G.B. Jones, Blue Mark Morrisroe, 2004. Graphite and coloured pencil
on paper, 22.8 x 16.5 cm. Courtesy the artist/ Participant Inc., New York.
It can be said, with or without facetiousness, that Jones attended the Tom of Finland School of Drawing. Just as two bodies might find one another across a room or a bar, a communion far more formidable to the corroboration of character can occur over an expanse of time and space—by way of aligned intentions—through art. During the middle of the night, at a kitchen table under an amber bulb, pencil in hand, beside an ashtray that clocked the hours with its crumpled contents, in this quiet realm began a series Jones dubbed the Tom Girls, which was ultimately exhibited in galleries around the world and remains a pertinent contribution to third-wave feminist art. In the course of those nights Jones came into possession of a drafting skill that is at once her own, but also the latest, and possibly among the last, iterations of a descendancy in guration—cartooning in the highest sense. From the late Renaissance mannerism of Cellini, through the decadence of Beardsley and wit of Cocteau, there owed a germ of style that nally proliferated over the last century as illustration in gay magazines, of which Tom was king. Jones studied and replicated Finland’s form and technique in service of her own agenda, observing the slick of polished leather, the drapery in denim to articulate strained tumescence, the penumbra necessary to a pert nipple that is both commanding and receptive. Jones is an appropriationist by conceit. Unlike some of her contemporaries and their Pop antecedents, she appropriates not ambivalently or ironically, but with sincerity; gay culture, for better or worse, is a part of her culture, and her critique of Finland was enacted devotionally.
Classicism, a wellspring for homosexual expression up until the middle of the last century, had ballast that allowed for a complex play of innuendo; its translations into painting and literature were the mechanics and art of expressing homosexuality implicitly. A homosexual reader or viewer would nd themself deciphering its code, an intercourse arguably more asserting of difference than any explicit declarations of these desires might have been. Translation is not purely the feat of making legible that which was previously unavailable to a certain group. Its crux resides, when one considers the potential for multiple versions, in the pleasure of the reprise—a rendition motivated more by the perceived sensibilities of a text than by its actualities. The verbosity of the first English translation of Proust undertaken by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, for instance, is a corruption of the author’s more matter-of-fact French toward ameliorating its melancholic purpose: one homosexual picking up the baton lain at the feet of another, to be molded in the relay by their own circumstances and vision into an exquisite subjective. Finland flourished at the beginning of a new climate, and his images ricocheted. His men, bursting from the closet, were iconoclastic motifs picked up by punk (namely, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren) just as by leather subcultures. The history of translation, at its most interesting, is that of hijacked content and, by reimporting nuance, Jones’s work serves this design.
Finland has only lately been metabolized by the contemporary art world, and his work remains, in popular imagination, either the stuff of the gay roué or malignant kitsch. A Norwegian artist recently recounted a different, personal story for me. At the time of his pubescence in the 1970s, Nordic progressives, in a moment of irreligious enlightenment, felt that Finland’s drawings were edifying material for youngsters whose bodies were in transformation. Issued in volumes available by Reader’s Digest–type subscription, Finland’s drawings were left (along with volumes on Will McBride) upon the low shelves of suburban Nordic dens. Certainly this isn’t the case anywhere anymore, but the anecdote is useful for contemplating the vagaries of taboo, and a scenario with which to imagine the discovery of Finland’s work by other aesthetically minded lesbian adolescents.
When the Tom Girls made their New York debut in 1991, it was concurrent with an exhibition of Finland’s drawings and sketches at the storied gallery Feature Inc., run by a man named Hudson. Finland was in the hospital and would die from emphysema later that year and Hudson was living with HIV. It is impossible to consider Jones’s early art, or any art made by homosexuals during the 1980s and ’90s, without the context of the AIDS crisis. It was a time during which Finland’s utopia was either consigned to the flames by those disgusted and panicked by its wanton, narcissistic bodies, or conversely, found to be grossly superannuated, something on the other side of the chasm of before and after, like Norman Rockwell in the wake of Hiroshima. (Finland and Rockwell are artists with much in common: propagandists in service of patriarchy in whose work the police were, however differently, worshipped.) It was a time when homosexual culture was besieged by puritanism, assimilation and AIDS, and Jones, herself a young veteran of this war, perceived its smoldering apogee on the anterior horizon, and knew instinctively that the past was where the good stuff lay.
G.B. Jones, Prison Breakout #2, 1991. Graphite
on paper, 26.6 x 20.3 cm. Courtesy the artist.
G.B. Jones, Doreen Valiente, 2017. Graphite on paper, 27.9 x 21.5 cm.
