1.
Otis Jones makes sometimes-colorful, sometimes-colorless canvases, oddly-shaped and super-thick — jutting as much as five inches from the wall. They sport a dot or two in a field of hue. These dots and fields usually consist of moody reds and off-kilter whites, but they use linen-scratched manila, pewter, peach, sky-blue, cerulean, cyan, aquamarine, orange, ochre, and rust, too.
The language of the artwork isn’t representational, sentimental, or existential.
Not to be faux-dramatic about it, but these are just “things.”
2.
You have to really dig into art history to find anything like them.
I found one: Blinky Polermo’s Graue Scheib of 1970.
Like Jones’ works, Graue Scheib attaches itself to a wall and hangs out there “with enigmatic simplicity,” as the critic, E. Luanne McKinnon, says of it.
Jones says the Palermo piece, “was like heaven to me.”
3.
I remember the first time I saw a Jones work.
It was at Dallas’ Barry Whistler Gallery early last year.
There was one minor, wall-mounted artifact there arranged with a few other small pieces in a back room.
The painting lacked flash.
It had weak “surface impact.”
I took a quick turn ‘round the rest of the space, then drove off — wringing my mental hands about this artist or that. But it was White and Red Circles on White that swam back to me in the next couple days, though I can’t say it pulled or pushed.
It didn’t please or displease me.
But some bird of awareness hatched from it. In the minor impression it made, some small balloon of attention drifted through my mind’s sky. Maybe White was paying attention to itself — “like a rock does” — as Jones likes to say about the paintings he makes.
The artpiece made a small, elegant self-assertion.
4.
His work only gives whispers about illusionistic dimensionality.
At the practical level, White and Red Circles on White was all surface.
It was resistive in this way.
It also spoke about its own means of making without vanity — without winking self-reference.
Jones’ canvases show all sorts of “hand.” They are rough and smooth, over-glued and rabidly stapled — and the wood-sandwich stretcher bars propping them up aren’t hidden. The toil behind their creation is evident, but none of this behaves like a signature. The artist’s “hand” seems uninterested in telling you about the intelligence guiding it, Jones’ emotional life, or his sweat equity. It has operated to make the object, and you can have a conversation about the object or its making, but the finished thing with all the construction exposed like undergarments seems unconcerned as to whether it will have a conversation with you or not.
5.
Jones has a large fourth-floor apartment in the building known as South Side on Lamar in the Cedar Oaks section of Dallas.
His big space retains the mood of the transformed Sears Roebuck & Co. Catalogue Merchandise Center that South Side was carved from. Grey concrete columns, too fat to wrap your arms around, pierce the space. His rooms are merchandise-filled.
There, man-tall, strangely-shaped blond-wood stretcher bars — marvelously thick — lean against all walls. “I have a special carpenter who makes them,” he says.
6.
I think of Sears — and that reminds me of my grandmother — who would buy catalog items for me and my siblings back in the 60s. Otis was just starting out as an artist then — while Minimalism rocked the art world.
7.
Jones is called a “Texas Minimalist,” but it’s a maximalist home he’s in — and it has the same mothball smell of my gram’s place. I think of the moth-like shades in his palette. I think of the polyphemus moth with eye-like dots on its wings — and how those dots imitate Jones’ main motif.
I don’t mind his home’s maximalness. I stay there two hours and the conversation flies, but the mothball smell is smoke-thick, and I want to get out of there quick as I can.
8.
So, I’m worried about the guy. He’s getting on in years (75) and says he has good days and bad days. When young, he tells me, he painted for 12 hours straight — easy. Now he’s happy to do six. In a major operation, he had two lungs replaced some years ago.
9.
Jones’ lungs and limbs are challenged, but his body of work has come into its own.
In the last six years, he’s been picked up by important galleries in Brussels, Copenhagen, and New York. Significant museums have also collected his work. “The work does so much better in Europe.” He says. “The viewers trust themselves. Not like Texas — where people are waiting for someone to tell them whether the art is bad or good. But, I have to say, I’ve been here 40 years, and it’s come a long way. The collectors are beginning to tune in to local art.” Recent shows at Barry Whistler have sold out, but he doesn’t know if any local museum reps passed through. He remains mystified as to why the state’s big institutions haven’t yet bought paintings.
