Always the Observed

Entering the first gallery of Joan Jonas’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the viewer encounters not an artwork nor its documentation but a prop that has endured across Jonas’s half-century of production: seven vertical mirrors resting against the wall, with a label dating them 1969–2024. The curatorial gesture offers mirrors as not only the raw material of Jonas’s earliest performance work—as demonstrated in the works that inaugurate the exhibition—but as a methodological symbol unifying the fifty-five years of Jonas’s multidisciplinary practice. Jonas is known as one of videos art’s earliest practitioners (she resists the oft-used moniker “pioneer”), but it was not until 1970 that she purchased a Portapak in Japan and began her decades-long engagement with the medium. Good Night, Good Morning introduces Jonas’s practice as it began: before her adoption of video, with a proliferation of the medium’s reflective glass analog in its stead. Across a desolate and undeveloped downtown New York, its emergent venues for performance, and the Mercer Street loft in which the artist lives to this day, Jonas staged her first works. Influenced by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Judson Dance Theater, and Minimalism, Jonas—alongside her peers—enacted simple, autotelic movements in impromptu settings. She and her fellow performers were often coupled with mirrors, either splintering their own image, or reversing the audience’s expectation to regard an embodied Other. 

In Mirror Check (1970), Jonas’s stated intention, quoted on an adjacent wall label, is to “[reverse] the gaze and [claim] her body as her own.” Performed in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia and captured on black-and-white 16mm film (transferred to video), Mirror Check shows Jonas slowly tracing the contours of her nude body with a handheld mirror. She sustains her visual inspection for over ten minutes, contorting to ensure that her engagement with her reflection is continuous. As a result, her face is frequently turned away from her audience, never returning their gaze as she alone enjoys the transcription of her image in glass. Mirror Check enacts a sort of synesthesia, with Jonas replacing a kinesthetic awareness of her body with a visual one—usurping the viewer’s primary claim to sight. In the wall text, Jonas directly attributes Mirror Check to the women’s movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s, indicating the social concerns at play in the performance’s tautological cache of the female form.  

Curated by Ana Janevski, Good Night, Good Morning explains Jonas’s enduring interest in reflective apparatuses in its didactic materials: “Her Mirror Pieces (1968–1971) deploy the mirror as a viewing device, prop, and tool for fragmenting space and reflecting on identity and self-perception,” reads the text in the exhibition’s introductory gallery. Mirrors’ reflective operations and spatial dislocations mimic those of the video feed, and their recurrence across Jonas’s early work suggests an interest in these formal strategies that predate her use of the electronic medium. But for Jonas, a woman practitioner who emerged in a field dominated by men and the cult of genius, the most radical intervention of reflection—both that of the looking glass and of the closed circuit—may have been the frustration of the gaze and its gendered operations, the collapse of art’s foundational dyad of observing Self and observed Other. 

Jonas first explored these themes in a New York art world rife with activism against the teleological and unilateral art history of museums, narratives long sustained at the expense of women artists and artists of color. Her half-century of production is historically bracketed by emergent movements to correct the white male supremacy of museums. Jonas’s earliest experiments in video and performance coincide with, for instance, the formation of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) in 1969 and Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC) in 1975, while her late work historically aligns with institutional correctives such as the 2019 rehang of MoMA itself, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current revisitation of the Harlem Renaissance, on view just a few blocks uptown, fifty-five years after its first attempt—an ethnographic survey that excluded Black artists entirely—spurred the formation of BECC. Despite MoMA’s own corrective endeavors, Good Night, Good Morning approaches but ultimately evades this rich historical context for Jonas’s production. References to gender, identity, and representation recur across exhibition texts, however, the material reality of these terms and the conditions that determined them are elided in favor of a portrait of the artist isolated from social history. Threaded through the retrospective but untethered to sociopolitical context is Jonas’s use of reflection to neuter the binary relations of looking. Implicit but underexplored in the exhibition is Jonas’s incisive illumination of the problematics engendered by looking, the distancing that observation enforces between an artist and their subject matter.

In Mirror Piece (first staged at Bard College in 1969), Jonas effectively reverses the gesture of Mirror Check, only to further interrogate the power relations of looking, this time between spectator and performer. A group of performers execute a simple choreography while holding large mirrors to the audience—folding them into the spatial tableau of performance, confronting them with their own image rather than engaging them in a one-directional study. Some of Jonas’s contemporaries in performance art mined the power dynamics between performer and audience to devastating and dangerous ends: Yoko Ono’s 1964 Cut Piece, for instance, or Marina Abramović’s 1974 Rhythm 0 supplemented the act of watching with opportunities for violence and degradation. In Mirror Piece, viewers are instead made to contend with their own image, disrupting the univalence of the gaze and deflecting its scrutiny. Such a reversal illuminates the security in passive looking, and the vulnerability of being looked upon. 

In 1976, during the formative years of video art and six years after Jonas adopted the medium, Rosalind Krauss aligned the operations of the closed circuit with the condition of narcissism: “Video’s real medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object—an Other—and invest it in the Self.”1  Krauss’s formulation, now firmly entrenched in discussions of new media, neglects the implications of video’s reflection for its women and non-white practitioners. The gendered and racial dynamics of artist and muse undergo a transformative rupture, with the tautology of the closed circuit collapsing the dyadic conditions of looking. Implicit across Jonas’s work is an awareness of the axes of power that transpire across the acts of observation and recording. Apprehension is a useful term here, denoting both the perception of an object and its capture; video—along with the mirror—flattens this perceptive hierarchy, its transcription automatic and ephemeral, its relations equivalent and simultaneous.

