The Objects, the Rituals, the Reel of Things: Video Works by Joan Jonas
November 8, 2007 - November 29, 2007
Like other artists of the late 1960s, Joan Jonas found herself occupying an interstitial position between the reigning disciplines of Minimalism, with its airtight reduction, and Pop art, with 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—through which her female alter-ego beheld its own shifting identity. Over time, Jonas wed the properties of video technology to her self-reflexive study of female identity. In her most accomplished works, the medium itself becomes a full partner in the mythical space of storytelling. As a companion to the installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things in the BAM Galleries, join us for two alluring evenings of Joan Jonas’s video work, illuminating her groundbreaking ventures in a theater of the self.
Steve Seid
Video Curator
Thursday, November 8, 2007
7:30 p.m. Program 1
Jonas explores reflections and reversals, identity and alter ego in four early works, including her first performance using video. Also, a rare screening of two intercut fairy tales of desire and loss, shot in the Berkeley Art Museum in 1980.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
7:30 p.m. Program 2
In four video pieces inspired by myth and science fiction, Jonas works with actors Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter, and Tilda Swinton and artist Richard Serra, among others. But the real star is Jonas, beautifully manipulating image, place, and time.
