Nobody influenced performance art quite like Joan Jonas, who rose to prominence in the 1960s when experimental art was an exciting new frontier. With her five-decade career, the New York artist has paved the way for not only video artists and performance artists but also women who danced between both spaces with improvisational spirits.
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She forged the path, but as Jonas explains in the wall text of “Joan Jonas: Good Night, Good Morning,” now at MoMA, you can’t turn someone into an artist. “You can only give the possibility of trying things out, how to improvise, how you find something, how you translate something into a form.”
Jonas, now 87 years old, got her start as a sculptor in the early 1960s but is widely known in the art world for Mirror Piece I, her breakout 1969 piece in which performers holding rectangular mirrors moved before the audience, whose images became part of the performance.
The MoMA show is a celebration of Jonas’ lifetime body of works, with more than 100 videos, photos, drawings and installations dating from 1968 to the present—many of which have been largely overlooked until now. Jonas is........