Joan Jonas, a highly acclaimed forerunner in performance art, presents Joan Jonas: stream or river, flight or pattern, a new exhibition at Fundación Botín in Santander (Spain)The pioneering practice of Joan Jonas (New York, 1936) across performance, experimental film and video-installation will be showcased in Joan Jonas: stream or river, flight or pattern, an exhibition to be held at Fundación Botín (Santander-Spain), from 25 June to 16 October, organized by Benjamin Weil, artistic director of Centro Botín.

At the core of the exhibition is a new multimedia installation that will be produced on site, in collaboration with a roster of fifteen international young artists Joan Jonas has selected to participate in the three-week workshop she will direct at Fundación Botín’s Villa Iris - from 6 to 24 June. In this new work, she will further explore the complex relationship of human beings with nature and the environment, a constant concern throughout her long-standing practice.

The presentation of this new work will be complemented by a selection of films related to 5 important performances the artist has staged in the past fifteen years: Lines in the Sand (2002); The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things (2004-2006); Reading Dante (2007-2010); Reanimation (2012); They Come to Us without a Word (2015). These works will offer the visitor a rich perspective on the performance work of this prominent figure of the New York avant-garde of the late sixties and early seventies and key protagonist of performance art.

A native of New York, Joan Jonas graduated with a BA in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958 before going on to study sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She furthered her training in drawing and poetry while at Columbia University, where she received an MFA in Sculpture in 1965. Her encounter with the work of Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti convinced her to expand her artistic practice and stage actions, in which she soon became a main protagonist. While sculpture and drawing have continued to be essential in her work, performance enabled her to add sound and the spatiotemporal dimension, something that also enabled her to refer to film as much as to dance and theatre.

Says the artist: “Performance is the medium I use to construct an object that only exists in time, and which is worked out in space with bodies, with my body. Performance for me is three-dimensional live poetry in space”

Interested in exploring other cultures and their rituals, as well as the origin of Western culture, the artist travelled to Crete in 1966, where she was the witness of a traditional wedding ceremony. She soon after attended a Hopi Snake Dance in the American Southwest. Both had a tremendous effect on her. In 1970, she took a trip to Japan and became acquainted with Kabuki and Noh theatre, which have also been a great source of inspiration. She once stated: “When I was trying to think what I could do as a performer, I

related to other culture and their rituals, because I did not know what rituals were in my culture, and [because] the rituals of other cultures are closer to nature and involved with nature.”

Film has also been an important source of inspiration for Joan Jonas, who spent considerable time watching films, and had a keen interest in making her own. Her discovery of video was a turning point in her use of the moving image, which she promptly incorporated in the palette of tools used to shape her performance work.

In 1994, when invited to exhibit her work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Jonas started thinking about ways to re-stage older work, and thus started setting up objects and video footage that were to be experienced without a performance. She has been producing installations ever since, along with continuing to explore performance, as these two forms in her work are intrinsically linked.

Performances and Mirrors

In Wind, one of the first documented actions by the artist dating back to 1968, a couple wearing costumes with mirrors affixed to them appears and disappears in a snowy and windy landscape by the sea, while other couples perform an intricate choreography. This is the first time mirrors appear in her work. The artist has been interested in the way mirrors distort one’s perception of space. Wearing mirrors is also a means to conceal the body or make it appear. Jonas used mirrors in most of her work thereafter: they have been a key element of her formal vocabulary.

At the same time Jonas has from very early on placed female subjectivity at the centre of her work, and used the mirror as a means by which women could reclaim their own bodies, returning the gaze of the masculine spectator or directing it to their own selves. In her performance Mirror Check (1970) she slowly inspects her own naked body with a small round mirror: while her body is exposed, the mirror enables her to deprive the audience from the view of the part of the body she is observing. As such, the mirror is both a means to reveal as well as a means to conceal and, in this sense, is a complex sculptural object.

Introduction of Video

Like many artists of her generation, Jonas first used video to stage herself in her studio, wearing costumes and masks, and dealing with issues of identity and image. It also became a means to expand on the themes of revelation and concealment which she was already exploring with mirrors.

The use of closed circuit video during her performances allowed her to draw or capture objects and show them in real time as projected images on a screen. Later on, she projected recorded footage as a kind of backdrop, thus adding an extra layer of information, simultaneously expanding and realigning the notion of space and perspective.

