Joan Jonas. (American, born 1936), Mirage. 1976/2005. Installation with six videos (black and white, sound and silent), props, stages, photographs. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Richard Massey, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, Agnes Gund, and Committee on Media Funds. © 2009 Joan Jonas. Installation photograph by David Regen, 2005; courtesy of Yvon Lambert gallery, New York. |
Joan Jonas' 1976 Mirage as a Gallery Installation at MoMA |
Joan Jonas. (American, born 1936), Mirage. 1976/2005. Installation with six videos (black and white, sound and silent), props, stages, photographs. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Richard Massey, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, Agnes Gund, and Committee on Media Funds. © 2009 Joan Jonas. Installation photograph by David Regen, 2005; courtesy of Yvon Lambert gallery, New York. |
Museum of Modern Art Joan Jonas created Mirage following a trip to India in 1975, and designed it specifically for the Anthology screening room, where she had spent countless hours viewing film classics. In 1994 Jonas created a discrete installation in which she reconfigured some of the elements of Mirage within a gallery space — metal cones, footage of erupting volcanoes, wooden hoops, a Mexican mask, drawings on chalkboard, and photographs documenting the performance. After repurposing these materials for a 2005 exhibition, Jonas has again re-imagined Mirage for Performance 7, in a composition that combines concepts of ritual, memory, repetition, and rehearsal, with games, drawing, and syncopated rhythms. The Museum of Modern Art presents Performance 7: Mirage by Joan Jonas, a gallery installation by Joan Jonas. The installation, which recently entered MoMA’s collection, re-imagines Mirage, a groundbreaking performance originally created in 1976 for the screening room of New York’s Anthology Film Archives. For the original performance version of Mirage, Jonas carried out a series of movements — including percussive running and drawing — while interacting with a variety of sculptural components, films, and videos. In the MoMA installation, original objects and photographs from the 1976 performance are combined with six moving image works (May Windows, Good Night Good Morning, Car Tape, Volcano Film, Mirage 1, and Mirage 2), which are shown both on monitors in the gallery and projected onto the gallery walls. Performance 7 is organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art. Ms. London states: “Joan Jonas has studied a wide range of subjects, and in the late 1960s she began to explore time as a material for art, both inspired by and part of an emerging practice that merged traditional performance mediums, such as dance, with avant-garde experimentation in the visual arts. Although she has been ever responsive to new ideas and mediums, for nearly 40 years Jonas has resolutely kept performance and video at the center of her practice.” |
Joan Jonas. (American, born 1936), Mirage. 1976/2005. Installation with six videos (black and white, sound and silent), props, stages, photographs. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Richard Massey, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, Agnes Gund, and Committee on Media Funds. © 2009 Joan Jonas. Installation photograph by David Regen, 2005; courtesy of Yvon Lambert gallery, New York. |
Joan Jonas, The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, Performance Dia:Beacon, New york, 2005, Photo: Paula Court. |
A Constantly Evolving Approach to Performance and Installation |
Joan Jonas, Lines in the Sand, Performance, Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002, Photo: Werner Maschmann.
Joan Jonas, Lines in the Sand, Performance, Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002, Photo: Werner Maschmann.
Joan Jonas, The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, Performance Dia:Beacon, New york, 2005, Photo: Paula Court.
Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976 / 2005. Multimedia installation, Performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1976, Photo: Roberta Neiman.
Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976 / 2005. Multimedia installation, Performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1976, Photo: Roberta Neiman. |
Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève An emblematic figure that came to the attention of the New York art scene in the late 1960s, Jonas has developed a constantly evolving multimedia approach to performance and installation, which has influenced subsequent generations of artists worldwide. She was among the first practitioners of performance and video, which investigated new formulations of female identity and offered an approach free from art history traditions as well as from male-dominated structures. Influenced by feminist movements, the artist said in 1995 in an interview with Joan Simon “there is always a woman in my work, and her role is questioned." Jonas draws on the fields of history, biography, literature, myth and ritual to question identity, using signature elements such as the mirror (to distort as much as reveal) and the mask (to enable shifting personas). Also key to the artist’s interests is to reflect upon the experience of time, where "de-synchronization" is, as Douglas Crimp (Professor of art history and art critic) has suggested, an essential experience of her work. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004) is a work in progress consisting of an installation and a performance, initially presented in the Dia:Beacon, New York. Resulting from an ongoing concern with ritual and performance, the project highlights Jonas’ basic interest in the beginning of aesthetic expression in other cultures in relation to the Western world. Nowhere else in her oeuvre has Jonas awarded such a pivotal role to narrative and text as in this project. Despite the strong theatrical thrust of the work, it remains poised between theater and performance art. Furthermore, it is partly inspired by a series of events and encounters in the artist’s life. Indeed it goes back to a journey made to the Southwest USA in the late 50s, where Jonas had the opportunity to see several Hopi (Native American Indians) rituals. Later in the mid 1980, Jonas came across a reference to these rites in an essay by German historian Aby Warburg, related to his own trip to the Southwest in the 19th century. In his investigations Warburg employed photographs of artworks from different cultures, recombined and cross referenced them to produce, among others, a display of particular gestures as portrayed by Greeks, Romans, Indians and so on. This methodology was particularly inspiring to Jonas. This project takes place 30 years after Joan Jonas' first performance in Switzerland at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in the context of the Festival Contrechamp (on the 3rd of February 1978).
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Joan Jonas, Volcano Saga, 1989, video, MACBA collection. |
Joan Jonas, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2004-2007, Photogram, © Joan Jonas, 2007. |
Joan Jonas, at a Crossroads of Dance, Performance, and Video |
Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976, Performance, Anthology Film Archives, Nueva York, 1976, Photograph Babette Mangolte, © Joan Jonas, 2007.
Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976, Performance, University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1976, Photo:graph Benjamin Blackwell, © Joan Jonas, 2007.
Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976, Performance, Anthology Film Archives, Nueva York, 1976, Photograph Babette Mangolte, © Joan Jonas, 2007.
Joan Jonas, Lines in the Sand, 2002, Performance, © Joan Jonas, 2007. |
Museu d'Art Contemporani The works created by Joan Jonas between the late 1960s and the early 1970s at the crossroads of dance, performance and video played a central role in formulating new artistic genres such as installations or experimental theatre. Joan Jonas is considered a pioneer in these areas, especially in video-art and performance. Born in New York in 1936, Jonas studied art in Boston, Massachusetts and New York. She became involved very early in the world of dance, following the teachings of Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer. Breaking away from the formulations of 1970's sculpture, her first works explored the notions of space and phenomena of perception. Elements from different areas flow together; the influences of Kabuki theatre or the Japanese Noh on one hand, and the act of drawing on the other. Collaborations with composers such as Alvin Lucier and performances with the Wooster Group have also been crucial in Joan Jonas' career. Jonas has developed an emblematic vocabulary in her performances, synthesising ritual gestures and symbolic objects, including masks, costumes and mirrors; playing with archaic methods for creating optical illusions and different narrative effects. Jonas began using video in her performances in Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) — which forms part of the MACBA's collection — by using live cameras and monitors to transform and superimpose images, space and time. In fact, the reciprocal alimentation between installations, video sequences and live performances has developed in her work in a cumulative way, which would become one aspect of Jonas' modus operandi regarding the narrative forms which are characteristic of her work. Among the other halls of the Museum, Joan Jonas' exposition will be presented in the MACBA Chapel, a space that transforms into a great open, polyphonic theatre, and where works central to her career will be displayed alongside more recent ones. The sample will include 4 large installations created by the artist from the early '70s until the present day in an attempt to trace the constant narratives and forms in a career full of elements strongly rooted in oral traditions. A selection of films will complete what will be one of the most ambitious retrospectives dedicated to Joan Jonas.
Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976, Photogram, © Joan Jonas, 2007.
Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976 / 2005. Multimedia installation, Performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1976, Photo: Roberta Neiman.
Joan Jonas, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2004-2007, Performance, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2006, Photograph Paula Court, © Joan Jonas, 2007. |
Joan Jonas, Volcano Saga, 1985-1989, Performance, Performing Garage, New York, 1987, Photograph Gabor Szitanyi, © Joan Jonas, 2007. |
