Even the act of arranging the MoMA show proves how much Jonas’s collective work defies easy collection or categorization. The process of choosing pieces, many featuring numerous elements — masks, clothing, drawings, headdresses, books, props — from so enduring and varied a career was a yearslong endeavor for the museum, a puzzle that needed solving by both Jonas and the show’s curator alike. Janevski and the curatorial team spent hours opening drawer after drawer full of sketches.
Drawing, for Jonas, has always been a kind of meditative practice, and she had bureaus filled with hundreds of works on paper. Many are simple, even spare, but also arresting — they evoke the energy and speed with which they were created. She draws to record the world around her, she said, the way some people use cameras; but drawings are also an innovative part of her performance art. She’s known for handicapping herself as she draws: sketching by looking not at the paper but instead at a monitor capturing her in the act of drawing, or drawing on canvas that covers her face, so that the audience sees her making her own mask, the act both self-obliterating and self-generating. “When I draw, I don’t have total control,” she said. “So for me, drawing is also kind of an adventure. That’s what interests me, is I get an image I didn’t expect.” (Jonas’s drawings will also be exhibited in a major new show that also opens this month, “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” at the Drawing Center in New York.)
That day at MoMA, Jonas and Janevski were talking in the museum’s model room, where doll-size configurations of exhibits are imagined, and maquettes of the museum’s various spaces, each for a different forthcoming show, clutter the tables. Staring at the 6-by-7-foot model for her exhibit, which even at that scale captured the sweep of her works, Jonas wondered about a few missing long mirrors (a callback to her 1969 and 1970 works “Mirror Piece I” and “Mirror Piece II”) that would make the audience visible to itself. Janevski assured her they would be there. Making the show clear and legible entailed difficult choices, given the vast amount of rich historical material in Jonas’s home and basement, including a trove of notebooks and sketches and journal entries from the ’70s. When the process was far enough along that few additions could be made, the curators discovered that Jonas had more notebooks from subsequent decades that she hadn’t exactly kept hidden but also hadn’t mentioned. In the process of being curated, she had revealed herself to be, as she is in her art, both visible and impossible to find.
The model revealed little about the new work for the show. Jonas already knew a lot: Along with that whale giving way to new life, it would feature a vampire squid, figures dancing, music and video projects. But like many of Jonas’s works, it would likely change over time and become part of something wholly new. “It’s not done,” she said and showed her small smile. “I’m never done.”
Photo assistant: Josh Mathews