Joan Jonas

Vertical Roll
1972

Black and white photo of a reflection of a woman's midsection wearing a decorative belt.

Not on view

Date
1972

Classification
Video

Medium
Video, black-and-white, sound, 19:38 min.

Dimensions
Aspect Ratio: 4:3

Accession number
2000.189

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Film and Video Committee

Rights and reproductions
© Joan Jonas. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

API
artworks/12812

Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll is widely considered a seminal work in single channel video. In the work, the video monitor’s vertical hold is used as a formal device to rupture the perceived wholeness of the image on the screen. Interrupting the electronic signal, a rolling black bar scrolls relentlessly downward, revealing a segment of the image for a fraction of a second, in a staccato rhythm that echoes the process of blinking. Each “blink” offers a fleeting glimpse of a section of Jonas’s body as she performs in front of the camera–either garbed in a feather headdress, wearing a mask, in a belly dancer’s costume, or nude. The rhythm of the images is punctuated by the sound of Jonas relentlessly banging a silver spoon on a surface, which introduces an assertive tone. In her refusal to sustain her image within a fixed pictorial space, Jonas uses the mirror-like qualities of the video camera to present herself as a sequence of fragments, suggesting the impossibility of reading identity as something singular and unified.

Audio

Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, 1972

In America Is Hard to See

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Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, 1972

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Narrator: The image in Joan Jonas’s video Vertical Roll jumps continually. Jonas created this effect by disrupting the electronic signal so that there would be a “vertical roll”—a common problem on early television monitors. The roll obscures our view of the scene Jonas is taping. We have to peer through the screen’s surface to see into its imaginary depths. In this way, Jonas disrupts our ordinary viewing habits, reminding us that that the flatness of the televisual image is an illusion.
Jonas made this video in 1972—soon after becoming committed to the rising feminist movement. And it’s significant that she uses the technology of video to play upon the female form. The vertical roll obscures the image of the artist herself as she comes in and out of focus—sometimes nude, sometimes masked or costumed. Over time, the vertical roll’s effect can be disorienting, even slightly nauseating. Near the end of the video, Jonas appears in the costume of a belly dancer, and the camera lingers over her exposed middle. But by this time, it may have become very difficult to keep looking. The technology both invites our gaze and repels it—mediating our access to the image of the woman onscreen.