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Against the Wind
John Haberin New York City
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas launched her career in performance and video by pushing against the wind—a strong wind, on the coldest day of the year. If that sounds futile, she has described a later video as "moving with no pattern." She still loves stories, but she finds them in things, from manta rays in the deep sea to fireworks in the sky.
She may begin with a story, like Juniper Tree after the brothers Grimm and Reading Dante. MoMA speaks of her drawings as "storyboards." Futility itself can be a story with no need of an ending. Wind took Jonas and friends to the Long Island shore in 1971, where five huddled in a mass, for companionship and warmth, and two walked separately together. Her work recreates her life as both performance and travelogue, 
from desert sunlight to the darkness in her studio. When it comes to art and the powers that be, she is still pushing against the wind.
Jonas has been working in the space between installation, sculpture, video, and performance for as long as anyone. She could well have defined it. She has united music, dance, and her own athleticism, leaving her props, large and small, as cryptic reminders. Before and alongside classics of 1970s feminism, she extended what video could do with a woman's own body. Her MoMA retrospective follows their use and reuse, while the Drawing Center looks to her drawings for clues. As a postscript, a 2007 exhibition packed much of it into a single room.
Not just about her
Wind already shows her attention to the feel of things, as the elements of nature and as experience. It also shows her dedication to others, with art as collaboration. It underlies her work with the Judson Dance Company and such musicians as Jason Moran, the jazz pianist and composer. It lets others structure a work or refuse to do so. When they head down to the vacant lots that would become Battery Park City, for Delay Delay, they mill about as if waiting to begin. With her first Mirror Piece, three years before she took up a Sony Portapak in 1972, she could collaborate with herself.
That urge to collaborate helped draw Jonas away from traditional media. This could no longer be just about the artist. When she does appear on camera, it may show rolling frames of only her legs, like a screen test gone terribly awry. The urge to cut, to multiply, and to recombine appears, too, in a mirror piece, where mirrors supply the patterned hem of a dress. The work does unfold in time, but not what others may take for real time. In Delay Delay, it takes sound longer to reach her than light, a doubled delay.
She acquires another alter ego soon after, as Organic Honey, dressed in whatever she could find in an erotic shop in Soho. Like Oscar Wilde, she can resist anything but temptation. When she heads for Las Vegas, she seems equally at home in a casino, in desert heat, and on Sunset Strip. The alternatives suggest, too, the role of drawing, within and alongside video. It could be drawing with a rake in the sand, with a casino's lights, or with loop after loop of plain chalk. Large red drawings of rabbits, dogs, or nothing at all round out the story—or the lack of one.
Not that the drawings are finished work of art, whatever that means. Rather, the props stand within and alongside new media, and her retrospective cannot get enough of them. They begin with mirrors and the steel hoop that she brought to Jones Beach Dance. (Later her favorite companion, her dog, jumps through a smaller hoop.) It could support Vitruvian man, arms and legs spread wide for Leonardo da Vinci, but without a shred of Renaissance idealism. In Tap Dancing from 1997, a man just shuffles his feet back and forth on the floor.
Increasingly, she has returned to the sea, but not just to the shore. As she puts it in 2019, her work is Moving Off the Land. It reflects a real concern for human damage to the planet, but also her impulse to collaborate. A marine biologist has taken her underwater and, just as important, created the lenses for observing the deep sea. Those videos come with props, too. Small glass spheres, both black and white, might not look out of place in Vegas.
Jonas reuses props from installation to installation. It is all part of what Organic Honey called her Visual Telepathy. The curators, Ana Janevski with Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, end with a work on several monitors to wrap things up. The manta rays from underwater have become kites overhead. The look both up and back to past work, given new life, suits an artist in her eighties with diminished output for twenty years now but still going. In the retrospective's title, "Good Night Good Morning."
The feel of paper
Jonas speaks of wanting to capture "the shape, the scent, the feel of things." If that suggests a raw immediacy, she works fast. The Drawing Center fills all three of its galleries with some three hundred works, chosen from more than two thousand. It is a challenge to Jonas herself to keep up with the pace of things. These are not simply things observed or the things in themselves, but things for both her senses and as they appear to themselves. They ask what drawing can still mean to an artist known not for so-called fine art, but for video, installation, and performance.
Drawings for Jonas sure look immediate, like the wild shape of things. Her line may seem barely to hold together, and so might a recognizable living creature. She calls her show "Animal Vegetable Mineral," and animals by far win out. What could that have to do with new media? What about an artist who has lived in Soho for fifty years, 
just up the street from the Drawing Center today? "I know," she insists, "what is around me"—which may sound more like boutiques, warehouses, and cobblestones than nature.
