A Mode Of Translation: Joan Jonas’s Performance Installations

Abstract

Imagine this. Parting a heavy curtain, you enter a vast space. Ceiling high and pitched, austere columns down two long sides—it’s a kind of post-industrial basilica painted black. Sound is a resounding murmur. Light flickers across video monitors and projection screens. You pause for your senses to adjust. First scanning the room and then moving within it, your perception sharpens to your surroundings… Figures, mostly women: in landscapes, with animals, mirrors, and masks; cones of white paper or galvanized tin nearly twice your height; line drawings in sand or chalk, on paper or in video; sounds of wind, foghorns, whistling, footsteps; images in facets, shadows, reflections, prisms… You walk through the space, gathering perceptions. Eventually, your experiences of aural and visual echoes cohere to form an internal syntax, a meaningful order, in which no external references pertain. Like a dream or a foreign place, the environment is immersive and so impossible, later, to fully recall or describe. What remains with you is an impression, an image that dwells in your mind.