The next day, a meeting was held in Mayor Sawyer`s office between aldermen and a school contingent headed by Jones and Marshall Field V, president of the Art Institute`s board of trustees. After hours of acrimonious debate, Field settled on a conciliatory stance. The school promised to apologize to city residents for any distress the painting had caused and agreed not to display it in the future. (A newspaper ad placed by the school the following day criticized the aldermen`s actions but explicitly expressed regret over the painting). The ad furthermore vowed a continued effort to improve minority representation at the school-a curious concession, since the institution, with an 18.1 percent enrollment of blacks, Latinos, Asians and native Americans, already had among the highest minority student populations in all of academia.
JONES SAYS HE SUPports Field`s view. ”The content of the piece was the responsibility of the artist, and we had every right to exhibit it and certainly the Art Institute doesn`t disparage the memory of the mayor any more than we are unpatriotic because we put a flag on the floor. But nevertheless, it is not ethical to ignore the distress of other persons and just stand up and scream that we have the right to do this. Yes, you have the right to show the piece, but it`s callous not to recognize that you live in a community filled with other people possessed of rights.”
Jones may have thought he was out of the woods, but in February of 1989 lightning struck again. This time, the occasion was ironically an exhibition organized by minority students in an effort to promote healing of racial rifts at the school caused by the Washington episode. Three professional minority artists selected the entries, and among the works they chose was one by senior Scott Tyler, called ”What Is the Proper Way To Display the U.S. Flag?”
The piece by Tyler, a leftist activist who styles himself ”Dread”
Scott, featured a flag lying on the gallery floor beneath three photographs of the flag and a shelf containing blank books in which a viewer could respond to the work`s title. One could walk around the flag to write in the books, or, if one wished, take the opportunity to step on the flag.
The confrontational work had previously appeared in another Chicago gallery without incident. But when Jones, after checking with counsel to make sure the piece was legal, gave the go-ahead for it to be included in the show, the result was pandemonium. Veterans groups, inflamed by the treatment of the national symbol, went to court seeking an injunction. Judge Kenneth Gillis dismissed the suit, saying Tyler`s expression of his views was protected by the First Amendment. The veterans, joined by flag-waving politicians such as state Sen. Walter Dudycz, responded by organizing huge marches and
demonstrations outside the Art Institute. Inside the school gallery, intensified security details watched while veterans took advantage of the participatory nature of the piece to ceremonially fold the flag up and put it on the shelf, only to have others, mostly students, immediately replace it on the floor.
The exhibition lasted a month, during which a torrent of abusive phone calls and hate letters ate up staff time. A campaign organized by Ald. Edward Vrdolyak, then running for mayor, urged people to boycott the museum`s corporate sponsors. The school`s $6 million capital campaign came to a temporary halt. A major donation was held up for months, and museum membership fell for a time, even though the museum is a separate entity from the school. The state legislature forced the Illinois Arts Council to cancel the school`s $70,000 appropriation (it was finally restored last fall). The cost to the school of beefed-up security and lost staff time came to more than $250,000.
”People have PR disasters,” notes Jones. ”But you don`t usually get Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez in successive years. I don`t know what my grandfather did for these sins to be visited on me, but he must have had some good time.”
In the wake of what has become known as the ”Flag on the Floor” affair, the Art Institute corporation deemed it advisable that a set of guidelines be drawn up to cover what would and would not be shown in future exhibitions. The resulting policy stated that the school would not exhibit work that is illegal, that endangers health and safety or that ”might disrupt the educational process”-the latter being an elastic clause that some critics felt gave the school discretion to censor pieces that might lead to further trouble.
Last May the guidelines got their first workout when time came for the annual exhibition of work by graduating seniors. When Tyler announced he wanted to reprise his flag piece, Jones was placed on the spot. After much discussion and thought, he decided to exclude the piece from the show, which pleased some students, who felt Tyler had already had his moment in the sun, but outraged others. In protest, some 35 students either withdrew their works, showing them in an alternative exhibition, or stayed in the show but symbolically covered their creations with paper.
By now, Bophal had been added to Chernobyl and the Exxon Valdez.
Nothing in Jones` past had prepared him for the tornadic storms he has had to weather since an executive headhunter induced him to leave his job as director of the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland to take over the Art Institute school, then a troubled institution that had run through four presidents in four years.
Born 46 years ago in Wales, ”next to the famous village that has 58 letters in its name,” Jones was orphaned at 10 and taken in by next-door neighbors. Discovering early on that he had a facility for drawing as well as an interest in architecture nurtured by his father, who had been a builder, Jones used to go into the little valley near his house and sketch the country churches. The diversity of churches fascinated him-Wales, an area only 350 miles by 175 miles, has 5,000 non-Anglican churches, each of them different in their earthy simplicity-and by the time he was a senior in high school, the precocious Jones had published a book on these so-called ”granaries of God.” But it was art, and specifically sculpture, that had a chief hold on him, and his skills were honed during a Fulbright scholarship at Tulane. For some six years, Jones made sculpture and paintings, as well as taught classes, until the embarrassing day when he passed out inside his mold. That same year, 1972, he accepted a post as chairman of the Department of Art and Art History at Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth.
