At age 78, Joan Jonas is having a banner year. Earlier this month, the innovative video and performance artist opened a wide-ranging survey, “Light Time Tales,” on view through February 1 at Milan’s HangarBicocca. Owned by the tire manufacturer Pirelli, the dramatic exhibition space occupies a former factory that once produced railway cars, industrial machinery, and, yes, airplanes. More than 20 works by Jonas, mostly multi-channel installations, occupy a sprawling 43,000-square-foot gallery with soaring ceilings — and no interior walls. Jonas’s first retrospective in Italy, the well-timed show serves as a stunning and lyrical introduction to her work. Just a few months after it closes, the artist will represent the United States at the 2015 Venice Biennale“Light Time Tales” is a tour de force, cementing Jonas’s reputation as a restless artist who defies easy categorization. The massive exhibition, curated by Andrea Lissoni in close collaboration with Jonas, is a work of installation art in and of itself. Jonas reimagines her pieces each time they are presented, making this show a surprising encounter for even the most seasoned viewer. Even though she is typically historicized as an artist whose experimental works sprang from her studies in sculpture and engagement with film, she proves herself a master of the theatrical mise-en-scène.In the open exhibition architecture, the viewer is encouraged to be distracted by other works and to move at will. With only freestanding projections, clusters of props, and monitors, the show allows contemplation of Jonas’s evolving methods of presentation as well as her enduring themes. For example “Double Lunar Rabbits,” 2010, mounted on specially designed curvilinear screens, echoes the animal-centric theme of a neighboring video created for the show, “Beautiful Dog,” 2014. At the same time, installations are displayed with a discrete, immersive experience in mind. “Revolted by the Thought of Known Places…Sweeney Astray,” 1992/1994, a series of videos created with a Dutch theater company based on a medieval Irish epic, invites viewers to circle around and between projections. “Mirage,” 1976/1994/2005, brings together elements like performance stills, props, and former standalone videos, like “Good Night, Good Morning” of 1976 and a tape documenting a trip down a Berlin road, into a new constellation examining the artist’s themes of that decade: the phenomenological aspects of videomaking and the construction of female identity.For all its curatorial risk-taking, “Light Time Tales” equally considers the history of evolving technology. Two of Jonas’s early, excellent filmed performances — “Wind,” 1968, one of her first works to utilize mirrors, and “Songdelay,” 1973, an early filmed performance with dancers and props in desolate downtown Manhattan — are presented as large projections. Vintage monitors show a pared-down selection of single-channel videos from the 1970s. These include “Paul Revere” of 1971, a collaboration with the Minimalist artist (and Jonas’s former husband) Richard Serra that painstakingly dissects the logic of the proposition “one if by land, two if by sea,” and 1972’s groundbreaking “Vertical Roll,” which shows Jonas’s body seemingly fragmented in front of the formal device of rolling videotape.However, what makes this curatorial endeavor so special is not its reverence for the formal evolution in Jonas’s work, but rather its willingness to support the artist’s anti-formalism. That’s not to say that this work is iconoclastic. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. For Jonas, the objects of her work, like the ancient myths she draws upon, are so ripe — so alive — with possibility that rather than being static holdings, they are pieces of a score always ready to be tweaked, revised, and reanimated. (It’s no coincidence that “Reanimated,” her most recent installation based on the animistic themes of the book “Under the Glacier,” includes footage from a piece she made in the 1970s.)Standing in the middle of Jonas’s retrospective, distinct themes and gestures repeat from work to work. Elongated cones, circular shapes, and poles and sticks mimic and extend the body; drawings index performative gestures; mirrors create complex relationships between site, performer, and viewer; masks indicate transformation and ritual; animals and nature become objects of awe. Props, which can so often feel superfluous in visual art, here take on a shamanistic significance, acting almost as sentient beings in Jonas’s improvisatory interactions with them.Jonas often speaks of playing with “distance,” in the theatrical sense, between artist and viewer. This exhibition masterfully shows how that proposition can work in space. Among Jonas’s works there arise moments of conversation, confrontation, and accord, newly staged and directed by the artist. The viewer is but one lucky player.
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