At Dia Beacon, a converted factory 90 minutes up the Hudson river from New York City, the vast 300,000 sq ft building is lit only by occasional shafts of sunlight falling in slants from the high windows and skylights. In the lower gallery, a grey cement floor is partitioned by sealed cracks running like map lines along the surface. Only one of the concrete walls has a row of windows: it is a dark and eerie place.
This is the sepulchral home of three site-specific installations by the celebrated New York multimedia artist Joan Jonas. Two of the performance works in the exhibition, which is curated by Kelly Kivland, have not been seen since 1976; the third was commissioned in 2004 by Dia and last seen in 2006.
All three are spread throughout the giant gallery — an overload of sound, sight and sensation that gives a haunting invitation to step back into Jonas’s creative history from the 1970s to the present.
Even at 85, Jonas still incorporates physical movement as part of the performance in some of her layered works. But in these installations the performance aspect is all on video, where Jonas recites from writings or engages with props or with her dogs. Some pieces are projected images with voice-overs or music collaborations. So the idea of “performance” in this exhibition is an overarching way to describe Jonas’s interest in the combining of different forms and structures, be that literature, music, sculpture, drawings, videos of body movement or projected images of places and space.
“After Mirage (Cones/May Windows)” displays two wide circles, each made up of a circumference of 9ft steel and cotton-rag paper cones. The cones were one of the first forms Jonas designed when she started making performance pieces. A small monitor turned on its side lies just outside the circles, and plays footage from Jonas’s 1976 performance May Windows. It is a curated mix of sounds from the world outside: a barking dog, the artist in her studio, whistling. At times one sees her form, blurred on the screen, creating the illusion that she’s melding into her surroundings.
The day after I visit the exhibition, I meet Jonas in her Soho studio. Light pours in over the long work tables, stacks of books and piles of props as if someone has tipped a bucket of sunshine from the sky. This has been Jonas’s studio for 47 years.
She begins by telling me about her last performance before the pandemic, in Madrid. At the Prado she performed a piece about oceans called “Moving off the Land II” in collaboration with composer Ikue Mori. Performance paintings from the piece are currently on view in the exhibition Fawn Grove at London’s Amanda Wilkinson Gallery.
From the start, Jonas says, it was the customs of art that especially drew her in. “I was always very interested in how art began as rituals in different cultures. I looked at the work of the film-maker Maya Deren, who went to Haiti and filmed religious rituals . . . Many people and cultures use drawing as a performative ritual. I thought I could do it without copying any of these other traditions, that I could have my own ritual.”
Born in New York in 1936, Jonas got her MFA from Columbia in 1965. She began working with figurative sculpture, experimenting with materials such as plaster and cement. She considers her installation work a form of sculpture because it exists in three dimensions, and her work segued to include performance after she was drawn to the Judson Dance Theater, the famed 1960s group that redefined aspects of dance to include everyday, non-theatrical movements.
“Sculpture at the time was just objects, but here I could include sound and movement with drawings. The multidisciplinary aspects attracted me.”
At the start of her career, she considered the role of props, including mirrors. “One aspect with mirrors was my earlier concern with perception. I wanted to alter the view of the audience, to affect the way they saw something. I used mirrors first as performance elements, with 17 women carrying big mirrors, 5ft by 18in, so the audience would see the space reflected and fractured.
“[I started] thinking of stage sets as my kind of sculpture . . . and working with video backdrops shot in different locations. In order to tell the story, I would use a certain landscape or a certain scene.”
For the current exhibition, Jonas has created the assembly of props from 1976: a series of sets she had made for performances developed into an installation without her bodily presence. Now, there’s a row of five chairs, replicas of an old accountant’s chair that Jonas found many years ago. She originally used it in her 1972 identity performance ritual piece, “Organic Honey”, when she played the role of a woman who could change her identity with masks and costumes.
The chairs face a row of six 9ft steel cones, suspended a few inches off the ground; a light beneath each creates floodlighting on the floor. Four long sheets of kraft paper walls, a steel hoop and beams are also suspended: it reminds me of a circus set-up for taming a lion to jump through a hoop. There are other pieces to the installation, drawings on paper, chalk drawings on the wall, an assortment of props. All were used in different performances from 1972-76, including her first performance of The Juniper Tree by the Brothers Grimm, in 1976, which marked her interest in working with narratives and fairy tales.
As Jonas’s work has evolved over the years, certain themes have remained consistent around merging and overlapping forms and structures in contemplation of ritual, myth, narrative, identity, landscape and space — “layering elements over time”, as she says.
In 2004, when she was commissioned by Dia to create the performance piece “The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things”, which is this exhibition’s third installation, she worked with jazz composer Jason Moran. It was her attempt to respond to a region of the US where the landscape — and the rituals and traditions of the indigenous Native American people — greatly influenced her.
“When I saw the Southwest, I realised why people have to have gods and myth to explain it. It’s so beautiful and fantastic. I was also very interested in shamanism. So I did a lot of research on ritual, and I saw the Hopi snake dance. Out of respect for indigenous people I never would show any of that, but it had a profound effect on me.”
She returned to a Hopi reservation for two weeks and consulted an anthropologist at the Getty Museum on how to handle the material. She eventually decided to use the Southwest landscape as a physical representation of her experience and added a projection of her reciting excerpts from the work of the early 20th-century German art historian Aby Warburg, who had studied the Hopi snake dance. For each performance during the 2005-06 run, Jonas created a large snake painting. The paintings now hang in various places in this iteration of the work, along with smaller drawings and images of snakes and dogs.
Jonas is careful about how she talks about shamanism because she doesn’t consider herself a shaman in any way. But she is drawn to “people who affect certain situations, calling forth an energy and expressing the energy”. Here, Jonas has reconfigured the piece, mixing props such as a taxidermy coyote alongside parts from the original performance video, blended with music, vocals and speech. She has also added footage of ecological ruin, such as the now toxic Salton Sea of California, layering it with the idealistic Woody Guthrie song “Pastures of Plenty”.
The works draw on her ongoing themes of exploring cultural rituals, myths and experiences of womanhood, and how certain types of energy can be created by performances. Together and separately, these three installations offer a layered insight into Jonas’s work from the past 50-plus years.
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Joan Jonas: ‘I realised why people have to have gods and myth’
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