Joan Jonas
b. 1936
An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas' elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity is a unique and intriguing inquiry. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts. Jonas first began using video in performance in Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), in which a live camera and monitor functioned as both a mirror and a masking device, a means of transforming and layering images, space and time. In the same year Jonas began making single-channel videotapes. Reflecting the conceptual performance and body art movements of the 1970s, Jonas' early video works break new ground in their application of the phenomenological properties of the new medium to a self-reflexive study of female identity. Her classic early works, including Vertical Roll (1972), explore the phenomenology of the video…
Films