Jones, Amelia 1961-

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Jones, Amelia 1961-

PERSONAL:

Born July 14, 1961, in Durham, NC; daughter of Edward E. (a professor) and Virginia S. Jones; married Anthony Sherin (a film editor), March 7, 1987 (divorced, 2005); married Paul Craig Donald (an artist), September 1, 2007; children: Evan E., Vita B. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Harvard University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1983; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., 1987; University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D., 1991. Politics: "Left/Democrat."

ADDRESSES:

Office—Art History and Visual Studies, Mansfield Cooper Building 3.10, University of Manchester, Oxford Rd., Manchester M12 9PL, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, instructor and advisor, 1990-91; University of California, Riverside, began as assistant professor, became professor of contemporary art and theory and the history of photography; University of Manchester, Manchester, England, Pilkington Professor in the History of Art. Curator of exhibitions; symposium organizer and lecturer; member of Editorial Advisory Board, Women in Performance and University of Manchester Press.

MEMBER:

College Art Association, Association of Art Historians.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow of American Council of Learned Societies, 1994-95, and National Endowment for the Humanities, 2000-01; Guggenheim fellow, 2000.

WRITINGS:

Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, 1994, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

(Editor and contributor) Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" in Feminist Art History, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

Feminist Directions: 1970/1996: Robin Mitchell, Mira Schor, Faith Wilding, Nancy Youdelman, Regents of the University of California (Riverside, CA), 1996.

Body Art/Performing the Subject, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1996.

(Editor, with Andrew Stephenson, and contributor) Performing the Body/Performing the Text, Routledge (New York, NY), 1999.

The Body Inscribed: Challenging Tradition, Sandra Chesterman & Carole Shepheard (Auckland, New Zealand), 1999.

(With Tracey Warr) The Artist's Body, Warr, Phaidon (London, England), 2000.

Angel of Histories: Dorit Cypis: Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, March 8-April 30, 2000, The Gallery (Riverside, CA), 2000.

The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader ("In Sight: Visual Culture" series), Routledge (London, England), 2002.

Paul McCarthy: Pinocchio, Réunion des Musées Nationaux (Paris, France), 2002.

(Editor) A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2006.

Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject, Routledge (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to books and catalogues by others, including Aesthetics and Difference, edited by Emory Elliott, Oxford University Press, 2000; InterFaces: Visualizing and Performing Women's Lives, edited by Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2000; and Whiteness, a Wayward Construction, edited by Tyler Stallings, Laguna Art Museum (Laguna Beach, CA), 2003; contributor of articles and reviews to art and history journals, including Atzlan: Journal of Chicano Studies, Art Journal, New Observations, Afterimage, and Camera Obscura: Journal of Feminism and Film History. Executive editor, Framework, 1995-98; contributing editor in charge of West Coast coverage, Artscribe, 1991-92.

SIDELIGHTS:

Amelia Jones is a professor of art history and visual studies whose focus is on feminism and art; performance, body, and video art; and Dadaism. She has curated many exhibitions, contributed to journals, and written for works by others, including catalogues. Jones is the editor and author of a number of volumes, including Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp and a related volume, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. In this volume Jones provides a history of New York's Greenwich Village, simply called "the Village," from about 1913 to 1923. It was a haven for artists, including the Ashcan School artists, musicians, and other free-thinking bohemians. Salons, such as one held by Mabel Dodge, hosted discussions of socialism, art, psychology, and feminist issues such as birth control.

Andrea Dahlberg reviewed the later edition for Leonardo Online, noting: "Unsurprisingly, Jones draws on Freud but also on the relatively unknown figure of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German expatriate living in New York, who mixed in the same circles as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp." The Baroness (1874-1927) is the most prominent figure in Jones's book. She was a poet, sculptor, and performance artist who appeared in public wearing such oddities as a bra made of cans and earrings fashioned from teaspoons. She appeared in Man Ray's film Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Shaving Her Pubic Hair, and her photographs were central to the review founded by him and Duchamp. The cover of Jones's book features a sculpture created by the Baroness. Titled God, it features bathroom plumbing fixtures.

Mira Schor reviewed the book in Art Journal, concluding: "This book is important at this moment in history: the recuperation of failed masculinity, combined with the silencing of nonconformist women in an America caught up in militarism, xenophobia, and profligacy, is a story that resonates strongly in the United States today."

