Joan Jonas. Invisible Miracles
For Ocean Space, a new cross-disciplinary platform initiated by TBA21-Academy and located in the Venetian Church of San Lorenzo, pioneering performance and video artist Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York) has produced a new performance and multimedia installation, titled
Moving Off the Land II. Beginning with this latest project to then go back to earlier works, such as the US Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennale, Anna Daneri delves into the inspiring and multi-faceted practice of the American artist.
“JOAN JONAS: MOVING OFF THE LAND II,” OCEAN SPACE, CHURCH OF SAN LORENZO, VENICE. THROUGH SEPTEMBER 29.
In 2007 Joan Jonas conducted a workshop titled Invisible Miracles, by invitation of Fondazione Ratti in Como. I worked with her on that occasion, on the construction of the performance with the workshop participants, as well as the exhibition at Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea in Trento and the publication made in that same year. Going back to examine that experience in order to talk about the present, after other collaborations, can be useful to put the career and the poetics of this great American artist into focus. Jonas was among the first to experiment with performance art and video starting in the late 1960s, and her work has brought about a turn in contemporary artistic research (and continues to do so). Her procedure is circular, marked by recurring themes and images that resurface, contributing to make her output a single whole, in constant ferment, in dialogue with the past and above all with the younger generations.
“The title Invisible Miracles is inspired by the work of Jean Painlevé and his films of aquatic life forms usually not immediately apparent on the surface of things,” the artist writes. Painlevé himself, a photographer and filmmaker specialized in undersea fauna, is the maker of some of the footage that appears in the latest work by Jonas, Moving Off the Land (2016-ongoing), a performance commissioned by TBA21-Academy in the context of the three-year fellowship program “The Current,” focusing on the state of the oceans and curated by Ute Meta Bauer, expedition leader of the first three-year cycle. The performance is the artist’s tribute to the oceans and the invisible miracle of undersea life, in a moment in which marine species are going through a period of great danger, threatened with extinction by pollution, overfishing and climate change. During the course of the performance the artist interacts with videos shot during the expedition in Jamaica and in various aquariums, including images of a seal in the aquarium of Genoa that Jonas pursues in front of the screen. For the first time after Mirage (the performance from 1976, specially reproduced last year at the Tate Modern by invitation of Andrea Lissoni), the footage includes materials shot by others, excerpts from films by Painlevé, and bioluminescent shots of deep seabeds made by the scientist David Gruber. Accompanied by the hypnotic music of Ikue Mori, Jonas creates a narrative packed with sensations, starting with the writings of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and making live drawings of a series of fish in blood-red paint, whose extinction is also addressed by a long list spoken by the artist during the course of the action. “I try to bring drawing into every single piece. And I try to draw in different ways, for different reasons. In other words, what generates the drawings is the content of the piece, the space of the piece – like making big drawings on the floor, or in early video works making drawings for the monitor, drawing without looking.”2
This is a work in progress, presented for the first time in 2016 during the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and later at the 8th iteration of the Sequences biennial in Reykjavík and at TBA21 Augarten in Vienna in 2017, the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London and Danspace Project in New York in 2018. This year, after the presentation at the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture in San Francisco in January, the work is on view in Venice with an installation of the same title that develops from the performance in the very new Ocean Space, the transdisciplinary research center on the oceans and “collaborative platform for change” opened by initiative of TBA21.
But let’s take a step back to examine the genesis of this new work, to which we will return below. In the catalogue published for the project at the United States pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), where Jonas was assigned a Special Mention by the jury, the artist writes:
2008: In a book I found images of strange beautiful forms living in the deepest parts of the sea, I called my performance class at MIT Action: Archeology of the Deep Sea. […] 2010: first version Reanimation titled Glacier was a video performance at MIT [presented later at documenta 13 in 2012] based on the novel Under the Glacier by Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. One of the first thoughts that comes to mind is that glaciers are melting […] found Japanese dictionary of fish in a second hand store in San Diego, carried it around with me – copied over and over these very detailed color renditions. 2012: journey to Norway in January – to record the landscape in the Lofoten Islands inside the Arctic Circle. In an aquarium recorded some very strange prehistoric-looking fish which as well as the fish included in this work (salmon and cod). […] For the performance of Reanimation in 2012 I drew fish in blue ink. The ink spilled down the page. Often I repeat or continue particular actions – In Kitakyushu at CCA in 2013, still referring to the fish dictionary, I drew about 100 different fish repeatedly in blue ink copying from the book of fish.3
Depths of the sea, fish, and aquariums become the topoi of the works of the last decade, following a thin blue line that connects them. But the sea, its sound, and the “reflecting pools” are there from the outset, in Jones Beach Piece (1970), a performance on the beach on Long Island, or Nova Scotia Beach Dance (1971), made at Cape Breton, in Canada, a seaside community where the artist has spent her summers since the early 1970s, and the initial setting for many of her videos and performances. Thus They Come to Us Without a Word, the project in Venice for the Biennale in 2015 and the resulting performance, with live music by Jason Moran, address the necessity for human beings to come to terms with the animals that coexist with them on this planet, creatures that are threatened by our careless actions that harm the environment. The animals – represented here by bees and fish – are associated with ghosts that come from the past to silently speak to us of a world that is being lost, that only the new generations can save. In the work the environmental theme, however, remains a subtext that is more suggested than stated, encouraging the viewer to enter multisensory spaces where all visitors have the possibility of creating their own sequence, their own montage of images and sounds, stories and possible meanings.
