Joan JonaS

CuLt of

LateraL tHinking

Splits, Doubles, and Sleight of Hand in the Work of

From a mosaic of sound, image, and live performance, fragments emerge. A piercing screech. A giant field of glowing orange poppies. The unexpectedly violent noise of a metal hoop falling to the floor. A white dog jumping through hoops. A live vocal solo of heartbreaking intensity. A chaise longue in the middle of the woods. A living frieze of maenads. Joan Jonas in an outfit somewhere between Laocon and a Hopi kachina, a tower of paper snakes on her head and two staffs with twisted red snakes in her hands.
Jonass piece The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things was commissioned by Dia: Beacon in upstate New York, where it was performed in 2005 and again in 2006. There, it took a position alongside some of the major totems of high Minimalism and process artDonald Judds plywood constructions, Richard Serras massive steel ellipses, Bruce Naumans corridors, Joseph Beuyss felt stacks, Robert Smithsons mirror non-sites. Central to these works are spatial and phenomenological questions, strategies of repetition and inversion, questions of negative space and psychological addressthe same concerns that Jonas has explored and sometimes
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pioneered since the beginning of her career, circa 1968. She has collaborated with Serra, and Smithson regularly attended her performances, while her study with Trisha Brown and interest in the Judson Dance Theater, as well as her connections to composers like Alvin Lucier and Philip Glass, betoken a certain allegiance to Minimalist aesthetics. Yet Jonass project has long been what critic Douglas Crimp calls eccentric, for Jonas is profoundly engaged with the psychological effects of montage and with associative thinking; in her work, image, poetry, narrative, and psyche have structural weight.

