PARIS.- Following the exhibition Barker Gillick & Jones, Air de Paris announces Clock in a Radio, Ronald Jones’ first solo show in France. Jones (1952-2019) worked as an artist, writer, and pedagogue. Presented by New York based empire, the exhibition is composed predominantly of works on paper and convenes around a box portfolio produced by Jones in 1993.

As he was known to say, a radio is just a radio until it starts ticking. Consumer electronics are containers. The touchscreen was preceded by the interface of knobs and switches externalizing the internal organization of circuitry, in radios and the like. This surface, divorced from the messy interior, is an abstraction. And the abstraction is an opportunity for smugglers. Similarly, Jones smuggles meaning into the assumed modern forms, converting benign abstractions into mediations of violence.

In his first exhibition with Metro Pictures in 1986 Jones included seven dining room tables. While scaled for a domestic interior to seat four, their designs were originally intended for a much larger conference in Paris to the negotiate peace in Vietnam. The United States and South Vietnamese had proposed six designs, each integrating a hemispheric geometry, precluding a set of parties and possible outcomes. The North Vietnamese proposed one, a simple circle, a single state. Negotiations of the negotiating table extended the war for six months.

The Vietnamese liberation struggle began under French colonial rule and continued after American intervention. Soldiers from half a globe away were sent to fight people indistinguishable from a territory they did not know. Relying on maps the soldiers gave new names to existing places, My Lai became Pinkville. The abstraction of a territory into a map is an expression of alienation, while the construction of the modern subject results from the encounter with the colonial subject as a projected other. The distinction of rational individual from savage indelibly results in the violent repercussions like those realized on March 16, 1968.

At the scale of the individual, scientific objectivity subjugates the body as other from the rational mind. In 1990 Jones presented a series of sculptures pairing the horrors of state violence with feats and tragedies of science. A valve connecting oxygen tanks to pressurized suit in space travel rests on the wooden table used for autopsies which is visible behind Warhol’s electric chair from Sing Sing Prison. Bookshelves that Ann Frank hid behind host a baboon’s heart used as an implant with a known 0% success rate. In this surgery the patient is both a victim and a specimen for experimentation. The collusion of these conditions is the focus of Jones interrogation of science.

Presented at the far end of the gallery are drawings of these sculptures on the artist’s letter head. In the fourth of the numbered series the bricolage depicted is composed of a sculpture made by a boy that lived in a bubble made by NASA who eventually died when the association withdrew support due to liability. It is perched atop a tower of collapse boards, wooden planks used in gallows to erect a body that is incapable of standing up to death. Two woodblock prints bracketing the exhibition are impressions of these devices, scaled for male and female.

— Noah Barker

Clock in a Radio is the continuation of the collaboration between Air de Paris, Noah Barker and Ronald Jones which began with the exhibition “Barker Gillick & Jones” (03.11.2024 - 01.02.2025). In this new configuration, Barker, now curator, highlights, through a larger selection of works, Jones’ interest in exploring political history through a variety of minimal languages.

In the Entrée des Artistes, a new photographic series by Liam Gillick & Noah Barker (And Heaven Too, 2025) builds on the work of this earlier project by juxtaposing installation views with texts written by Ronald Jones, which at the time of the exhibition appeared in four kakemono banners (Ronald Jones Advice for a Singular Artistic Solution for The Trial of Pol Pot, 2024).

empire is a curatorial project by Noah Barker based in 53 E 34 St suite 308, New York.

Noah Barker (b. 1991) is an American artist. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. He is interested in ecologies and mythologies of knowledge production.

American artist and critic Ronald Jones gained prominence in New York during the mid-1980s. Through juxtapositions of historical events, innovations, discoveries, violence and fear, he explores the complex interrelation of events as they define our perception of ourselves and the world often through connecting seemingly unrelated occurrences. The relationship between the modernist code and the codes of power is the persistent theme in his work.

« Maybe this was one of his fundamental philosophies: art, technology, culture and politics are spheres in which the most ordinary things should be observed, and talked about, as if they were radically alien findings from outer space – but not to deny their ordinariness and effect on real life, but on the contrary, to fully grasp that effect. Ron’s conceptual artworks exemplified that approach of unravelling the untold, unheard-of story behind the seemingly conventional (art) object.» — Jörg Heiser Jones’s criticism has been published in Frieze, Artforum, Art in America, and many others publications, and he penned the exhibition catalogues for artists such as David Salle, Laurie Simmons, Elizabeth Peyton, and Carroll Dunham. He delivered over two hundred lectures to universities, museums, art and design schools.