Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s". Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. 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.

Early life and education

thumb|Joan Jonas in her Soho loft, 1973. Photograph by Chris Kraemer.

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.

Jonas also worked with choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton.

Work

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 outdoors in urban or rural landscapes and/or industrial environments. Between 1968 and 1971, Jonas performed Mirror Pieces, works which used mirrors 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. 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.

In 1975, Jonas appeared as a performer in the movie Keep Busy, by the photographer Robert Frank and novelist-screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. She also created Revolted by the Thought of Known Places... (1992) and Woman in the Well (1996/2000).

In her installation/performance commissioned for Documenta 11, Lines in the Sand (2002), Jonas investigated themes of the self and the body in a performance installation based on the writer H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle) epic poem "Helen in Egypt" (1951–55), which reworks the myth of Helen of Troy. Jonas sited many of her early performances at The Kitchen, including Funnel (1972) and the screening of Vertical Roll (1972). In The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, produced by The Renaissance Society in 2004, Jonas draws on Aby Warburg's work on Hopi imagery.

Since 1970, Jonas has spent part of every summer in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. She has lived and worked in Greece, Morocco, India, Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland, Poland, Hungary, and Ireland. Yet, in restaging early and recent works, Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years.

Jonas' performance inspired by the writings of German anthropologist Aby Warburg, The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, was commissioned by Dia Beacon and was twice performed between 2005 and 2006. This project established an ongoing and continuing collaboration with the pianist Jason Moran.

For the season 2014/2015 in the Vienna State Opera Joan Jonas designed a large-scale picture (176 sqm) as part of the exhibition series Safety Curtain, conceived by museum in progress.

Jonas was also featured as a choreographer for Robert Ashley's Opera titled Celestial Excursions in 2003.

  • Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2008)
  • PERFORMA 13, (2013)
  • Art Night (2016)
  • Oberlin College

Solo exhibitions

Jonas has had a number of solo exhibitions, including:

  • Stedelijk Museum (1994)
  • Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles (2003)
  • Pat Hearn Gallery, New York City (2003)
  • Joan Jonas: Five Works, Queens Museum of Art (2003)
  • Joan Jonas. Light Time Tales, HangarBicocca, Milan (2014)
  • Safety Curtain., Vienna State Opera, Vienna (2014/15)
  • what is found in the windowless house is true, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, NY (2017)
  • Joan Jonas: Ice Drawing, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2017-2018)
  • Joan Jonas, Tate Modern (2018)
  • Moving Off the Land II, at Ocean Space, Venice (2019)
  • Joan Jonas, Cinco Décadas, at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, (Brazil, 2020) curator Berta Sichel
  • Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, at the Drawing Center, New York (2024)

Group exhibitions

Jonas has participated in many international group exhibitions, including:

  • Documenta, Kassel, Germany (Jonas has participated six times since 1972).
  • Point of View: A Contemporary Anthology of the Moving Image, New Museum(2004)
  • Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007)

In 2009, she exhibited for the first (and only other) time at the Venice Biennale.

In 2015, Jonas represented the United States of America at the Venice Biennale. She was the sixth female artist to represent the United States at Venice since 1990.

Other activities

In 2023, Jonas served on the jury that chose Sarah Lucas as first winner of the New Museum’s $400,000 Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award.

Recognition

Jonas has been awarded fellowships and grants for choreography, video, and visual arts from the National Endowment for the Arts; Rockefeller Foundation; Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund; Television Laboratory at WNET/13, New York; Artists' Television Workshop at WXXI-TV, Rochester, New York; and Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).

Jonas was named Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon 2016. In 2018, Jonas won the Kyoto Prize for Art.

Jonas has received awards from Anonymous Was A Woman (1998); the Rockefeller Foundation (1990); American Film Institute's Maya Deren Award for Video (1989); Guggenheim Foundation (1976); and the National Endowment for the Arts (1974).

Art market

Joan Jonas is represented in New York City by Gladstone Gallery, after previously being represented by Gavin Brown's enterprise. Jonas is represented in Los Angeles by Rosamund Felsen Gallery.

In addition to working on her art, Jonas has been serving on the advisory board of the Hauser & Wirth Institute since 2018.

Public collections

Jonas' work can be found in a number of public institutions, including:

  • Museum of Modern Art, New York
  • Tate Modern, London

Archival collections

Archival materials from the Jonas' personal archives have been made available in the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base, an open source resource from the Artists Archive Initiative at New York University.

References

Further reading

  • Maufras, Frederic. "Joan Jonas". Parachute 121, para-para, January–March 2006. http://www.parachute.ca/para_para/21/para21_Maufras2.html
  • Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, MoMA Learning
  • Biography: Joan Jonas and list of video works at Electronic Arts Intermix.
  • Video art works distributed by the Video Data Bank
  • Joan Jonas, Mediateca Media Art Space
  • Joan Jonas in the Netherlands Media Art Institute
  • "Joan Jonas: Mirage" by Cora Fisher, The Brooklyn Rail (May 2010)
  • Joan Jonas at New Mexico Museum of Art
  • "Joan Jonas: Stream or river, flight or pattern" Fundación Botín (2016)
  • Joan Jonas Knowledge Base