18 - Joan Jonas: Making the Image Visible

Summary

The recent, untitled video/performance piece by Joan Jonas is more striking for its video than for its performance elements. Theatrically, the video imagery dominates the spectacle insofar as the live performance is most interesting in terms of the way it is reconstituted on video. This enables Jonas to focus on what might be thought of as an esthetic interrogation of the conditions of representation in video. Her video imagery is predominantly representational, but her treatment of it bypasses a concern with the referential or representational significance of the imagery in favor of a preoccupation with the representational power or scope of that imagery. That is, Jonas seems less concerned with what the imagery represents and more involved with how much it represents.

The piece begins with the audience assembled in an area defined by the presence of three television monitors and a camera. Two of the monitors face each other on a slightly diagonal north – south axis. Initially, these monitors determine the lateral limit of the audience. Spectators, seated on cushions, cluster around these monitors. Both the spectators' distance from the monitor and the spectators' posture are highly evocative of the everyday, home viewing of television. The third monitor is in front of the audience on the set of the performance. A camera, placed in front of the performance area, keeps the audience back from this third monitor, assuring that each spectator will have at least two, and in some cases three, distinct vantage points on the video imagery.