While in Ft. Worth, before he moved on to the Glasgow School of Art in 1980, Jones oversaw the construction of a $16 million visual and
communications arts building designed by Kevin Roche. He also found time to become one of the world`s preeminent authorities on Scottish architect and furniture designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a leading figure, with Frank Lloyd Wright, in the development of the Modern Movement. During his tenure in Glasgow, Jones again became involved in a building program, and he intended to stay 10 years. Then came the invitation to assume command of the School of the Art Institute, which proved irresistible. ”It was the Art Institute, one of the most famous schools of art and design in the world,” he says simply.
THERE WAS ANOTHER reason for taking the Chicago job-the chance to see his son, Emrys, on a regular basis. The boy lives in Texas with his mother, from whom Jones was divorced in 1978 after a marriage lasting six years. Jones didn`t know it at the time he came to Chicago, but his son would go on the next year to develop a severe neurological disease that has confined him to a wheelchair. ”He has developed a tremor that is so appalling he cannot walk or talk properly,” says Jones sadly. ”Every doctor in the world has seen him, and no one can tell us what is wrong with him.”
If Jones had no idea of the censorship battles that awaited him in Chicago, one thing would serve him in good stead. As an artist and an art historian, he has thought long and hard about the definition of art and the right of free expression, and by philosophical nature, he takes a very liberal stance.
”Art is a very shifting definition,” he says. ”Are Mapplethorpe`s photographs, even the most offensive of them, art? Taken as a whole, yeah. You have to take everything in the context of the person`s life. He revealed some of these unknown practices that were out there that maybe people didn`t want to know about. But this is the reality of the alternative lifestyle. This is the reality of what his world was like, and you have to see these pictures in relation to the lilies and the wonderful portraits because they form the fabric of the man`s life. Art is not immaculate conception. Art is made by human beings with all the ranges of emotions and choices we all have. Here`s an artist who`s made work that is uncompromisingly difficult for people to take, who also made things that are just awesomely beautiful, that will live forever. But you have to take it all, the whole body of work.
”Take Serrano. His pieces are now all about bodily fluids. There`s a new piece called `Ejaculate in Trajectory,` which is semen flying through the air. Then he showed some photographs at Art Expo of soiled sanitary napkins. These are pretty tough images, and at first you ask why did he do that? But if you see all his work together, you realize he is commenting on his relationship with the Catholic Church and Catholic teaching, and the fluids are to capture the idea of transubstantiation.”
But what makes something art? If someone does something extremely gross or offensive, is it art because he says so? Is it art if someone defecates on a street corner and declares he did it because he believes the world is a toilet?
”Well, you would be subject to the same rules of arrest as anyone, but yes, it can be art if you`re an artist and it is part of your work taken as a whole. Artists are declaring that they have a particular philosophy, a point of view. That gives them the credentials to do what they do. Individual pieces are often incomprehensible and extremely insulting until you see the whole. You may not care about that philosophy, and you may be even more offended if you find out what those artists are doing, but still, you need to know it.”
Is that his remedy for a Jesse Helms, to tell him to look at what the artist is trying to say?
”I haven`t got a remedy because I don`t think there is any,” Jones says. ”I would love to think that people are as tolerant as I am, but in reality the world isn`t. On the other hand, I`m not in disagreement with everything Jesse Helms says; 99.9 percent I`m absolutely opposed to, but there is an area of artistic expression that is on any level unacceptable to me, and I`ll fight that-when it injures another person, for example, or exploits children.”
Jones, a polished man with graying hair and an indefatigable gift for articulating ideas, scoffs at the right-wing notion that shock art-including its more commercial practitioners such as comedian Andrew Dice Clay-is gnawing away at American values. ”The belief that there is an organized plot by artists and fellow travelers to pervert society, to corrupt the young, to make them look at work that will act as a satanic invocation to an unhealthy lifestyle is absolute drivel,” he says. ”First of all, artists couldn`t organize themselves out of a paper bag. Second, there are children growing up in Jesse Helms` world who are going to grow up and make an alternative sexual choice, whereas you can show a child who is destined to be straight five million Mapplethorpe photographs, and it`s not going to make any difference at all.”
To Jones, there are several kinds of art. ”For many people, art is a kind of entertainment. Say `Art,` and they think of Monet, with its wonderful, splashy colors. Or they think of the abstract art of the past 30 years. They`re not used to art that grabs hold of you and yells in your face. They`ve forgotten the kind of art we saw in the 1960s, art that reached out and said, `I`m concerned about this and what are you gonna do about it?` ”
It is the return of this kind of art-art that shocks-that has disturbed the equilibrium of the right wing. And it is from this tradition that Scott Tyler`s flag piece emerged.
”As a piece of artwork, it wasn`t much,” Jones says of the Tyler work in retrospect. ”Was it beautiful and sublime? No. It was not well crafted, it was just a shelf screwed to the wall with some books on it. It was the power of the idea that the piece had, and the effect that it had on you. Scott`s work is part of a body of work being produced across the entire country by a lot of young, politically motivated or socially concerned artists who are using art to question you about your values, or about something that`s going on in society about which they are concerned.”
