Ian Hunt, 'Alison Jones'

Alison Jones

Alison Jones's paintings show art in its natural-historical setting – Park Avenue apartments, private views, the super rich holding their champagne flutes. The interior furnishings and objets d'art are part of this system, as is, more broadly, fashion. She has commented on 'the sense of Roman undress' that tends to feature in the photographs of owners' houses and parties that are her source material for these paintings. The art depicted – we may recognize Thomas Ruff, Dubuffet, Helmut Newton or Morris Louis – may protest the settings it ends up in, or not.

That, briefly, is what the paintings show. What they produce (something very different) is gasps of recognition, shock and laughter, somewhere far removed from the certainties of satire. Gasps are not fully part of language. They are what we do when we are overcome, when we can't find words for what we are feeling or thinking. A gasp represents a small derangement of sense. You don't have words for the mixture of contradictory things you feel – so you gasp. Can you grasp what's in a gasp? The enlightenment project of critique (and the tradition of critical art that follows, questions and extends it) aims to make everything, in the end discussable. And we can discuss most things in the end, after we have got our breath back. But critique meets a tricky moment here: aesthetic shock. The painfulness of what you see is at the same time fascinating and funny. It is the achievement of these paintings to provoke a bewildering variety of reactions simultaneously.

The first law of critique is to demystify. So what exactly is going on in these gasps of recognition, excited and appalled, that the paintings produce? Let me set out some observations:

1. A community – the critical art audience, the enlightened ones – is brought face to face with images of another community, mostly female, around market- and auction house-approved artworks often (though not always) depicting women. This wealthy community appears numerous – there seem to be more of them than there are of us. These are paintings of crowds, albeit well controlled ones. Most often, when you look at art in a gallery, you are relatively isolated.

2. The laughter provoked is uneasy. You can take comfort that you are not one of the people in the picture, but what then are those people, automata provided so that we can feel smugly superior? No, they are images of people (mostly women) of a particular social class who are also part of a system of representation in magazine images, high life blogs, and elsewhere. In the clothes and shoes these women wear, and the art they are invited to mutely approve, they exemplify sexist assumptions that are found in different ways across the entire social structure.

3. Alison Jones is an enthusiastic reader of Pierre Bourdieu's sociological accounts of art, taste and culture. In these paintings 'art' – its values, its assumptions, whether grandiose or critical – comes off badly. The extra-economic values that any account of art as quality must struggle to justify and explain appear debased and complicit. The 'critical' potential of Thomas Ruff's photographs based on pornography is a particularly notable failure.

4. All of the above points are written as though the content of the images is transparent, available to us as easily as it would be in a photograph. But these are paintings. Their strategy is to be limpid, simple, clear. They do have a brilliant way of appearing transparent. But their own artfulness – the way the images are cropped, reversed out, transformed, examined in mirrors, and realised in the breathtaking one-off performance that watercolour brushstrokes can be – all this means they are made from an unusual combination of immediacy and constructedness. Part of what makes us gasp is the invisible labour in the studio to perfect each image, which sometimes requires many attempts and abandoned versions. It is as though, if she lived in a better world, Alison Jones could just have developed her skills and been a brilliant artist on a formal level; but she doesn't live in such a world, so there is a job of work to do. The skill and judgment that each painting shows – the extra-economic aspects of art's quality – are thrown at subjects that seem unworthy, but which are tackled nonetheless with cheerful gusto.

In this brief account, I cannot provide a more detailed commentary on how the paintings function. It is part of their deep interest that they can be seen at a glance, and that in that glance we know we are seeing something simultaneously complex and blatant; and that they reach out to the potential audience, rather than simply addressing the known audience. I will return, however, to some questions about what these paintings do to our own position, as we stand in front of them.

The privileged subject and viewer of Western art and philosophy has been male; it is a puzzle of these paintings that they so insistently put female spectators in the frame, as objects and also as potential subjects. The feminist understandings that inform the work have been held to through a period, particularly in the 1990s, when feminism was widely rejected and repositioned. One aspect of this was the redescription of feminism as more successful than it has actually been. There have, despite this repositioning, been signs of an international revival of feminism in recent years. Alison Jones's paintings are part of the movement; but by examining art and more specifically a stratum of the art world, she is using the tools of art against some of the ways in which art functions as part of a patriarchal and capitalist order; and doing so in a way that short-circuits irony while admitting the value of exasperated laughter.

Part of the repositioning of feminism in the 1990s was the unleashing of a state of general irony, relentlessly employed through every level of culture, from tabloids to government. Irony (which does have its uses) involves, among other things, being where one is not, making temporarily tolerable through a laugh or a smirk a situation that is not truly tolerable. The questions about where the viewer stands in front of these paintings is connected with the more specific problem for women spectators in a relentlessly ironised culture: how do I recognize myself in the images I see? (This is, fairly obviously, not an overwhelmingly difficult problem for men.) The female viewer of these paintings sees, I think, that sexualised images are still at the apex of a wider structure of exchanges, that art is part of a system; that the immediate circle of wealthy people around art know this, and don't appear to care. And therefore, in a different way than usual, she experiences a gap in terms of identification, except, perhaps, with the other people in the gallery with whom she may feel more inclined to share an observation or a joke.

But again: I should interrupt this line of thought and admit that while the paintings present a temptation to viewers to 'see' their content transparently, they also work to make a complex content of their own, through the ways such apparent simplicity, the blatant obviousness of a correct critique, is refigured, translated and mistranslated in paint. The pleasures of the process of art itself, as it intervenes in the system of its own circulation of images, have not been deleted from the labour of critique. This is, finally, the most significant source for the gasp that these works produce.

Ian Hunt