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Joan Jonas: Queens Museum of art, New York
ArtForum, April, 2004 by Johanna Burton
In her widely influential 1974 Speculum of the Other Woman, the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray condensed a number of badly behaved and highly contested ideologies into one neologism: la mysterique. The term exposed mysticism, hysteria, mystery, and femininity to be deeply entwined bedfellows in numerous representations of "woman" appearing in canonical texts from Plato to Lacan. Yet rather than conjuring the figure of the mysterique in order to dispute or exorcise her, Irigaray took her as figure par excellence of potentially subversive feminine productivity. If, Irigaray argued, women had been historically contained and rendered mute by texts and images created by and for men, one feasible putsch could be enacted, rather counterintuitively, by way of a unique symptom of hysteria: the compulsion to mime. Indeed, by coming face to face, as it were, with predetermined representations of one's own subjectivity, one could, by way of a kind of radical aping, replace what was taken as natural with an exaggerated simulacrum.
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Some thirty years later the mysterique is alive and kicking in Lines in the Sand, 2002, a performance conceived by Joan Jonas for Documenta 11 and included as an installation in "Five Works," the largescale Queens Museum exhibition of pivotal pieces from throughout her career (a concurrent performance at the Kitchen in New York City gave viewers a chance to experience Lines live). The piece takes its inspiration from the epic poem Helen in Egypt, written by the Imagist poet H.D. between 1951 and 1955. In H.D.'s retelling of The Iliad, the infamous abductee Helen never leaves Egypt at all, so that she can be considered a cause of conflict between the Greeks and Trojans only as an absence, a needed fiction, a phantasm born of frustrated (male) desire. Jonas, whose work has long followed a kind of myth-based, pathos-driven logic of refractive multiplication, finds in H.D.'s Helen a perfect absent center and, thus, a most revealing, even revelatory protagonist.
Lines in the Sand proceeds by way of myriad displaced, densely layered images that serve only to underscore a base ground-lessness. The stage set-like installation at the Queens Museum included props from the performance and a double video projection in which a nonlinear narrative mined--and then mimed--the story of Helen while feverishly reconfiguring its familiar fundamental details in relentlessly unfaithful fashion. Onscreen, Jonas casts a diagonal shadow, pushing a long stick through sand, a dog bounding alongside; black-and-white photographs of Egypt in 1910, framed through a tourist's wide eyes (Jonas's own grandmother's, in fact), are arranged as enthusiastic primers of exoticism, replete with pyramids and sphinxes; a tinny doppelganger Egypt flashes by in the form of Las Vegas's Luxor Hotel; and Jonas dances a sped-up, dervish rendition of the seven veils under Nevada's vast desert sky. These views of a semifantastical Egypt are narrated in a recording of Jonas, who alternates reading excerpts from H.D.'s Helen in Egypt and the poet's Tribute to Freud, in which she recounts her sessions with the infamous psychoanalyst.
This constellation of images and texts produces a kind of dilating effect; the more there is, the less securely grasped any of it can be. Put another way, Jonas has created a space of focused destabilization, in which the very force behind Lines in the Sand (i.e., Helen qua Helen) comes into a vivid kind of three-dimensional being precisely because the mythically two-dimensional character is unmoored from the literary logic that had for so long assigned her only a stereotypically causal status. If The Iliad's heroic logic depended on Helen being brought to Troy, while in H.D.'s recasting she needed to remain in Egypt, then by natural progression Jonas's Helen ends up no place at all--self-consciously pondering the plausibility of a myth that has come to circumscribe, and thus dictate, her being. Jonas, not performing as Helen or H.D. but rather performing toward them both, jams the machine (to borrow another of Irigaray's notions) of mythology, our oldest form of history, makes it stutter, and then watches the ripple effect unfold.
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QMA director of exhibitions Valerie Smith's smart decision to avoid going the retrospective route probably had something to do with a similar kind of ripple effect. In organizing "Five Works," Smith seemed to embrace Jonas's signature method of multiplication and fracture: The exhibition, in point of fact, housed the abundant elements of some eleven pieces (rather than the purported five), each of which demonstrated Jonas's long-standing involvement with space, representation, the body, and storytelling. These concerns have remained central throughout her years of steady production, yet the means of making her works has varied radically, as she has experimented with different amalgams of theatrical and outdoor performance, textual appropriation, dance, and, perhaps most famously, film and video. Although the problematics of presenting work that often first existed as live performance are innumerable, Jonas's present a second complication since many of them also already incorporate elements of prerecorded video--there precisely to disturb any smooth conception of continuously unfolding time and perhaps more radically to point to space as a tangible medium, one that might be reoriented or displaced to show its otherwise hidden folds.
