Joan Jonas
Draw on the wind, 2018 | By a Thread in the Wind, 2024 | I Know Why They Left, 2016–2018 | Wind, 1968
AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY is a very simple newsletter where I share a collection of creative expressions I enjoyed coming across.
“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. […] She began her decades-long career in New York’s vibrant Downtown art scene of the 1960s and ’70s, where she was one of the first artists to work in performance and video. Drawing influence from literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history, her early experimental works probed how a given element—be it distance, mirrors, the camera, or even wind—could transform one’s perception.
MoMA
Draw on the wind, 2018 | By a Thread in the Wind, 2024
In ‘Draw on the wind’ (2018), Jonas extends physical movement into her materials, employing bamboo and collaged paper to create kites that float in the gallery space. Following a formative trip to Hanoi in 2018, the kites were handmade in Vietnam, which Jonas then hand painted and collaged with vividly colored paper cutouts.
Gladstone Gallery
I Know Why They Left, 2016–2018
‘I Know Why They Left’ [was] created while Jonas was an Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2017. The artist photographed and documented an assortment of real and mythological creatures found throughout the museum, conservation labs, and archives. Redrawing and tracing from these photographs, Jonas paid particular attention to both birds and fish – animals in movement, studying their various states of swimming, gliding, and flying.
Gladstone Gallery
Drawing, for Jonas, has always been a kind of meditative practice, and she had bureaus filled with hundreds of works on paper. Many are simple, even spare, but also arresting — they evoke the energy and speed with which they were created. She draws to record the world around her, she said, the way some people use cameras.
Susan Dominus
Wind, 1968
Wind is a dance of bodies that move guided, in part, by the strength of the wind. This work, shot in black and white in long takes with no sound, is one of the earliest performances by Joan Jonas, which she would set in natural or industrial environments. In it, the artist allows the wind to determine the performers’ movements in a blend of choreography, ceremony and improvisation.
MACBA
The people are actors. Their moves are choreographed. In contrast, the wind is wild. It pushes people around, makes it difficult for them to stand up.
Jeff Goodell for Blanton Museum of Art
