PARIS.- It’s an exhibition built like a conversation, a game of dominoes that unfolds within different temporalities. It features three artists who use references to language (in art and political philosophy), coding and, in particular, maritime codes, to evoke complex political realities. With conceptual and formal ease, they cast a powerful critical eye on unbridled post-modernity.

The project began with a conversation about a work by Ronald Jones, an artist who was decisive for Liam Gillick, who knew him well, and for Noah Barker, who organized his first solo show since 1998 at Empire in New York.

Florence Bonnefous: Dear Noah and dear Liam,
— Dear Ronald in another dimension —

This project started while I was walking fast in the rain — a chat with Noah about his work A New Concept in Sailing (2023), concerning boats and codes, about Ronald Jones and a series of works from 1986 that belong to Edouard and is now part of this exhibition. I would like to start by repeating the first sentences of a review in Artforum1 that Liam dug out almost a year later:

Ronald Jones’ new work balances a perfect impersonation of formalist abstraction and a strict program of coded meanings. The result is an oscillating, multivocal art that refers to minimalist systems, neo-Expressionist anxiety, and the politics of art, its funding and its designated audience.”

“His two concurrent shows (bracketed under the title “A Tribute to the Future”) this past summer were based for the most part on an iconography Jones has taken from the International Maritime Code. The symbols are squares and crosses with a clean look and with conventional meanings: “You are in grave danger,” “I am trying to communicate with you,” etc.

Liam Gillick: I think a key word here is coding. I was interested in Ron’s work from the first time I came across it. It was apparent from the beginning that he was playing with layers of coded meaning that were sitting inside a shell that could easily conform to a language of advanced modernism. There was something uncanny about the visual language he deployed that strongly suggested that there was something going on beneath the surface. Once you started decoding Ron’s work all other art also began to leak ideological plasma. You could no longer look at any work of the post-war period without sensing the power games going on beneath the surface.

Noah Barker: Considering coding, my mind drifts to California. Palo Alto, but also Santa Monica where the RAND Corporation is located. A group of people coalesced around questions of rationality and prediction, breaking codes and modelling games. A New Concept in Sailing was some research and development they originally published. From this group, Robert McNamara (former President of the Ford Motor Company, US Defense Secretary and subsequently head of the World Bank) emerges as an important figure in this history and is someone Liam focused on around the time when Ron was making the flags. I’d seen photos, but never really understood what was going on with Liam’s ad hoc TV studio set made of cardboard. It had the feel of a well-digested avant-garde turning back on itself, in the way radical forms became solutions. I assumed it had been used to film something by someone, so seeing this video where the vital language has been removed was a welcome clue. I have something floating around my head about the medium as the message, especially when there’s no voice, offering up a Mcluhanite answer to the question “were people this dumb before television?”, which brings me to The Trial of Pol Pot (Magasin, Grenoble, 1998).

LG: To some extent the projects you mention leading to The Trial of Pol Pot were attempts to show how the restrained visual language of advanced modernism could be used as a way into bringing up complex and often distressing political realities without resorting to didactic displays or documentary structures. Philippe and I were under a lot of pressure during The Trial of Pol Pot exhibition in Grenoble to use standard advanced liberal forms of “transparency” expressed via information rooms and archival material. We absolutely fought that. The cardboard television studio set I made for a potential documentary structure actually became a film in 1997. Where I just sat there in silence occasionally swinging around in an office chair – waiting. I was interested in the exhibition as a form. I think Ron was more involved in the production of often quite elegant art works that could find their way into the bourgeois home and boardroom. He wanted to make quite salient points about the trajectory of modernism - in tension between design, art and the critique of cultural practice. His position was quite extreme for some people. There was something distressing to the cultural establishment about someone making good-looking sophisticated artworks that demonstrated the impossibility of operating outside of certain control systems. If he had made work cloaked in sub-cultural aesthetics I think he would be more appreciated. He made distinct choices and accepted the apparent contradictions between his powerful lectures and rhetoric and what actually ended up in the gallery space. I think Noah and Ron share something in that regard.

FB: I visualize an empty office chair in the exhibition. Somehow, a place for the visitor to experience a silent movie, a potential camera dolly … Liam, can you tell us about what you are currently producing, in your name and in the name of Ronald?

