Two major retrospectives of Joan Jonas open at MoMa

Upon entering the first gallery of Joan Jonas’ current survey at The Drawing Center in New York, one might think of zoological dioramas akin to those in the collection American Museum of Natural History. Liberally occupying the wall space, drawings of animals are clustered together in a salon-style presentation organised by kingdoms. Half of one wall is dedicated to hooved mammals, others dedicated to birds, fish, canines, serpents and so on, stacking iterations in different palettes and postures as if to cover the breadth of species. Other taxonomies chime in occasionally, including shorter series of leaves, shells, rocks, human organs and snowflakes which extend the artist’s obsessive catalogue of the natural world. Including vitrines of the artist’s sketchbooks, the art exhibition in total presents more than 300 individual drawings—just a selection of thousands of works on paper in Jonas’ oeuvre. Spanning pastel, oil stick, ink and watercolour, this two-dimensional ecosystem captures Jonas’ familiar hand—hasty, playful and folkloric, yet characteristic of themes deeply embedded within her iconic 60-year practice across media.

Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral opened on March 6th, just before the artist’s monumental retrospective Good Night Good Morning arrived at the Museum of Modern Art on March 17th. The MoMA exhibition is both immersive and archival, rising to the challenge of anchoring the artist’s legacy in performance and installation to the physical space of the museum’s sixth floor gallery. Curators Ana Janevski, Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley drew from Jonas’ strategies of translating work across the boundaries of live and recorded formats. With guidance from the artist, the exhibition restages seminal performance pieces such as Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1972) by nesting video essential to the performance amongst recordings of the performance itself, props and script notes. The labyrinthian, thunderous exhibition at the MoMA proves quite different from The Drawing Center’s quieter venture. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral was conceived by the artist, who has kept a studio within blocks of the small SoHo institution for over 60 years.

Beyond watercolour storyboards and sketches seen in the MoMA’s vitrines, one can catch glimpses of the artist drawing live throughout the recorded performances in Good Night Good Morning: sketching and erasing shapes on blackboards, scrawling loops on the floor and tracing outlines of animal faces using found objects. Jonas’ live drawing is a recurring facet of her practice, another means of displacing visual mediums from their ordinary confines of time, tangibility and perception. For Jonas, the active experience of making influences the more passive object of output. “A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw, erase—memory erased,” she has said. For an artist whose open-ended practice naturally resists the production of commodifiable objects, uncovering a vault of drawings would seem to contradict their essential context of performance or installation. Yet the works in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral appear more live and perhaps unresolved than one might expect. There is a clear current of energy running through each grouping as animals multiply in horizontal and vertical space, an illusion of movement as the eye is drawn across their repetitions and a sense of infinite evolution. Jonas’ occupation with duplicity and symmetry emerges in the Double Lunar Dogs (1984) series, which was produced during performances of the same name and underlines the impossibility of exact replication—each drawing’s subtle uniqueness transmits the influence of an ever-changing present moment. Several “body drawings”, traced on Japanese paper by Jonas over her own form, offer a similar sense of unpredictability in the final product as the lines capture frenetic layers of movement.

Jonas’ capacity to draw three-dimensional subjects on paper over and over, forming constellations of similar drawings from different decades of her career, suggests continuous and interconnected lines of inquiry into the world around her. Seeing these drawings, one can follow the prolonged closeness of the artist’s observations as she returned to critical subjects in her career: whether extracting the mythic implications of Celtic designs as practice for her 1994 performance Sweeney Astray (Revolted by the Thought of Known Places), or copying out snowflake enlargements for Reanimation (2010/2012/2013), or producing watercolours of deep sea creatures in conjunction with her video installation Rivers to the Abyssal Plain (2021), also on view on the bottom floor of The Drawing Center. The works in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral particularly impress upon us Jonas’ concern for the natural world and its tenuous web of ecosystems, which land just as powerfully throughout Good Night Good Morning. Curators Laura Hoptman and Rebecca DiGiovanna, working in close collaboration with the artist, seem to recognise the importance of staging an exhibition of Jonas’ work on paper in the same time frame as her larger retrospective at the MoMA. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral offers another angle—or perhaps dimension—of Jonas’ legendary influence. This simultaneous undercurrent indeed feels appropriate to the artist’s habit of synchronising different mediums at once, connecting them with unconventional logic and evolving her work in what feels like “real time.”

‘Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ is on view at The Drawing Center in New York until June 2, 2024.