Joan Jonas

Born 1936 in New York, lives and works in New York



Galleries:
Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Santa Monica/CA
Yvon Lambert, New York/Paris/London


Right back to crucial earlier works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Joan Jonas has long been and remains one of the foremost practitioners of video and performance art. 

For her video Waltz, 2003, a small group of friends (and a prominent white dog) go down to the beach and out into the woods in Nova Scotia, dress up in odd costumes, arrange and rearrange several objects, and make an improvised, strangely magical performance, like an amateur theater troupe in the middle of nowhere. It is a playful and exuberant video, but it is also deeply touching, and seems haunted by immensities. You hear a lilting waltz played on a fiddle, and this music blends with the rough sounds of wind moving through the trees, the surging ocean, and clicking stones. The proceedings, with costumes and props, evoke eccentric carnival processions, while the work functions as a transformative excursion into nature⎯a major theme for Jonas through the years.

Mirror Improvisation, 2003, is another such excursion. Jonas, a young woman, and the same prominent dog frolic in an open field, but also seem to be enacting arcane rituals and fantasies. Reflected in a concave mirror, these goings on, accompanied by piano music, meld realism, abstraction, and delirious psychedelia. Throughout, Jonas expertly uses reflections and odd angles to make an otherwise prosaic natural setting seem dreamlike and wondrous, while the whole work easily traverses and combines several media, including live performance, video, music, and sculpture.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008–09: re.act.feminism, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
2008–09: Looking at Music, Museum of Modern Art, New York
2008: WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, P.S.1 MoMA, Long Island/NY
2007: Timelines: Transparencies in a Dark Room, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva

Bibliography:
Noemi Smolik, “Die Maske als Begleiterin,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 4, 2008
Joan Jonas. Timelines: Transparencies in a Dark Room, texts by Bartomeu Mari, Katya García-Antón, and Gregory Volk, exh. cat. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona 2007
Susan Morgan, Joan Jonas: I Want to Live in the Country, Cambridge/MA 2007
Joan Jonas: Five Works, ed. by Warren Niesluchowski and Valerie Smith, texts by Tom Finkelpearl and Joan Jonas, exh. cat. Queens Museum of Art, New York 2003
Joan Jonas, Performance, Video, Installation 1968–2000, ed. by Johann-Karl Schmidt, Ostfildern-Ruit 2001