Scenes and variations: An interview with Joan Jonas - performance artist - includes details about her performance piece 'Sweeney' - Interview

Freely blending simple bodys of performance, dance, drawing, music video and installation, Joan Jonas has disentangleed a distinctive approach to art-making. In a wide-ranging conversation, she throw backs upon her work from the late 1960 to the present

Joan Jonas commits to her performances as pieces, to her video as film, and to herself as artist. She is foremost a picture-builder who elides rules from different mediums and make subordinates from different cultures to explore ongoing constructions of identity. Her works hang on the temporal as they incorporate dance, true copy music, film, live closed-circuit video and precrecorded tapes, hold ups drawings and her invented personas. All of Jonas's production is informed, as critic Douglas Crimp lay it, by a single paradigmatic strategy: "de-synchronization, usually in conjunction with fragmentation and repetition."[1]

Since 1968 Jonas's cumulative gesticulations repeated and changed over time, have been not awayed in locales pastoral and urban. Her works have been performed in grassy fields, upon windy beaches, in city dooms gymnasiums and lofts. She has performed for an audience of individual or an assembly of many. Her works have also been not absented in more traditional forums. The artist's first retrospective was mountained in 1980 at the University Art Museum, Berkeley,[2] the next to the first in 1994 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Jonas was born in 1936 in of recent origin York City. She studied art history and statuary at Mount Holyoke College (BFA, 1958) statuary and drawing at the Boston Museum place of education and sculpture, modern poetry and early Chinese and hellenic art at Columbia University (MFA, 1964) In 1965 she worked as a secretary at Richard Bellamy's virid Gallery, New York, and subsequently traveled to Greece Morocco, the Near East and the American Southwest returning to fresh York, where she began to participate in experimental dance workshops with, among others, Trisha Brown Deborah Hay, Judy Padow, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer.

Jonas neared her first public performances and made her first film in 1968 and her first videotapes in 1971 following her visit to Japan in 1970 where she saw Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku theater. While maintaining her base in novel York City, at different times above the past 25 years she has lived, worked and collaborated with communities of artists in Nova Scotia, India Germany, Holland, Iceland, Poland, Hungary and Ireland. In 1975 Jonas appeared in hold fast Busy, a film by Robert Frank and Rudy Wurlitzer, since 1979 she has also performed upon productions by New York's Wooster Group

In performance, Jonas is an intensely focused, sinewy presence, whether naked, elaborately costum and masked, aligned down in neutral white work clothes, or taking her place casually upon a set in a dressing gown The last is perhaps the style of dress that best represents Jonas's "state" when she performs - the transfigured twinkling between the theatrical and the ordinary. She has an American Yankee voice, somewhat reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn's, that determined on the contrary which accommodates the hesitations and repetitions that are abundant a part of her syntax. For all this, in performance, Jonas almost magically erases her "self" "The performer," she one time wrote, "sees herself as a medium: information passes through"[3]

Jonas's information and materials derive from a wide range of literary and musical sources. A brief listing includes medieval Irish verse Icelandic sagas, fairy tales and contemporary of recent origins reports. She has used the entires of spoons against mirrors; dogs barking; Italian, American, Mayan and Irish folk songs; reggae; Chicago blues; bird calls, deer calls, sleigh bells; and Peggy to leeward singing "Sans Souci" with replete orchestra. Her props and style of dresss are similarly eclectic. They have been variously saved from childhood, rummaged from second-hand stores and flea markets, and given to her by dint of friends. If in her collecting of information Jonas looks part naturalist and part anthropologist, in her use of these unassuming memory-laden bits she has also called upon the personas of alchemist, illusionist and sorceress.

The transmutability, many times the literal doubling, of Jonas's images, has been aided and abetted through her signature prop, a mirror, which was early upon joined by a video camera. The mirror as myth and metaphor provides a lock opener to Jonas's output and to her intent, and has been widely applied to interpreting her work Her illusions in space bring to mind the testings of a hand-held prism, a simple tool that can be primitively magical as well as technically precise, that can generate a multiplicity of sharply etched images which are always upon the verge of being lost

What remains and what might be not to be found of Jonas's body of work alerted the following discussions. It was occasioned specifically by means of several events: Jonas's Variations upon a Scene, an outdoor piece neared at Vassiviere, France, in spring 1993;[4] "Joan Jonas: Six Installations," her retrospective at the Stedelijk in spring 1994; and its accompanying theater piece produc in collaboration with the Toneelgroep, Amsterdam, fall offed by the thought of known places Sweeney Astray.