Jon Tower
American Fine Arts Co.
Jon Tower isolates private acts to focus their refraction of public ritual; his “Solved Problems” series from 1988 framed inscrutable homework ciphers of mathematics and physics, while “Diluted Holy Water,” 1988, invented a wry self-portrait out of thieved Vatican fluid thinned with profane tap water. In Seed Piece, 1991, he installed the artifacts of an experiment in which he swallowed an apple seed made of silver and x-rayed its passage through his body. Tower’s methodical display of tools for this experiment (white casts of his mouth and asshole, the silver seed, a masticated apple in a