Joan Jonas
1936–
In the experimental climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists used the moving image to extend their sculptural practice into a time-based form, using film, video, and performance. Joan Jonas produced some of the most important works of the period in these mediums, among them Vertical Roll, widely considered a seminal work of single-channel video.
In Vertical Roll, Jonas videotapes a television monitor, which plays a video of her performing in front of the camera. The image of the performance is disrupted by the black bar of the video monitor’s vertical hold scrolling down in a staccato motion, repeatedly detaching the image for a fraction of a second, in a relentless rhythm that evokes the act of blinking. Each “blink” offers a fleeting glimpse of Jonas’s body as she performs a series of gestures in front of the camera, wearing a mask, a feathered headdress, a belly dancer’s costume, or nothing at all. Legs, fabric, mask, face, and arms appear in a series of tantalizing flashes, constructing a body that continuously slips away from our visual grasp.
The rhythm of the images is further punctuated by the sound of Jonas banging a silver spoon on a mirror and then clapping two blocks of wood together repeatedly, in a reference to Japanese Kabuki theater. At the end of the video, the artist moves her head in front of the persistently blinking image, revealing that the camera is recording not only Jonas, but also the monitor on which her performance appears. She uses the properties of the video camera to present herself and the process of recording as a sequence of fragments, suggesting the impossibility of reading identity as something singular and unified.
Introduction
Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s". Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.
Wikidata identifier
Q453808
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 12, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, performance artist, sculptor, video artist
ULAN identifier
500058309
Names
Joan Jonas
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 12, 2025.
