The New Yorker Joan Jonas (born Joan Amerman Edwards in 1936) is considered one of the pioneers of performance. She studied art history (Mount Holyoke College 1954-58), sculpting (Boston Museum School 1958-61) and art (Columbia University 1961-64), discovering performance early on as her medium for the synthesis of many different elements such as film, video, drawing, acting and pieces of narrative.

Her central subject is the visualisation, experience, penetration and fragmentation of real and illusory space.

It was around the time of her first public Performance in 1968 that she took up dancing lessons (1968-69) under Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton who also participated in her later Outdoor Performances.

In her highly symbolic, many-layered live actions, Joan Jonas combines a variety of media and elements: a collage of ready-made props, in part folklore in character (masks), drawings, video and monitor, installation, lay actors, text elements from legends and fairy-tales. She is joining in the Performance herself as an actress, singer, and dancer.

To her, a key item of archetypal character is the mirror, which recurs in all her early works. A stylistic element that was frequently used during the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism, a Lacanian object of (mis)understanding, it acquires metaphorical significance in Jonas' work, both as a means of refraction and distortion and as a divider of the depth of space, and as the transmitter of signals in a landscape. In her Mirror-Pieces (1969-71), the mirror functions as a duplicating component of reality, as an object acting as a picture within a picture which throws the gaze of the viewer back at him and unites the performer with her audience in an infinitely reproducible experience of déjà vu.

As an observer and reflective element of reality, the mirror, reflecting only part of that reality, adds a bewildering, distorting component. Therefore the mirror involves the audience, duplicates the experience of space, and represents illusion and imagination in the picture-image context.

Jonas' Outdoor-Performances (1970-90) in open country or in the suburb demonstrate the phenomenon of de-synchronisation: the delay of sound and image in space through distance. Acoustic signals such as the clicking of wooden blocks, the reading of text passages, the din of voices, singing, the horn of a ship, like in Jonas' Beach Piece (1970), Delay Delay (1972), and Song delay (1973) are combined with activities that can be experienced visually as well as acoustically such as playing with hoops, walking sticks, long poles, etc. The mirror then serves as a transmitter of acoustic signals, also with regard to their delay and distortion.

In what way, then, is the medium video involved in her work? On the one hand it, too, takes on the specific function of a mirror to provide feedback, e.g. in a closed-circuit system as the reproduction of Joan Jonas' performance activities. In part she reflects her actions, such as drawing or particular movements, exclusively via the screen. Thus the performer acts through movement and the viewing of the monitor, both actress and director at once. In Organic Honey (1972-74/1980), a performance that has been realised, altered, and expanded several times, the video monitor once again serves as a mirror for the self-reflections of Jonas, dressed up as the beautiful temptress. Her self-observations acquire an almost self-referential character, and she describes the difficulties of keeping a balance between "acting" and "watching at the same time" without sinking into solipsism.

Into most of her performances, she has also integrated films or video tapes that were specially shot for this purpose, for instance Vertical roll from the early seventies, or He Saw Her Burning from a 1983 performance of the same title. In both cases, Joan Jonas modified the video produced during her first performance and integrated it in her later one. The very long, 19 hour Vertical Roll tests the patience and perception of the viewer, not least because as in a faulty transmission, the picture keeps rolling off the screen.

Since they shared an interest in avant-garde film, Joan Jonas and Richard Serra frequently met in the Anthology Film Archives in New York. They lived and worked together for a number of years: Serra was involved in her performances, and in 1971 they both shot the film Paul Revere.

Joan Jonas is interested in primitive and folk cultures. After taking a degree in art, she tackled primitive art as well as Chinese and Greek art and has been travelling to Europe and Japan since 1958.

In Mirage (1976), a film-video performance, she integrated two earlier actions, Funnel (1974) and Twilight (1975): In Funnel, she again used the video monitor in a closed-circuit system as a running mirror. She observed herself trying out a variety of objects – a metal funnel which she liked to use as a pipe to whisper, sing, and blow into, masks and gestures – thereby changing into various roles, a constant, narcissist self-observation on video. An important aspect in Mirage is drawing. For this performance, Jonas had filmed herself drawing pictures on the blackboard over and over again and then wiping them out. She associates the "endless drawings" resulting from this process with the ritual Book of the Dead of the Molasses, the natives of New Guinea :
"It says there that somebody wishing to cross from one world into the next has to complete a drawing in the sand begun by an old woman, the devouring witch, at the boundary between life and death."

From 1976, Jonas integrated a new aspect into her work: Dramatisations of fairy tales. Inspired by a performance for children, and in consideration of their ritual, shamanism, and magical elements she created Juniper Tree, based on the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, which later on resulted in an installation (1994) that shows the pictures painted during each performance in the background.

An important aspect of her actions is the lack of a focal point, of a main story, since Jonas is mainly interested in the actual process and integrates many different elements, among them some from Japanese theatre.

Multi-media performances have been part of her work since the eighties. Volcano Saga (1985/1994) tells the story of an Icelandic Legend from the Middle Ages about a woman's dreams. Here, Jonas combined the video of her solo performance with original slides of her stay in Iceland and her drawings. In Sweeney Astray, produced for her retrospective in Amsterdam, she added the element of electronics with music and sound effects.

The central role of the integration of video as a vehicle for the perception of space and time in Joan Jonas'performances is evident in her statement:

"Video is a device extending the boundaries of my interior dialogue to include the audience. The perception is of a double reality: me as image and as performer. I think of the work in terms of imagist poetry; disparate elements juxtaposed … alchemy."

Lilian Haberer