The Big Review: Joan Jonas at the Museum of Modern Art, New York ★★★★★

When was the last time you witnessed the birth of a sperm whale? Were personally greeted by the artist at the entrance to her exhibition in a major museum? And became so engrossed in the videos, sculptures, photographs and even the plinths in said show that you turned right around at the end to take it all in again?

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, the trailblazing octogenarian’s animating career retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is primal exhibition-making. From start to finish it tempers an exhilarating sense of childlike wonderment at the world with the knowledge of its imperilled existence. It gives the most ephemeral and market-defying form of art—performance—a solid body. And it is beautiful—with, as Jonas puts it, an edge.

Never have I seen so high a degree of elegance and visual intelligence in this museum’s top-floor galleries. Gone are most of the dull, white walls that typically neuter much of the art hanging on them. Now, existing walls and domestically scaled room dividers are painted a cushiony black or grey, while rows of deadening lights formerly attached to ceilings too high to provide useful illumination have been sent to storage. Instead, we get a legibility essential to understanding how the many components of Jonas’s layered art cohere in live performance— and in the mind.

The overall design by Hiroko Ishikawa, who worked closely with the curator Ana Janevski and Jonas, grounds ideas that have shaped the artist’s multivalent vision in the materials she uses to lift even its most documentary emanations into arresting, frequently endearing, phantasms of art. The show’s chronological, inherently thematic, organisation tracks Jonas’s evolution from her first forays into body-positive performance and rudimentary explorations of new technologies, to sophisticated, dreamlike observations of a natural world that is changing beyond recognition or disappearing altogether, swept away like grains of sand in the sort of stiff wind that buffets, well, Wind. This short, black-and-white film from 1968 introduces the show with the welcoming title work, made almost 40 years later. Jonas shot the 16mm Wind on a wintry Long Island beach, where she and a group of friends stubbornly perform pre-determined tasks against relentless gusts that repeatedly blow them out of the frame, only to return them seconds later in new configurations.

Elemental touchstones

The film, a Sisyphean metaphor for life—with Buster Keaton-ish overtones—gives the nod to natural elements that have been touchstones for Jonas throughout a career that has seen collaborations with the jazz pianist Jason Moran (such as The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, 2004) and her show for the US pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, become landmarks.

The other introductory work, My New Theater VI, Good Night Good Morning ’06 (2006), finds the artist in her summer home in Nova Scotia. She is talking to her dog and her video camera, but because the small screen is set within a painted box that resembles a keychain slide viewer, she is also greeting spectators, one by one.

Jonas does not so much show her work as share it with others. Among these is Song Delay (1973), a now poignant film of a performance that Jonas choreographed for herself and others amid the rubble of acreage razed for the construction of the World Trade Center, watched by an audience of other artists from a distant rooftop.

From time to time, Jonas worked solo with a camera and her most dependable prop, a mirror. A story by Jorge Luis Borges inspired its use in Oad Lau (1968), her first performance, for which she sewed small mirrors onto her costume. By the 1970s, when a plot point of feminism was “the male gaze”, Jonas reversed it by standing naked in a SoHo gallery and examining every inch of her body with a small hand mirror in Mirror Check.

Jonas has confessed that it scared her to do Mirror Check, but fear is a great motivator. She repeated the performance for a video camera, this time manipulating a larger mirror that forced audience members to look at themselves while fracturing her own image. Subsequent videos in which she was joined by other women holding full-length mirrors upright and sideways incorporate the country landscapes they were moving through, further deflecting the female gaze and turning the body into sculpture.

The video monitor is her real mirror. The doubling effects that Jonas brings to her work began with her acquisition of a Sony Portapak in 1972. It recorded Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, her first standalone video. It starred her erotically masked alter ego, who would reappear in live, multimedia performances staged and uniquely installed over the years in different parts of the world. It was also the genesis of a companion work, Vertical Roll (1972). Shot during a rehearsal for Organic Honey, Jonas manipulated the transmission to jerk from the bottom of the monitor to the top, revealing “the mechanics of illusion” and making quick work of the notion that there is only one way to look at anything.

Artist interview

A brush with... Joan Jonas

Hosted by Ben Luke. Produced by David Clack and Aimee Dawson

Sponsored byBloomberg Connects

Fairy tales and folk sagas

Noh and Kabuki theatre have exerted a powerful influence, inspiring Jonas’s use of ceremonial or animal masks as well as elaborate physical and vocal movements. Fairy tales and folk sagas inform such films as Double Lunar Rabbits (2011); while Dante was a later source. Especially absorbing is Volcano Saga (1989), a film performed by Tilda Swinton and the late Ron Vawter, and a multipart installation that Jonas derived from reading the Icelandic Nobel Prize-winning writer Halldór Laxness.

But any performance by Jonas is likely to involve a reading or lecture, kimono-like dresses, paper hats, headdresses of ribbon and seaweed, live music, live drawing, spoken word, remote landscapes, a stuffed coyote, duck decoys, her dog and her own gamine self. Unframed drawings of dogs, rabbits and fish appear throughout the show, some chalked directly on the walls or tacked to them, others flying on lines overhead like the 14 hand-painted kites at the show’s exit. In SoHo, where Jonas has lived since the early 1970s, The Drawing Center has given itself over to Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (until 2 June), a robust retrospective of the artist’s works on paper and an essential companion to the show at MoMA.

Jonas is a veteran of many retrospectives—Tate Modern had one in 2018—but Good Night Good Morning is her most comprehensive, and it debuts a work so new that it is not in the show’s catalogue: To Touch Sound is Jonas’s tribute to the marine biologist David Gruber, whose work she addressed previously in Moving Off the Land.

To Touch Sound appears in three connected viewing boxes, each supplied with a bench; together they resemble a playground merry-go-round. In one, Moran’s 16-year-old son Malcolm dances before a watery expanse; cut to Jonas standing on a rainswept deck to read a poem by Pablo Neruda. In a second video we see a whale sleeping underwater until Jonas enters the frame to make large drawings of whales with blue chalk while the screen behind her fills with sparkling flashlight fish. As if that were not dazzling enough, a pod of sperm whales appears in the third box to lend support to their pregnant granddaughter and sister’s long labour. They are by her side when her baby suddenly flops onto its mother’s head; the clicking sound between them is whale speech. This footage is the first scientific record of a sperm whale’s birth since 1986, and that account had no visuals or sound.

This is not a show anyone will grasp on a casual stroll during lunch hour. It takes time. Whether attending a performance—MoMA has scheduled several during the exhibition’s run—or immersing oneself in the exhibition, it’s best to just let the magic happen. And it will.

• Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, Museum of Modern Art, New York, until 6 July

• Curator: Ana Janevski