The Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective on Joan Jonas, titled “Good Night Good Morning,” promises to be a comprehensive exploration of the artist’s influential career spanning over five decades. From March 17 to July 6, 2024, visitors can immerse themselves in Jonas’s world, experiencing a diverse array of works including videos, drawings, photographs, installations, and performances.
Curated by Ana Janevski with the assistance of Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, the exhibition delves into Jonas’s evolution as an artist, from her early experiments with performance and technology in the 1960s and 1970s to her more recent explorations of ecology and landscape. With Jonas actively collaborating with the curatorial team, attendees can expect a fresh perspective on both her older and newer works, enriched by their recontextualization within the exhibition space.
The retrospective aims to highlight Jonas’s pioneering role as a trailblazer in video and performance art, showcasing her enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists. By tracing the trajectory of her career, the exhibition underscores the Museum’s commitment to recognizing the contributions of key women artists to the history of performance, media, and feminist art.
Organized chronologically, the retrospective revolves around four central themes that have consistently permeated Jonas’s multidisciplinary practice: performance, technology, literature, and ecology. Furthermore, it emphasizes Jonas’s approach to her own works as archival material, with each project building upon and transforming those that came before it.
Overall, “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning” promises to be a captivating journey through the artistic evolution of a pioneering figure whose impact extends far beyond the confines of the gallery space.
The exhibition also outlines the artist’s use of newly available technology at the beginning of the 1970s, like the Sony Portapak camera used in the artist’s first video-performance, Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972). In this work, Jonas considered the monitor as an ongoing mirror—her alter-ego Organic Honey’s performance for the camera harnessed technology’s ability to record and display content in real time. The retrospective offers a new version of the installation Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy/Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll adapted to MoMA’s space, reinvigorating Jonas’s contemporary legacy in the fields of
video, installation, performance, and feminist art.
Joan Jonas artworks through time
Cross-media installations throughout the retrospective provide insight into Jonas’s unique working method, including the artist’s multilayered translation process from one medium to another—from performance through video to installation. For example, Mirage (1976/1994/2005/2019)—a work in MoMA’s collection, on view in the third gallery of the exhibition—began in 1976 as a performance at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. Jonas used film, video, drawing, and props to evoke rituals there.
In 1994, the artist reimagined the work as an installation consisting of sculptural elements, chalkboard drawings, videos, and documentation of the original performance—which she then reconfigured at MoMA in 2005 and 2019, and has revisited again for this exhibition. Since the late 1960s, the artist has drawn inspiration from fables, ancient myths, folklore, and poetry, which form the groundwork for important works like The Juniper Tree (1976/1994), on view in the next gallery.
A large-scale performance installation based on the Brothers Grimm’s written version of the eponymous story, this work’s audio recording of the artist retelling the fairytale demonstrates Jonas’s interest in oral traditions and women’s narratives about their societal roles. The following gallery also features Volcano Saga (1987), in which Jonas continues her interest in literature and reinterprets the Laxdaela Saga, a 13th-century Icelandic folktale. Initially realized as a performance, the video version on view in the exhibition was realized in 1989 and features the actors Tilda Swinton and Ron Vawter. Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning features two new works, including a new commission by the artist informed by David Gruber’s latest research on the consciousness of whales,
titled To Touch Sound (2024).
The exhibition concludes with By a Thread in the Wind (2024), a series of newly made kites that, according to the artist, can be used “to judge distance, to signal, to carry fire, to banish evil, for communication, to carry a child, to carry an adult, to bear a message.”