By Judith RodenBeck

P o r t r a i t s b y dana Lixe n B e Rg

There are at least two routes into Jonass oeuvre. One emphasizes the repertoire of techniques she has deployed, refined, and mastered in more than 30 years of making art. The other concentrates on a set of themes and motifs drawn from folktales and mythology that emerged early in her career and has remained a consistent focal point ever since. Jonas originally trained as a sculptor, but in the late 1960s she began to produce a body of work in video, performance, and installation. Her formal tactics include mirroring, doubling, juxtaposition, fragmentation, spatialization, and desynchronization. Distance, in both the psychic and visual sense, is a key device. Ive always been interested in that: in getting very far away from the audience for different reasons, she says, and in what things look like in that distance. In Jones Beach Piece (1970), for instance, the audience and performers were separated from each other by nearly 300 yards of mudflat. In Mirror Piece II (1970), choreographed performers carried full-length mirrors that fractured the performance space and returned the gaze of the audience to itself. The use of video allowed for a deepening of these explorations. I was interested in the discrepancies between the performed activity and the constant duplicating, changing, and altering of information in the video, she wrote in the catalogue for her 2000 retrospective in Stuttgart. In Vertical Roll (1972), generally acknowledged to be a masterpiece of video art, a strange masked figure (Jonas, as her character Organic Honey) moves in and out of camera range and around the edges of the video frame, while the normally static and hidden signal bar (a horizontal black strip that appears when the video is out of sync) rolls incessantly over the image. The result is a hugely distracting interruption of any unified apprehension; the viewer becomes acutely aware of the medium of video, its formal properties, and its relation to television. Organic Honey infiltrates this unstable space like an agent provocateur. Indeed, the electronic sorceress Organic Honey is a key figure, or even daemon, in Jonass oeuvre. In a series of videos and performances done in the early 1970s, Organic Honey performed odd, symbolic gestures, often while wearing a disturbingly bland plastic mask. The expressionless face was standard in 1960s performance. What Jonas added, in her choice of a plastic dolls face, was an overcoding of femininity, as she stated in the Stuttgart catalogue: Wearing the mask of a dolls face transformed me into an erotic electronic seductress. Since those Organic Honey pieces, Jonas has used masks, veils, and mirrors to weave stories of violent dissociation and identity.
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Because I was working with mediamirrors very early on and then the closed-circuit TV systemfrom the very beginning, she says, I was outside looking at myself. I saw myself as something other. I didnt want to be myself in the performances. Such emphasis on depersonalization, combined with her references to folktales and mythology, has sometimes led her work to be compared to the gnomic performances of Joseph Beuys. But Jonas, who admires Beuyss work immensely, says (in a typical moment of nonlinear thought), The main difference between me and himand there are a lotis I dont call myself a shaman. She continues, When I started doing performance, I was interested in other cultures, meaning I was reading The Golden Bough, for instance. Being in the New York environment in the 60s, I was thinking, Who am I? So I did look at other cultures. But, she rightly notes, ethnographic borrowing is really a kind of dangerous terrain to be in, and problematic. While her performances from the early 1970s shared Beuyss mythic and ritual inspirations, she has since shifted toward more literary sources and to constructing personae. From the disturbing 1976 retelling of the folktale The Juniper Tree, to her more recent mining of Seamus Heaneys version of the pagan Irish king Sweeneys madness in Revolted by the Thought of Known Places (1994), to the Trojan War reread through the work of Imagist poet H. D. in Lines in the Sand (2002), Jonas has extracted image and text from poem and tale. And she carries resonant shardsfragments of language, images, sections of videotape, movement sequencesfrom piece to piece, reworking them in performance or, more recently, in hybrid installations that undermine the fixity of museum displays. For instance, in an extraordinary show at the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 2004, five works set up to be discrete leaked visually and spatially into one another, creating a dynamic, intertextual, and intellectually mobile effect. At 70, Jonas is vital and wry. She shuttles back and forth between studios in New York and Nova Scotia when she is not teaching at MIT or traveling for shows; all the while, she is making new work and collaborating with younger artists, musicians, and performers. Long heralded as a video pioneer, Jonas has most recently begun to explore uploading video podcasts to the Interneta medium that seems perfectly suited to the ethereal, depersonalized intimacy of her most recent videos. A key influence on the work of artists as diverse as Pipilotti Rist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Pierre Huyghe, and Seth Price, Jonas has justly been celebrated in Europe; a highly successful exhibition was jointly held at the Jeu de Paume and Le Plateau

previous page joan jonas in her studio with zina, new york, december 2006 top left Jones Beach Piece, 1970 PerforMance still, jones beach, new york
Photo: richard landry courtesy the artist and yvon laMbert gallery, new york and Paris

above Mirror Piece ii, 1970 PerforMance still, eManu-el yMha, new york
Photo: Peter Moore estate of Peter Moore/vaga, new york

Ive always been interested in getting very far away from the audience and in what things look like in that distance.

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opposite joan jonas in her studio, new york, december 2006 above left still froM organic honeys Vertical roll, 197399 video, 15 Min
courtesy electronic arts interMix (eai), new york

above right stills froM Vertical roll, 1972 video, 19 Min, 38 sec
courtesy electronic arts interMix (eai), new york

