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Disturbances

Joan Jonas

1974 00:15:00 United StatesEnglishB&W
Tags:
Feminism, Performance, Video History

Description

Jonas uses reflections on a lake as a mirror to displace reality, creating a disruption and the illusion of presence.

“Disturbances begins with a Symbolist-like image of two women, dressed in white, seen only as reflections in water.… Throughout the tape the water fills the monitor, creating layers of images. The reflections on the surface of the water are superimposed on the activities that take place underneath the surface.”

—David Ross, “Joan Jonas’s Videotapes” in Joan Jonas: Scripts and Descriptions, 1968-1982, ed. Douglas Crimp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)

About Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas studied sculpture and art history at Columbia University and Mount Holyoke College, and dance with Tricia Brown at the Boston Museum school. Widely known for her work in performance in the mid-'60s, Jonas first incorporated a live video camera and monitor into a 1972 performance, Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy. In the same year, she began producing single-channel tapes, among them Vertical Roll (1972), which are recognized as landmark investigations into the structural and performative nature of the medium.

Jonas's tapes draw on the essential connection between performance art and the video monitor, as time-based media especially suited to materializing the artist's psyche. Exploring the dislocation of physical space and mythical female archetypes, Jonas's work occupies an important position in the development of both early formalist and early feminist video.

"Space was always a primary concern, and in considering the space of the monitor I then dealt with the box-like structure, positioning it in relation to myself. I tried to climb into the box, attempting to turn the illusion of flatness into one of depth."
— Joan Jonas