haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

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. Her retrospective, through July 6, 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—and together they are the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

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 trace 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 so 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.”

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Joan 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. Is even that a mere preface to her retrospective at MoMA? 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,” through June 2, 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’s spine or its gaping black maw.

The curators, 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?

Did I say that The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is also the title of a video? I turn soon, I promise, to her MoMA retrospective.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.