Ben Jones at Deitch Projects

A context for Ben Jones’s media room snaps into focus strolling through Times Square on any night of the year. Reality filling digital planes are a hyper-reality in the urban epicenter, behaving with the tacit normalcy of a brazen heterotopia— a city built not from concrete but a rapacious pixel takeover. Screens are in the air and in the seams, blending and dominating from silent totemic towers. In the frigid months Jones gives us a much warmer telematic embrace. The body heat helped with that. The blinking helped as well. And the tangling with projections streams to navigate the room. But above all it was the whirrr of holy noise in white that tinged the consumption with pleasure. If Times Square could emanate holy holds on the upper end of a key board in the same way then we would probably all blank out like incinerable moths. Concentric patterns in op-art colors with moving projections laid over top! Ancient mystics wish they could have gotten hold of such a trick. But without the mystical ‘path of the warrior’ to precipitate the mind altered moment, does sensation have any meaning? Of course not, unless we invest it with meaning. The Gumby Buddha of Jones’s shrine has parallel characters in Times Square that give us a shift to consider about meaning. I nominate Bruce Springsteen. After his utterly embarrassing ax-swinging Boss antics for the Super Bowl half-time show, the current Rolling Stone cover and his giant likeness on 42nd and 5th, it is apparent that our emblematic exaltations are a purely malleable rouse, although sadly not always so easy to render with a nostalgic vector. Gumby is one ounce more meaningless than Bruce Springsteen as a banal mascot of the telematic sensory (and the puffy dalliance of sensory with its cousin the spiritual). Gumby is drained of corporate interest and so his banality bears the strength of an orphaned blank slate, created and perpetuated by the entertainment-media mechanism that alone wields the strength to culturally glue us, but whose likeness is now free to be appropriated as a means of identification alone. And so Ben Jones gives us a generation’s plasticine identity index coupled with the quickest route to affects of a mystical vision, or the warm hug that someone should call Roy Ascott about so he can come a little closer to telematic coitus.