On many occasions Joan Jonas makes the body of the performer(s) disappear into the projected space, sometimes even dressing in white to turn the body into a projection

surface. Video recording also enables her to transpose an action from one place and time to another, in turn echoing the artist’s keen interest in cinema as a narrative form.

Literature, Myths and Legends

The complex narratives of Joan Jonas’s performances and installations are often rooted in literature, and she mentioned Jorge Luis Borges as being a seminal source of inspiration from the very beginning of her artistic investigation. She has also worked with the texts of many other writers, ranging from Dante Alighieri to the Grimm Brothers or Aby Warburg.

While the written word has all along been an important source of inspiration, the spoken one has been as well, and local legends and tales have also been at the core of many of her works, one of the most recent being They Come To Us without a Word, her contribution to the 2015 Venice Biennale, for which she used ghost stories gathered in the small community of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (Canada) where she has been spending her summers since the early 1970’s.

Drawing and Nature

Drawing has been an essential component of Joan Jonas’s work. Both as action and trace, drawing epitomizes the notion of time and space in performance. Often enacted in the course of the performance, it remains in the resulting installation work, whether as such or in a video recording of the performance. Drawing is sometimes carried out directly onto a surface— paper, slate, a wall, an easel, a screen, or even on the floor—but it can also be projected, as the artist’s gesture is mediated by a retro projector, a video camera or presented as video footage. Drawing may accumulate or disappear, as the artist tears or crumples the paper or is torn or erases the chalk mark is from the black surface of the slate.

Having spent a considerable amount of time during her childhood in the country, Joan Jonas has maintained very strong ties with nature. She has consequently been concerned with the way humans relate to their environment. The fast-changing conditions brought about by human activity on Earth, the very distant—almost abstracted—relationship the “developed world” maintains with nature, and the complete denial of the fragility of our environment have been core to a number of her recent works.

The recipient of many honours and awards, Joan Jonas has taken part in six editions of Documenta Kassel since 1972 and major survey exhibitions of her work have been staged, such as those at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1983 and 1994; the Queens Museum of Art, New York in 2003, or the most recent at HangarBicocca in Milan in 2014. Among her most noteworthy recent solo shows are: Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010), Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm (2013), Proyecto Paralelo, Mexico (2013), Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2013), Centre for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan (2014).

In 2015, she represented the USA at the Venice Biennale, where she received a special mention from the jury for her installation They Come To Us without a Word. Fundación Botín was an important contributor to the production of the related performance.

Jonas has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1998, where she is Professor Emerita in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology at the School of Architecture and Planning.

Joan Jonas: stream or river, flight or pattern is her first exhibition in Spain since the one held at MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona) in 2007.

HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES

The following images are available in high resolution for download in the website (http://www.fundacionbotin.org/joanjonas).

For more information, contact the Botín Foundation’s Press Department by telephone 942 36 04 53 or email: mmeoro@fundacionbotin.org

Joan Jonas. Performance documentation of They Come to Us without a Word II, U.S. Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015. Photograph by Moira Ricci. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.

Joan Jonas. Performance documentation of They Come to Us without a Word II, U.S. Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015. Photograph by Moira Ricci. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.

Joan Jonas Portrait. 2015. Photograph by Moira Ricci.

Joan Jonas. Lines in the Sand, 2002. Performance documentation, Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002. Photograph by Werner Maschmann. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.

Joan Jonas. Reanimation, 2012. Video performance. Image from a performance at HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2014. Photo by Moira Ricci. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.

Joan Jonas. Reanimation, 2012. Video performance. Image from a performance at HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy, 2014. Photo by Moira Ricci. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.

Joan Jonas. The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, 2004-2006. Video

performance. Image from a performance at Dia: Beacon, Beacon, NY 2006. Photo by Paula Cort. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.

Joan Jonas. They Come to Us without a Word, 2015. Video performance. Image from a performance at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale, 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2015. Photo by Moira Ricci. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.

Joan Jonas. Reading Dante, 2007-2010. Video performance. Image from a performance at MACBA, Barcelona, Spain, 2007. Photo by Jaunchi Pegoraro. Image cortesy of the artist and Gavin Brown´s Enterprise.