Somewhere in the stratosphere between Ohio and New York, cumbersome bodies bumping against pockets of turbulence, my mind turned to the title of Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem, “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World.” Pinched into a cylinder of insulated metal, a meager woven band straining around my onerous hips, I was struck by how ridiculous it was that we are so accustomed to being hinged this tenuously to the earth. Or perhaps with climate change accelerating, social contracts upending, and futures shuttling toward uncertainty, air travel is too old hat to warrant any particular notice. But the poem assumed especial poignancy for me on that flight, having just seen the exhibition Joan Jonas: From Wind to Rivers to the Abyssal Plain at the Gund, curated by Daisy Desrosiers, director and chief curator of the generously appointed museum on the bucolic grounds of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Jonas’s elliptical, interdisciplinary practice—spanning drawing, installation, performance, sculpture, and video—has long explored art-making as directly adjacent to, or as an extension of, the body and its connection with environmental predicaments to which we cannot help but surrender. While often taking a ritualistic form, her work nonetheless offers only conditional transcendence, harnessed, irreparably as it is, to the earthly elements that determine our lived experience.
This tight pendant of an exhibition features only the two works mentioned in the title, The Wind (1968), the artist’s first film, and Rivers to the Abyssal Plain (2021), a more recent installation of a film and attendant drawings. Together, they function less as bookends tracing a body of work that famously eschews structural impositions of beginnings and endings than as participants in an intimate conversation, seemingly initiated some time ago that only now has become privy to the rest of us.
As the exhibition opened with Rivers to the Abyssal Plain, we began with Jonas’s attention closer to the present moment. Clipped to wires stretched like clotheslines, paper adorned with Jonas’s signature idiomatic gestures stood in for bedsheets. These drawings conjured both animals—pastel clumps of anemone or an angular origami fox (long a leitmotif for the artist)—and landscapes—yellow shapes and blue squiggles resemble sections of Manhattan and other cartographical schema of land abutting water. Closest to the looping film was a small drawing—perhaps a rudimentary diagram of a heart, the necks of its sienna chambers, trussed by pink veins, bending toward each other like loving companions. The film, complex and irreducible, is composed of diverse tableaux, temporal and spatial layers that circle about themselves, reflexively, cohering momentarily into affixed scenes: an action, a figure, a world. In one moment, the artist and another woman stalk the beach at dusk, carrying large walking sticks as the waves curdle against their feet; in a subsequent shot, the artist and a male compatriot, both dressed in white, attempt to draw on long strips of paper that alternately wrap around and fly away from their bodies in the wind. Against other configurations of people and materials, rear-screen and superimposed projections obscure, sometimes fuss, but more often animate an enigmatic mise-en-scène of scrolling human and environmental entanglements.
Installation view of Joan Jonas, Rivers to the Abyssal Plain, 2021. On view at The Gund at Kenyon College Spring 2025. Image by Luke Stettner.
In its near inexplicability, Rivers to the Abyssal Plain recalls Annie Dillard’s brief chronicle of her solitary life on the Puget Sound, Holy the Firm (1977), in which she gives ambiguous warning: “Nothing is going to happen in this book. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.” Her provision is aptly applied here as well. Little happens in this film, despite its lyrical voiceover—at least, hardly anything that could be considered narrative. The shards and scrims of part knowledge that flutter in transparent lozenges across the screen open into shifting points of view and nebulous meaning. And the violence, perhaps less minimal than Dillard’s, is still unintentional, without agency: it’s in the digitized geothermal rendering of the undersea abyssal plains caused by abrading tectonic plates; it’s in the pushing and tugging of conflicting weather fronts destabilizing the air that whips sleeves, skirts, and hair into frenzies. This violence, albeit agnostic to its targets, nonetheless hints at the off-screen dangers looming in our days of catastrophe. It is not, as Dillard maintains, eternity that clips time, but the quick and merciless shears of our ecological fate.
