Joan Jonas
| Joan Jonas | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1936 New York City, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Video art, performance art, sculpture |
| Movement | Performance art |
| Awards | Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, 1995 |
Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art who is one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jonas' projects and experiments provided the foundation on which much video performance art would be based. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.
Jonas was born in 1936 in New York City. In 1958 she received a bachelor's degree in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She later studied sculpture and drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and received an MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Immersed in New York's downtown art scene of the 1960s, Jonas studied with the choreographer Trisha Brown for two years. Jonas also worked with choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton.
Though Jonas began her career as a sculptor, by 1968 she moved into what was then leading-edge territory: mixing performance with props and mediated images, situated outside in natural and/or industrial environments. Between 1968-1971, Jonas performed Mirror Pieces, works which used mirrors to as a central motif or prop. In these early performances, the mirror became a symbol of (self-)portraiture, representation, the body, and real vs. imaginary, while also sometimes adding an element of danger and a connection to the audience that was integral to the work. In Wind (1968), Jonas filmed performers stiffly passing through the field of view against a wind that lent the choreography a psychological mystique.
In 1970, Jonas went on a long trip to Japan — where she bought her first video camera and saw Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki theater — with the sculptor Richard Serra. Her video performances between 1972 and 1976 pared the cast down to one actor, the artist herself, performing in her New York loft as Organic Honey, her seminal alter-ego invented as an "electronic erotic seductress," whose doll-like visage seen reflected bits on camera explored the fragmented female image and women’s shifting roles. drawings, costumes, masks, and interactions with the recorded image were effects that optically related to a doubling of perception and meaning. In one such work, Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas scans her own fragmented image onto a video screen. In Disturbances (1973), a woman swims silently beneath another woman's reflection.Songdelay (1973), filmed with both telephoto and wide-angle lenses (which produce opposing extremes in depth of field) drew on Jonas' travels in Japan, where she saw groups of Noh performers clapping wood blocks and making angular movements. In a video interview for MoMA, Jonas described her work as androgynous; earlier works were more involved in the search for a feminine vernacular in art, she explains, and, unlike sculpture and painting, video was more open, less dominated by men.
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