BIOGRAPHY
Joan Jonas was born in New York, USA, 1936. Lives in New York
2008 In Transit 08, Performing Arts Festival, House of World Cultures, Berlin
2007 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles at the Geffen Contemporary, USA
2006 The Power of Women, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, Italy
2005 Joan Jonas: Survey 1968-2005, Le Plateau and Jeu de Paume/Hotel de Sully, Paris;
After the Act, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna.
INTERVIEW
Joshua Decter: What was the evolution of this work, which you’ve described as a “site-specific video performance,” for Dia:Beacon?
Joan Jonas: I visited Dia:Beacon before it was renovated and recorded video footage of images of the vast, columned factory. This would later become a backdrop for a scene in the same space. In the spring of 2005, I went back to the site, and decided on placement of the audience and the related positioning of video projection screens. However, in the winter of 2004, I began to work on a script based on Aby Warburg’s lecture notes concerning his visit to – and thoughts on – the rituals of the Pueblo villages in the American Southwest at the end of the 19th century. I visited Arizona and New Mexico, and spent some time on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. I then edited a six-channel video installation that was presented at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, in Spring of 2004. During a residency at the Getty Foundation in the Spring of 2005, I continued my research, recording landscapes in southern California. I also shot scenes in the woods and on the beaches of Nova Scotia. These elements were subsequently edited into a series of backdrops relating to the script and the spatial structure of Dia:Beacon.
Joshua Decter: On conceptual and experiential terms, can you reflect upon the kinds of spatial, temporal and aural dislocations that took place during the live event?
Joan Jonas: I work in the space between installation and performance. The performance site is also an installation. The perception of sound and image in a particular space is my main concern. At Dia the moving and shifting projection screens seemed to shrink and expand the long corridor of the action. In a live performance, there is time for the eye to wander from video to live action to the space itself. Time is my material.
Joshua Decter: This work was subsequently rearticulated as a multichannel video installation within the context of Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York…
Joan Jonas: In the Yvon Lambert installation, the work is deconstructed, and rearranged. The audience walks into the space of the work. The view is not frontal. I selected five edited backdrops from the whole, representing one possible perspective on the ideas contained in the work. Props and furniture are included – an assemblage of objects used in relation to the body. The soundtrack of the performance, shown in an edited version, was the sound of the installation.
Joshua Decter: Can you discuss the place of narrative within this work – how the historical account of Warburg’s experience symbolically intersected with your own exploration of the American Southwest?
Joan Jonas: I am interested in stories that suggest conditions of the contemporary landscape, and memory has played a role in all these works. In the mid-1960s, I traveled to Arizona to see the Hopi Snake Dance on the mesas of the Hopi Reservation. It was a profound and moving experience. I never referred to it in my work out of respect for the Hopi. The book I found about Warburg referred to notes he had written in the 1930s for a lecture delivered to a group of doctors in a Swiss sanatorium, meant to demonstrate his recovery from a nervous breakdown. I was immediately drawn to his spirit, and reminded of my own experience. I returned to this indirectly through Warburg’s text, considering his ideas about the loss of contemplative space in relation to technology, while representing my own perceptions of history and the present. The space of Dia:Beacon became the sanatorium in Switzerland, and the actor Jose Blondet would address his doctors, his audience, and us.
Joshua Decter is a curator, critic, and art historian. He is the director of the Public Art Studies graduate program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and he is based in Los Angeles and New York.
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