Five pieces: Joan Jonas recently brought her dance, music, sound, film, videos and installations to the Queens Museum in a selected survey reaching back 35 years; a related performance at The Kitchen was her first in New York in a decade

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Lilly Wei

Mirrors, masks and video cameras have long been Joan Jonas trademarks. Also characteristic of her work is the combination of multiple mediums, including dance, music, sound, film, live closed circuit videos and prerecorded tapes, props and drawings. She may focus on the body, in urban or pastoral, indoor or outdoor spaces, and her narratives may be borrowed from other cultures.

Jonas, now in her late 60s and a much-respected installation, performance and video artist, was a member of the groundbreaking ground of downtown New York experimental artists, dancers, performers, filmmakers and composers in the late 1960s and '70s, which included Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Robert Morris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Whitman and Philip Glass, Like them, Jonas, although specifically trained (as a sculptor, in her case), acknowledged no categorical biases. She wrote, in a 1983 statement, that she "didn't see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance." (1) radical at the time, her fine disregard is now the norm, shared by artists as varied as Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney and Sue de Beer.

Still based in New York but often traveling far in search of material for her performances and installations, Jonas is arguably one of the best of her generation of artists--which is high praise, considering the accomplishments of that generation. She continues to make complex, uncompromising, innovative work, spurred by an eclectic and fearlessly idiosyncratic vision. Despite showing steadily in the United States since the '70s, with a retrospective at the Berkeley University Art Museum in 1980, she has been particularly admired in Europe, where she has participated in several Documents and has had retrospectives of her work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1994, the Galerie der Stadt, Stuttgart, in 2000, and the Neue Galerie fur Bildende Kunst, Berlin, in 2001.

In the past few years she has recaptured the attention of the New York art world, her work singled out in critically acclaimed group exhibitions such as P.S. 1's "Video Acts" (2002-03) and the Whitney Museum's "Into the Light" (2001-02), culminating in her recent, widely admired exhibition at the Queens Museum. It was organized by Valerie Smith, the museum's director of exhibitions, who initiated the project. "Joan Jonas: Five Works" (something of a misnomer) presented 35 years of her art, from Wind (1968), an important early performance, filmed on a beach by Peter Campus (5 minutes, black and white), to the recent multimedia extravaganzas Revolted by the thought of known places ... Sweeney Astray (1992/2003) and Lines in the Sand: Helen of Egypt (2002). The latter, a performance and installation commissioned for Documenta XI, was performed at The Kitchen in Chelsea last February, concurrent with the Queens exhibition, it was her first performance in New York in a decade--and utterly illuminating.

"Five Works" (the title counts only the installations) was not chronologically arranged, due to the museum's architectural constraints. Nevertheless, it was evident that from Jonas's first public performances in 1968 and her first videotapes in 1971 onward, she has made her productions increasingly elaborate, multifaceted, technologically sophisticated and theatrical. Her cumulative process acquires deeper resonance with each new piece. Just as she recycles her talismanic objects, she returns again and again to themes of self and other, the proximity of the mythic and the real, and elemental motifs of wind and water, earth and fire.

Jonas's signature trope, certainly from the mid-'70s on, is to interweave and layer the mystical and the everyday in allegories flamed by current events. She interconnects "de-synchronized" (Douglas Crimp's often-quoted descriptive term for Jonas's method) fragments in a series of mirrorings and transformations of disparate sequences that lead from one image to another, one meaning into the next. (2) In Jonas's vulnerable domain, the narrative is nonlinear, looped and unstable. Memories and dreams flow forward and backward, turn over and over, tumble through different levels of the conscious and unconscious.

Jonas once wrote that an idea could come to her just from staring at a space until it blurred; then she would begin working, starting with a prop--"such as a mirror, cone, a TV, a story." (3) One of the earliest works at the Queens Museum, shown as a projection, was Mirror. Filmed in her loft in 1968, it was a simple exercise of naked men and women walking back and forth, in and out of range of the camera lens, holding mirrors at various angles and positions in relation to their bodies. It introduced much of what would preoccupy Joints for the next three decades: reflection, doubling, repetition, marking and mapping space with stylized, task-oriented movements, fracturing perception as Smithson did with his mirrors. Very soon, in the pivotal video Mirror Check (1970, not in the show), she turned the mirror--and camera--on herself. She is seen sliding a small round mirror slowly down her naked body, looking into it the entire time, seeing a "succession of places unfolding in time." (4) Jonas said she was greatly struck by the discrepancies between what the mirror, the camera and the viewer saw.