Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things
The Objects, the Rituals, the Reel of Things: Video Work by Joan Jonas
Like other artists of her generation, Joan Jonas found herself occupying an interstitial position between the reigning disciplines of art. The time was the late sixties, when an emergent Minimalism, with its airtight reduction, vied for attention with Pop art and its exuberant embrace of mass culture.
For Jonas, a sculptor’s adherence to space informed a fragile theatricality, laced with ritualized movement, telling objects, and an alchemical agency. This “space between” was also occupied by the artist’s body, propelled across a playing field littered with symbolic forms, archetypal costumery, and painterly traces. Jonas’s practice was essentially a theater of the self in which the artifactual female beheld her own shifting identity, but from a critical distance.
Over time, Jonas edged closer to the electronic, first incorporating video into her performance, and then entering fully into the embrace of the televisual. Her earliest videotapes, dated approximately 1972 to 1976, charted the innate properties of the medium, joining a phenomenological investigation of electronic diffusion to a self-reflexive study of female identity.
Like a subsuming kaleidoscope, Vertical Roll (1972), Jonas’s most rigorous and notable video work, appropriates a technical flaw—a destabilized signal—and reinvents it as an energetic formal device. Inside the ever-rolling image, Jonas, using several guises reminiscent of her alter ego Organic Honey, constructs a self-portrait that seems impossibly disjunctive. Her identity is prisoner to a (reproductive) mechanism that resists stabilization, resists the calm of integration. The rhythmic crack of a spoon hitting a hard surface accompanies the unnerving picture “roll,” at once a signal of distress and a tapping to readjust the technology.
Expanding on the notion of instability, Jonas applied the poetic metaphors of mirror and fragment in works like Left Side Right Side (1972) and Disturbances (1974). Here, literal mirrored images collided with their electronic counterparts, creating complex reversals that denied the unified self in videospace.
To heighten this fragmentation, Jonas also used masks, veils, and an ornate wardrobe, adding masquerade to misidentification. Jonas continued to develop a highly emblematic, somewhat cryptic grammar of space, ritual, and gesture while seeking out the ever-elusive integrated female self. These works unfolded not with linear delineation but in associative patterns that built meaning around an almost ceremonial practice.
Not content to continue in this rich but primordial mode, Jonas began to play at the edges of narrative. Ritual movement and symbolism merged with fairy tale and fable to form a visual text of expanded potential—these enacted texts were now less hermetic; now, linearity and literary genre were themselves offered up as cultural objects for critique.
Just as Jonas had probed the primitive properties of earlier video technology, she now deployed advances in image manipulation as part of her idiosyncratic vocabulary. The medium itself became a full partner in the mythical space of storytelling. In these later works, such as Double Lunar Dogs (1984) and Volcano Saga (1989), images break up, splinter, and re-integrate; others replicate or assume unnatural form, simulating psychological and metaphysical states. These technologically astute works still resisted the lure of pure linearity, instead compressing spatial relationships into a stylish, conceptual video theater.
Though Jonas hasn’t created a single-channel video work in quite some time, she continues to employ the technology as a vital aspect of her dynamic performances and installations. In these settings, large-scale projected images divulge their meaning as displaced geographies, counter-narratives, and conjured characters. One of Jonas’s most recent assemblages, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004–05), a cross-cultural journey through the Southwest, relies on the almost architectural presence of video screens emitting their Hopi-inflected panoramas and props. A recent BAM/PFA acquisition, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is on view in Gallery 6. During the first part of the gallery exhibition’s run, in November 2007, PFA offered two alluring evenings of Joan Jonas’s video work, illuminating her groundbreaking ventures in the theater of the self.
Steve Seid
PFA Video Curator
