I'm going to drop down some parts in the joan jonas book I have (from the 2018 tate show) which I'm finding particularly inspiring especially now that I'm more interested in expanding my practice from painting...
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P.16 ‘... I was very influenced by the poems, by the idea of poetic structure - the way a poem is put together in relation to the way I put an image together. that’s why I use the word poetic when I talk about my work, because a poem is like a condensed image. Maybe you can’t always see that, but it’s in my mind. The construction of experimental film has a lot to do with poetry.’
‘For Jonas to speak about “translating”, when moving between different formats in her works, from performance to installation, is therefore very apt, since a translation can of be a mere duplication of the original.’
P.18 ‘In the performances, Jonas appeared as both herself and, by putting on a doll’s mask and feathery headdress, as her alter ego Organic Honey.’
-installation versions (stage sets) of the performances. -live monitors reflecting performances video
P.21 ‘It is noteworthy that US art historian, critic, and curator Douglas Crimp, having written on Jonas’ works in the 1970s and 1980s, considered his position anew in 2015: “I moved from thinking about Jonas’s work in terms of spatial illusionism to thinking it in terms of split subjectivity. This is a big shift [...] [S]plit or de-cantered subjectivity - involves a relation between subject and object: between spectator and performance.”
-Moving Off the Land (2017) talks about underwater life and its indissoluble relationship with human beings. lecture develops into ritual, concert, dance, drawing session, projected sequence where she mingles with underwater species. layers of images, sound added forming an illusion, which she shatters by conducting the audience back to the frame of lecture with factual but surreal story about the octopus at the Boston aquarium who escaped mysteriously from his tank to steal rare fish at night.
P.48 work: ‘I want to live in the country’ 1976
‘Throughout the narrative video, one hears music and Jonas reading from the journal she keeps in Nova Scotia; her dreamlike comments refer to living in the country as opposed to the city, and the impact this has on her art.’
P.78 The installation’s individual elements are tied together by the theme of the bird. Investigations into nature and animals, especially endangered species, have taken on greater importance in Jonas’ work in recent years, appearing in installations such as reanimation and they come to us without a word (2015).
P.85 ‘it is significant that Jonas was an early adopter of image-capture technology, from the Portapak she bought in Japan in 1970 and onwards to the smart phone camera... The camera’s attitude (“the video camera is in our head”, as Jean Baudrillard put it) inflected both the installation and the performance that link her work to a younger generations practice - her Nova Scotia video diaries evidence the fact that “sometimes I [video myself] every day as just a discipline to collect images.”
P.88 ‘Re-enactment implies copying an authentic but dead original; whereas for Jonas, the origins were always charged with theatrical, fictional magic whose likeness persists as a possibility.’ (restating of real political events like miners strike in Jeremy deller and Mike figgis’ film the battle of orgreave (2001)
P.101-2 (interview) Jonas: ‘I was just reading about Donald Richie, the chronicler of Japanese culture. He said that being a tourist, you can go and get lost - you forget yourself. I identify with that. To go to a foreign country is like performing in a way; you’re not yourself. Within your own context you play a certain role. When I go to Europe, I sometimes think, you can be someone else, a different person, or dress differently; it’s like performing. When you go to another country, you’re actually in a silent space because you don’t speak the language. You are an observer outside of culture. That is what makes Chris Marker so appealing, he goes around recording and commenting. He turns it into his own work, something else.
P.103 (Susan Howe talking about her work) ‘in one of my poems I took the archaic word thorow .... this triggered a year’s work for me. It was as if that word was as solid as a prop. Jonas: the word becomes an iconic or totemic object that connotes.
P.106 ‘The object is often the material I first start working with. What’s important is how the material is manipulated in relation to medium and structure. Time is a material, too. When Richard Serra talks about his work, it’s about the material. In that sense, I’m like a sculptor.’ Susan Howe: what about the dog that you draw obsessively? Jonas: it’s true I’m obsessed. In this way I am like a primitive or outsider artist, because I like to draw the dog’s head over and over. I could draw it endlessly. Maybe this is sick, but I’m going to keep doing it. ... Susan: ... you mentioned that coincidentally your brother gave you some photographs. When a piece is really alive and going well, you give yourself over to coincidence. Jonas: your mind is a computer into which you load certain information. All kinds of things filter in. They take form, and then you finally just let go. I realised that when I did Mirage. I thought of the come, and then I saw the hopscotch game in the street. Then everything began to fall into place. I agree with you, but it’s not only coincidence, it’s something else.
P.107 Jeanne Heuving: Language can convey the essence of the violence of war, but only with great difficulty the language of pain. Woman have written so well on this - Elaine Scarry’s book The body in pain (1985), in particular.
