Even the organization of the MoMA show demonstrates how much Jonas’ collective work defies easy collection or categorization. The process of selecting pieces, lots and lots of elements—masks, clothes, designs, headdresses, books, props—from such a long and varied career was a years-long effort for the museum, a puzzle that needed to be solved by both Jonas and by the curator of the show. similarly. Janevski and the curatorial team spent hours opening drawer after drawer full of sketches.
Drawing, for Jonas, had always been a kind of meditative practice, and he had desks filled with hundreds of projects on paper. Many are simple, even spare, but also exciting — evoking the energy and speed with which they were created. She designs to capture the world around her, she said, the way some people use cameras. but designs are also an innovative part of her performance. She is known for her disability as she draws: sketching looking not at paper, but instead at a screen that captures her drawing, or painting on canvas that covers her face so that the audience can see her making her own mask. they act both self-neutralizing and self-producing. “When I paint, I’m not in total control,” he said. “So for me, design is also a kind of adventure. That’s what interests me, is to have an image that I didn’t expect.” (Jonas’ designs will also be on display in a major new exhibition also opening 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 imagined doll-sized exhibit configurations and mock-ups of various museum spaces, each for a different upcoming show, fill the tables. Looking at the 6-by-7-foot model for her exhibition, which even at that scale captured the sweep of her works, Jonas wondered about some 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 themselves. Janevski assured her that he would be there. Making the show clear and readable involved difficult choices, given the vast amount of rich historical material in Jonas’ home and basement, including a trove of notebooks and sketches and journal entries from the 70s. When the process was far enough along that minimal additions could be made, the curators discovered that Jonas had more notebooks from the following decades that she hadn’t exactly hidden but hadn’t reported either. In the process of curation, she had revealed herself to be, as she is in her art, visible and impossible to find.
The model revealed little about the new job for the show. Jonas already knew a lot: Along with that whale giving way to new life, it would include a vampire squid, dancing figures, music and video. But like many of Jonas’ works, it would likely change over time and become part of an entirely new one. “It didn’t happen,” she said and flashed her small smile. “I’m never done.”
Photo Assistant: Josh Matthews