{"id":2081418,"date":"2026-08-06T14:18:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T11:18:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2081418"},"modified":"2026-08-06T14:18:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T11:18:26","slug":"how-jonathan-gonzalez-became-the-performance-artist-of-the-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2081418","title":{"rendered":"How Jonathan Gonz\u00e1lez Became the Performance Artist of the Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tThis past May, on one of the first warm days of an unusually frigid spring in New York, two friends seized on the good weather and decided to have cocktails on the Whitney Museum\u2019s eighth floor terrace. They chatted and laughed\u2014and then were quickly interrupted by a woman in a white leotard that looked as though it had been splashed with paint. The woman got up on their table and gleefully pretended to tap dance, drawing an amused crowd of onlookers. \u201cA typical Friday night in New York,\u201d one security guard drily mused to another before walking away.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe friends eventually grew bored and went back to their cocktails, but the rest of the viewers continued watching as the dancer descended the museum\u2019s outdoor staircase and linked up with four others below. The performers staged what appeared to be some kind of dance battle, creating a circle near sculptures by David Smith and Barnett Newman. One by one, the dancers extravagantly performed in the center of the circle. Then they appeared to teach each other their moves. \u201cOh, okay, okay, I get it!\u201d one of the dancers exclaimed, leaping around with a smile. Less than a half hour later, all of these dancers disappeared without much explanation.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat was this? A flash mob, a rehearsal of a sort, some kind of prank? It turned out that one of the onlookers, dressed unostentatiously in a deep blue T-shirt and a brown jacket, was masterminding it all: Jonathan Gonz\u00e1lez, whose performance magic hour\u2013golden time<\/em>, was premiering that night as part of the 2026 Whitney Biennial. The thrilling, beguiling work lasted for a hypnotic three hours; this was merely its second act, with the third, a 60-minute-long bow staged in a part of the Whitney that\u2019s inaccessible to the public, following afterward.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking in July by Zoom, Gonz\u00e1lez told me that they designed magic hour<\/em> so that its dancers start apart and gradually come together. The second hour, they said, was called \u201carchive body.\u201d The dancers \u201ctry to recall every dance they\u2019ve ever danced over the course of their life. It can be very playful, because they\u2019re remembering doing a ballad when they were five, or doing a very serious modern dance when they were 10, or doing a West African course in college, or [referencing] the random scenarios of a life of labor of being an artist. They\u2019re also sharing in the game of telephone gestures with each other from afar.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s words, magic hour<\/em> asked: \u201cWhat is the choreography of the group? How do we consider the psychology of the group?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jonathan Gonz\u00e1lez, magic hour\u2013golden time<\/em>, 2026<\/span>Photo Julieta Cervantes<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThese are the questions that have animated many of Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s performances of the past half-decade, which have often centered around the power of Black collectivity. The performances have gained the artist a loyal following within the New York art world, with works staged in venues ranging from MoMA PS1 to the Kitchen, where Gonz\u00e1lez debuted a new commission, Swerve Fatigue<\/em>, earlier this year. Later this month, Gonz\u00e1lez will premiere another commission, for Pittsburgh\u2019s Carnegie International. Their participation in that show makes them the only artist to appear in the current editions of both the International and the Whitney Biennial, the two top recurring art exhibitions in the US\u2014a feat, considering that Gonz\u00e1lez has yet to turn 40.<\/p>\n

\n\tOften unfurling over the course of entire afternoons and evenings, Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s knotty, hypnotic works typically test the expectations (and patience) of viewers, who are left to figure out what\u2019s improvised and what isn\u2019t. The dancers move without much regard for the audience, and the performances can, at times, seem to be more for Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s troupes than the people watching them.<\/p>\n

