Joan Jonas

Since her earliest performances in the late 1960s, Joan Jonas has concerned herself with animation and moving images, asking what it means to move images, or to be moved by them. The artist constantly returns to her ever-expanding archive of images, sounds, gestures, ideas and places, reworking materials into new forms across the decades. Published in conjunction with the artist’s most comprehensive retrospective in the United States, presented by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Good Night Good Morning spans more than 50 years of her remarkable career and features works in all mediums—including videos, drawings, notebooks, photographs and major installations and performances.
The abundantly illustrated publication features essays by curators and scholars that delve into the political, social and historical impact of Jonas’ working method, a suite of oral histories gathered specifically for this project and a new photographic portfolio by the artist Zoe Leonard. Featuring extensive archival materials, many previously unpublished, this monograph sheds new light on Jonas’ unique role as a trailblazing figure of video and performance, and highlights her enduring multimedia legacy for generations of younger artists.
Born in New York City in 1936, Joan Jonas is a pathmaking figure in video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015 she was the sixth woman artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

The installation, performance and video works of American artist Joan Jonas (born 1936) are emblematic of the ’70s–’80s downtown New York avant-garde. Jonas privileged form over content, generating rigorous pieces with thematic concerns such as time, space and feminine subjectivity. Significant as these works are, other parts of Jonas’ diverse and dynamic oeuvre deserve their due attention. This book is the first comprehensive catalog to elucidate an under-examined component of the artist’s practice. Fascinated by the tension between motion and transcription, Jonas developed “endless drawings” composed of lines that weave around themselves or through a grid. She also began to draw natural things—plants, animals, minerals—both from her own environment and from fiction.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Drawing Center, this volume examines several decades of Jonas’ drawing practice, presented in chronological order. The drawings are accompanied by extensive images from the artist’s notable performances and exhibitions.

This volume closely follows the development of Joan Jonas’ (born 1936) multiformat project Moving off the Land. The artist’s most recent body of work, it encompasses three years of research into the significance of the ocean throughout history, and features sculptures, drawings, sound and new video productions. Jonas combines poetry and prose by writers such as Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville with texts by Rachel Carson and Sy Montgomery, and with moving images filmed in aquariums and in Jamaica, where algae bloom and over-fishing pose urgent threats to the ecosystem. The monograph includes the complete script for the performance along with annotations, images of Jonas’ live performance, and a complete chronology with documentation of the performance’s history.

Published in conjunction with the first major US museum show of Joan Jonas’ art in nearly 15 years, this volume breaks new ground by contextualizing and expanding understandings of Jonas’ body of work through three thematic approaches: the critical notions of gender, being and otherness; the politics of landscape and ecology; and new conceptions of medium specificity and un-specificity. These themes serve as a framework through which to address the rich vocabulary of Jonas’ performances, sculptures, drawings and installations from the early 1970s until today.
Inspired by the format of a reader, the monograph presents new writing and scholarship, excerpts from Douglas Crimp's final interview, as well as a selection of drawings and sketches from Jonas’ notebooks, including never-before-published drawings created during the coronavirus lockdown.
Born and based in New York, Joan Jonas (born 1936) has taught at UCLA School of the Arts, in Stuttgart, Germany, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is a professor emerita. She has lived and worked in Greece, Morocco, India, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Poland, Japan, Italy, Hungary and Ireland.

Reissued for the 15th anniversary of this volume and during Joan Jonas’ (born 1936) first major US museum show in 15 years, this catalog documents the deep, immersive performance The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, originally commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and responding to German art historian Aby Warburg's essay on his visit to the American Southwest. The book includes a statement from the artist, scene-by-scene descriptions with photos, a conversation between Joan Jonas and Jason Moran (who composed music for the performance) and an essay by Lynne Cooke, a senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and former curator at Dia. With a new reflection from the artist looking back on this groundbreaking performance, the anniversary edition is a tangible manifestation of the ongoing significance of Jonas' work.