Joan Jonas

Few artists can claim to have initiated a new form of art. Joan Jonas, however, was crucial to the formation of two—video and performance art. Beginning in the late 1960s, Jonas melded diverse influences (ranging from silent film to magic shows) and new technologies (such as portable video cameras and TV monitors) to explore the entanglement of the human body and its recorded image. Her videotaped performances, such as Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy and Vertical Roll (both 1972), posed questions that, in the 21st century, have only grown in relevance. How do we look at ourselves and others through the video camera’s eye? What new kinds of identities do these electronic images open up for us, or impose upon us—and particularly upon women? How do we see, think, and act in the video age?

Working in New York City’s vibrant Soho arts scene, Jonas performed as the character Organic Honey, an exaggerated avatar of femininity whose masked face was frozen in a coy and somewhat sinister smirk. “Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy evolved as I found myself continually investigating my own image on the monitor of my video machine,” says Jonas.¹ As she looked, she saw herself transformed into “an erotic electronic seductress” who conjured phantasmagoric scenes with her ritualistic manipulations of feathers, dolls, and mirrors.² Reflecting surfaces would be a key motif throughout the artist’s career. In her influential Mirror Piece works (which she began in 1969), performers carried mirrors that faced the audience, who suddenly found themselves confronted with their own image—a reversal of the typical relation between onlooker and artist. For Jonas, the mirrored image does more than simply reflect: it projects out into the world and changes it.

Even as Jonas has charted the effects of new technology, she has also looked to longer histories which connect past and present. The strange powers of modern electronics, with their capacity to create visual illusion, find their precedents in old folktales about magical characters and mysterious events. For centuries, these tales were shared through storytelling, or what Jonas describes as “the technology of the human voice box handed down.”³ In her video Volcano Saga (1989), Jonas worked with actor Tilda Swinton to retell a traditional Icelandic tale about the character Gudrun and her adventures. It would be the first in a series of pieces focused on female characters in history and myth. In works like these, Jonas becomes a modern-day bard, using video effects to infuse old stories with a contemporary form of sorcery—thereby showing technology itself as a kind of magic.

In recent decades, Jonas has continued to innovate with her complex, multimedia installations addressing themes related to the natural environment. In Reanimation (2010/2012/2013), Jonas records herself drawing rams, goats, and other creatures onto an icy canvas of snow in Norway. Accompanied by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran’s poignant soundtrack, the work evokes these animals’ rich inner life as well as their precarity in the face of a changing climate. As Jonas notes, “from the very beginning nature has been a context for my work”—ecological images permeate all stages of her career.⁴ She has continually revisited earlier work, transforming previous pieces and sometimes incorporating them into current projects (Reanimation, for example, includes excerpts from Jonas’s 1974 video Disturbances. Reanimation itself has undergone numerous iterations, including as a performance: hence, the multiple years given as its date.) Just as a natural ecosystem recycles the old into the new, Jonas’s art creates a dynamic, interconnected ecology that continues to evolve.

Mitchell Herrmann, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Media and Performance Art, 2023