The Brooklyn Rail

When I visited Joan Jonas’s installation Empty Rooms at Gladstone Gallery, I spent most of my time appropriately alone, considering what the emptiness of both the gallery itself and Jonas’s constructed rooms—geometric structures of handmade paper, almost like three-dimensional kites or sails, white, lit from within, suspended from the ceiling—meant. But Jonas’s multimedia installation requires a different approach, less an interpretive uncovering than a surrender to the affective force of the work, demanding that we tolerate the uncomfortable weight of loss.

The sidelining of semantic meaning comes through even though the video element of the installation begins with a girl walking across the screen reading a book. The book will not provide answers. Jonas has spoken of her work in terms of poetic structure, but her language remains elusive. Her video installation, Reanimation (2010/2012/2013), quotes from Halldór Laxness’s 1968 novel Under the Glacier: “Better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.” But then Jonas questions, “Are you sure the flowers are silent, if a sensitive microphone were placed beside them?” Jonas’s work might speak if we are quiet and open to a language made of different stuff from our own.

While the suspended empty rooms emanate a white light, as do two similarly constructed but grounded houses in opposite corners of the space, the overwhelming sensation of blue persists in a kind of heady synesthesia: the blueish light of the video screen diffused across the room and its echo in the gestural drawings of trees, a grid of fifty, done in blue marker. In music, the blue note persists in a flatness that defies the drive towards resolution in a manner akin to Jonas’s work. Furthermore, as the art and social critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) would have it: “‘Blue’ does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation; and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not.”¹ Empty Rooms might in fact be empty, but blue remains in the timeless loop of the video, the accompanying music of Jason Moran, and the aching absence that fills the room.

Jonas began her career as a sculptor, and, with Empty Rooms, it is to sculpture that she has returned. Her interest lies in gesture, dimensionality, and weight. Every piece in the installation, apart from the video, is three dimensional—the rooms, the houses, the wooden figurine of a whale from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia where Jonas has made her second home for many years. Even the grid of drawings on the wall strives for the third dimension; the crumpled paper resists planarity. Jonas has said that she sees no difference between “a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing.” Showing no patience with a hierarchy or even differentiation between media (in wild defiance of those early modern and Enlightenment thinkers who might divide them), Jonas tellingly invokes (verbally) and evokes (visually) weight. Most of Jonas’s sculptural elements in Empty Rooms float, solidity giving way to hollow lightness. Her hanging structures are open, roofless, ready to be filled with something other than an absence that is not yet nothingness.

The video on the back wall is a remaking of Jonas’s performance at the Venice Biennale in 2015. A central turbine rotates throughout the short video, at times like a scythe, as figures—two young girls—almost entirely black shadows, move across the screen, making shadow puppets through their gestures. At times their hands long to touch but they exist in different filmic planes, proximate but separated. Once again, weight figures largely in the video as the girls push structures (easels?) across the frame, their bodies forming taut right triangles in a hard-fought struggle with objects that seem agential in their resistance. Ever more defiant, the girls will master and use them.

If movement seems essential to video form and stasis so often imputed to sculptural form, Jonas will have none of it. Media will do what she asks them to do. Though many have labeled her a “performance artist” or “video artist,” no doubt due to her major innovations in those fields, Jonas has always preferred the term “visual artist.” She is also a haptic one. In his seminal treatise on sculpture, philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) asserts that form itself can be known only through touch. If Jonas throws off the bridle of medium specificity, she does seem to recognize this essential truth; the solidity of objects, their weight, their availability to touch is how they become known to us, beloved to us, and lost to us.