The Artist's Body, for which Jones collaborated with Tracey Warr, is a history of how artists used bodies, their own and those of others, to interpret their art. Examples include Yves Klein, whose paint-covered models writhed on his canvasses. Australian performance artist Stelarc hung from the ceilings of galleries by meat hooks pierced through his skin. Others subjected themselves to various tortures and self-mutilations, and some smeared their excrement onto their bodies, along with blood and paint. In 1961 Pero Manzoni sold tins of his own feces at a price equal to gold by weight.

Jones is editor of The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, the seven parts of which are Provocations, Representation, Difference, Disciplines/Strategies, Mass culture/Media interventions, Body, and Technology. The first section is comprised of new essays, while the other sections contain previously published material. The essays were printed during the period from the 1970s to the time of publication, providing a thorough model of feminist scholarship across the years.

Jones is also editor of A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, a collection of art history and criticism by contributors who write on such topics as technology, formalism, public space, diasporas, culture wars, the avant-garde, and the society of the spectacle.

Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject is Jones's study of artists who, from the nineteenth century to contemporary times, have addressed self-identity in their work, particularly with the use of film and video, through which the artist interacts with the viewer.

Jones once told CA: "Initially inspired to write the great American novel, I realized in my early twenties that academic prose offered a more direct (and less frightening) path toward becoming a writer, and was better suited to my polemical writing style. After studying art history in college and graduate school, I became increasingly comfortable writing about contemporary art and culture.

"It seemed to me that I can do a great deal in this area, especially by diversifying my writing into a wide range of venues, in order to reach academics, the nonacademic art world, and (ideally) the general public. In diverse publications I have enjoyed attacking subjects ranging from postfeminism, representations of women in Hollywood films, and feminist art from the 1970s to the construction of the French-turned-American avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp as a father figure for U.S. postmodern art and the contemporary use of the artist's body in or as the work of art.

"My goal with all of these publications has been to open areas of accepted thought in contemporary culture to critical analysis and to disrupt traditional narratives of art history by insisting on the inclusion of women and artists of color. In my writing, as in my teaching, I encourage readers and students to take a critical distance from the information that bombards them in the contemporary world. I have been motivated by the importance of communicating the powerful relevance of art history (understood in this broad sense as the study of culture through historical and theoretical models) to everyone who lives in the imagery-saturated contemporary world. I try to convince readers and students that, by grasping the inevitably ideological ways in which visual culture is made to mean, they can become empowered in relation to these representations and can potentially find ways to intervene in, critique, or encourage various representations in progressive ways.

"I believe in writing as polemic, but also as a kind of seduction. While some may try to veil it, all writers have a point of view, and the best favor we can do our readers is to make that point of view as clear as possible. To this end, my favorite writers are philosophers whose main project has been the poeticizing of academic writing (bell hooks, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray) and fiction writers—especially black women who have negotiated with passion and eloquence the commingling of oppressiveness and potentially liberatory magic in the English language—Alice Walker and Toni Morrison especially. Norman Rush is, for me, one of the great contemporary authors, in that he, too, writes in that ephemeral but fabulous space in which the gorgeousness of language, the complexity of intellectual and political ideas regarding race and gender, and profound emotional and sensual meanings intersect.

"My long-standing love of fiction has held me in good stead with my academic prose. Recently, I have enjoyed opening up this usually rather formulaic kind of writing to fictionalized and playful modes of expression. In doing so, I not only answer my own desire to merge my emotional, personal self with my academic, rational self, but also expose the illusion of objectivity thrown up by the mannered poses of academic prose. Looking at art and experiencing culture are always emotionally invested processes. For this, I have been called—sometimes derisively, sometimes in praise—a ‘new art historian’ and a ‘poststructuralist feminist.’

"Writing is the process that has allowed me to exist. Without writing I would have nothing to say."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Afterimage, May-June, 2007, Elena Dubas, review of Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject, p. 38.

Art in America, September, 1994, David Joselit, review of Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, p. 35.

Art Journal, spring, 1999, Henry Sayre, review of Body Art/Performing the Subject, p. 112; summer, 2006, Mira Schor, review of Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada, p. 133.

Library Journal, April 1, 2004, Prudence Peiffer, review of Irrational Modernism, p. 90.

Literary Review, winter, 2005, Irene Gammel, review of Irrational Modernism, p. 166.

New York Times Book Review, May 2, 2004, review of Irrational Modernism.

NWSA Journal, spring, 2007, Jessica Dallow, review of The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, p. 166.

Parachute, July-September, 2001, review of The Artist's Body, p. 145.

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2006, review of A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945; February, 2007, review of Self/Image.

TDR, summer, 2000, Ann Daly, review of Body Art/Performing the Subject, p. 153.