While drawing is central to Rivers to the Abyssal Plain, it is the wind, a dynamic, invisible force, that activates the film, indexing its trace not by mark-making but in the movement of what it encounters. It is also the thematic tie between the two works in this exhibition. The Wind, Jonas’s initial foray into merging film and performance, matches the elaborate intricacy of the later work with its own simple, yet captivating, intuitive spark. The kinship is clear: the wintry Long Island beach in which the titular current of air billows and knocks about a group of women as they attempt rudimentary actions and haphazard choreography; a fanciful pair of figures adorned with mirrors grapevine along the background, adding a sense of shamanistic whimsy. The silence of the film does little to void the presence of the wind. One need not hear it bluster in our ears, nor even feel its briskness against our cheeks—just seeing its material effects on the participants registers its presence powerfully enough. However, the film resounds with a sense of joy in collaboration and experimentation, as witnessed by the huddle of women in the foreground who try and fail to carry one another, remove their coats, or fall to the ground bound together.
And yet, the wind here does not evoke dread or fear: its violence is reduced to playful toying, as if both the humans and the weather are in on the joke—revealed in the stolen smiles and laughter on the faces of the women in close-up as they struggle to remove their coats. This glee is crucial and not to be taken lightly. It reminds viewers today, so pinioned to rigid categories and earnest expectations in art, that the jubilance of trying something new—the near limitless possibilities of the body as a medium to communicate, document, and create when married to the newly available technology of film—was born not only of conceptual rigor, but also of an excited spirit. So palpably is the wind made manifest in this film that when walking back through Rivers to the Abyssal Plain, I was almost shocked to see its drawings still hanging motionless.
Installation view of Joan Jonas, Rivers to the Abyssal Plain, 2021. On view at The Gund at Kenyon College Spring 2025. Image by Luke Stettner.
Jonas has said, “Art is a way of talking about the world, and the world is a way of talking about art.” This looping discourse that she describes is reminiscent of the correspondence between interior and exterior life that Leo Bersani elaborates in his essay, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” published in Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (2006). He argues against the antagonism inherent in “subject-object dualism” by offering a chiasmatic statement similar to Jonas’s: “The world finds itself in the subject and the subject finds itself in the world.” This “specific syntax of being” made up of the “perpetual and imperfect recurrences” that he notices emerging in works of art (writing, film, painting, etc.) speaks to the array of similar forms, gestures, and images that echo across both of the works in the exhibition. I recall the two women tied to each other falling on the sand in The Wind and remember the drawing of the heart in Rivers to the Abyssal Plain—the shape of these bodies mirrors the paired ventricles, each embracing the other. Jonas’s open-ended congruencies in these two works speak of our aesthetic relation between world and self—and to how we are bound up in one another. Through this understanding we bear witness, as Bersani maintains, to the idea that “we are born into various families of singularity that connect us to all the forms that have, as it were, always anticipated our coming, our presence.” In Dillard’s far less psychoanalytically oriented vision of the world, she comes to a similar conclusion, observing that “there is the no man’s land of many things wherein they dwell, and from which I seek to call them, in work that’s mine.” Jonas’s singular practice challenges such proprietary structures via its collaborative energy, its readiness to improvise with nature, and its unrestricted sense of cross-genre exploration. As such, what she seeks and calls forth in these films, drawings, sculptures, and performances offer her viewers ample plentitudes for association, identification, and interpretation.
Throughout our time on earth, each of us spars with the elements, and yet for Jonas, the frost’s hoar, the wind’s bite, the sea’s indifference are not antagonists but her lifelong collaborators. In both parts of this exhibition, she (as we all do) darts and dissembles in front of larger forces, grappling, often futilely, with its eventualities and our own—namely, a sense of mortality continually left unresolved. Back in the turbulence-pummeled plane, I gripped the armrests until my knuckles blanched and whispered prayers that I learned as a child, even though I no longer believe in them. Is this what is so ridiculous—not the solace of faith but the consuming power of fear? Caught up in these paranoid loops of understanding the world, we harness ourselves so anxiously to inherited conventions and familiar patterns that we forget the thrill of letting go and embracing the unknown.
Jonas’s work may be enigmatic, but it does not traffic in the so-called mysteries of life. Rather, she fearlessly shows us the strangeness intrinsic to its complexities by unraveling such assumed myths and standards into new and possibly oracular forms. In one section of Rivers to the Abyssal Plain, we see the artist alone at night, syncopated in digital pixels as she runs along the surf with her dog. A spotlight seems to hover around her, as if assisting in a search. Perhaps that edge of sea and earth is the brink of Dillard’s no-man’s-land, and Jonas is seeking new things to call into her care—forms that have always already been there, just waiting for us to see them. Imagine what else could be found washed up on the beach by the waves, brought forth by the rising wind, or illuminated by the lambent stars of twilight.
