6.21.24 — Against the Wind
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.