A wolf appeared at the southern edge of the English Garden in Munich at the weekend. But please don’t panic. The animal is only electric. Its creator is the American performance and media artist Joan Jonas, born in New York in 1936. “Wolf Lights” is the name of the video work that will flicker day and night this autumn and winter on a large video screen in the colonnade of Haus der Kunst.
Produced between 2004 and 2005, it is part of the major Joan Jonas retrospective that has just opened inside the art institution. It points to a body of work rooted equally in modernity, science fiction, and ancient myth. The almost three-minute video loop shows a dancer with a wolf mask in animalistic poses in front of the glaring neon lights of Las Vegas. A touch of New York is now blowing in the middle of Munich.
As recently as April, the video creature danced across the video screens in Times Square in Manhattan at midnight for a month. And in 2024, Joan Jonas will be honored for her life’s work with a comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The 85-year-old artist, who came to Munich in person for the opening on Friday, is an internationally respected veteran of the New York performance and video scene, a living legend. When the multiple Documenta participant is not travelling, she lives and works in her artists’ loft in Soho, Manhattan’s old, albeit thoroughly gentrified artists’ district. She also has a second studio in Canada.
Early on, the artist dealt with climate change in a poetic way
Before Jonas became an artist, she studied art history in the mid-fifties, and later also sculpture and painting. In the late ’60s, she finally dove into the experimental-minded avant-garde circles of New York and became a major player on the scene. Jonas began working with performance, film, video art, sound and installation. She has remained so to this day.
One of the earliest works now on view in Munich is the 16-millimeter film “Wind” from 1968. The silent film features a group of masked performers moving across a snow-covered Long Island beach in a peculiar stiffened choreography moves the whipping wind and performs a silent dance with nature. It’s hard to tell if it was the snow or the graininess of the footage that gave the black-and-white images their peculiar grayscale smear.
Another early film work entitled “Songdelay” is based on a performance on a brownfield site in Manhattan’s Lower West Side and the Hudson River harbor. At the time, the architect and conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark was among the performers, who, among other things, banged pieces of wood together above their heads in a certain rhythm or stalked through the urban desert landscape like human drawing devices. Back then, Jonas was working with a telephoto lens, which has nice perspective effects: at one moment in the film, a large cargo ship seems to be gliding silently through the picture directly behind a performer.
Instead of a linear sequence along a work chronicle, the three curators of the exhibition, Andrea Lissoni, Julienne Lorz and Elena Setzer, decided to conceive an exhibition that is more like an island group. In this way, the show, which comprises a total of 32 works, takes into account the many, more or less visible connections between the individual work groups. Because Jonas himself always took up certain themes or motifs and developed them organically. The artist dealt with climate change in a poetic way early on, for example in the video installation “Reanimation”, which is now being shown at a central location in the Haus der Kunst. An earlier version of the work was shown at Documenta 13 in Kassel in 2012.
The history of the exhibition is adventurous, only against much resistance it finally takes place in Munich
Inspired by the novel “On the Glacier” by Halldór Laxness, which was first published in Icelandic in 1968, Jonas created an installation with four video screens that show, among other things, a journey into an Icelandic glacier tunnel. The motif of the disappearing ice is transferred to a graphic act in a different sequence. A close-up shows two hands producing an abstract image with ink and ice cubes on a sheet of paper. Watching the artist’s hands draw elsewhere in the show is absolutely mesmerizing. Whether fish, birds, bees or dogs: Jonas’ animal drawings run through the whole show. In an interview in the catalogue, she explains why: “The relationship between animals and humans is very mysterious and I think it’s very important, especially in today’s world, on the planet we live on. As animals are becoming increasingly rare , they are becoming increasingly important.”
The adventurous history of this exhibition, which is now taking place in Munich against much resistance, can be indirectly read from the imprint of the exhibition catalogue. The book was already printed in January 2018. That was before Covid and the Ukraine war and seems like ages ago. The exhibition was originally planned by Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019) and was firmly agreed as a cooperation project with London’s Tate Modern and the Fundação de Serralves in Porto.
But in Munich: Installation by Joan Jonas in the Haus der Kunst.
(Photo: Maximilian Geuter/Haus der Kunst / VG Bild-Kunst)
Then came the small catastrophes of 2018, which almost tore the internationally renowned house for contemporary art into the abyss. Enwezor lost his post in an undignified political maneuver in 2018. The visionary curator died a few months later in Munich. The commercial director took over the overall management on an interim basis, suddenly went into reverse and canceled the Joan Jonas show. Instead, the painters Markus Lüpertz and Jörg Immendorf were hoisted into the program. This was based on well-known but less advanced positions. Since the appointment of the Italian curator Andrea Lissoni in April 2020, the house seems to be back on track and is making a name for itself with top-class exhibitions.
This show is also programmatic because Lissoni wants to move the institution towards greater sustainability with small steps. This includes, for example, reusing and reusing individual exhibition elements from previous exhibitions. That is why the floor made of wooden boards, originally designed for the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya in the early summer in the large exhibition hall was inserted, still there. With 120,000 visitors, Nakaya’s installation “Fog Life” was the most successful exhibition in the history of Haus der Kunst. A more sustainable institutional policy also includes administrative decisions, such as longer exhibition periods. Or that for the current exhibition – with one exception – no art transport was necessary and no art insurance was paid.
When he took office, Lissoni said he wanted the cumbersome house to “fly like a spaceship.” The Joan Jonas retrospective shows how serious he is about international flight altitude.
Joan Jonas: Until February 26, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstr. 1, hausderkunst.de
Catalogue: Hirmer Verlag, 29.90 euros