of her scores turned up just last year in “Grief and Grievance” at the New Museum, a show about white grievances and black grief. Is Jones out to leave all that behind, in favor of recent work and an homage to Martin? The Guggenheim quotes her dismissal of black abstraction as bombast. Her visual and sonic aura is anything but.
Still, she seems like the last person to indulge in apologies or evasions. If she minimizes the references, it is to maximize what she finds in music and an installation. They exist both in the moment and in an extended time, the “sustain” of a pedal point, and that alters how one perceives her painting as well. Like Adnan before her and Cecilia Vicuña to follow, the walk up the ramp leads to another abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky. His late work seems busy and bombastic by comparison, but again Jones is listening. Adds Shakespeare’s Caliban, “When I waked, I cried to dream again.”
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.