Jennie C. Jones (b. 1968) is well known for her embrace of music and sound in her practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, and audio recordings. So naturally, for her rooftop commission at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, she’s actually built her own musical instruments, fabricating three monumental stringed instruments. Tantalizingly, visitors are asked not to touch the Aeolian harp, zither, and one-string, letting them be activated instead by the breeze.
“You have this very precise settings of objects, almost in an orchestra,” Met director Max Hollein told me.
The sculptures are angular, with a deep red powered aluminum coating and concrete panels meant to match the color of the travertine in the Met’s soaring Great Hall. The wind did not oblige during the press preview for the exhibition, leaving their sonic qualities a mystery.
Jones compared the work’s latent musical potential to Walter De Maria’s (1935–2013) New Mexico Land Art masterpiece The Lightning Field in the exhibition catalogue, saying the untouchable instruments “open up a space for anticipation, for failure, for waiting, for impatience.”
But she was also responding to the objects in the Met’s musical instrument collection, which features 5,000 examples from six continents and the Pacific islands.
“These works that are behind glass that you can only imagine what they sound like,” Jones told me. “That was an important thing to carry over.”
The project’s scale presented a major challenge for the artist, who previously built a 16-foot-tall powder-coated aluminum and wood harp titled These (Mournful) Shores for the Clark in Williamstown, Mass., in 2020. (The Met project is just Jones’s second outdoor sculpture installation.)
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