Jonas augmented this power dynamic in 1972 when she invented a hyper-feminized alter ego and subjected her to the conditions of video, allowing the artist to behave simultaneously as auteur and starlet and highlighting the roles’ attendant prescriptions of gender. Organic Honey was an “erotic electronic seductress,” the artist explains in a wall text, whose exaggerated sexuality Jonas could at once embody and depict, thanks to video’s circuitous operations. Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) is among Jonas’s first video works. Dressed in drag—a feathered headdress; a sequined jacket; a semi-transparent mask fixed in a slight, disquieting smile—and calling upon a succession of mirrors, Jonas multiplies and fractures the Self. Organic Honey holds a mirror and performs bemused absorption in her own image. She looks into the camera though a jar of water, obscuring and warping her masked face. She—or perhaps Jonas in this case—rhythmically shatters her unmasked reflection with a hammer. Yet Jonas’s titular reference to telepathy refuses alterity to her counterpart. Instead, Jonas and Organic Honey are distinct subjects in extrasensory communion. Representation has historically carried with it an asymmetry of consciousness, the author in sole possession of perceptive abilities while his objects of study exist at the surface. With Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, Jonas levels these terms. A few years later, in 1980, Howardena Pindell would complicate this asymmetry further in Free, White, and 21. In the video work, Pindell describes her experiences of racism and then, disguised as a white woman, dismisses the reality of those experiences—enacting this denial of consciousness to Black subjects. A comment on the racism that pervaded many social movements of her time, including feminism, Pindell’s video was on view among MoMA’s new acquisitions until a month before Jonas’s retrospective opened, precluding the dialogue their coincidence might have engendered: Pindell, also through the deployment of an alter ego, illuminating in social terms the subordinated consciousness to which Jonas enigmatically alludes.

Jonas performed Organic Honey for a live audience, under the title Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, a dozen times between 1972 and 1980. On view at MoMA is the only recorded performance of Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll. Staged at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1973, an audience looked on at Jonas, her avatar, and her (or their) transmissions and reflections. While Krauss’s discussion of video focuses on the duplication of a performer’s subjectivity, Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll splinters the object of the viewer’s gaze. Jonas’s identity is rendered unstable, complicating an audience’s ability to fix its apprehension. Not only does she simultaneously embody artist and muse, actor and character, original and copy—she flings the variable personas across literal and virtual space. By reiterating these actions several times over nearly a decade, Jonas further compounded the fugitivity of these identities.

Calling various modalities and temporalities into simultaneity, Jonas’s late practice extends the multiplicity of Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll. Mirrors and video persist, as does Jonas’s transitory approach to drawing (the plastic medium in which the artist was originally trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Columbia University in the 1950s and ’60s). When Jonas draws, her hand is swift and sure, telescoping the usual delay between looking and transcribing. The drawings she renders in performance resist auratic fetishism, discarded after their making. Much like the closed circuit—which replicates without recording—drawing, in Jonas’s hands, is automatic and ephemeral. Her drawings are often rehearsed to ensure her manual stamina, aligning her approach to transcription proximate to her origins in performance and dance, while also severing drawing from visuality. 

Tucked in a vitrine and omitted from the exhibition’s checklist, as though a footnote, is Jonas’s contribution to composer Robert Ashley’s opera Celestial Excursion (2003), which shows Jonas—one among many in Ashley’s operatic collaboration—holding a large sheet of paper to her body and tracing its outline with marker (the actual Jonas is clothed while the drawn Jonas is nude, cementing the performance’s parallels with Mirror Check’s circumambulatory examination). Jonas collapses the distance between a drawing and its subject, rendering herself both figure and ground and radically compressing the terms of portraiture. Once again, Jonas interrogates the dynamics of representation to insist on sovereignty over one’s image. 

In the exhibition’s penultimate gallery, Jonas turns her attention to environmental justice through the underexplored consciousness of animals. In a series of video installations, images of the sea are projected onto Jonas and a suite of adolescent collaborators, rendering them flush with the species they describe, immersed as well in the sea’s dappled light. One young performer recites a passage from John Berger’s 1977 polemic “Why Look at Animals” that pinpoints Jonas’s lifelong explorations of the othering that inheres in close study, of the distance enforced by looking that Jonas’s practice has consistently sought to narrow:

Animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extended knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus, an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away from them we are.2

In the exhibition’s final passages, Jonas restores subjectivity to the specimen just as she has the muse. Her selection of adolescents as mediaries telegraphs a more environmentally urgent appeal, a subtle reminder that the future belongs not to those currently in power but to the disenfranchised who will inherit it. 

MoMA’s retrospective is comprehensive, sprawling, and dense with time-based media in a manner that successfully embodies the artist’s approach to performance even in her physical absence. Yet, the museum misses an opportunity Jonas’s work proffers: a chance to examine, through the formal strategies of one artist, how asymmetry emerges in the representation of others and how a monopoly on sentience attends the cult of authorship. To align video’s closed circuit with the conditions of narcissism rests on the assumption that subjectivity resides in the artist. Jonas’s prescience lay in her persistent decentralization of the Self. An ethos of compassion quietly courses through Jonas’s oeuvre, her work across decades unified by the rejoinder that the observed also see. 

1 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 57.

2 John Berger, About Looking (Penguin Random House: New York, 1980), 16.

Katherine Siboni is a writer and curator based in New York City. She is currently the Curator and Program Manager of Art Omi Pavilions @ Chatham, New York.

All photos: Courtesy the artist, © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Image of the unrealized poster for Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy: Photo: Richard Serra

Image of Delay Delay: Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Image of Mirage: Photo: Benjamin Blackwell

Image of Moving Off the Land: Photo: Ian Douglas/courtesy of Danspace Project

Installation image: Photo: Jonathan Dorado

This text was supported by a Public Humanities Grant from Humanities NY.