Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning - by Ana Janevski & Joan Jonas & Lilia Rocio Taboada (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning is published in conjunction with the artist's most comprehensive retrospective in the United States, opening March 2024. Since her earliest performances in the late 1960s, Joan Jonas has concerned herself with animation and moving images, asking what it means to move images, or to be moved by images. The artist returns constantly to her ever-expanding archive of images, sounds, gestures, ideas, and places, reworking those materials into new forms across the decades. Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning spans more than fifty years of her remarkable career and features works in all media, including videos, drawings, notebooks, photographs, and major installations and performances. The richly illustrated publication features essays by curators and scholars that delve into the political, social, and historical impact of Jonas's working method, a suite of oral histories gathered specifically for this project, a fully illustrated chronology, and a new photographic portfolio by the artist Zoe Leonard"--

Book Synopsis

A comprehensive retrospective of work from one of the foremost performance artists to emerge from the 1970s

Since her earliest performances in the late 1960s, Joan Jonas has concerned herself with animation and moving images, asking what it means to move images, or to be moved by them. The artist constantly returns to her ever-expanding archive of images, sounds, gestures, ideas and places, reworking materials into new forms across the decades. Published in conjunction with the artist's most comprehensive retrospective in the United States, presented by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Good Night Good Morning spans more than 50 years of her remarkable career and features works in all mediums--including videos, drawings, notebooks, photographs and major installations and performances.
The abundantly illustrated publication features essays by curators and scholars that delve into the political, social and historical impact of Jonas' working method, a suite of oral histories gathered specifically for this project and a new photographic portfolio by the artist Zoe Leonard. Featuring extensive archival materials, many previously unpublished, this monograph sheds new light on Jonas' unique role as a trailblazing figure of video and performance, and highlights her enduring multimedia legacy for generations of younger artists.
Born in New York City in 1936, Joan Jonas is a pathmaking figure in video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015 she was the sixth woman artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

Review Quotes

How to be long-term luminous was the lesson taught by 'Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning' at the Museum of Modern Art, a six-decade survey of the still intensely active career of one of our most inventive contemporary artists.--Holland Cotter "The New York Times"

Different elements layer on top of each other, figuratively, juxtaposed, and affect a spectator in ways that can't be described instantly.--Lynne Tillman "Frieze"

Her installations, visually complex and textured, are dynamically personable on their own.--Holland Cotter "The New York Times: Arts"

In the process of being curated, she had revealed herself to be, as she is in her art, both visible and impossible to find.--Susan Dominus "The New York Times: Arts"