From the very beginning, I was outside looking at myself. I saw myself as something other. I didnt want to be myself in the performances.
Switzerland. (He had begun to break down toward the end of World War I, offering tea to the left-wing revolutionaries the Spartacists; he was finally hospitalized after his overwhelming anxieties about Bolshevism led him to threaten his wife and children with a pistol.) The focal point of Jonass performance is a lecture Warburg gave in 1923 to demonstrate his fitness to return to societyan analysis of the snake dance of the Native American Hopi, whom he had encountered on a trip to the American Southwest in 1895. The Warburg material provides Jonass performance with a double arc: in Shape, she layers the story of his stay in the sanatorium over the unfolding of his lecture. The first third of the performance moves from an account of Warburgs breakdown (told in fragments drawn from Warburgs writings and from Binswangers notes; the former are delivered by an actor portraying Warburg, the latter by Jonas in a voice-over) to a healing ritual; the scenes are shot through with a loose evocation of animism. The latter two-thirds of the performance explore Warburgs lecture, from his insights into symbol formation to his lament for the ways in which technological progress (at the time, telecommunications and the airplane) and hyper-rationality had destroyed the distance that space between a culture of touch and a culture of thoughtrequired for art. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things took place in a remote section of the cavernous basement alleys of the 1929 ex-Nabisco building that houses Dia, a deep, dark space that smells slightly of wet cement and is gridded by a forest of structural columns. When entering the performance area, one descended into darkness from the dazzling optical realm of Dias aboveground galleries light-filled expanse to the clammy haptic one of the underworlds horizontal extension. The performance area was defined by the alley between two rows of columns, stretching all the way back to the rear wallless a stage than an extremely deep arena. Jonas says, A lot of things came together in this piece that Ive been working with for a long time: being able to use distance in an indoor piece, and also the fact that distance stands for Warburgs journey, and then the distance that one gets from the audience. Within this arrangement, Jonas orchestrates the appearance of frames and sequences about Warburgs life in the sanatorium and his observations about the snake dance; these are rendered by a complex choreography of live movement, videotaped sequences, and closed-circuit collisions between the taped and the corporeal. Space, in other words, is diagrammed with movement: Jonas turns the floor into a horizontal drawing, then uses a moving wall of video image to compress and derealize it. At specific moments, wall-size projection screens cut the depth, one pressing forward from deep space to middle ground to foreground, another sliding in from the sides. A delicate but lush and appropriately 1920s-ish live piano accompaniment (composed and performed by Jason Moran) weaves through the piece, the music at times reminiscent of Satie or late Debussy, at times of the carny, and overall beautifully integrated with the action. The Bellevue episode aligns neatly with folktale morphology (Warburg was the princess kidnapped by a dragon, to borrow Russian formalist Vladimir Propps pithily reduced folktale structure), but the power of Jonass Shape comes from the resonance between her fundamental interests and those of Warburg: in him, she has found an avatar. As part of
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in Paris in 2005, and this September a major retrospective of her work will open at Barcelonas MACBA. The Queens Museum show marked Jonass triumphal return to New Yorks sometimes surprisingly provincial art radar; although her videos circulate, since 1980 New York audiences have had only seven opportunities to see her perform. The Dia piece had already been commissioned when the Queens show went up, but certainly the latter (of which New York Times art critic Roberta Smith said, Its revelations are almost guaranteed to knock you sockless), along with the recent revival of serious interest in performance, can take partial credit for drawing an audience to the consistently sold-out and held-over performance in Beacon. This performance, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, is the extraordinary outcome of a mature media artists drawing on almost four decades of work and, at the same time, looking fearlessly, even defiantly at the present. Dense, complex, and in progress, it will morph, mutate, and be available for future cannibalization. The title comes from a passage in H. D.s Tribute to Freud. It never ceases to intrigue me as a little self-contained poetic statement about space and time and memory, says Jonas. Were living in a time thats very reminiscent of that precarious moment (the poet was being psychoanalyzed in Vienna in the 1930s). The narrative arc derives from the peculiar story of art historian Aby Warburgs madness and recovery. Warburg, one of the preeminent cultural historians of his dayhe is the father of the branch of art history known as iconology was institutionalized in 1921, moving in and out of a locked ward at psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswangers Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen,

