Ronald Jones
Metro Pictures
In the Whitney Museum’s show “Mind Over Matter,” 1990, Ronald Jones’ crisp, deadpan redeployment of Minimalist stylistic conventions seemed to grant that movement a stay of extinction in exchange for its rematerialization of grim politico-historical events. The range of his work was as impressive as it was rare: from cool, cartographic indictments of formalist self-referentiality to tear jerking memorials in which Joseph Kosuth’s “Platonic” chair doubles as the electric chair of state-sponsored murder. In each instance, politicization takes place in the mode being critiqued, setting up a kind