Rooftop barflies frittered away a sunny Saturday afternoon last month from the fifth-floor terrace of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, their rosé-tinted views of the Midtown skyline accompanied by the discordantly sober minimalism of Jennie C. Jones’s Ensemble. Resembling a trio of stringed instruments, the installation provides a coda, for the time being, to the Met’s buzzy annual Roof Garden commission, which has served site-specific summer fun to the museumgoing public since 2013. (Demolition of the patio will soon commence in preparation for the forthcoming Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art, slated to open—with new and improved outdoor space—in 2030.)
Jones’s powdered-aluminum sculptures are a moody burgundy, accented with a sanguine hue she has jokingly denominated “public-art red.” The tallest of the three works, the so-called Aeolian harp, echoes the gangly skyscrapers visible in the cracks between its vertical components. Another structure is influenced by a single-stringed folk instrument known as a diddley bow; it features two slender, leaning polyhedrons abutting a concrete slab intended to recall the travertine of the Met’s Great Hall. On the topside of the third sculpture, based on a trapezoidal zither, a shock of scarlet draws the eye to a cutout that catches the afternoon sunlight—evoking the sound hole of the instrument, presumably.
Jones characterizes Ensemble as site-responsive rather than site-specific; the installation speaks not only to the Met’s Cantor Roof Garden but to its encyclopedic collection of musical instruments and even to instruments beyond its vast holdings. The diddley bow sculpture, for example, nods to the vernacular minimalism of Mississippi blues artists Moses Williams and Louis Dotson, who fashioned one-string zithers from found objects, including planks, nails, rocks, and porch walls. Jones’s piece was inspired by a photograph of one of Dotson’s DIY chordophones, held not at the Met, but in the archives of Davidson College, South Carolina.
One might expect the last Roof Garden commission of the decade to go out with a bang. In fact, Jones’s sculptures are inaudible. Any sound of the wind stroking the strings of the Aeolian harp, as teased in the Met’s publicity materials, was certainly not detectable to my ear. Instead, snippets of awkward conversation occasionally surfaced from the day-drunk din. Two exes sat on my right, catching up before one of them beelined to the bathroom to throw up what remained of the previous night’s excesses. To my other side, an unenthused man was enlisted as photographer of his date’s attire. The clack of shoes on the roof’s south-facing wooden deck suggested the antic atmosphere of a pier boardwalk.
Steeped in histories of minimalism and Black avant-garde music, Jones has for decades haunted a kind of conceptual interlude between sight and sound. As curator Lauren Rosati put it, “her works often suggest the presence of music and its technologies despite an absence of sonic matter.” On the roof of the Met, this Cagean reticence takes on a political valence, with Jones seeking, in her own words, to subvert the “expectations” and “clichés that go along with Black performativity.” In a venue where the art often plays second fiddle to the 360-degree view, Jones’s quiet refinements don’t try to compete with other stimulations.
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