Joan Jonas, Drawing in the Sand
On an afternoon in May, members of ArtTable gathered at the Drawing Center in SoHo for a conversation between Joan Jonas and the center’s Executive Director Laura Hoptman, who curated Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetables, Mineral. Known as a pioneer in video work, Jonas’s drawings have received less attention, although the artist has created more than 2,000 drawings over her sixty-year career. The exhibition shows that these drawings serve as a direct link to her hand, or as expressed by the curator, “a backbone to her video, performance, and sculptural practice,” which Jonas reinforced during the conversation.
Jonas’s beautiful drawings, mostly on paper, covered almost every inch of the museum which has been a staple in SoHo since 1977. Hoptman and her curatorial staff installed the show as Jonas was supervising the installation of her concurrent retrospective Joan Jonas: Good Night, Good Morning at MoMA. Listening to Hoptman, I heard that the installation was both challenging and fun, and both results speak volumes. The MoMA exhibition is an extensive retrospective embracing every medium Jonas touched: photographs, drawings, found materials, recordings, paintings, sculpture, and, of course, many videos. She had done it all, diving into every subject with mind and heart without letting the men in her life, like Richard Serra, stop her. At least, this is how it looks now. She collaborated with him and other artists, emphasizing the creative process of simply making art, suffering, and enjoying making it at the same time. The collection of drawings is more whimsical—a lexicon of human and non-human, from self-portraits to dogs and butterflies. Whether you connect with either retrospective or not, you must tilt your hat to Jonas for trying it all and working hard to make her footprint on art history.
Something extraordinary was in the air as Hoptman introduced Jonas, dressed in black and wearing trainers her small and fragile build is deceiving; although she is in her late 80s, she is vibrant. Everyone instantly smiled as they looked at Jonas and her dog at her feet, “listening politely.” Although I’ve been familiar with Jonas and her work for decades—she lives in SoHo, a block away from me—I haven’t had the opportunity to talk in-depth about her work. Most of the time, we quickly pass each other, neighbors exchanging a few words while she walks her beloved dog, who is always by her side.
While the MoMA exhibition is almost overwhelming with its old and new technology, the Drawing Center exhibition brings you right back to the artist’s hand. You feel and can closely appreciate her using her hand on paper: “I let the ice run over the ink,” she explains. In these three rooms, you get in touch directly with the talent of the artist. I made a point of seeing her show a few times. My partner, also an artist, Zigi Ben-Haim, joined me on one occasion and as we walked, looking at the diversity of drawings, he said, “She’s good. She has it.” Their peers’ and other artists’ opinions and criticism are usually what matters most to artists.
Joan talked about what happened over the decades she created these works, some on her travels abroad, that now surrounded us. Most were stored in her studio until Hoptman offered to show them. Jonas never thought they would see the light of day since she abandoned her desire to show the medium. Even though drawing was a transforming experience she came to concentrate mostly on video productions. However, in one video work, Rivers to the Abyssal Plain (2021) which is installed in the lower gallery, Jonas connects her drawing practice with her video work as she draws on the beach in the sand with a branch, almost like a dance in the wind with the sound of the waves in the background. Seeing her a few days later, during our morning walk on Mercer Street, I commented that this piece took us, as viewers, back to the roots of her artistry. I deeply felt that the personal touch of drawing with the technical video installations took her work to new heights.
At the end of the conversation, I asked: “What next? Where do you go from here?” She answered, “I’m going to start something, but I don’t know what it’ll be.”
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Tsipi Ben-Haim is the founder of CITYarts, a non-profit public arts and education organization that engages youth with professional artists to create public art. l website l