I’ve heard this talk a lot, lately. In the back-alleys where artists share gossip, the timidity of the state’s institutions and its consumers is a common theme.
10.
On the cloudy Wednesday that we met, we considered the term, “Texas Minimalist,” that’s pinned on him.
We both had difficulty with it.
A week after our talk, it made sense.
My favorite art-historical era is the 20 years that started when Jones was born (in ‘46) — when high-drama Abstract-Expressionism emerged and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg followed up with efforts to drain art of emotion (their method of competing with that preceding, noisy cabal). Pop Art, Op Art, and then Minimalism followed quick on the heels of the Neo-Dada “school” of Johns and R-berg — one that burned brightest from ’55 to ’62. (The couple are tossed into the Pop Movement, but their broader concerns were way grittier. They don’t classify well.)
Mid-60s Minimalism riffed off Johns’ focus on objects, Op Art’s clean lines, and the repetitive imagery of Warhol. It developed an aesthetic of severe edges and even more emotional neutrality than that of Rauschenberg and Johns. It leaned on Frank Stella’s desiccated interpretive rubric: “What you see is what you see.”
11.
Jones has done perhaps the most stunning jiu jitsu moves I’ve ever seen to get paint to behave just as paint.
He out-Stellas Stella.
Though he applies, sands, and layers pigment with some hard-core comeliness, it won’t leap at you like a lover.
Though generous, there’s something it will not let go of.
The paint stands there naked but keeps its mouth shut.
12.
Of course, Pollock gets credit for making paint really talk.
His “paint as paint” was a scripture of anger, a shout against representation, and a signal of courageous “action” — among many other things. In relation to art history, Pollock’s canvases worked paradox because he gave “paint as paint” a cataclysmic voice. His big, raging, rangy canvases are hard to swallow because they’re so incensed, so thick with aggression — not because they’re abstract — despite what the philistines say.
Jones sends a different train of non-representation steaming down the tracks.
His works are paradoxical because they’re a-paradoxical — and they don’t work any war of decibels.
Those blind to abstraction’s language tell us that paint strokes alone are mute — that they have “imaginal opacity.” Not so, of course. The mark is usually rambling on about suffering, joy, curiosity, lust, or some other feeling.
Jones has turned his paint’s murmuring way, way down.
J. Johns anchored some quiet, too.
He made things that restrained expressiveness within objectness. His process has been described as a “pantomime of meaning” by Peter Schjeldahl. He could keep your imagination latched to something by saying very little. He bottled silence in pigment — even as he fussed with his brush. Still, his objects aren’t altogether hushed. His vows of silence aren’t complete.
Jones’ paintings get closer to a shut-your-gob ideal than anything I’ve seen (Graue Scheib notwithstanding).
They’re completely uninterested in the viewer’s thoughts or feelings.
They don’t chatter away, and they don’t want you to, either.
They do this quiet work while dodging the harsh geometry and mechanistic touch of Minimalists, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, or Ellsworth Kelly. Jones likes a rough edge of color. He likes a rough edge of canvas that lets glue leak all over the place and leaves staples marching over edges like ants.
We can favorably compare this mouth-gagged approach to Robert Ryman or Agnes Martin, but even Ryman has something feminine to say, and Martin, something masculine.
Jones shows an interest in unsexed, sound-blanked structure. Structure with evidence of work. Structure with some very slim echo of intent — with intent thoroughly masked.
13.
So, his works are Minimalist.
Maybe like the sagebrush-strewn deserts of this state with their landscapes so quiet, or like the East Texas oilfields with their efforts so direct, so archly pragmatic, Jones’ work is also Texan (though he’s very reluctant to wear this crown).
I’m at one with the mob.
He wears more hats, but, for now, I’ll call Jones a “Texas Minimalist.”