Joan Jonas’s MoMA Show Reveals Unexpected Influence: Japanese Culture

In a vitrine in Joan Jonas’s exhibition at MoMA lies a peculiar artifact: a Noh drama notation book open to facing pages showing a schematic on the left and columns of calligraphy on the right. Upon encountering the 14th-century Japanese theatrical tradition, Jonas wrote in a journal displayed beside the book (a souvenir from a trip she took in her mid-30s): “The Noh was the deepest in the La Monte Young sense.”

At the start of the 1970s, Jonas, who was born in New York, had been exposed to the downtown avant-garde scene populated by the likes of Young—a minimalist composer and Fluxus member whose influences included Japanese classical music—but had not yet discovered a formal language that resonated with her. As subtly argued throughout “Good Night Good Morning,” Noh is the skeleton key to Jonas’s oeuvre. In the artist’s first New York retrospective, MoMA’s sixth-floor galleries demonstrate how Jonas effectively deconstructed and assimilated the basic formal elements of Noh—woodblock acoustics; slow, simple gestures; and the use of masks—into five decades of performances, videos, and installations.

Following her first trip to Japan with the late Richard Serra, Jonas performed Jones Beach Dance (1971) on the Long Island shore. Commandeering a tidal flat, she placed a ladder in the sand and stood on it while holding a large rectangular mirror, which beamed sunlight toward an audience more than a thousand feet away. In Richard Landry’s photographs of the performance displayed in the first gallery of the exhibition, one sees Jonas on the ladder, as well as the wooden blocks she struck to create the piece’s sonic atmosphere. In the same gallery, crisp, resonant clacks issue from Songdelay (1973), a black-and-white video projection transferred from 16mm film. In one sequence, a performer stands in front of a passing boat in Lower Manhattan striking two blocks overhead. The figure, centered in the frame but filmed at a distance, appears small and remote, like a ceremonial functionary.

In Japan, Jonas purchased a Sony Portapak, a newly released handheld camera that proved crucial to her practice. In her SoHo loft, Jonas used it to film her well-known work Vertical Roll (1972),a 20-minute closed-circuit video performance that alternatingly exposes and occludes parts of her body by way of an ongoing televisual glitch. The richly saturated photographs of Béatrice Heyligers show Jonas executing a performance adaptation of Vertical Roll at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1973. In one of these images, Jonas wears a crown of peacock feathers, her face covered by a plastic mask, its pearly surface flushed with rouge. The doll-face mask, procured from a sex shop in New York’s Times Square, transforms her into her alter ego, Organic Honey, whom she calls “an erotic electronic seductress.” It is remarkable how intuitively Jonas’s early video performances embody and extend the possibilities of masked choreography.

Other Japanese elements that appear in Jonas’s work—kimonos, ink art, shoji screens, and kites—serve as conspicuous markers of cultural difference that render the resulting works more complex and poignant. Jonas’s 1976 interpretation of a Brothers Grimm tale, The Juniper Tree, features a spare wooden house, a dried branch, an apple, a mask, drip-painted silk banners, and a pale blue kimono. Embroidered with red and gold blossoms, silver branches, green leaves, and opalescent birds, the garment hangs from a ladder, evoking a scene in the fairy tale in which a dead child beneath a juniper is resurrected as a songbird. Unlike the sound of woodblocks, which derive from Noh but could just as easily conjure the notion of a Western orchestra, the kimono is too specific in its material and design to shed its associations as a cultural signifier. This is perhaps why it catches the eye: it appears simultaneously melancholy and radiant, exalted and displaced, refusing to blend into its surroundings.

Ink features prominently in Jonas’s multimedia installation Double Lunar Rabbits (2010). In Japan, where the installation was first exhibited, the lunar rabbit is a figure in a myth from the Buddhist Jataka tales, where a rabbit sacrifices itself in a fire so that an old man may eat and, as a reward, has its image carved on the moon. Accordingly, seven works on paper arranged on a black wall depict a lean hare from various angles. Jonas’s blunt linework evokes the tactile sensation of someone scratching a faraway surface. Two shoji screens—room dividers used in domestic settings—displaying videos in which the performer Ayano Momoda wears a white bunny mask around the city of Kitakyushu complete the installation. Altogether, the component parts of Double Lunar Rabbits present an ambiguous and fragmentary reenactment of the myth, and generate a productive tension between the anonymizing powers of the mask and the specificity of the surrounding cultural cues that give it meaning. Over the years, Jonas’s commitment to cultural eclecticism has been premised on this sort of necessary tension, as well as a degree of distance and spontaneity. As if to illustrate this point, “Good Night Good Morning” concludes with By a Thread in the Wind (2014/2024), a work comprising three rows of hanging bamboo kites. With red, yellow, orange, and green surfaces that reprise the palette of The Juniper Tree’s wistful kimono, the kites evoke images of birds, gourds, houses, leaves, and fruit. Conceptually, they call back to Jonas’s early studies of how light, sound, and other signals travel through air and extend perception into space, connecting distant entities without subsuming one into the other.