Joan Jonas: Five Works
On view through March 28, 2004

The Queens Museum of Art presents Joan Jonas: Five Works, the first major exhibition of the American artist Joan Jonas’s work in a New York museum. The exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s most significant installations, a video room, and a survey of Jonas’ drawings, photographs, and sketchbooks. Curated by Valerie Smith, QMA Director of Exhibitions, the show brings together key works from Jonas’s career including Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), The Juniper Tree (1976), Volcano Saga (1985), Revolted by the Thought of Known Places… (1992), and Woman in the Well (1996/2000) . This exhibition also includes her portable My New Theater series (1997-1999) and Lines in the Sand (2002), which she will perform at The Kitchen in February. Joan Jonas: Five Works will be on view December 14, 2003 – March 14, 2004.

Joan Jonas (b. 1936) is one of the most important women artists to emerge from the late 1960s and 1970s. Working in New York as a sculptor, by 1968 she moved into what was then considered new territory – mixing performance with props and mediated images, situated outdoors in natural or industrial environments. In her early works, such as Wind (1968), Jonas filmed performers stiffly passing through the field of view against a wind that lent the choreography a psychological mystique. Songdelay (1973), filmed with telephoto and wide-angle lenses, drew on Jonas’ recent travel in Japan where she saw groups of Noh performers clapping wood blocks and making angular movements.

Jonas’ video performances between 1972 and 1976 pared the cast to one actor, the artist herself performing in her New York loft as Organic Honey, her seminal alter-ego invented as an “electronic erotic seductress,” whose doll-like visage seen reflected bits on camera explored the fragmented female image and women’s shifting roles. Drawings, costumes, masks, and interactions with the recorded image were effects that optically related to a doubling of perception and meaning. For Jonas, in Organic Honey and earlier performances, the mirror became a symbol of (self-) portraiture, representation, the body, and real vs. imaginary, while also sometimes adding an element of danger and a connection to the audience that was integral to the work.

In 1976 with The Juniper Tree, Jonas arrived at a narrative structure from diverse literary sources, such as fairy tales, mythology, poetry, and folk songs, formalizing a highly complex, nonlinear method of presentation. Using a colorful theatrical set and recorded sound, The Juniper Tree retold a Grimm Brothers tale of an archetypal evil step mother and her family. In the 1990s, Jonas’ My New Theater series moved away from a dependence on her physical presence. The three pieces investigate, in sequence: a Cape Breton dancer and his local culture; a dog jumping through a hoop while Jonas draws a landscape; and finally, using stones, costumes, memory-laden objects, and her dog, a video about the act of performing.

In her installation/performance commissioned for Documenta11, Lines in the Sand (2002), Jonas investigates themes of the self and the body in a performance installation based on the writer H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle) epic poem “Helen in Egypt” (1951-55), which reworks the myth of Helen of Troy. Jonas sited many of her early performances at The Kitchen, including Funnel (1972) and the screening of Vertical Roll (1972). Lines in the Sand (2002) will be Jonas’s first performance in New York in over ten years. Jonas’ works were first performed in the 1960s and 70s for some of the most influential artists of her generation, including Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham and Laurie Anderson. While she is widely known in Europe, her groundbreaking performances are lesser known in the United States, where as critic Douglas Crimp wrote of her work in 1983, “the rupture that is effected in modernist practices has subsequently been repressed, smoothed over.” Yet, in restaging early and recent works, Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years.

Events
Jonas will perform Lines in the Sand: Helen in Egypt (2002) at The Kitchen, February 19-21 (Thu-Sat), 24-28 (Tue-Sat). Tickets are $20. Generous support for Lines in the Sand provided by The Overbrook Foundation. TV Dinner No. 18: Joan Jonas, February 26 (Thu) 6-8pm Reservations required (includes dinner). $50 with 8pm performance, $30/$25 Students, Seniors, Kitchen Members. Moderator: David Ross. Meet the artist over video screenings and a vegetarian buffet. Call (212) 255 5793 for more information. The Kitchen is located at 512 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011.

On March 20 (Sat), 3pm, Jonas will perform An Improvisation at the Queens Museum of Art. Free, open to public. Call (718) 592 9700 ext. 222 for more information.

Biography
Joan Jonas was born in 1936 in New York, where she currently lives and works. She received a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College, Mount Holyoke, MA (1958), studied sculpture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1958-1961, and received an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Columbia University, New York, in 1965. She has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, since 2000. Her first performance retrospective was at the University Art Museum, Berkeley (1980) (Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, 1981). She has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Institute of the Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Kitchen, New York, and Pat Hearn Gallery, New York. Jonas has had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1994), and Stadtsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany (2000), and was represented in Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002)

Press Contact: David Strauss, (718) 592-9700, ext. 145, dstrauss@queensmuseum.org