Joan Jonas, MoMA review — a series of selfies without the engaging attitude

Wind barrels silently across a snowy beach, buffeting a group of masked actors swaddled in woollen robes and mirrored cloaks. They perform a curious dance, their movements hampered by gusts that sweep them sideways and kick their hair into hectic tangles. The young performers are undaunted by this coldest day of 1968, or by the gale that knocks them wantonly about. The footage radiates youthful joy, and if there were a soundtrack, it might consist entirely of wild laughter.

“Wind”, Joan Jonas’s first film, plays on a loop at the entrance to MoMA’s 21-gun retrospective, promising a romp that the rest of the exhibition doesn’t deliver. Instead, we get intermittent pleasures scattered among long stretches of frustration. The 87-year-old Jonas has been an art-world darling for decades, feted abroad but less well known in her native New York. Even now, her work lays bare faultlines of taste. Fans wallow contentedly in her drawn-out pantomimes, deadpan energy and mystical leanings. Others, including me, find her grainy, jumpy videos repetitive, abstruse, overstuffed with allusion and nauseatingly dull.

The show’s title, Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, refers to an iconic work that she created twice, 30 years apart. I mustered the endurance to watch both, though I have patience for neither. In the 12-minute black-and-white original from 1976, she greets the camera first thing when she wakes up and again just before she goes to bed — many, many times. The picture is blurry, the sound muffled, the tone flat and inexpressive.

The 2006 version is a slightly more elaborate sequel — 16 minutes of the same perfunctory salutation, only in colour and with longer shots. This time, we’re allowed to see Jonas puttering around the kitchen and her white dog hobbling down the stairs to play the role of comic sidekick. A convex mirror adds some dramatic distortion.

Jonas is hardly alone in her penchant for monotonous discipline. Her contemporary On Kawara sent off two picture postcards every day for 12 years, each one stamped with the date and the phrase “I got up at”, plus the precise time of his awakening. I have scant appetite for repetition as an aesthetic strategy, which makes me a poor fit for Jonas, who appears to take infinite pleasure in revisiting past incantations. She thinks of herself as a sorceress and her work a series of spells, but they rarely work on me.

At least there’s nothing more to Good Night Good Morning than an affectless, content-free declaration of existence. Many other works come stuffed with a dizzying array of esoteric rituals, indecipherable symbols, literary references and folk myths of disparate origins. In videos and installations, Jonas does her best to distract the eye and then distract from those distractions. In the 1984 work “Double Lunar Dogs”, we get spaceships, rolling waves, Jonas in red leggings stamping her foot, Jonas chanting, close-ups of eyeballs, clouds, atomic explosions and more. The actor Spalding Gray holds up various objects — an apple, a book, a toy car — and asks: “Do you remember this?” (She doesn’t.)

There’s a heavy dog presence in her work, and touring this exhibition is a bit like walking a puppy: you flit madly from a scudding leaf to a passer-by with a curious gait, and then spend an eternity nosing the same unpromising patch of sidewalk. Meaning is beside the point, and all the portentous dialogue and clownish imagery undercuts the surreal poetics. Even dreams aren’t this disjointed.

To be fair, Jonas anticipated social media by decades, but in this case prescience has the unfortunate effect of weakening her work in retrospect. Each piece amounts to a prolonged and gritty selfie, without Instagram’s softening filters and ingratiating attitude. She and MoMA seem unjustifiably entranced by tricks that have become prosaic. Her 2014 video “Beautiful Dog”, which features her adorable white poodle Ozu cavorting on the beach, isn’t in the galleries, but it can be viewed in the video channel on the exhibition website, along with an accompanying text that reads: “In a disorienting scene shot from a mobile camera positioned on Ozu’s collar, Jonas yields cinematic control to her beloved canine friend.” That sounds visually inventive and I suppose it once was, but today the same description could apply to a million TikToks.

Jonas came honestly to her multidisciplinary approach. She studied art history at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts and sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then started her career as a dancer and moved back to New York in the mid-1960s in time to catch a wave of happenings. Those self-consciously weird and earnest experiments in participatory theatre inspired her first artistic efforts. So did the crumbling city itself, then verging on catastrophic ruin.

She organised “Songdelay” (1973), in which performers improvised with wooden blocks, sticks and giant hoops on a massive empty lot at the edge of lower Manhattan. In one scene, a man on a bank of the Hudson River rhythmically claps two blocks above his head, as a massive tanker steams by behind him, dwarfing his puny, primal gesture with its industrial heft.

Seen at this remove, these grainy videos haze the ugly realities of a failing city behind a scrim of nostalgia: oh, for the days when downtown welcomed long-haired creatives, rents were cheap and you could share a cold water flat with like-minded peers who had the time and inclination to pitch in. Jonas belonged to an influential and yeasty cohort that included Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk, and some of her projects come off as studies for her colleagues’ final drafts.

Take the Organic Honey series from the early 1970s, probably her best-known work. Documentation of these performances captures Jonas in a creepily simpering doll mask and headgear out of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza. In this outfit, her alter ego acted out a sort of grotesque femininity for the camera. A few years later, Cindy Sherman covered the same terrain, only better.

Whatever you think of the work itself, MoMA has outdone itself in the presentation, a technically complicated set-up involving multiple screens, loudspeakers, headphones and other paraphernalia. This is art that takes time to experience, and the museum has set up comfortable spots to sit and watch. I found myself returning to a single small screen showing “Barking”, a brief (for Jonas) and mysteriously compelling narrative sequence.

We watch from a distance as an abandoned-looking sedan sits outside a house surrounded by overgrown greenery. We hear a bark. A woman enters the frame. A white dog emerges to greet her. As the camera lingers over the scene, we spot what looks like a black animal far away. Another dog? The object of the white dog’s attention? The woman circles the car and walks away. That’s it.

I stayed to watch the whole routine four times, letting its banality mesmerise me in a way I couldn’t explain. That’s what Joan Jonas is best at: inviting other people to witness as she doggedly plumbs the shallows of ordinary life and comes up with nothing much.

To July 6, moma.org