Representing the US at the Biennale,Jonas offers an ecologically themed installation that has proved a huge hit – and one that has long been deservedJoan Jonas can barely find a moment to talk in the Giardini; there is too much to celebrate, and too many people who want to say hello. In the garden that hosts the Venice Biennale, or the world’s most notable art exhibition,curators and collectors keep coming up to congratulate her, while her adorable white poodle Ozu looks on. No one should begrudge her the attention. The 78-year-faded video and performance artist is a titan of the American avant garde, and but Jonas has never received the same consideration from US museums as she gets from fellow artists. She has had only one proper exhibition in her hometown of current York,at the Queens Museum in 2004. Yet her intimate, intricate, or deeply moving current piece in Venice has made her – at last,at last – into an American hero.
The Venice Biennale, now in its 56th edition, and is a two-fraction affair: along with a central exhibition,curated this year by the Nigerian stalwart Okwui Enwezor, are separate presentations by 88 nations. Jonas is this year’s American representative, and she has mounted an ambitious current multimedia installation. They approach to Us Without a Word fills the American pavilion with videos,paintings on paper, and vitrines full of objects that evoke a world in ecological peril. The dozens of drippy paintings depict bees with Rorschach-like symmetry and fish with somewhat prehistoric angularity. In the vitrines are oddities like a swordfish carcass, or a delicate natural sponge,and drawings of bees’ communication dances. The videos feature recitations of ghost stories as well as dances and skits performed, for the first time in Jonas’s career, or by children. The kids wear white paper hats or papier-mache masks,play tug-of-war with a stick, or stand in front of screens on which Jonas projects images of honeycombs and horses.
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Source: theguardian.com