\n\tViewing one of these works can be frustrating and electric simultaneously, especially because the performances ceaselessly switch form and genre as they churn on. PRACTICE<\/em>, a 2022 work staged outside the Clemente in the Lower East Side featured dance, poetry, and DJ sets in a broader exploration of \u201cthe critical through-lines of creolized expressive arts formed within the greater Caribbean and Turtle Island,\u201d as Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s description put it. (Turtle Island is the name some Indigenous peoples use to refer to North America.) Spectral Dances<\/em>, a 2023 commission staged Uptown, at Arts and Letters, took place partially in a library, suggesting a connection to the written word that extends throughout Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s practice. (They have written one book, titled Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars<\/em>, and are working on another, planned as a travelogue, a memoir, and a theoretical tract all in one.)<\/p>\n

\n\tGonz\u00e1lez is \u201csingular in transmuting language, movement, sound, touch, atmosphere, durational recurring collaboration, intellectual entanglements (like questions of Black life, dance theory, and queer study, which includes queer nightlife), and the archival record,\u201d said Angelique Rosales Salgado, an assistant curator at the Kitchen who worked closely with Gonz\u00e1lez on Swerve Fatigue<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Ananda Naima Gonz\u00e1lez, India Lena Gonz\u00e1lez, Marguerite Hemmings, Kingsley Ibeneche, and AJ Wilmore in Jonathan Gonz\u00e1lez, Swerve Fatigue<\/em>, 2026.<\/span>Photo Elvin Tavarez<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDanielle A. Jackson, a curator at Artists Space and an organizer of this year\u2019s Carnegie International, recalled the thrill of seeing PRACTICE<\/em>, saying, \u201cWhat excited me most was never knowing when an action would emerge. The audience\u2019s movements and conversations also felt folded into the work rather than existing outside it. PRACTICE<\/em> seemed to be breaking open form, disrupting conventional ideas of the stage and performance. It had already begun before I arrived, and I imagined it continuing long after I left.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite the epic length of these works and their unusual locations\u2014one from 2023 took place in a gallery of Anselm Kiefer\u2019s paintings at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts\u2014the performances resist becoming the kind of sprawling, theatrical pieces that go viral on social media. Most of the time, Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s performances consist of little more than a few committed dancers, without any elaborate sets or noisy music to accompany them.<\/p>\n

\n\tName-checking a range of influential Black theorists, from Fred Moten to Tina Post, Gonz\u00e1lez said their work was opposed to the sense of \u201cspectacle and virtuosity\u201d that many people associate with dance, and that they instead cast dancers who exhibit \u201ca level of transparency and sincerity when that\u2019s asked for, and a level of austerity when that\u2019s asked for.\u201d (Displaying what Gonz\u00e1lez described as \u201cidiosyncratic behavior\u201d is also a plus.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHow can I create an experience where the performers can feel a sense of liberation, that they actually are able to work with Black mundanity, Black quietude, Black abstraction, stillness?\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez asked. \u201cSlowness, mundanity, ineptitude, boredom: these are things that they\u2019re typically not given as qualities to work through. Duration allows them to access that, and it tends to be extremely liberating for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThreaded through these works is also an interest in what can and cannot be seen. In magic hour<\/em>, the Whitney performance, dancers would frequently point at nothing, as though they were calling attention to invisible spirits. And speaking of invisibility in a different sense, Drew Sawyer, co-curator of the Biennial, also pointed out that the last act of magic hour<\/em>, the \u201cextended bow,\u201d could only be viewed by leaving the museum and crossing seven lanes\u2019 worth of traffic. The performance \u201caligns with their general interest in this tension between what is visible and what is invisible. What does it mean to be seen, especially within, say, an art historical tradition, and especially within the history of Black visibility?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGonz\u00e1lez cast the work in terms that some might use to describe a haunting, asking: \u201cHow do you pay attention to all of this life in the air? There\u2019s ghosts, there\u2019s futures, there\u2019s residue in this building\u2014there\u2019s sweat from colonial histories that reside in brick and concrete for centuries. What would it mean when you\u2019re watching my work to see that?\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jonathan Gonz\u00e1lez, magic hour\u2013golden time<\/em>, 2026<\/span>Photo Julieta Cervantes<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBorn in 1991 in New York to a family with Cuban and Dominican heritage, Gonz\u00e1lez trained as a classical musician and attended a visual arts program at Trinity College, where they took courses in anthropology and architecture. Finding themselves \u201cintrigued by how the body was a political site,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez began crossing disciplines, turning to the work of an array of Black thinkers from a spread of fields, from the choreographies of Ralph Lemon to the writings of architecture historian Mabel O. Wilson. \u201cI was always trying to understand: What is the role of the written word, what is the role of the performing body, what is the role of the object?\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez said. Their MFA studies in dance at Sarah Lawrence College and subsequent performances became a way to answer those questions.<\/p>\n

