Joan Jonas: Reanimation

          Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas: A Meter Making Talk by Gregory Bolt. MIT List Visual Arts Center. 30 October 2014.

Reanimation, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. 13th November 2014. 

It's been a while since you’ve heard from me, and while I don’t want to make excuses, part of the reason is that I’ve been trying to find a way to talk about the performance artist Joan Jonas. For those who haven’t heard of her or her work, the cliff notes: when people talk about Jonas, her name is practically always preceded by words like “legendary”, “pioneer”, and  “acclaimed.” Rightly so too- at the age of 77 she’s certainly been in the art game for long enough to have earned that respect. With the advantage of hindsight- rare for a living and active artist- it’s clear that her performances, which bend traditional notions of medium by combining drawing, video, music and installation, place her at a vital junction of art history. Among so many other things, she’s environmental, digital, feminist, collaborative, and conceptual. Still, she’s not an artist I had encountered before moving to Boston this fall.

An image from a performance of Reanimation, discussed later in the post. 

This could very well be because I chose to go abroad for university and thus don’t have the best grasp of modern American artists, but I think Jonas is also an artist that’s been a bit overlooked academically. Why this is isn’t too hard to gleam. As an artist focused on creating site-specific works, performances that live inside a point in time, her work doesn’t lend itself to the kind of easy description found in textbooks and art history lectures. You have to experience it for yourself.

Luckily, Boston is having a bit of a Jonas moment. Although she now lives in New York, she's has strong ties to Massachusetts- she attended art school here and is a professor emerita at MIT. What’s new? Jonas will be representing the United States at the 56th Venice Biennale next year. Everyone at MIT, who proposed her name and will be presenting her exhibition, is understandably over the moon.

Jonas herself.

So fittingly enough, it was at MIT where my little Joan Jonas journey began. I’d wanted to visit the List Visual Arts Center since I’d moved back to the East Coast, and when I heard that they would be giving a lecture on Jonas, I was finally convinced to take the T ride over to Cambridge. Gregory Bolt, who gave the lecture, did a wonderful job of covering four decades of art in such a brief talk. Public lectures of this sort are always a challenge- it’s nearly impossible to strike the right tone when speaking to a group of people whose experience with the topic could range from nothing at all to expert-level study. When the breadth of topics to cover is as expansive as Jonas’ career, that challenge only gets greater. As someone whose experience ranked on the lower end of the scale - I don’t think I could have named a single work by her before the evening began- I loved the way that he didn’t shy away from analysis. Over the course of the hour, he compared her focus on nature to Emerson, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman- a comfortable touchstone for most arty types in New England.

Still, when I found myself sitting in a sold out auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts two weeks later waiting for Jonas to begin “Reanimation”, I hardly knew what to expect. Then, Jonas and Jason Moran, who collaborated on the performance and played piano over the course of the hour, came onto the stage and began without fan fair, it was disconcerting at first. Jonas, dressed entirely in white, came onto the stage, took a seat, and began to read, breaking the silence. I knew from the MIT lecture that it was from a novel called  “Under the Glacier” by the Icelandic Halldor Laxness, the book on which the entire performance is based, but it was an unsettling hello even with that context; the passage was about a woman rising from her coffin to bake bread for the men who would dig her grave in the morning. Then, she set down the microphone and began to draw. The drawing, mostly abstract, continued throughout the hour. Every so often she’d put down her brush or bit of chalk or stick to do something else. She’d play music along with Moran or put on a white mask and stand in front of the projections, one with the mountains displayed behind her. In one moment, she played with marbles, trying to contain them as they bounced and rolled. Still, she always returned to where she began: drawing and Halldor Laxness.

While I might have gone into the evening confused, I didn’t leave that way. As I’ve had a chance to reflect, Jonas’ message, the meaning hidden in her lines and music and words, is all about humanities relationship with nature and how that relationship can become ground for both creation and destruction. The glaciers that can inspire us can also destroy us, just as we are destroying it. In one reading, Jonas spoke about how words cannot possibly capture the experience of seeing mountains. The words just become meaningless. So it is too, it seemed, with art. Over and over again in course of the hour, Jonas would trace on a projection screen the ridges of the mountains seen in her videos, and time and time again they would shift under her hand, leaving her to start again. Tossing away one paper after the next, attempting to come up with a legible images, at the end there was simply a pile of paper covered in lines, pretty but meaningless. As Jonas said near the middle of the performance, there are things in this world that go beyond us: time, weather, and nature. They existed before us and they’ll exist after us. The only thing we can do is to try to make something positive from it, something beautiful.

That, in the end, is what I was truly struck by. In spite of the bleak undertone, the destruction inherent in it all, I felt so uplifted. It was an affirmation of the beauty that can be found in anything, from the smallest bird to the largest mountain. The more I think about it, the more touched I' have become. I certainly can't wait to see what she comes up with for Venice. After all these years, I’d say she's more than earned her right to take centre stage.

Full disclosure: I've taken the photos here from The Boston Globe and MFA website. I hate pilfering from the internet like this, but photography was strictly limited to those with press passes. Also, I'm currently an intern at the MFA, but I promise I said all these nice things because I wanted to.