{"id":10287,"date":"2019-02-12T19:32:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T00:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=10287"},"modified":"2019-02-12T19:32:00","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T00:32:00","slug":"joan-jonas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/02\/12\/joan-jonas\/","title":{"rendered":"Pioneering Video And Performance Artist Joan Jonas Draws At The Gardner"},"content":{"rendered":"

During Joan Jonas’s 2017 residency<\/a> at Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the pioneering 82-year-old video and performance artist found herself attracted to animals. She photographed real and mythological critters she found on furnishings, textiles and sculptures throughout the museum, its archives, and conservation lab.<\/p>\n

And these images inspired her loose, brushy sketche of a big blue fish reproduced as \u201cBlue to Blue,\u201d<\/a> a giant broadside hung on the museum\u2019s fa\u00e7ade, and 55 drawings featured in the exhibition \u201cI Know Why They Left\u201d<\/a> in the museum\u2019s Fenway Gallery.<\/p>\n

\"Joan<\/a>
Joan Jonas “I know Why They Left” drawings series. (Courtesy Gardner Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cFinding all those animals was amazing,\u201d Jonas says in a museum press release. \u201cThere were many more that I didn’t draw. But what I learned in the process was how important animals were, not just to humans, but also to artists representing the human scenes in everyday life. Animals have always been part of our lives and that was interesting to see. I knew that, but at the Gardner it was very evident at every level.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Joan<\/a>
Joan Jonas “Blue to Blue” banner on facade of Gardner Museum, Feb. 1, 2019. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jonas, a professor emerita from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who splits her time between New York and Nova Scotia, was born in Manhattan in 1936. After studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Columbia University, she moved to SoHo in 1968 and became immersed in New York\u2019s downtown scene.<\/p>\n

Her husband at the time, Gerry Jonas, knew Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s first curator of contemporary art, from Yale. Geldzahler would call New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin with updates on what was happening and Trillin would pass the reconnaissance on to the Jonases.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw [Claes] Oldenburg\u2019s happenings and dances by Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown, and also pieces by [Robert] Rauschenberg,\u201d Jonas told Interview magazine in 2014. \u201cI saw this collaboration between dancers and visual artists. What attracted me was that you could be a visual artist and do something time-based.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Joan<\/a>
Joan Jonas “I know Why They Left” drawings series. (Courtesy Gardner Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Beginning in the late 1960s, she abandoned her sculptures and began fashioning her own performances, often involving people wearing or carrying mirrors. For her 1970 performance \u201cMirror Check,\u201d she inspected her naked body with a hand mirror. She was one of the first artists to incorporate live video feeds into their work. In \u201cOrganic Honey’s Visual Telepathy\u201d (1972), she wore feathered head-dress as she explored eroticism and narcissism, in part watching herself in a video fed from live camera, as the audience watched her perform live as well as on video.<\/p>\n

With \u201cJones Beach Piece\u201d in 1970, performers acted out choreography and signals a quarter mile from the audience. \u201cPerformers stood at different distances from the audience and clapped blocks of wood together over their heads. The farther away, the greater the sound delay,\u201d Jonas told Interview.<\/p>\n

\"Joan<\/a>
Joan Jonas “I know Why They Left” drawings series. (Courtesy Gardner Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI related performance to the structure of film and music, and to the rituals of other cultures,\u201d Jonas told Interview.<\/p>\n

From the downtown lofts of Soho, Jonas\u2019s stature has grown. She represented the US in the 2015 Venice Biennale and last year she was the subject of a major solo exhibition at London\u2019s Tate Modern, which is now touring.<\/p>\n

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Joan<\/a>
Joan Jonas “I know Why They Left” drawings series. (Courtesy Gardner Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Joan<\/a>
Joan Jonas “I know Why They Left” drawings series. (Courtesy Gardner Museum)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During Joan Jonas’s 2017 residency at Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the pioneering 82-year-old video and performance artist found herself attracted to animals. She photographed real and mythological critters she found on furnishings, textiles and sculptures throughout the museum, its archives, and conservation lab. And these images inspired her loose, brushy sketche of a big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10368,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,105],"tags":[37,215,61],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10287"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10378,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10287\/revisions\/10378"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}