\n\tGonz\u00e1lez\u2019s work took a turn with Looking for Lucifer I<\/em> (2018), a performance and installation commissioned for MoMA PS1\u2019s courtyard. During the making of the work, Gonz\u00e1lez traveled to the Caribbean and visited ritual spaces associated with Santer\u00eda and Candombl\u00e9, two Afro-syncretic religions. According to both belief systems, there are \u201cforces that allow you to enter into the space of spirit,\u201d Gonz\u00e1lez said. They realized their performances could allow dancers to act as vessels for a similar kind of spiritual experience.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn particular, Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s works enable his performers to obliquely animate histories of resistance and refusal. Looking for Lucifer I<\/em>, as well as a similarly titled sequel made for the Abrons Art Center, was in part a tribute to CHARAS, a Puerto Rican community organization known for building geodesic domes in the New York neighborhood of Loisaida. Gonz\u00e1lez also studied the poetry of June Jordan, who called for the creation of more green space in Harlem. In weaving their ideas into a dance performance, Gonz\u00e1lez was trying \u201cnot to impose this linear, rational idea that we know everything that\u2019s here with us and everything that\u2019s ever come before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTheir Carnegie performance, a four-hour piece about Black steel workers in Pittsburgh that\u2019s called The Strikebreakers<\/em>, continues the artist\u2019s research-heavy process. With Jackson, the Carnegie International co-curator, Gonz\u00e1lez visited Carrie Furnace, a disused site once used by a steel company owned by Andrew Carnegie, whose arts patronage gave the Carnegie Museums their name; Gonz\u00e1lez also interviewed Black steel workers\u2019 families and Tony Buba, the documentarian behind several films about steelworks in the Pittsburgh area.<\/p>\n

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Jonathan Gonz\u00e1lez, Spectral Dances<\/em>, 2024.<\/span>American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, 2026<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHow exactly will that performance, which will debut on a sprawling staircase inside the Carnegie Museum of Art on August 14, play out? Gonz\u00e1lez didn\u2019t provide many details, but if it\u2019s like their past work, The Strikebreakers<\/em> will reflect all their research without ever explaining it away. Of their process, Gonz\u00e1lez said, \u201cIt\u2019s a commitment to understanding that history can be qualitatively, instead of quantitatively, reperformed. It can be sensed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThey continued, \u201cThere are always gaps when you try to represent Black life, and I think the quantitative and qualitative thrust, sociologically, when we think about Black life, is to talk about its victimization. What I\u2019m actually trying to insist upon is the history of collectivity, life, and possibility that is always occurring under dispossession. Dispossession is the condition, but there\u2019s also all this life that is happening there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Headshot.-Rudy-Gerson.jpeg?w=1024″] This past May, on one of the first warm days of an unusually frigid spring in New York, two friends seized on the good weather and decided to have cocktails on the Whitney Museum\u2019s eighth floor terrace. They chatted and laughed\u2014and then were quickly interrupted by a woman in a white leotard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2081418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2081418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2081418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2081418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2081418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2081418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2081418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}