Johanna Fateman
A stunning retrospective at MoMA holds a mirror to the artist’s career-long focus on performance, movement, and landscape.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, organized by Ana Janevski with Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West Fifty-Third Street, New York City, through July 6, 2024
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There has been no shortage of wondrous achievements in Joan Jonas’s career, from her groundbreaking tricks at the dawn of video to the awe-inspiring literary-cinematic treatments of land and sea in her recent work. But among her art’s most magical qualities—and a particularly pertinent, lucky one now, for the purpose of her momentous retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—is its capacity for shape-shifting reiteration. The presentation of a six-decade career anchored in performance as an exhibition (albeit one that incorporates many hours of moving-image work) is a stunning feat. The multimedia installations in Good Night Good Morning are, without fail, beautifully reworked for the space and situation. Just as impressive is how the artist’s early, historic pieces are represented—through props, documentation, and ephemera—in environments and vignettes.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, far left: Wind, 1968.
From the outset, Jonas’s themes are established with an air of playful mythologizing. Her 1968 film Wind, for which her friends were enlisted in a simple choreography on a wintry Long Island beach, appears as a wall-spanning projection at the show’s entrance. Their bodies in motion, buffeted by frigid gusts, hint at her fascination with elemental forces and the figure’s—or humanity’s—relationship to landscape (concerns that have become more central to her art over time). Just inside, viewers encounter a bank of seven full-length mirrors leaning against the wall, reminiscent of those carried and manipulated by performers in Jonas’s legendary Mirror Piece I and II, initially staged in 1969 and 1970. While these works are captured in nearby photographs, it is the line of ordinary household mirrors that makes the animating effect of the pieces manifest—their disorienting, picture-in-picture function puts the viewer in a position of simultaneous spectatorship and self-regard.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, left: Mirror Dress, 1969–2024. Right: Hoop used in Delay Delay and Songdelay, ca. 1972.
In contrast to these angled rectangles, whose austere, serial presentation nods to Minimalist sculpture, two elegantly suspended objects have the aura of ritual artifacts, foreshadowing the iconographic, witchy, and folkloric elements of what’s in store. Mirror Dress (1969–2024), a black A-line garment adorned with reflective rectangles, like the one Jonas wore in the outdoor performance Oad Lau (1968), serves as a symbol or surrogate for her presence. A weathered metal hoop, fitted with handles (so a person might roll in it, like a wheel), used by Jonas in early pieces, has a mysterious, archaeological air.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, Peter Moore, Joan Jonas, Delay Delay performance views, Lower West Side, New York, 1972.
For those acquainted only with the later decades of the now eighty-seven-year-old’s art, with which she has established herself as a sui generis force—known for a way of working that is grand in scale and uniquely cross-disciplinary (with collaborators as diverse as jazz musician Jason Moran and marine biologist David Gruber)—it might not be readily apparent what scene, which overlapping movements, she emerged from. Good Night Good Morning efficiently conveys that Lower Manhattan ferment. A mural-size photograph, snapped by Peter Moore in 1971 in Jonas’s Soho loft, shows the performance of Choreomania (which featured a movable wall designed by Richard Serra); another gallery wall is papered with Moore’s image of a rooftop audience gathered to watch Delay Delay, an epic performance unfolding over ten derelict city blocks. A related film, 1973’s Songdelay, plays opposite. Shot at the edge of the Hudson River, it features a number of Jonas’s artist peers, including such luminaries as Gordon Matta-Clark, Steve Paxton, and Tina Girouard, executing mundane or absurd tasks with props (such as the aforementioned giant hoop).
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.
The use of ordinary, untrained movement in postmodern dance—as in the experiments of Judson Dance Theater and Grand Union—informed Jonas’s work in an enduring way. In undated lecture notes for her students (Jonas taught for many years, beginning in the 1960s), she writes, “if you can make a dance you can make a drawing . . . if you can make a drawing you can make a dance”—words to live by for the artist. Incantatory mark-making as a component of performance, as well as a means to produce imagery, is a hallmark of her practice. Another deep influence is the stylized, costumed actions of Noh theater. A trip to Japan in 1970 would prove pivotal for Jonas, enabling her to study the ancient form—and it was there that she got her hands on a Sony Portapak.
Richard Serra, Joan Jonas posing for an unrealized poster for a performance of Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy at LoGiudice Gallery, New York, 1972. Digital print (printed 2024). Courtesy the artist. © Joan Jonas / Artists Rights Society.
The landmark 1972 tapes Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy and Vertical Roll are exhibited as discrete works as well as emblems of a new field of inquiry related to live feeds and performance. Among the materials assembled are a script, event announcements, costume elements, and a camera trained on a dog drawing, showing it as both a sheet of paper and as a static stream on a bulky monitor. From this mix, Jonas’s famous alter ego, the seductress Organic Honey, emerges as a quasi-spiritual figure, ritualizing experiments in closed-circuit technology, testing its potential for fracture, glitch, recursion, and mirroring. This is Good Night Good Morning’s most intimate, enthralling section: the glamour of outdated equipment—the clamp-light and cathode-ray ambience—here heightens the reverberating radicalism of Jonas’s ahead-of-her-time deconstruction of gender, her exposure of femininity as a mediated, surveilled condition. The visual drama of what follows throws its understated presence into relief.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured: Mirage, 1976/1994/2005/2019.
The moody and spectacular Mirage (1976/1994/2005/2019) is a case study in Jonas’s ability to reimagine her work according to its venue and its moment. Conceived initially as a theater piece, it exists here as a stunning arrangement of obliquely connected videos, drawings, and poetic objects (a small forest of tall cones and footage of an erupting volcano are among its components). The constellation of elements that form Lines in the Sand (2002)—whose title references George Bush’s rhetoric before his invasion of Iraq—appears as a surreal gameboard. A sandbox and rake, a giant drawing of a ziggurat, and a lime-green version of Freud’s couch accompany a video in which the poet H. D.’s reimagining of Helen in Troy is transposed on the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. Documentation of Jonas’s activation of the set is offered but almost unneeded—it’s implied.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured: Lines in the Sand, 2002.
In the 1990s, her interest in evoking performance (without live performers) resulted in her My New Theater works—portable, diorama- or camera obscura–like sculptures to house film projections. When similar enclosures appear (creeping back up in size) within the expansive presentation of her Moving Off the Land series—a lush paean to biodiversity initiated in 2016—two of them, like miniature cinemas, contain seating. Within a bright gallery hung with both careful and slapdash drawings of ocean creatures, the black-painted boxes invite viewers to join (or occlude) Jonas’s videos-within-videos—underwater wildlife scenes layered with human speech and action. In one moment, children move mirrored cardboard rectangles around, fragmenting and distorting a projection of a school of fish. Their silvery props are placed in a line against a wall, a reminder of how Jonas’s journey is one of constant circling back.
Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, installation view. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured: Reanimation, 2010/2012/2013.
Good Night Good Morning can be a primer or a deep dive into the artist’s brilliant corpus, depending on how much time you have to devote to its study. Either way, it offers an experience of unexpected sculptural and scenographic power that, counterintuitively but consummately, uses Jonas’s (physical) absence as a performer to show us what her long career has been about. The character Organic Honey may have been short-lived, but her mode of technologized sorcery echoes throughout the survey and in its twinkling grand finale. In an installation version of Reanimation (2010/2012/2013), a centerpiece of swaying crystals casts shadows on shoji screens and refracts rainbow flecks on the floor to complement projected footage of glaciers, and of Jonas dripping paint on snow.
Johanna Fateman is a writer, art critic, and musician in New York.