G.B. Jones

at Cooper Cole

*G.B. Jones*, 2022, installation view, Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo: Jessann Reece.

As we enter the gallery, we’re greeted by the artist’s name, spelled out sloppily across the stark white wall in a two-tone, drop-shadow tag: G-B-J-O- N-E-S. “Are you familiar with the artist?” a member of the gallery staff asks. Like any good queers who grew up on the internet, my friends and I spent years online acquainting ourselves with G.B. Jones's visual practice: perusing digitized versions of her queer punk zines through online archives, returning to her iconic erotic drawings of leather dykes on Tumblr, and listening to whatever songs from her queer post-punk band Fifth Column we could find uploaded to YouTube. Now, for the first time, I’m encountering Jones's original works in person, in Cooper Cole’s commercial gallery.

Jones is an interdisciplinary artist celebrated for her expansive practice and her contributions to “queercore.” Jones, in fact, coined the term to describe a uniquely queer, punk subculture based in a DIY form of cultural production that diverges from both the gay and punk subcultures and seeks to antagonize normative heterosexual values. Her contributions to the queercore scene in Toronto span diverse mediums: notably her band Fifth Column, her “no-budget” 8mm films, and the queer fanzines that she produced and distributed. Contemporary art and mass-produced culture meet in Jones’s practice, which centers easily reproducible and financially accessible mediums like zines in keeping with her anti-establishment principles. Among Jones’s most widely circulated works are her Tom Girls drawings. In a lesbian take on Tom of Finland’s hyper-masculine gay erotica, these present a slew of unapologetic leather dykes riding motorcycles, cruising, and performing delicious acts of debauchery. They originally appeared strewn across the pages of J.D.s, Jones’s and Bruce LaBruce’s queer fanzine. The zine, which ran from 1985 to 1991, featured drawings, photographs, and stories by Jones and LaBruce and boasted contributions from artists like Vaginal Davis and Dennis Cooper.

The relics of Jones’s broad contributions to queer punk culture form the basis of her self-titled exhibition at Cooper Cole. The exhibition focuses on a monograph of her work that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) confiscated and later burned in 1995. This publication brought together Jones’s Tom Girls series with other images related to her practice: film stills, show posters, and collages as well as testimonial-like texts written by past collaborators. When the New York–based publisher attempted to send the monographs to Canada, the CBSA designated them as “immoral” and prohibited their importation, citing their depiction of “bondage.” Jones’s publication met the same unfortunate fate as many other queer printed projects of the time, which were heavily targeted for censorship by anti-obscenity acts. Almost thirty years later, Kunstverein Toronto — a nomadic curatorial and publishing platform dedicated to experimentation and hospitality in exhibition practices — reprinted the monograph; it appears in this solo exhibition alongside a related and varied collection of drawings, photographs, ephemera, and other works by Jones. Members of the Kunstverein Toronto team, with research and publication direction by D St-Amour, curated the exhibition: a celebration of Jones’s decades-long campaign of unapologetic salaciousness highlighting the ongoing fight against anti-queer censorship that persists today.

Upon entering the exhibition, I approach a glass-enclosed display case that contains a series of pornographic graphite drawings; one of them features two leather dykes on a “GBJ”-branded motorcycle. I recognize it from a series of drawings in the monograph that narrates a dyke couple retaliating against a police officer who tickets their motorbike. Here, the couple rides away on the bike, leaving the officer bound to a tree. The words “I AM A FASCIST PIG” appear written boldly across her pants, which are tied around her knees. Whip marks crisscross her bare ass, and one of the dykes waves her belt as a victory flag as they ride away from the scene. Explicitly anti-cop works like this, as well as Fifth Column vinyls and ephemera from legendary queer parties like Vaseline (later renamed Vazaleen to avoid a copyright lawsuit), all cohabitate within one vitrine, emphasizing the political and abolitionist threads that run through Jones’s work and her championing of sexual liberation politics.

I peer into the vitrine and snap a photo on my phone, adjusting my stance to minimize the amount of my own reflection that steals its way into the image. The glass vitrines of this exhibition simultaneously trouble the iPhone camera and my desire for tactility and access to the materiality of these ephemera. These objects would completely transform if accessible to the viewer: if I could sit in the gallery and thumb through a zine or encounter the cotton of one of Jones’s T-shirts against my skin. My access to Jones’s work, previously mediated by online documentation, now faces the barrier of a display case. The visual language of the museum and the commercial gallery encroaches on the intimate nature of erotica zines and ephemera like matchbooks, making precious commodities of objects that have historically resisted this type of classification.

G.B. Jones, *Broken Column*, 2022, installation view, *G.B. Jones*, 2022, Cooper Cole, Toronto. Photo: Jessann Reece.

Across the room, two chrome fist-like shapes reach toward each other, unevenly silhouetted by black spray paint. The same fists reappear — now stacked on top of each other and doubled in a digital print — in the basement of the split-level gallery. Here, I can understand each fist as half a broken Ionic column graffitied onto a set of doors along with the words “THIS WILL FALL DOWN.” The print foregrounds graffiti as a practice dedicated to defacing, destroying, or compromising the value of public and private property. What does it mean when this act of defacement instead creates value? In the context of a commercial gallery, Jones’s anti-style scrawls risk reduction to nothing more than window dressing for a trendy, counter-culture showroom. The anti-establishment ethos central to her work is extracted with a totality that is equal parts impressive and devastating.

I’m beginning to tire of the juxtaposition of edgy, historically excluded art forms with white cube commercial gallery spaces. What might be more interesting than emphasizing this incongruence is employing presentation techniques that genuinely begin to eat away at the embedded display customs that expect and produce monetization. Perhaps the incongruency of this exhibition is what makes it interesting for some visitors. Perhaps it is what made it interesting for the curators, the gallerist, the marketing staff at Cooper Cole, the domestic and international collectors of Jones’s work. For me, however, the sterileness of the gallery overpowers any punk or anti-establishment aura inherent to the work. Rather than Jones’s work disrupting the order of the gallery space, the gallery swallows her work, molding it to fit within the visual language of commerce and inaccessibility. The work becomes the glass vitrines, the stark white walls, the security cameras, the coffee table, and the imitation Barcelona Chairs neatly placed at center.

Queer artists deserve financial stability and commercial success, and it is significant that many of these artists have found representation with Cooper Cole. However, I would also like to believe that achieving this type of conventional success is possible without surrendering what the work is about or compromising what the work means to accomplish. Can curators and gallerists prioritize embodied experience and experimentation in exhibition and display practices so as not to decontextualize the work to the point of near unrecognizability?

The notice of detention CBSA issued Jones in 1995 hangs, expertly framed, on the wall of the gallery. Ironically, this paper — which acts as a conceptual centerpiece for the show — mirrors the sterilization of Jones’s work by its institutional framing. While the gallery does not censor, it does sanitize through modes of display. This exhibition brings together an impressive collection of G.B. Jones’s works, but ultimately the commercial presentation conventions undermine their true power, power that lies in resisting capitalist modes of distribution and value-making. After purchasing a copy of Jones’s reprinted monograph, I left the gallery with a complementary Cooper Cole–branded tote bag in hand, irretrievably desiring something more experimental, something messier, and something dirtier.

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