Four of the five spaces in the project have a specular structure. In the “Fish Room” we find a selection of drawings of fish in blue ink (copies made for conservation) hung on the walls to create a large multi-species school, in relation to footage of marine environments shot by the artist in different places and years, as is clear from the various video formats. Several props appear on a small stage, including paper hats and cones, and drawings of octopus and other aquatic animals on slate, made by children during preparatory performances in which they could spontaneously react to the videos screened in the space of the theatrical action, conceived in turn to be shot on video. In the display case, in order, we see: one mask, ten sea urchin shells, one dried seahorse, one drawing, three photocopies, two Japanese postcards, six pieces of white sea coral, and one glass sea sponge.
The sole space that does not have this arrangement is the “Mirror Room” created by Jonas starting from the particular architectural “rotunda” structure of the neoclassical US pavilion. As the artist says:
Mirrors create a space. They also change the space. And they can break. It always makes people a bit uncomfortable to see a mirror; to perceive themselves. The first prop I used was a mirror. […] I am also experimenting with having mirrors made in Murano. Because I want distortion, they are working with an oldfashioned technique that Alex Rosenberg, a former student [the one who gave Joan the marine glass exhibited in the vitrine], reminded us of. You make a big glass cylinder – it looks like a bottle – and cut it. The glass actually flops open. These mirrors are thick and they are beautiful.4
The collaboration with the master glassmakers of Murano has been one of the keys of the work. For the first time, in fact, the artist was able to come to terms with the production of mirrors. The pursuit of possible solutions put Joan Jonas into contact with various artisans – discovered thanks to the precious guidance of Elena Mazzi, an artist based in Venice – who surprisingly no longer knew about the traditional technique of cylindrical glassblowing that was the basis of all the production of glass for ordinary useful objects in the past. Some of the elder craftsmen remembered it, but only one – a younger glassmaker – was enthusiastic about the idea of experimenting with this traditional practice. The results were a series of glass pieces in a wide range
of forms, also with very marked undulations, which were finished as mirrors and placed on view in the “Home Room.” For the “Mirror Room” the choice went instead to industrially produced glass with a slightly undulated surface, again mirror-finished by hand, which covered the surface of the room, producing an infinite play of reflections augmented by the presence of a chandelier of salvaged crystal drops at the center, in a wide range of forms, hanging from an iron structure designed by the artist and crossed in turn by a video projection. Discussing the role of mirrors in her practice, Jonas states:
One of the underlying concerns of my work is the perception of space, and I work with various devices, such as the mirror, to alter the audience’s experience of a space. My “Mirror Pieces” (1968-71) were performed in large indoor rooms – such as gyms, auditoriums, and lofts – and once outdoors. […] Today I use different mirrors – concave and convex – because they reflect and distort the image and change the space. Often instead of using special effects in video, I use the mirrors to create magical worlds, one step more removed. My camera, pointing at the mirror, records my gaze as I look indirectly into the lens reflected in the mirror.5
The mirror finishing is itself an alchemical process, and I believe that for Joan Jonas being present during the operation constituted an important moment. The procedure is similar to that of photographic printing: the surface of the glass is immersed in vats with a mixture of chemicals, and the glass is transformed, gradually revealing the image, like the image that emerges through the passage in developing trays.
It is magical – the mirror is like a camera that records the data of the visible and restores them to the gaze with the variations caused by its surface. A game of rebounds of gazes (and images) that has been the basis of artistic representation since its origins, and whose history continues to nurture the work of Jonas. “As I developed a piece, the important thing was to sit and stare at a space as if I were looking at a painting. In studying art history I traced the history of painting for instance, which fascinated me, in relation to representation of space.”6
A new production of mirrors is also central to the large installation Moving Off the Land II (2019), created for the spaces in Venice of TBA21, curated by Stefanie Hessler. Their surface suggests the ripples on the lagoon, and reflects the interiors of the church of San Lorenzo, one of the few churches in Italy with a bifrontal altar, built at the end of the 16th century by Simone Sorella and previously closed for many years. All the elements of the installation are thus implicated in the game of reflections: large suspended canvases that reproduce some of the red drawings made during the performances; rows of drawings on paper of fish that make reference to the undersea creatures in the videos by Gruber; and, of course, the videos, projected in specially designed spaces that remind us of the “My New Theater” series of cinema-sculptures for domestic viewing, which take on an environmental scale, in this case. In the exhibition, as in the performance, Joan Jonas constructs reflections in images and texts on the state of the oceans and our possible relationship with the beings that live inside them, another part – as we have seen – of a research project spanning many years, in search of invisible miracles.
Anna Daneri is an independent curator based in Genoa.
1 - Anna Daneri and Caterina Riva (ed.), Invisible Miracles. XIII Advanced Course in Visual Arts of the Fondazione Ratti, Mousse, 2008, p.1. 2 - Frances Richard and Anthony Huberman (ed.), Joan
Jonas is on our mind, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2017.
3 - Joan Jonas, “Notes on Process” in: Jane Farver (ed.), Joan Jonas. They Come to Us Without a Word,
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Gregory R. Miller & Co. & Hatje Cantz, 2015, p.15 and 17. After Venice, the piece has been shown in 2016 at NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore and DHC/ART Montreal. In 2019 Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture presented the installation with the support of the Kramlich Collection. 4 - Ingrid Schaffner, “Conversation with Joan Jonas,” in: ibidem, p.116 and 131. 5 - Joan Jonas, “Mirrors” in: Joan Simon (ed.),
In the Shadow of the Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas,
HangarBicocca and Malmö Konsthall, Gregory R. Miller & Co. & Hatje Cantz, 2015, p.40. 6 - Joan Jonas, “Space, Movement, Time” in: Anna Daneri and Cristina Natalicchio (ed.), Joan Jonas, Fondazione Antonio Ratti and Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento, Charta, 2007, p.48.