LG: One important element is the first presentation of Ron’s proposal for The Trial of Pol Pot. I won’t go into detail about the exhibition itself. But it was a collaboration between Philippe Parreno and myself. We were pushed by Yves Aupetitallot to show him that could not be done. So we proposed an exhibition that would address the trial of one of the great architects of genocide in the 20th century - who happened to still be alive at the time - in the border area of Cambodia and Thailand. In order to manage the ethical and moral demand of the show we turned to a group of “advisors” – mainly artists – who could propose singular solutions to the problem of the exhibition. The advisor’s proposals were all eventually printed on top of each other onto a free poster that you could take away. If you took a poster however – you were not supposed to enter the exhibition. You had a choice. You could take a poster that could not be read with lots of ideas from artists including Lawrence Weiner, Josephine Pryde and Gabriel Kuri or enter the exhibition and see fragments of conversations between Philippe and myself. At the time I was very close to Ron. He had been running the sculpture department at Yale and I was offered a job there. He had just left Yale - so I asked his advice about taking the job. He told me he was moving to Columbia to run the MFA program and I should come with him instead and do what I want. So I did. I had invited Ron to speak in London in the 1990s and he blew people away with a really strong formal lecture that elegantly traced the way advanced modernism masks and accentuates the ideological control systems that underscore our personal and political lives. It was stunning.

So for this exhibition we are presenting Ron’s proposal for The Trial of Pol Pot for the first time. It is powerful and is literally about how catastrophe is propped up within institutional and aesthetic frames. His work was some of the best being made in New York in the 1990s. I am extremely influenced by his position.

My own work for the exhibition involves the installation of two new works that make use of aluminium t-slot extrusions – the material that is the armature of all contemporary advanced production – that are combined with simple graphs. The graphs relate to the writing of Otto Neurath. And particularly a phrase I think is important and apt in relation to Ron and Noah. “We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components.” Obviously it means that none of us start from year zero or a tabula rasa. This is what Ron and Noah specialise in. The creation of novel forms that conceal a deep understanding of complexity within the understanding that what appears to be abstracted away from representation is merely another accretion on top of a pile of philosophical contradictions and contractions. We might include a final work that I produced in the early 1990s. It is a film of me sitting in a home-made cardboard set for a discussion program. I am just sitting and waiting in a typical television office chair. There is no soundtrack. I am waiting for “conditions” to improve before engaging in discourse. It was a protest in a way of all the art at the time that embraced dialectical transparency. The film is titled Documentary Realisation Zones (1997) and is a fragment from a longer work that was first shown at Le Consortium in Dijon2.

FB: This sounds all very exciting, and I remember Robert McNamara, A Feature Film by Liam Gillick (1992), an artwork in the form of a scenario that was printed in three copies on red yellow and green paper, opening a potential to produce three different films.

And, talking about film, I also remember fondly Les trois couronnes du matelot (1982), a film by Raoul Ruiz. The crew of a ghost ship is very sick, worms wiggle out of the sailors’ skin. The voiceover of the narrator — a sailor himself — says: “C’est de la poésie pure.” [this is pure poetry — in French the word vers means verse and worm]. Indeed, the visible often appears to us only transformed by the narrative and the emotional experience of the narrator. Every code may meet a verse, all images are coded. We can deliberately enjoy the visual, and the contents, and the subtext. Noah, your first name is also that of a sailor from far ago. Can you let us know more about your work docked in this exhibition?

NB: Perhaps beached, rather than docked. As a ship run ashore. It is in dialogue with Ron’s Tribute to the Future. My boat plays a similar game with history as Ron’s warnings of “grave danger”. The details regarding the history of the retro chic design object are included in the materials list for the work following “foam, fibreglass, epoxy, nylon, polyester, laminated pine […]”. These are the new materials of West Coast modernism that compose an Eames chair or an airplane wing. Next, the fabricators are named and the original designer: an engineer who concurrently pioneered the design of the Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile for the Pentagon. As a technology the ICBM decentered life in real and subconscious ways, making a target everywhere from anywhere. I consider the windsurfer a subject counterpoint to this cybernetic geography, an elusive target. A friend, Gloria de Risi, called the boat my white whale. The whale is fleeting because it is everywhere, at times simultaneously, its uncertainty only extended its engrossing totality. Likewise, the materials, industries, discourses, landscapes that informed A New Concept in Sailing were essential to the lifeforms and psychologies developing in California. Surfing in particular was a West Coast icon of unmoored modernity, or as some were beginning to describe it: post modernity.

1 Glenn Harper, October 1986

2 McNamara Papers, Erasmus and Ibuka Realisations, The What If? Scenarios, Le Consortium, Dijon, 1997.