The image-chains in the Dia:Beacon performance pile up, yielding an associative flood of magic and logic, of alchemy and physics, of nurse and nymph.
his efforts to find representations of primary emotional expressions across cultures, Warburg kept what he called the Mnemosyne Atlas, a transhistorical and transcultural compendium of some 1,000 images taken from sources as diverse as antiquarian prints and postage stamps. He arranged these images in ever-changing configurations driven, like Freudian dream work, by visual detail and lateral conceptual linkage. I became so passionate about Warburg when I picked up this book [his lecture], about the fact that he looked at art history in this way, she says, referring to Warburgs search for fundamental expressive forms. Ive always been tracing things back to their origins, such as looking at Minoan culture in Greece, even though the reason I became a performance artist was because of what was going on artistically in New York in the 60s. As part of her preparation for Shape, Jonas, who herself had witnessed a Hopi snake dance some 40 years prior, traveled to the Southwest in early 2004. I stayed on the Hopi reservation in Arizona and began a dialogue with people in the community, but I did not wish to impose on, or take away from, the Native American people, she says. I decided instead
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to return to Warburgs writing. During her stay there, she became interested in Warburgs fascination with Drers Melancholia I (1514), which for Warburg emblematized a struggle between logic and irrationality that seemed to have yielded the terrible violence of World War I. To me, Jonas wrote in the program notes for the performance, Melancholia evokes memories of history as it impacted the American landscape. This imageand sensibilityis key to the performance. Players take on the aspect and attributes of Drers image, from the posture of contemplation to the arrangement of small props. In a much larger sense, the tension between logic and irrationality, their (eternal) twinned recurrence in our technological era, is both Warburgsand Jonass target. As psychohistorian, Warburg wrote, I tried to diagnose schizophrenia of Western civilization from its images in an autobiographical reflex. This line provides the opening words of the performance. The two chief devices Jonas has included in her spatial dislocations have remained consistent over the years: the use of mirrors and of attenuated signal transmission (e.g., sound over great distance, video feedback), both of which fragment and dislocate

images. Jonass use of a convex mirror in video footage, which dramatically alters and frames certain sequencesfantasy play in a field, a tree that emerges from Warburgs belly at a climactic momentdisrupts both straightforward documentary and decorative effects. In the Dia performance, the mirror is not only a tool but also an emblem: a concatenation of less-than-literal mirrorings structures the piece. These sequences often exceed mere doubling to become chains of associations as Jonas layers words and images. In the opening scenes, Warburg shares the foreground with Nurse 1 and a stuffed coyote, whose position mirrors his; later, Nurse 1 (played by Jonas, who also plays Warburgs psychoanalyst, Binswanger) makes a drawing of the moths Warburg is talking to by supporting the paper against her belly and drawing the image upside downbecoming, in a sense, the moth to whom he is talking; Warburg and Nurse 2 both assume a posture like that of the predominant figure in Drers Melancholia. The image-chains pile up, yielding an associative flood that acknowledges the imbrication of disjunct systems, of magic and logic, of alchemy and physics, of nurse and nymph.

He practices a cult with the moths and butterflies that fly into his room at night, Binswanger wrote in his notes on Warburg (Jonas repeats them in voice-over in the performance). He speaks to them for hours. He calls them his little soul animals and tells them about his suffering. The word psyche in ancient Greece meant both soul or conscious self, and butterfly, so when Warburg practices his cult, he is, in effect, mobilizing the talking cureconversing with his own consciousness. Warburgs cult of lateral thinking, of scholarly drift combined with riveting focus, and of radically combinatorial image-play has at least one other adherent: Joan Jonas. In discussing him, she throws in a bit of personal fondness: He wanted to dance with the nymphs, says Jonas. He loves the dancing maenads on the Greek vases. So all of that made me think that he may have been a performance artistwho knows? (She adds, crucially, He was unable to take those three-piece suits off.) This bit of projection is an appropriate one. Jonas has lightly slipped on her Warburg mask, the likeness of one who was, like she is, capable of extraordinary acts of materialized, symbolic thinking.
Turn to Index, on page 110, for detailed information about Jonas.

opposite JuniPer tree, 197678 PerforMance still, joan jonass loft, new york, october 2005
Photo: babette Mangolte courtesy the artist

this page the shaPe, the scent, the Feel oF things, 2005 PerforMance stills, dia:beacon, new york, october 2005
Photo: Paula court courtesy dia art foundation, new york

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