Joan Jonas

Who is Joan Jonas?

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video and performance art and one of the most important female artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She was born in 1936 in New York City. She began her career there as a sculptor. By 1968 she moved into what was then leading-edge territory: mixing performance with props and mediated images, situated outside in natural and/or industrial environments. In her early works, such as Wind, Jonas filmed performers stiffly passing through the field of view against a wind that lent the choreography a psychological mystique. Songdelay, filmed with both telephoto and wide-angle lenses drew on Jonas' travels in Japan, where she saw groups of Noh performers clapping wood blocks and making angular movements.

Jonas’ video performances between 1972 and 1976 pared the cast down to one actor, the artist herself performing in her New York loft as Organic 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. 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. For Jonas, in Organic Honey and earlier performances, the mirror became a symbol of 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.