P.110 I was very influenced by Maya Deren. I saw the four hours of unedited footage about the Voudon rituals she shot in Haiti for the first time at Anthology Film Archives in 1976, before they edited it. There was one image of a man making sand paintings over and over again, and I was very moved by it. I’m interested in this question because I don’t fully understand why I do it myself. It has to do with the pleasure of repetition, which is not the same as obsession. ... Susan: repetition is used in hopscotch, too.. Jonas: Mirage was partly about games. I’m interested in playing children’s games in performance. In that hopscotch game, I jumped in the numbers one through nine, beating the floor with a stick each time. A friend in the audience thought it was violent. For me it’s the nature of children’s games.
P.112 Susan: I’ve been very interested in D.W. Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object. Very basically, he points out that parent have no control over what object - toy animal, blanket - the child will choose to need and love. once chosen, it becomes all-powerful. It is the object that pulls the child away from the parents and into a relation with the outside world. The object assumes a cultivated status and has magic power. Later, the child will abandon of brutalise this beloved thing. Which may be thrown to the four winds and suddenly have no value. This phenomenon also concerns art. One tends to abandon a work once it is finished, whereas previously, in the process of creating and performing it, it was loved and needed. In ways, Joan, I think you have carried this idea into your work. Do you think of your props as transitional objects? ... Joan: .. people are material in the same way. But your question m, Susan, is difficult because it touches psychology. I’ve never been able to read Lacan. But from the beginning, transitional objects have been about constructing my identity in the work. It was somewhat of a coincidence, but in the first pieces I went through the mirror stage. The mirror also enables the performer to see herself the way the audience sees her. I thought of myself as schizophrenic, because I was so separated from the world and very shy. The performances gave me an identity, through visual language, that I didn’t have otherwise. That’s one of the reasons I became an artist. I could go out in public, and even if the public didn’t know me, they would know my work. in this way I could communicate. Susan: (on looking back and seeing things to explore more) ‘it’s as William James said, “Life is in the transitions.”
P.114-5 (transition and collage) Jonas: ... transition is one of the most difficult things - the in-between parts, getting from one section to the next in one work. Transitions can be the most interesting part, but can also be unsuccessful. My solution is to simply move from one thing to another, cuffing or editing. Susan: the blank space between two poems in a series invites contingencies. ... Jeanne: (collage) Quite recently, there has been a series of new writings on collage, which as a term is being recycled. For a while, everyone was preoccupied with [claude] Levi-strauss’s idea of bricolage, which isn’t quite the same as collage, but similar... Jonas: Collage relates to film, in which you put totally different things together. it all adds up to one subject eventually, or it could not. it’s about cut-and-paste. People who write about media and the language of the computer now still use these terms. it may be an obsolete word, but it depends on how you use it; it’s just a technique. It’s even harder when you’re moving people around the floor and you have to coordinate their movements with all the other elements. It becomes a four-dimensional unity.
P.16 ‘... I was very influenced by the poems, by the idea of poetic structure - the way a poem is put together in relation to the way I put an image together. that’s why I use the word poetic when I talk about my work, because a poem is like a condensed image. Maybe you can’t always see that, but it’s in my mind. The construction of experimental film has a lot to do with poetry.’
‘For Jonas to speak about “translating”, when moving between different formats in her works, from performance to installation, is therefore very apt, since a translation can of be a mere duplication of the original.’
P.18 ‘In the performances, Jonas appeared as both herself and, by putting on a doll’s mask and feathery headdress, as her alter ego Organic Honey.’
-installation versions (stage sets) of the performances. -live monitors reflecting performances video
P.21 ‘It is noteworthy that US art historian, critic, and curator Douglas Crimp, having written on Jonas’ works in the 1970s and 1980s, considered his position anew in 2015: “I moved from thinking about Jonas’s work in terms of spatial illusionism to thinking it in terms of split subjectivity. This is a big shift [...] [S]plit or de-cantered subjectivity - involves a relation between subject and object: between spectator and performance.”
-Moving Off the Land (2017) talks about underwater life and its indissoluble relationship with human beings. lecture develops into ritual, concert, dance, drawing session, projected sequence where she mingles with underwater species. layers of images, sound added forming an illusion, which she shatters by conducting the audience back to the frame of lecture with factual but surreal story about the octopus at the Boston aquarium who escaped mysteriously from his tank to steal rare fish at night.
P.48 work: ‘I want to live in the country’ 1976
‘Throughout the narrative video, one hears music and Jonas reading from the journal she keeps in Nova Scotia; her dreamlike comments refer to living in the country as opposed to the city, and the impact this has on her art.’
P.78 The installation’s individual elements are tied together by the theme of the bird. Investigations into nature and animals, especially endangered species, have taken on greater importance in Jonas’ work in recent years, appearing in installations such as reanimation and they come to us without a word (2015).
P.85 ‘it is significant that Jonas was an early adopter of image-capture technology, from the Portapak she bought in Japan in 1970 and onwards to the smart phone camera... The camera’s attitude (“the video camera is in our head”, as Jean Baudrillard put it) inflected both the installation and the performance that link her work to a younger generations practice - her Nova Scotia video diaries evidence the fact that “sometimes I [video myself] every day as just a discipline to collect images.”
