Paper Trail: (Re)viewing Lines in the Sand and Other Key Works of Joan Jonas

During my third visit to the Joan Jonas exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art, I found myself mulling a comment I had read by Laurie Anderson, where she expressed a preference for large-scale multi-media stage productions over the more tempered realm of the gallery exhibition. "In a gallery, I need one idea to fill a room," she said, "On stage I need five hundred."¹ Perchance a visit (or two, or three—or four) to the Jonas exhibition is in order, where the complex, multivalent, revelatory work on view might rekindle Anderson's interest in the expansive possibilities of exhibition practice.

Is this an unfair jibe? Anderson's remark conveys an implicit and accurate critique of much gallery- and museum-based work privileging the easy read, a prêt à porter conceptualism and well-rehearsed strategizing satirized in Artnet's glib toasting of this year's Armory Show as artworld-manufactured "toys for the rich." The exacting pressures museums face to continually expand audiences, with a fast-food detail for service and delivery, only worsen matters for the not-for-profits.

The crux here is the nature of Jonas's exhibition, a five-work survey (expressly not a "retrospective") of production over four decades—its excess, to consciously draw from psychoanalysis. How fitting that the exhibition be extended, overspilling its scheduled time frame as well as the boundaries and expectations of a conventional gallery show. For the record, the actual number of works on view, as diagrammed in the exhibition handout, is eleven—exhibition title notwithstanding—with almost every piece refracting into a multiplying constellation of objects, images, and media. Viewer, be forewarned, this show antes up: expect more, get more, give more, have more.

In the "TV Dinner" discussion at the Kitchen, held in conjunction with the U.S. premier of Jonas's performance, Lines in the Sand: Helen in Egypt, a testy exchange sparked between Jonas and long-time admirer David Ross, the country's first video curator and former director of ICA Boston, the Whitney, and SF MoMA, over how to characterize her complex installations/exhibitions. Jonas insisted on a distinction being made between earlier presentations of work used and generated in concurrent performances, i.e., her mid-career retrospective curated by Ross at the Berkeley University Art Museum in 1980, and the current Queens exhibition, which, following the format of her Stedelijk and Stuttgart exhibitions—and the best of the three, Jonas added—actively addresses the problematics of an exhibition installation independent of performance. This evolution parallels the challenge the artist herself faces as a maturing performer sustaining and expanding a practice in which she is both no longer capable of and less interested in predominantly foregrounding herself.

Pace, Anderson, Jonas, and Ross. Yes, time-based spectaculars intended for collective audience reception sustain, require, and allow a nimble, successive and simultaneous multiplicity at risk in self-paced, individual viewership. Yes, the presentation of performance objects differs from the presentation of discrete sculptures or installation. And yes, an exhibition surveying the practice of performance art beguilingly mimics installation, comprising objects, images, and time-based media. Conceding each contesting view, however, leaves the matter of curatorial and exhibition approaches to work negotiating spatial and temporal modalities naggingly open-ended—which is precisely/imprecisely the point.

This restless unease is at the heart of the thematic exploration Jonas conducts and enacts in her work, from her early investigations into the possibility of female imaging (Organic Honey, 1972, and The Juniper Tree, 1976) to more recent projects engaging world events (the Mid-East conflict read through the Trojan War in Lines in the Sand, 2002) and the role of the artist in society (Revolted by the thought of known places . . ., 1992/2003). Her practice freely, though not easily, exchanges the subject/object coordinates securing viewer and performer position, shifting and conflating the viewer with the viewed as well as complicating tense frames in real-time and simultaneous performance, pre-recorded and closed-circuit video, and playback nesting. Queens Museum curator Valerie Smith posits an aggregate term, "performance...