Still, performance for Jonas has always meant experiencing her surroundings, going back to Wind in 1968. And the Drawing Center brings a more recent video of two women, one of them the artist, walking by the sea. Their paths cross as they hold out a paper cone, like a makeshift megaphone or telescope, but without a sign of communication or recognition. One can see what she means by an art of "incurable solitude." It is also art with a sense of humor and experiment. Whatever it takes to see or fail to see.
She has summered in Nova Scotia, collecting rocks from the Canadian wilds, and a table holds its share. (She began as a sculptor, and one might hope for hints to her early work, but good luck with that.) She keeps looking, too, with the same ambiguity as to whether she is looking for nature or herself. Her drawings turn to butterflies and bees, seen up close, rendered in ink on paper folded in half. It brings out their symmetry, but also her love of accident. The back of a bee could just as well be an animal spine or gaping black maw.
The curators for drawing, Laura Hoptman with Rebecca DiGiovanna, take things not chronologically but in series. They can hardly help it, not with a series of thirty-seven dogs or forty-seven birds. It is a human creation all the same. Dogs are domestic animals, and the rest could belong to the artist's backyard or her imagination. She has drawn fish "as they are in the sea," but how would she know without imagination? She has sketched snowflakes, but they have already melted away.
They have a life of themselves all the same. A series for Jonas is not so much variations on a theme as a focus of attention. It also has its impetus in her media. What begins as wild freehand may not stay that way, and what looks immediate may be anything but. It may run to a single intricate loop in response to traditional Irish patterning—what a video calls Mystic Knots. It may also run to chance.
She has her Rorschach tests, in folded paper or melting ice. She has worked with a twig dipped in ink and made puppets from photocopies. Like David Hammons or Yves Klein, she has made art from the traces of a human body, her own or another woman's—on paper and in performance. It can be hard to know one subject, human or animal, from another. The show opens with faces in profile, with more dips and turns than needed for just a nose and a mouth. Who, though, can say in advance the shape of things?
Morning, noon, and night
Did you guess that "the shape, the scent, the feel of things" quotes an additional work, of Jonas drawing (as in tugging) her dog? It does not appear either at the Drawing Center or at MoMA. Yet it anchored a 2007 installation that did its best to keep up with her means and ends. She may still be, as The New York Times said on the eve of her retrospective, "the world's most elusive artist," but not for lack of leaving her traces. She could be using her art as an extension of nature, of the body, or the medium itself. A mirror could be an agent of doubling or distortion.
The 2007 exhibition opens a messier kind of space. Beyond a black curtain, Jonas fills it with five screens, white painted curves on the wall, a dog's head on the floor, and more related paraphernalia than I can remember. She points to other spaces as well, concluding with the total work's performance in October 2005 and 2006 at Dia:Beacon. At her old gallery, she added a tour of her studio and kitchen—but these, too, as constructed spaces. One can see them still in a photograph or in a long, enclosed video theater, distorted as in a convex mirror. Recall her themes from the very start, of mirrors and doubling.
She asks one into her studio personally, leaning into the camera a few times to say good morning and, in no time, good night. The informal touch helps her avoid turning her life or her mind into a private mythology. It seems only right that she collaborates once again with a jazz musician, whereas Bill Viola, Eve Sussman, and Matthew Barney invoke grand opera. One of the first words I caught, schizophrenia, insists on moment-by-moment changes and their risks. The main work's title, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, makes explicit her belief in intuition. It may help explain her relatively low profile for so noted an artist.
If not exactly a myth, she has developed a mythos. It involves performance as travel—as she puts it in a spoken narrative, "allegories of the world and of bodies in motion." The personal greetings may allude to Good Night Good Morning, the past work that gave its name to her retrospective. Projected scenes include a wind farm, passing trains, and a loft-like interior, like an inventory of indoors and outdoors. She also shows herself open to other peoples' mythologies: the animal head accords with another spoken word, paganism.
She is open to specific histories as well. Some of her text derives from Aby Warburg, an early historian of Renaissance art who may himself have suffered from schizophrenia. Jonas's visual range parallels Warburg's creation of a great library. Naturally she refuses to peel apart the layers of history by stating just who contributed what words. Only Warburg, though, could have witnessed Italian Fascism as a pagan revival. It reminds me not to elevate Jonas to mythic status too easily myself.
Jonas does not use video as challenge to philosophical underpinnings, like Gary Hill. She would rather be learning from Las Vegas. She refuses a message as straightforward as that of Martha Rosler in her kitchen video or Yoko Ono in text art. Underwater video for her will not save the oceans, no more than other frail human gestures. She has to do with more than beginnings and ends, whether as a myth of origins or as morning apart from night. She would rather be seeing, smelling, and feeling.
Joan Jonas ran at The Museum of Modern Art through July 6, 2004, and at Drawing Center through June 2. She ran at Yvon Lambert through April 28, 2007. The review of Jonas at Yvon Lambert first appeared in the June 2007 issue of Artillery magazine.