Notes on Joan Jonas
Joan Simon has noted the impact of painting on the “performative arenas” that Jonas would create; what Crimp had identified, in 1976, as an eye for “spatial illusionism.”6 “While I was studying art history,” Jonas later wrote, “I looked carefully at the space of painting, films, and sculpture—how illusions are created within a frame. From this, I learned how to deal with depth and distance.”7 When Jonas stepped out of the frame and into the “real space” of performance, as she referred to it, she would continue to plumb depth and distance, weaving spatial ambiguities into the layered texture of her live pieces.
Video to watch
https://leaveryap.com/2011/01/19/performing-the-image-joan-jonas-glass-puzzle/
Some subjects that Joan Jonas has touched on over her fifty year career (in no particular order): nature, her dog, animism, Japanese Noh theatre, the moon and the sun, insects, masks (metaphorical and literal), ghosts, landscape, Hopi mythology, the female body, the female artist, the nature of presence versus representation, memory, her home in Cape Breton. Yet the artist never addressed this diverse range of interests directly, instead they are filtered and reflected back and froth through the wide-ranging media she employs, not least performance, drawing, film, video, sculpture and sound, often together in a single cacophonous installation.
JJ: I am just dedicated to experimenting with and making drawings as a part of my work because it is another part of what I am trying to say – in some way. I don’t know how you perceive it, but I don’t want to just make video and performances – I like to have a physical moment which is making something on a page, and I like the idea of juxtaposing this to technology.
http://collection.fraclorraine.org/collection/print/689?lang=en
I am a visual artist. Drawing was important to me before I stepped into performance. I was interested in how to draw and what to draw.
When I started doing performance I saw that it could be a place for drawing in a new way. I became interested in what it was to draw in front of an audience and to draw while I was being witnessed. – repeated to Mary Clare Foa
I also make drawings in my studio that are autonomous, but I felt like what I was exploring was how to make a drawing in relation to the particular performance that I was working on, which meant how to make it in relation to the technology or to the subject or the space.
JONAS: Oh yes, definitely. It’s about the line. I see it all as drawing with different instruments. I don’t call anything I do “painting.” I make drawings with paint.
Reannination notes:
JONAS: I think drawing is a way of finding for myself. With the drawing on top of the Icelandic slides in the performance, I draw over one slide and then it changes and I continue the drawing over another. It didn’t produce great drawings, I have to say. But it’s an interesting tracing of one’s memories in trying to make something coherent out of them.
MARRANCA: I was fascinated by all the drawing in the video and on the projections. Is that a form of re-writing? You are always drawing your way into the images. There is so much outlining of images of the animal faces, of the landscape, and the topography. Do you feel that this work is taking you to another place or is it refining what you already knew?
JONAS: In a way it has taken me to another place. I’m not sure what it is though or how to talk about it. I worked with the music in a different way. It wasn’t at all accompanying me. It was part of my body and my space. Partly because Jason is a jazz musician, he has the same way of interacting with what’s going on.
MARRANCA: It’s such a strange novel. Susan Sontag had high praise for it, which she referred to as science fiction, philosophy, dream novel, allegory. One of the things that struck me, in terms of using this as a starting point, is that there seems to be more drawing in Reanimation than in anything you’ve ever done. Is that true?
JONAS: I’m not sure, but there is a lot of drawing in it and it’s because I have become increasingly more involved with drawing, as my performance becomes a little less.
MARRANCA: It seems almost now like a theatre of drawing.
JONAS: I guess it is, yes. In a way, I rely on it to say things. I speak through the drawings.
MARRANCA: What function does the drawing have in Reanimation that the video or the text can’t accomplish?
JONAS: I make drawings that represent many of the things that Laxness is talk- ing about. I refer to, say, the bumblebee, but I don’t make a drawing of a bee. I use Rorschach tests to make drawings of insects. I pour ink on paper referring to snow and oil and I draw fish referring to fish in a visual language. So it really highlights certain things.
When I use a text from the past I bring it into the present and refer to present situations. All through the performance is a reference to the idea of melting and that’s why I used all the water images. Some imagery was from an old piece made in 1973 in a swimming pool. The subtext for the bee, for instance, was a newspaper article that I cut out that said “Two busy bees . . .” so it referred to the situation of the bee now. When you talk about the miraculous action of the bee taking pollen from the flower, everybody understands that’s in jeopardy.
The way Laxness talks about nature is in a very poetic, beautiful, and touching way. Nature is being threatened. Everything we know is threatened now. The planet, the globe. So that was my subtext for this piece. Then the bird. I drew the bird in relation to a certain text about how strong and very fragile a bird can be in a face of the storm and, as in many other parts of this piece, I was inspired by Jason Moran’s music. He plays live during the entire performance. That drawing was in relation to the text but also in relation to his music. That was my favorite.
It actually seems a literal sense of story telling through many different kinds of media — drawing, image, text, and music.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3246472.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A1ee848a4f9118bd9ee4c4bfe20b762b2
D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid describes Jonas’s work as an art of “‘acts’ in action,” implicating performer and viewer in a shared quest for “new vocabularies,” remaking “new stories from old.”
Mirrors – altering the space – this is what interests her
Outdoor works- perception of objects in the distance
Delay delay
Drawing is an activity pursued in all work and looking for reasons to draw in every performance
Performance is ritual
https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/case-studies/joan-jonas
Interview on draw without looking
Notes from watching performance online
Illusionistic, appearing and disappearing
Layering and projection with drawing onto wall
Drawn masks
The use of flags, cut out shapes to alter the frame – obsurring
The ease with which she draws with a blue line – the fluidity of the paint. Looking spontanies but she talk about practice drawing like practicing scales on the Fiona. Everything she draws in a performance has been drawn before but it has an appearance of improvisation
The use of language / words as a preliminary step tot he online piece – addressing th audience directly. The list of instructions presented as a poem
- The execution of the drawing is gestural – art of acts in action
- Her interest in ritual and culture and how the drawing output is a direct reference to these I ie the drawing in the sand
- ‘In performing a drawing, it is not about making a precious object, it is about the action and the image. It gives me pleasure to crumple the paper, to create another fleeting moment like the performance itself.’ Jj
- She talks about building her visual language of her own in this respect – related to the visual mark making – the language of in drawing
- The Wind – 1st performance / video /clowning
- Elastic gestures
- Her relationship with blind drawing which she calls draw without looking
- when I began to do performance I read about other cultures and rituals and observed how drawing functioned as ritual. I experienced drawing in performance as a ritual. I thought of what I did in performance as a kind of present-day ritual. – repetition of the drawing is ritualistic]
Saga Primitive rites, strange ceremonies, the repeated gesture, dance or mantra: all are played out and enriched through the latest technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S25joBnSFY
Documentary
Imagery in the video relates to snippets of text from book
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