Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning – Hardcover

Edited by Ana Janevski with Lilia Rocio Taboada. With contributions by Brandon Eng, Danielle Jackson, Piper Marshall, Chus Martínez, Jason Moran, Lilia Rocio Taboada, Molly Superfine, Gee Wesley, and Gillian Young. Photographic portfolio by Zoe Leonard When the portable video camera became available in the late 1960s, Joan Jonas was one of the first artists to explore its meaning as a technology capable of capturing the fleeting moment of a live performance, and to explore ways to fashion herself into a subject for it. Over her five-decade career, Jonas has continued to draw on these early investigations, translating them into different mediums, combining performance, video, and objects into artworks that defy categorization. Published in conjunction with a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this volume showcases Jonas's ever-expanding archive of images, sounds, gestures, ideas, and places. The entwining of her artwork, teaching, and personal life is revealed through an extensive selection of archival and contemporary images, accompanied by excerpts from oral-history interviews with her friends, collaborators, and former students. An essay by curator Ana Janevski considers the challenges of exhibiting an artist resistant to traditional labels and timelines; three shorter essays focus on forms and themes that flow through Jonas's oeuvre. In Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning , these images and texts, along with newly commissioned photographs of Jonas's living and working spaces in New York and Nova Scotia by Zoe Leonard, present the work of a singularly complex contemporary artist, one whose legacy continues to fascinate and inspire. 200 pp.; 220 illus.