paul ramirez jonas

In Give and Take, Ramirez Jonas presents the visitor with a speculative, funny and lighthearted experiment that gives us a glimpse into the interdependence between compulsion and form, between demand and choice. The artist takes, once more, the role of the scientist or collector and transforms his studio into a laboratory that artificially isolates the drive that structures the exchange economies at the center of his public artworks. All the pieces in the show are sourced from the remainders of earlier works accumulated over time in the artist’s studio.

Alone in his workspace, Ramirez Jonas has now become his own audience or public, a detached observer of the drives embedded in the exchange economies he has spent a career constructing. There is something strikingly impersonal in the exercise, a taxonomical impulse that the artist balances by including traces of the personal and singular—fingerprints, handwriting, small smudges on the surface of the paper. The drive emerges here as a resistant mechanism that reconfigures the relation between the private and the public, the political oxymoron of a community made up of strangers to themselves and to others as well.

In this way, Ramirez Jonas’s delicate drawings show an intimate encounter with the subject-object of the leftover as a problem, as well as a source of temporal anxiety. A comparison with the poignancy of Ramirez Jonas’s preoccupation with temporality as an implacable force comes to mind—consider, for example, the 1997 Longer Day or the 2003 Another Day. The artist’s gesture is transposed here onto an inefficient calendar that, rather than marking time, marks Ramirez Jonas’s own obsession with time. Similarly, the intersubjective nature of Ramirez Jonas’s collective and public artworks gives way to an exploration of the subject’s drive as an object that can now be tacked to the wall because it has been isolated and reduced, like an entomologist taxidermy display.

The drive is exhibited even more fully in the exchange economy of the cash register sculptures, which double as the condition of possibility of all the drawings on the wall. At their core, these mechanical devices for the production of value and rationalization also undergird the taxonomical, the desire to measure and contain. While essential for the socialization of relations, in a way that is akin to language, the cash register, and the sculptural weight it carries in the show, foregrounds the law of equivalences in which anything or anyone can be substituted for something or someone else. Yet the drive is also an equalizer between different modes of classification, a unifying mechanism that borrows a variety of forms because it is formless in itself, a shapeshifter and also a trickster of sorts.

The central role of language in the artist’s work is also affected by his foregrounding of the drive as procedure or disembodied dispositif. In his 2016 performative sculpture Public Trust, for instance, the performative underpins the existence of a world that is affirmed by language. There, Ramirez Jonas uses the rhetoric of the oath to sustain and protect the stability of language as an object with power, so that it safeguards above all its own value as event and speech act. However, Ramirez Jonas has now removed both the performative and discursive elements that has characterized most of his previous work. The objects presented here are traversed by the events and verbal contracts they were designed to be part of. Yet in their effort to persist beyond those discursive rituals, in their resistance as leftovers or studio debris, they also signal the loss of the talismanic quality Ramirez Jonas had previously conferred on them though his social practice. The use of the two-dimensional speaks of that loss while foregrounding the resilience of quasi-objects that resist their emancipation from the social event that gives them power and meaning.

If the talisman is an object of mysterious and extraordinary use value, what we see here are objects voided of sense, value, and signification. The relationships of equivalence they establish among themselves through Ramirez Jonas’s compositions, in his reduction of creativity to an organizing task, carry within a lack that threatens to disturb the rationality of the whole system. It is indeed possible to read them as the linguistic ruins of the performative or as failed instruments of verification and measurement. Despite having the shape and form of signifiers, their signified is nowhere in sight. Thus, they inscribe groundlessness and uncertainty within the reassuring formal protocols typically connected to verification, measurement, and transaction—processes that anchor the commonalities of a shared world and its necessary fictions. Nevertheless, the non-functional calculus of reciprocity or of full nomination remains inscribed as utopian longing. Nothing in this drawings and sculptures has been dematerialized yet immateriality and absence are at the center of Ramirez Jonas’s displays.

On the other hand, the apparent formalism of the paper drawings, collages, and cut-outs, their lightness and visual economy, is intrinsic to currency itself. The language of the transactional, of money and the laws of equivalences, is an abstraction and a formalization that we have ceased to perceive as aesthetic. The monetization of the social, the transformation of relations into transactions, the algorithm that structures our neoliberal everyday life, comes full circle in Ramirez Jonas’s paper drawings, where a paper bill looks just like piece of paper with a drawing and inscription on it. Yet on the paper we also see the immaterial desires, hopes, and fears we inscribe onto them, traces of a social life governed by a formalized abstraction.

In their infinite potentiality of endless configurations, Ramirez Jonas’ drawings constantly betray their limitation as acts of vain linguistic nomination because rather than affirm they question the stability of a shared world and its relations. These leftover patterns and shapes trace the formal conventions of currencies and measurements and insist in organizing, classifying, and calibrating even when there is nothing to organize, classify or calibrate. Thus, they function like phantasmatic remainders and producers of anti-value and lack, whereby debt is unveiled as the economic capture of absence.

The quasi-subject (the rhetorical subjects produced by the system) and the quasi-objects (objects with a functional agency in the system) presented here traverse one another as artifacts severed from the social context in which they would function in hybrid unison. Works of art are paradigmatic examples of such hybridity and Ramirez Jonas’s public practice typically thrives in the production of their social encounters. Yet it is the gap between the given and the received, their Give and Take, the impossible calculus of reciprocity, that allows Ramirez Jonas to escape the market’s law of equivalence. His cut-outs and voided forms introduce absence as the obverse of the drive and as the key to his whole system.

Ramirez Jonas has devised in Give and Take a sliding puzzle of sorts, where the missing piece allows for all the others to move and fall into place. Thus the missing piece doubles as a placeholder for the incalculable, for the surplus and leftover that cannot be counted. However, in a similar way that trust and suspicion operate as two sides of the same coin in earlier performances, placeholders also exhibit a sinister side as indexes of debt or of demands that can never be fulfilled. Ramirez Jonas’s inscription of the drive walks a fine pencil line between enacting a break in the law of equivalence and becoming a symptom of subjective destitution. Placeholders, then, exhibit their lack as a form of suspension between subjecthood and objecthood.