JOAN JONAS

Joan Jonas in her New York studio, photographed by Toby Coulson for Tate Etc., September 2017
© Toby Coulson 2018

Jonas works as a Performance artist, but within this realm she incorporates drawing, dance, noise, video, travel, and at the same time introduces various sculptural objects, photographs, and props. She also interweaves a plethora of literary sources, including poems, myths, and fairytales, and as such, presents a highly complex and multi-layered private imaginative world to a public audience. The result is not usually simple, and often viewers feel overwhelmed, as though they cannot grasp any sense of linear narrative in the artist’s work. This is the honesty and integrity of a Jonas piece; she exposes without restraint that the self is fragmentary, anxious, and ultimately nonsensical. Since the early 1960s, and still today, albeit now with more institutional support, Jonas continues to examine her own identity, often in relation to other artists, cultural rituals, gender equality, societal gaze, and contemporary politics.

Juniper Tree, 1976 – 24 works on silk, acrylic paint, wooden structure, string of 29 wooden balls, ladder, kimono, mirror, glass jars, 78 slides, box and other materials

The work explores Jonas’s love of folklore and of fairy tales. The work is her reinterpretation of the tale of the same name taken from the first volume of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. The story begins with a woman wishing for a child “as red as blood and as white as snow”, while standing by the juniper tree where she would eventually be buried. After giving birth to a boy, she dies and her husband re-marries and has a daughter. The step-mother, jealous of the step-son, kills him and serves his remains to his father in a stew. The son is then reincarnated into a bird and gets his revenge on his stop-mother by crushing her with a millstone. Upon the stepmother’s death, the son is reborn and reunited with his father and half-sister. This work became an important transitional work for Jonas, in that she uses paint, the practice of drawing, as well as narrative and text to represent the symbols and motifs in the story.

My New Theatre 1, 1997 – Video (color, sound) and mixed media in miniature

My New Theater 1 is a tabletop installation in the form of a box that slopes upward from front to back. Open on one end, this “theater” allows several viewers to observe a video projected onto a screen filling the far wall. The video presents a Cape Breton step dancer performing to the accompaniment of a fiddler and a piano player, intercut with a young girl dancing in a more elaborate style. The Scottish music radiates over the lush green of summertime, contrasting sharply with the murky theater setting. The scale evokes the miniature cityscapes and elongated figures by Alberto Giacometti, whose work has influenced Jonas, and the spirit recalls the New York avant–garde theater companies The Wooster Group, with whom the artist has frequently collaborated, and Mabou Mines.

In discussion with art critic Robert Ayers, Jonas comments that her theatre boxes are “an extension of the studio. It’s as though you are looking into a miniature world. That’s the indoor space, and then I also include landscape space”.This notion of how performance art can exist without the performer is a constant theme at the core of the theatre box works. The new medium challenges the notion of what performance is. In an interview with the Tate, Jonas comments that she felt drawn to video so that her performance work would not simply “disappear” after its execution. 

Reanimation, 2010/2012/2013 – Four videos (color, sound and silent) on custom screens within a prefabricated house structure, two custom benches (made by Ed Gavagan), and crystal sculpture; two wooden theater boxes with video (color, sound and silent); fifteen ink drawings on paper; three oil stick drawings on paper, and two china marker wall drawings Soundtrack and voice: Joan Jonas Sami yoik singing: Ánde Somby Piano and additional sound effects: Jason Moran

Reanimation is an immersive installation inspired by the Icelandic writer and Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s 1968 novel Under the Glacier, which tells the story of a man sent to investigate paranormal activity around a glacier. The environment—at once mystical and domestic—also contains drawings of symbols that appear in the work, and two “theater box” sculptures, as Jonas calls them, displaying videos in miniature. Jonas’s multilayered works evolve over long periods of time, encompassing various disciplines. Reanimation began as a performance, in 2010, and this installation comprises both new and previously recorded footage. Echoing Laxness’s nonlinear storytelling, Reanimation combines his descriptions of the Arctic with excerpts from early-twentieth-century translations of Japanese Noh theater plays by poet Ezra Pound and art historian Ernest Fenollosa. 

Reanimation brings together many of the elements of multi-layered materials and meanings which Jonas has explored throughout her practice. Jonas comments that her interest in layers stems from “the way our brains function. We think of several things at the same time. We see things and think another, we see one picture and there’s another picture on top of it. I think in a way my work represents that way of seeing the world – putting things together in order to say something.” 

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