A Mode of Translation: Joan Jonas’s Performance Installations

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Published: Feb 20, 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18239/sinobj_2017.00.04

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Robin K. Williams   
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

This paper considers Joan Jonas’s translations of her works from performance to installation through a focus on one specific but crucial work: her 1976 performance, turned multi-channel video installation, Mirage. Throughout her career Jonas has worked fluidly across media, cultivating transformations among motifs as they traverse two and three dimensions, still and moving images, and return in various works over time. As introduced within the context of Jonas’s 1994 retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, installation forms a relatively new component in this matrix, but not a fundamentally different approach. This paper argues that to recognize that continuity is to appreciate Jonas’s performances and installations not as dichotomous but rather as integrated within a cohesive practice that encompasses her multifaceted artistic concerns. At the same time, to recognize the new emphasis that Jonas placed on installation at a crucial historical juncture in the 1990s suggests an interpretation of her practice as historiographical, the artist’s active shaping of her work’s legacy in the future. With close attention, Jonas’s actions demonstrate her conceptualization of her performances and their potential relationships to other art forms—information vital to broader histories of performance art and the integration of performance within museum collections.

Article Details

Issue
#00 Collecting the Immaterial
Section
Dossier

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Author Biography

Robin K. Williams   , University of Texas at Austin

Robin K. Williams is a doctoral candidate in art history at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation in-progress about Joan Jonas’s art is entitled “Disparate Images, Juxtaposed: Viewing Joan Jonas’s Mirage”. She has held curatorial fellowships at The Blanton Museum of Art and Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas and will begin a Ford Curatorial Fellowship at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, Michigan) in 2017. Her article “A Mode of Translation: Joan Jonas’s Performance Installations” originally appeared in Stedelijk Studies 3, The Place of Performance (2016). She has published numerous critical essays in magazines, including Arts + Culture Texas, Glasstire, and Pastelegram, and has contributed to several exhibition catalogues, including Strange Pilgrims (The Contemporary Austin, 2015), Joan Jonas: Light Time Tales (HangarBicocca, Milan, 2014) and Byzantine Things in the World (The Menil Collection, Houston, 2013).

References

Benjamin, W. (1968). The Task of the Translator. En Hannah Arendt, (Ed.), Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. (Traducción castellana: Benjamin, W. (2010). La tarea del traductor. En Obras, IV, 1 (pp. 9-22) (J. Navarro Pérez, Trad.). Madrid: Abada.)

Jonas, J. (2001). Joan Jonas: performance video installation, 1968–2000.Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag.

Jonas, J. (2003). Transmission. En J. Malloy (Ed.), Women, Art, and Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Rockwell, J. (2004, Abril 30). Preserve Performance Art? Can You Preserve the Wind? The New York Times.