Joan Jonas: Exploration of the in-between spaces

**Irina Sheynfeld, *Summer 2021 at Dia Beacon*, 2021**

“I rehearsed my work only at night, and when I rehearsed, I stepped into another space that was not the same as my everyday space. You could almost call it a séance.”

Joan Jonas

A show of Joan Jonas' (b.1936) work, a founding figure in video and performance art, is now on view at Dia Beacon. Jonas is an artist who likes to explore in-between spaces, the areas where the boundaries between reality and representation are not so sharp, where the gap between knowing and seeing, culture and nature, video image and mirror image dissolve. As early as 1972, she made a mind-bending work with her Left Side, Right Side video, in which the artist is moving the mirror held at the center of her face, pointing to one side and then to the other side, and in the process making us aware of the disconnect between what we see and what we know. Now at Dia Beacon, three important works by the artist, in which Jonas explores imagined and real spaces by the means of mirrors and video projections, are on display.

Upon descending into Dia’s dark, cavernous underground space, which used to be a parking garage, a visitor is immediately summoned by one of the museum’s young guardians, who warns you not to stand in the middle of the circle made up of tall white cones (something I immediately wanted to attempt) and not to climb the precariously positioned ladder with converging sides (something that is very unlikely to happen). The mysterious cones are part of After Mirage (Cones/May Windows) (1976); they are more than six feet tall and resemble a copse of simplified branchless trees. After Mirage lures visitors into the illusory arena of magic – a space between reality and art – a protected, taboo space that museums are so good at enforcing.

The After Mirage installation in Dia Beacon today is a non-linear translation of an original performance called Mirage (1976) that took place at Anthology Film Archives in New York, where Jonas performed it for a group of artist friends. The artist has always been interested in rituals, games, and performance. In keeping with these themes, Mirage consisted of looping videos of erupting volcanoes, several repetitive actions that the artist performed with a small wooden hoop, and video projections of Jonas drawing and erasing a series of simple forms like stars and grids. In an interview with Karin Schneider for BOMB magazine, Jonas observed that “the act of watching somebody draw is very intense. And when the motion or the gesture is repeated over and over again it becomes a kind of ritual.” Through all these repeated actions, the artist created her own ritual space.

After Mirage consists of the props used for the Mirage, including two sets of ten white paper cones, used in the performance like megaphones, and ten black metal ones used as backdrops. Two video monitors peek between the cones, one at each circle. Like small aliens they sit quietly, playing an overexposed video, May Windows (1976), in which the artist emerges in front of the bright window, opening and closing it. The mysterious cones also appear in the video, further blurring the line between reality and art. In After Mirage, the artist references her previous work as if they were an archive. She is taking Mirage apart and then reformatting it in an even more complex way by layering elements in time and space, creating an immersive experience among several realities. For Jonas, the circular space between the cones is the Lacanian mirror stage of discovery and a shamanistic space of ritual connection. After all, Mirage, in its many variations, is a work that explores spaces where transformations take place.

As you move farther into the subterranean hall you encounter Jonas’s latest work, which takes up most of the exhibition space. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things was first performed at Dia in 2004. The origins of this work can be traced back to the sixties when Jonas made her first trip to the American Southwest, where she observed several Hopi rituals. In her statement for Dia’s current show, Jonas reflects that “this very special experience has inspired my work ever since.” Indeed, in 2004, Jonas made another trip to the Southwest, where again she stayed on a Hopi reservation, searching for fresh inspiration. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, emerged as a direct result of that trip. The immersive installation consists of several video projections of the site-specific performance from 2004. Interspersed with the screens are the sets and props from that performance: wooden swords, masks, and costumes. The atmosphere of otherworldliness is intensified by soundscapes that Jonas created in collaboration with the jazz musician Jason Moran.

Integral to The Shape, the Scent is the Hopi ritual of a snake dance and German-Jewish art historian Aby Warburg’s reflections on his own experience of it. During her most recent stay at the Hopi reservation, Jonas didn’t observe the snake dance, but upon her return she decided to turn to Warburg’s seminal lecture, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (1923), for the descriptions of the dance as he observed it 1895. Jonas’s resulting work explores the role of ritual and performance as a transitional space where spirits of the animal world, sometimes in the shape of snakes, enter our realm as guardians or guides. Characteristic of Jonas' practice, the current reincarnation of The Shape, the Scent is self-referential, in that it uses its earlier versions as layers, creating a space within a space within a space.

The Shape, the Scent is somewhere in-between traditional theatrical production and performance art. It is based on Warburg’s narrative – a lecture, which the scholar delivered at a sanatorium in Kreuzlinger, Switzerland, as proof of cure from his mental illnesses. It seems that while giving this lecture Warburg, an eminent reformer of the discipline of art history, was himself in the in-between zone, neither a patient, but not entirely himself either:

There are essentially two voices for this text: one spoken by the actor representing Warburg and the other by Joan Jonas. The time of the performance is the moment of Warburg’s lecture, the setting is the sanatorium. Images and actions constructed in the live performance and the video represent Jonas’s interpretation and response to this text.

Warburg described the snake dance as a bridge between the spiritual and the literal, “The serpent ceremony at Walpi thus stands between simulated, mimic empathy and bloody sacrifice. It involves not the imitation of the animal but the bluntest engagement with it as a ritual participant-and not as sacrificial victim but, … as fellow rainmaker.” The serpent is the enduring motif throughout The Shape, the Scent. Spread around the gallery are Jonas’s giant white on black snake drawings with paint brushes and buckets left as if the artist is about to return at any moment from a break. Right next to the drawings there is a video screen showing the artist, wearing a costume and creating the drawings with a brush on a long stick. In the video Jonas is moving around like a shaman performing a sacred rite. We are simultaneously watching the performance, which is scattered around us on several screens, while being on the set where it was performed. As a result we are in the in-between space – not yet participants and not merely observers.

No other work by Joan Jonas encompasses her oeuvre as well as The Shape, the Scent, the Feel Things. In it we observe a panoramic view of Jonas’s entire world that is neither fantasy nor reality but a land in-between. It is a land that Jonas populates with things and characters that are important to her and we are invited to visit this unearthly realm for a short period of time at the former Nabisco box printing factory in Beacon.

Bibliography

Jonas, Joan, and Karin Schneider. “JOAN JONAS.” BOMB, no. 112 (2010): 58–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27801164.

Warburg, Aby M., ABY M. WARBURG, and MICHAEL P. STEINBERG. “Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America.” In Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, 1–58. Cornell University Press, 1995. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt1g69xgc.5.

Nature Transformed at The Clark