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Review: Joan Jonas’s Venice Biennale Pavilion Is a Triumph

Joan Jonas's “Mirrors,” in a rotunda gallery, joins this artist’s multimedia installation, “They Come to Us Without a Word,” at the United States pavilion for the Venice Biennale.Credit...Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

VENICE — Performance art is a young person’s sport, most often pursued in heat, often accompanied by sensationalism and abandoned as stamina fades. But, at 78, Joan Jonas has avoided all of the above, quietly but determinedly elaborating performance into an immersive multimedia art form that has sustained her for more than five decades.

Now her moment has arrived in the form of a triumphal exhibition at the Venice Biennale. “They Come to Us Without a Word,” her multimedia installation piece, is one of the best solo shows to represent the United States at the biennale in over a decade — an effortless combination of maturity and freshness.

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“They Come to Us Without a Word,” an installation by Ms. Jonas, fills the United States pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.Credit...Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

Organized by the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the show doesn’t simply look back on a long and fruitful career: It extends that career. Linking the five spaces of the American pavilion into a great, yet intimate, chain of life with titles like “Bees,” “Fish” and “Mirrors,” this new work enriches and clarifies the increasingly accessible form of avant-gardism pursued by Ms. Jonas since the late 1960s.

In one of the short projected video scenes in “They Come to Us Without a Word,” Ms. Jonas sidles up, slightly crouched, to a grove of ripe wheat in an expanse of green grass. As she reaches her hands across the golden stalks, you realize she is rather awkwardly miming a harpist, seated at her instrument, plucking its strings. The moment is beautiful, comedic and brief, an improvised homage to the entwinement of nature, art and music. It is followed by other fleeting moments — a white dog swimming through light-shot water, or a broad bright beach receding into the distance, darkened only by the slanting shadow of the artist walking with a cane.

Ms. Jonas has never belabored things. Grasping performance art’s innate porousness from the onset, she incorporated video, made props double as installation elements, wove in drawings and the act of drawing, added music as well as narrative — all to explore both the universals of existence and the glorious and quirky particularities of human perception. The result here is an artwork that tends to be made, unmade and remade as we watch, its magical effects turned inside out.

The simple tricks of mirrors, silhouettes and shadows, of inverted or revolving cameras, or projected images layered together have long been part of Ms. Jonas’s repertory. Here they play against recorded tales about the doings of playful ghosts taken from oral histories of the residents of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, near where Ms. Jonas has long spent her summers.

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Ms. Jonas outside the American pavilion in Venice.Credit...Domenico Stinellis/Associated Press

Moving through the galleries, we hear of the “hiding people” who braid horses’ manes at night, and a talented self-taught violinist who used the same hair combined with a stick to make his first bow. The mysteries aimed at the eye and those aimed at the ear are equally alluring but never quite in agreement. And always, behind and beneath everything, is nature, the prime inspiration and the source of all materials, forms and structures.

Some of Ms. Jonas’s objects have been with her since the beginning, like the mirrors, the little school slates drawn with chalk or the tall conical hats made of white paper — simultaneously conjuring dunces, sorcerers and the commedia dell’arte — that are worn by the children, all dressed in white, that figure in several videos. Similarly, a pile of stout sticks lies near a projected video in which sticks are repeatedly jumbled by the children, to great percussive effect.

In the small central rotunda gallery named for them, the mirrors reach an apotheosis of sorts. Large handmade examples line the walls, capturing the reflections of a glass-drop chandelier, which also casts a marvelous shadow. On a small video monitor, we see the legs of a white dog walking on the beach, a GoPro apparently attached to its collar. Once again, Ms. Jonas’s acute percussive instincts contribute: A crunching sound — perhaps of someone walking on seashells — accompanies the dog’s progress, creating a delightful dissonance.

One of the most striking aspects of “They Come to Us Without a Word” is the wisdom with which it counters the biennale’s stressful onslaught of art. It meets this inherently distracted, distracting setting with a fragmentary structure that you begin to comprehend the minute you step into the work, looking and listening to its quiet flux of sights and sounds. There is no beginning and no end, and almost any span of attention is quickly rewarded.

The Biennale runs from Saturday through Nov 22.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Glittering Moment, Long in the Making. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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