CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/4/2015

In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas

"If it seems surprising that Joan Jonas regularly points to magic shows and Broadway musicals as great influences 
on her practice, the artist's enthusiasm for such stagecraft becomes less unlikely when considered alongside an observation she once attributed to Gaston Bachelard," Johanna Burton writes in Gregory R. Miller's stupendous, 536-page In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas, which launches today at MoMA PS1. "'The symbol plucks all the strings of the human spirit at once—speech is compelled to take up a single thought at a time. Only a symbol can combine disparate elements into a unitary expression.' Jonas' use of these words is quite apt, since they underscore the way in which her own works are typically non-linear. Objects and events are rarely taken up one at a time by the artist. Instead, she creates an intricate layering system, never allowing a work's myriad elements to be immediately accessible to audiences, even while they are all in play—such that no viewer ever quite sees everything there is to see at any given moment. In this light, Jonas' evocation of magic and musicals becomes quite specific in its implications: As she says in an interview with Joan Simon, her attraction to these forms of entertainment issues from their ability to create 'illusions, surprises,' while her own work labors to 'reveal the way the illusions were made.'" Featured image is a photograph (by Richard Serra) for a poster (never produced) of Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas' first performance employing video.