Begin Again

Reanimation. Better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do. Are you sure the flowers are silent? If a sensitive microphone were placed beside them? As a matter of fact, others are ready to help. There is for instance the Weather; and there is the Law of Gravity; and last but not least, Time. No one is a match for them.¹

In the performance work Reanimation, Joan Jonas’s recorded voice reads these lines by the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness, while the artist herself stands at a desk in one corner of the stage. A video camera and a lamp are pointed at the desk, where her hands are manipulating a transparent plastic sheet, moving and bending it rhythmically. At the stage’s opposite corner the jazz musician Jason Moran plays the piano, his arpeggios gently filling the space. It’s not clear if Jonas’s handling of the plastic is being directed by the musical theme or the other way around—they seem engaged in a delicate dance. At center stage a screen shows black-and-white video footage of a body of water whose surface is agitated by stones, light, and the reflections of two shimmering figures walking toward and away from each other, sometimes seeming to merge; a naked woman swims under the reflections, as if in a choreographed routine. If we watch the video closely we realize that the surface disturbances are partly caused by the camera capturing the plastic sheet’s movements and projecting them onto the image, producing another layer of glimmering effect.

Reanimation was inspired by Laxness’s novel Under the Glacier (1968), which tells a story of a man sent by the Bishop of Iceland to investigate an idiosyncratic pastor and reports of odd and possibly paranormal activities taking place on a glacier. Jonas was attracted to the book’s poetic descriptions of nature and animals, its linking of the spiritual and natural worlds, and the absurdity that tempers the story’s fundamental questions of belief and existence: “Reanimation,” Jonas has said, “means redoing something, or literally . . . reanimation. In an abstract way, it refers to what I’m doing: I am animating, again, with my work and with text.”² The footage of the rippling pool surface comes from Disturbances (1974), one of Jonas’s early video works, which draws a parallel between the spatial and mirroring effects of water and video and the doubling of female figures; Reanimation’s other images—of animals, glaciers, and oceans—are either from the artist’s ongoing visual archive or were originally produced for the work.

This sequence takes up just two minutes of a 50-minute performance. For the rest of it, Jonas moves between the desk—where she juxtaposes images, objects, and drawings with and on the projected footage, adding new layers, effects, and meanings—and center stage, where she plays different instruments, puts on masks, and holds up sheets of paper to create new projection surfaces. With chalk tied to the end of a stick, she draws a snowflake on a chalkboard; with blue paint on another stick she draws fish on paper. Throughout, Moran plays versions of Reanimation’s theme.

Jonas is dressed in white. Her body is at once fragile and strong; her movements are decisive and fast; she passes from one action to another with no hesitation, firmly and rapidly. She integrates signals, instruments, and objects, simultaneously performing and manipulating drawings, sounds, voices, and narrative. She is an electronic magician, reanimating existing images in front of our eyes, giving them new life, warning us about climate change and imminent ecological crises.

Joan Jonas. Reanimation. 2010/2012/2013. Performance view, Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2014. Photo: Moira Ricci

The power of Reanimation lies not only in the simultaneity of its objects and visuals but in its repetition and multiplicity. It was conceived as a lecture performance in 2010; in 2012 it was shown as an installation with video, drawings, and objects, visible only through the windows of a prefabricated house, as well as in a performance with Moran. In 2013 the installation was reconceived as a set of videos projected onto four shoji screens arranged in a rectangle, showing images of glaciers, icy roads, and dark tunnels intercut with footage of the artist drip-painting on snow and drawing with ice and black ink on paper. A sculpture composed of 80 crystals sat at the center of the rectangle, refracting light from the projections and casting shadows and reflections back onto the screens. Drawings of animals that appear in the video were mounted on the walls, and two “theater box” sculptures displayed videos in miniature. The installation’s recorded soundtrack included Moran’s score and traditional yoik songs of the Indigenous Sámi people of northern Scandinavia, performed by the musician Ánde Somby.

Reanimation is emblematic of Jonas’s process of experimenting in different mediums and drawing from a broad range of sources. The writer Susan Sontag, in her introduction to Under the Glacier, notes that the novel fits all literary categories at once, among them science fiction, philosophy, reverie, and comedy.³

The art historian Douglas Crimp remarked on a similar characteristic of Jonas’s early performance work, and consequently of her work as a whole: that it exceeded any categorization we might try to apply.⁴

Joan Jonas. Reanimation (detail). 2010/2012/2013. Installation view, The Long Run, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 11, 2017–June 2, 2019

Reanimation is an important key to Jonas’s practice. It contains the principal elements and motifs of Jonas’s video performances from the 1970s and 1980s and the installations she subsequently developed from them: nature, landscapes, and oceans; animals and children; live drawing; sound and music; mirrors and masks; images, objects, and rituals collected from her travels; and her dogs. It exemplifies the migration of her work from one medium to another, with previous material reedited and rearranged into new formulations that touch on the themes and questions that have sustained her career: the technical possibilities of video and its relation to live action; the ways in which literature, myth, and past tales can illuminate our present; the perception and alteration of space; the visual trickery and illusion of fragmentation, repetition, doubling, and reflection; the generative process of collaboration; and the cyclical nature of time.

Because the nature of time arcs over Jonas’s work as a whole—bending back upon itself, drawing on the past to tell stories in the eternal present of performance that, once recorded, slides into the past—the question of how to exhibit her work is particularly challenging and complex. As we planned Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning at The Museum of Modern Art, we knew that even in the almost 19,000 square feet available in our galleries, it would be impossible to show the entirety of her oeuvre, so we worked with the artist to choose the most representative works, the most significant for her practice and artistic method.

An exhibition, in a way, is always reanimating, bringing something from the past into the present, and we asked ourselves how we might best honor this element of her practice: How would we show artwork that already so consciously enacts her strategy of reanimation? How would we immerse viewers in Jonas’s recursive, enchanted world—her reappearing objects and themes, her complicated approach to linearity—and make her myriad references and forms available and accessible? And how to do this while also insisting on her work’s thrilling rigor and structure?

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning.

The exhibition Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning is on view at MoMA March 17–July 6, 2024.