Screening Room: Joan Jonas
The third chapter of Screening Rooms is devoted to Joan Jonas, a central figure in the development of performance, video and installation who has relentlessly pushed the boundaries of contemporary art in over five decades of artistic practice. After studying sculpture and art history, in the late 1960s and early 1970s she became one of the founding figures of performance in New York, where the artist was born and still lives and works. Throughout her career Jonas has made works employing a complex vocabulary of moving images, gestures, representations, and narratives, often collaborating with visual artists and musicians. In the artist’s videos, performances, and installations, which draw upon a range of sources, from fairy tales to essays, from myths to local folklore, these materials find new relationships to contemporary life, both poetically and politically. Screening Room 03: Joan Jonas presents a selection of four single channel video works which place key aspects of the artist’s past two decades of output into focus.
Jonas’ video works, which often evolve alongside her performances and installations, exemplify the artist’s unique approach to non-linear narration and circular repetition, renewed and ever different in each of her films as well as in her entire body of work. Developed over two years of travelling, to realize Flawless Decoys (2017), Jonas collected images of birds in Singaporean markets, motorcycle traffic and street scenes in Vietnam as well as the South-East Asian rainforest and rivers. The flow of time follows the manipulation of images, which are juxtaposed, created, captured. A portion of the footage is projected and captured again in Joan’s New York studio, becoming a backdrop for performative actions which include the generation of drawings. Several of Jonas’ video works are also components of installations; Flawless Decoys is part of Stream or River, Flight or Pattern (2016-2017).
Animals and the “natural” world have been recurring touchstones in Jonas’ multifaceted practice, especially in her works on paper. Birds, dogs, bees, fish, snakes are just some of the animals that constellate the artist’s world of drawing. In recent years Jonas has turned her attention towards the creatures that inhabit our oceans, as seen in her exhibition project Moving Off the Land; first presented in Venice at Chiesa di San Lorenzo, the work is currently installed at the Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid.
Also presented as a performance at Dia:Beacon with original piano score by Jason Moran, Joan Jonas created the installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004-2006) in response to writings by German art historian Aby Warburg about his visit to the American Southwest in 1896. The two video works presented below, as well as the drawing, relate to this project.
In Mirror Improvisation (2005) a convex mirror – like a fisheye lens – distorts and reflects the image of two women in pink tutus and tall green paper hats, moving about on a sloping field by the woods, as they arrange and rearrange objects. The construction of a structure in front of the camera’s fixed point of view sees a succession of grey sawhorses, paper flags, round and square hammers, swords, metal hoops in an accelerated and slowed-down play.
The video Wolf Lights (2004-2005) is built on two layers: details of flashing gold and red neon signs on casino marquees in Las Vegas are the background to a female performing wearing a wolf-like mask. American musician and composer Jason Moran, a long time collaborator of Jonas, plays vibrantly in the background, giving a voice to the shimmering lights with the piano.
Magic Marker on paper
75 × 56 cm
Waltz (2003) is a performance piece paying homage to 18th-century French outdoor theater, incorporating mythology as well as spontaneously occurring events into the narrative. The flags, which the artist has often incorporated in her performances, play here as banners, bringing evocative colors to the stage; Jonas refuses to attach them to any specific symbolism, and yet are able to vividly recall natural elements and historical events. The representation of female figures, which are prominently featured in works such as Waltz, has been a major concern in Jonas’ practice and can be traced back to her early experiments with mirrors and video as well as the artist’s drawing production.
I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, draw, erase—memory erased.
– Joan Jonas