The Brooklyn Rail

For T.S. Eliot, April was the cruelest month. For Joan Jonas, April marks the culmination, through two major exhibitions, of a career whose scope is as vast as America itself, providing an opportunity for all of us to experience the length and breadth of her oeuvre. Be forewarned: Jonas’s show at the Museum of Modern Art occupies the entire sixth floor and contains so many examples of her work that grasping it in one visit is impossible. Likewise, with over three-hundred drawings at the Drawing Center, comprehending the totality all at once is hopeless. You must return. This vastness provides an insight into Jonas’s modus operandi—a continual work in progress. While individual drawings or videos may be finite, they are part of an infinitely expanding artistic universe.

To eat an elephant, the best method is one bite at a time, so starting from the beginning is probably the best approach to the elephantine presentation at MoMA, Good Night Good Morning. The visitor is greeted by two works, a 1968 video, Wind, which is projected onto a wall and a 2006 video My New Theater VI: Good Night Good Morning, shown in a coffin-shaped projection box. Wind captures people on a Long Island beach in midwinter during a gale so powerful that Jonas observes, “The wind became a character and a force.” The characters buffeted around have mirrors attached to their clothing, and we will come to realize that what we see here introduces several of her important motifs. First, nature itself as an ineluctable presence, a theme which Jonas returns to later in her career in more explicit environmentally conscious works. Second, video-preserved performance, one of the essential features of Jonas’s output. Performance is simultaneously predictable—it is choreographed—and aleatory: wind, sun, and the nature of the performers, whose motions are their own despite the presence of a director. Third, the mirrors, ubiquitous in Jonas’s output and essential to our understanding of how she conceives the relationship between the viewer and the work, be it a live performance, a video, or a drawing.

Jonas reinterprets the ancient hermeneutic circle, the idea that we apprehend a work of art by understanding both its constituent elements and the relationship each element has with the totality. Through her use of mirrors, she transforms the viewer from passive to active participant. Ideally, we become her mirror twin, identical yet reversed, during the time we experience the work. This is dramatized brilliantly in the Good Night Good Morning video, where Jonas appears to greet us or bid us farewell in a seemingly endless but constantly varied loop. Just as our reflection always pops up when we face a mirror, Jonas is there at the screen—standing, sitting, petting her dog—just as we are there watching her. She brings us into conjunction to draw us into her art, to break down the imaginary wall separating us from her. Her mirrors evoke all the connotations of mirrors: the distortions of the funhouse mirror, the magical inversions of the concave mirror, the passage into another world as in Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

Equipped with the knowledge we gain at this outset, we enter the expansive show. Another video from 1968 is populated by naked actors holding sheets of glass. To be sure, the bodily display and overt flaunting of sexuality distinctly marks the work as a product of the sexual revolution decade, but it also reminds viewers that prurience is not the subject here but the gaze itself, the possessive gaze that Jonas turns back on itself. As we move onward, we find Jonas acquiring technical skills, using more complex technology, incorporating music and sound in her work, and constantly integrating new socio-political elements. The proto-feminism of these early nude subjects gives way in 1973 to the overtly feminist Mirror Check, where a naked Jonas uses a handheld mirror to inspect her own body as we watch her, thus inverting the masculine gaze and reclaiming her body as her own property. Repositioning of the place occupied by the female body, transforming it from object into subject, reaches a high point when Jonas creates the persona Organic Honey, a character performing before a camera who reminds us that we too are performers. Jonas moves ever onward, combining storytelling with feminism by reworking stories from Grimms’ Fairy Tales and Icelandic sagas with female protagonists.

The further we move into Jonas’s career, the more her universe expands. By 2010, she creates an immersive project with “lunar rabbits” that combines a meditation on nature with the total incorporation of the viewer into the work. Nature also comes to the fore in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, the colossal drawing show at the Drawing Center. Drawing for Jonas is a reflex action like breathing, but drawing too is performance and experiment. So, while she obsessively takes inspiration from the natural world—a series of bird studies for example—she also experiments with technique, notably in her ink and ice drawings of the 1990s, where she pours a pool of ink onto a sheet of paper and then uses an ice cube to move the ink around. The result is simultaneously gestural, like abstract expressionism, and psychological: the drawings are like Rorschach inkblots, psychic mirrors. Her magical mystery tour career is living proof that Joan Jonas knows no limits.