Joan Jonas | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Jonas in 2010 | |
| Born | Joan Amerman Edwards (1936-07-13)July 13, 1936 (age 88) |
| Known for | Video art,performance art,sculpture |
| Movement | Performance art |
| Awards | Maya Deren Award, 1989 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, 1995 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, 1998 Kyoto Prize, 2018 |
Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an Americanvisual artist and a pioneer ofvideo andperformance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s".[1] Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended toconceptual art,theatre,performance art and other visual media.[2] She lives and works in New York andNova Scotia, Canada.[3]
Jonas was born in 1936 inNew York City.[4][5] In 1958 she received a bachelor's degree in Art History fromMount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.[4] She later studied sculpture and drawing at theSchool of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and received an MFA in Sculpture fromColumbia University in 1965.[4] Immersed in New York's downtown art scene of the 1960s, Jonas studied with the choreographerTrisha Brown for two years.[6]Jonas also worked with choreographersYvonne Rainer andSteve Paxton.[7]
Though Jonas began her career as asculptor, by 1968 she moved into what was then leading-edge territory: mixingperformance with props andmediated images, situated outdoors in urban or rural landscapes and/or industrial environments. Between 1968 and 1971, Jonas performedMirror Pieces, works which used mirrors to as a central motif or prop.[8] 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. InWind (1968), Jonas filmed performers stiffly passing through the field of view against a wind that lent the choreography a psychological mystique.[9]
In 1970, Jonas went on a long trip to Japan — where she bought her first video camera and sawNoh,Bunraku andKabuki theater — with the sculptorRichard Serra.[10] Her video performances between 1972 and 1976 pared the cast down to one actor, the artist herself, performing in her New York loft asOrganic 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.[8] In one such work,Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas scans her own fragmented image onto a video screen.[8] InDisturbances (1973), a woman swims silently beneath another woman's reflection.[11]Songdelay (1973), filmed with bothtelephoto andwide-angle lenses (which produce opposing extremes in depth of field) drew on Jonas' travels in Japan, where she saw groups ofNoh 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.[12]
In 1975, Jonas appeared as a performer in the movieKeep Busy, by the photographerRobert Frank and novelist-screenwriterRudy Wurlitzer.[11]In 1976 withThe Juniper Tree, Jonas arrived at a narrative structure from diverse literary sources, such asfairy tales, mythology, poetry, andfolk songs, formalizing a highly complex,nonlinear method of presentation. Using a colorful theatrical set and recorded sound,The Juniper Tree retold aGrimm Brothers tale of anarchetypal evil stepmother and her family.
In the 1990s, Jonas’My New Theater series moved away from a dependence on her physical presence. The three pieces investigated, in sequence: aCape Breton Island dancer and his local culture; a dog jumping through a hoop while Jonas draws a landscape; and finally, using stones, costumes, memory-laden objects, and her dog, avideo about the act of performing.[13] She also createdRevolted by the Thought of Known Places... (1992) andWoman in the Well (1996/2000).
In herinstallation/performance commissioned forDocumenta 11,Lines in the Sand (2002), Jonas investigated themes of the self and the body in a performance installation based on the writerH.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle) epic poem "Helen in Egypt" (1951–55), which reworksthe myth of Helen of Troy. Jonas sited many of her early performances atThe Kitchen, includingFunnel (1972) and the screening ofVertical Roll (1972). InThe Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, produced byThe Renaissance Society in 2004,[14] Jonas draws onAby Warburg's work onHopi 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.[11]
Jonas’ works were first performed in the 1960s and '70s for some of the most influential artists of her generation, includingRichard Serra,Robert Smithson,Dan Graham andLaurie Anderson. While she is widely known in Europe, her groundbreaking performances are lesser known in the United States, where, as criticDouglas Crimp wrote of her work in 1983, "the rupture that is effected in modernist practices has subsequently been repressed, smoothed over."[15] Yet, in restaging early and recent works, Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions ofgender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years.
Jonas' performance inspired by the writings of German anthropologistAby Warburg,The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, was commissioned byDia Beacon and was twice performed between 2005 and 2006. This project established an ongoing and continuing collaboration with the pianistJason Moran.[16]
For the season 2014/2015 in theVienna State Opera Joan Jonas designed a large-scale picture (176 sqm) as part of the exhibition seriesSafety Curtain, conceived bymuseum in progress.[17]
Jonas was also featured as a choreographer for Robert Ashley's Opera titled Celestial Excursions in 2003.[7]
From 1993, the New York-based Jonas spent part of each year in Los Angeles, teaching a course in New Genres at theUCLA School of the Arts.[11] In 1994, she was made a full professor at theState Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, Germany.[11] Since 1998, she has been a professor ofvisual arts at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is currently Professor Emerita in the Art, Culture, and Technology program within MIT's School of Architecture and Planning.[1]
Jonas has performed her works at countless institutions and venues, including:
Jonas has had a number of solo exhibitions, including:
Jonas has participated in many international group exhibitions, including:
In 2009, she exhibited for the first (and only other) time at theVenice Biennale.[31]
In 2015, Jonas represented theUnited States of America at theVenice Biennale.[32][33] She was the sixth female artist to represent the United States at Venice since 1990.[31]
In 2019 Jonas work was presented at theAnimalesque group show atBildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden.[34]
In 2023, Jonas served on the jury that choseSarah Lucas as first winner of theNew Museum’s $400,000 Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award.[35]
Jonas has been awarded fellowships and grants for choreography, video, and visual arts from theNational Endowment for the Arts;Rockefeller Foundation; Contemporary Art Television (CAT) Fund; Television Laboratory atWNET/13, New York; Artists' Television Workshop atWXXI-TV, Rochester, New York; andDeutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).[6] Jonas has received the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Modern Art Prize at the Tokyo International Video Art Festival, the Polaroid Award for Video, and theAmerican Film Institute Maya Deren Award for Video.[1]
In 2009, Jonas was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum.[31]
In 2012, Jonas was honored on the occasion of theKitchen Spring Gala Benefit.[36]
Jonas was namedWhitechapel Gallery Art Icon 2016.[37] In 2018, Jonas won theKyoto Prize for Art.[38]
Jonas has received awards fromAnonymous 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).[7]
In 2023 Jonas was elected to theRoyal Academy of Arts in London, as anHonorary Royal Academician (HonRA).[39]
Joan Jonas is represented in New York City byGladstone Gallery,[40] after previously being represented byGavin Brown's enterprise.[41] Jonas is represented in Los Angeles byRosamund Felsen Gallery.[42]
In addition to working on her art, Jonas has been serving on the advisory board of the Hauser & Wirth Institute since 2018.[43]
Jonas' work can be found in a number of public institutions, including:
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 atNew York University.[45]