P.88 ‘Re-enactment implies copying an authentic but dead original; whereas for Jonas, the origins were always charged with theatrical, fictional magic whose likeness persists as a possibility.’ (restating of real political events like miners strike in Jeremy deller and Mike figgis’ film the battle of orgreave (2001)
P.101-2 (interview) Jonas: ‘I was just reading about Donald Richie, the chronicler of Japanese culture. He said that being a tourist, you can go and get lost - you forget yourself. I identify with that. To go to a foreign country is like performing in a way; you’re not yourself. Within your own context you play a certain role. When I go to Europe, I sometimes think, you can be someone else, a different person, or dress differently; it’s like performing. When you go to another country, you’re actually in a silent space because you don’t speak the language. You are an observer outside of culture. That is what makes Chris Marker so appealing, he goes around recording and commenting. He turns it into his own work, something else.
P.103 (Susan Howe talking about her work) ‘in one of my poems I took the archaic word thorow .... this triggered a year’s work for me. It was as if that word was as solid as a prop. Jonas: the word becomes an iconic or totemic object that connotes.
P.106 ‘The object is often the material I first start working with. What’s important is how the material is manipulated in relation to medium and structure. Time is a material, too. When Richard Serra talks about his work, it’s about the material. In that sense, I’m like a sculptor.’ Susan Howe: what about the dog that you draw obsessively? Jonas: it’s true I’m obsessed. In this way I am like a primitive or outsider artist, because I like to draw the dog’s head over and over. I could draw it endlessly. Maybe this is sick, but I’m going to keep doing it. ... Susan: ... you mentioned that coincidentally your brother gave you some photographs. When a piece is really alive and going well, you give yourself over to coincidence. Jonas: your mind is a computer into which you load certain information. All kinds of things filter in. They take form, and then you finally just let go. I realised that when I did Mirage. I thought of the come, and then I saw the hopscotch game in the street. Then everything began to fall into place. I agree with you, but it’s not only coincidence, it’s something else.
P.107 Jeanne Heuving: Language can convey the essence of the violence of war, but only with great difficulty the language of pain. Woman have written so well on this - Elaine Scarry’s book The body in pain (1985), in particular.
P.110 I was very influenced by Maya Deren. I saw the four hours of unedited footage about the Voudon rituals she shot in Haiti for the first time at Anthology Film Archives in 1976, before they edited it. There was one image of a man making sand paintings over and over again, and I was very moved by it. I’m interested in this question because I don’t fully understand why I do it myself. It has to do with the pleasure of repetition, which is not the same as obsession. ... Susan: repetition is used in hopscotch, too.. Jonas: Mirage was partly about games. I’m interested in playing children’s games in performance. In that hopscotch game, I jumped in the numbers one through nine, beating the floor with a stick each time. A friend in the audience thought it was violent. For me it’s the nature of children’s games.
P.112 Susan: I’ve been very interested in D.W. Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object. Very basically, he points out that parent have no control over what object - toy animal, blanket - the child will choose to need and love. once chosen, it becomes all-powerful. It is the object that pulls the child away from the parents and into a relation with the outside world. The object assumes a cultivated status and has magic power. Later, the child will abandon of brutalise this beloved thing. Which may be thrown to the four winds and suddenly have no value. This phenomenon also concerns art. One tends to abandon a work once it is finished, whereas previously, in the process of creating and performing it, it was loved and needed. In ways, Joan, I think you have carried this idea into your work. Do you think of your props as transitional objects? ... Joan: .. people are material in the same way. But your question m, Susan, is difficult because it touches psychology. I’ve never been able to read Lacan. But from the beginning, transitional objects have been about constructing my identity in the work. It was somewhat of a coincidence, but in the first pieces I went through the mirror stage. The mirror also enables the performer to see herself the way the audience sees her. I thought of myself as schizophrenic, because I was so separated from the world and very shy. The performances gave me an identity, through visual language, that I didn’t have otherwise. That’s one of the reasons I became an artist. I could go out in public, and even if the public didn’t know me, they would know my work. in this way I could communicate. Susan: (on looking back and seeing things to explore more) ‘it’s as William James said, “Life is in the transitions.”
P.114-5 (transition and collage) Jonas: ... transition is one of the most difficult things - the in-between parts, getting from one section to the next in one work. Transitions can be the most interesting part, but can also be unsuccessful. My solution is to simply move from one thing to another, cuffing or editing. Susan: the blank space between two poems in a series invites contingencies. ... Jeanne: (collage) Quite recently, there has been a series of new writings on collage, which as a term is being recycled. For a while, everyone was preoccupied with [claude] Levi-strauss’s idea of bricolage, which isn’t quite the same as collage, but similar... Jonas: Collage relates to film, in which you put totally different things together. it all adds up to one subject eventually, or it could not. it’s about cut-and-paste. People who write about media and the language of the computer now still use these terms. it may be an obsolete word, but it depends on how you use it; it’s just a technique. It’s even harder when you’re moving people around the floor and you have to coordinate their movements with all the other elements. It becomes a four-dimensional unity.