Joan Jonas is firmly placed historically as one of the first and most important pioneers of performance and video art. Since her early works in the late 1960s she has continued to develop her own complex and intriguing visual vocabulary. Over recent years she has not only created intricate and compelling performance works, but has also found a way to translate those performances into video installations which have become works in their own right, pointing to her early interest in sculpture. Wilkinson Gallery is delighted to present Jonas’s installations for the first time in London. Based around the theme of the mirror, this show brings together three works, Mirror Pieces, 1969/2004, My New Theatre II, Big Mirror, 1998 and Glass Puzzle, 1974/1999.
Mirror Pieces is an installation based around the early mirror performances which took place in New York in the late 1960’s. It includes film footage of one of the first mirror performances and a photograph taken of Jonas in one of her mirror costumes taken by Peter Campus in 1969.
My New Theatre II, Big Mirror is the second in a series of four My New Theatre works which Jonas made as a way of presenting a performance without there being an actual physical presence. The viewer stands and looks into a small cone shaped theatre where a video is played. Miniature props that refer to the context of the video are located on the tiny stage and the floor in front, as well as small speakers that amplify the sound. ‘This second box (black, with a more irregular shape) evolved from the first. “I play the woman in black who dances her own steps made more nimble by editing, to fiddle music played backwards. The New York studio wall seems an extension into the interior of the box. With the performer the wall flips from side to side in an optical play, left and right. The dog jumps through the hoop in slow motion. A nine foot tin cone from Mirage continues the play of illusion, appearing to be a tube or a cone as it turns, and funnels a song “Look up and down that long lonesome road…” (early American folk song). Big Mirror comes from prose piece by William Carlos Williams, “It was a big mirror…” which describes a painting that a man does on a mirror as he paints it. Listening, I make drawings of the described landscape around a waterfall.’”
In Glass Puzzle Jonas brings together an early video work and some found colour video footage to make a new installation, ‘I was recently asked to show a video piece from the seventies in a show at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen. I chose Glass Puzzle, a piece I made after having completed Vertical Roll, which was shot off a monitor. At that time in 1974, I wanted to experiment further with this situation peculiar to video, and so Glass Puzzle was also shot off a monitor. Both pieces concern this object. In Vertical Roll it was the rolling black bar of an out of sync signal, while in Glass Puzzle it was the illusion of boxed space. I wanted to alter it; to climb inside, to use the reflective surface, to tape the layers of reflection and interior image feed to the monitor by a second camera. The monitor was turned on and off editing the movement of a performer. The tape is a black and white. I built a set made out of black and white photographic backdrop paper for some of the scenes, based on the set for Funnel, 1974, a video performance piece – to make a piece for movement, and to define the interior space of the box. Lois Lane was my double. We walked, crawled, danced around the paper set while dodging a swinging wooden bar. Recently, looking through old tapes rescued from oblivion, with Electronic Arts Intermix, I found forty minutes of colour footage composed of out takes of a single scene from Glass Puzzle. I had never thought of using the colour footage and had completely forgotten about it. For the show, I reconstructed the Funnel set and projected the black and white original edited version of Glass Puzzle on the paper wall. The new colour footage shows simultaneously on a monitor placed on the floor next to the paper that hangs from the ceiling. Also reconstructed were a child’s desk and different sized cones made from paper. The photographs by H. Belocq of New Orleans prostitutes at the turn of the last century were originally one of the sources for the piece. They were often photographed with a sheet hanging up as a backdrop. They were women sitting, or waiting for their various possessions, props and objects. The juxtaposition of the original, carefully edited black and white video with the colour video repeating continuously one scene with variations, gives a new dimension to this work as it is experienced nearly 30 years after its creation. Seventies video colour seems strangely contemporary.
