“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture,
a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing:
draw, erase, draw, erase–memory erased.”
-Joan Jonas
Location One is proud to present Drawing/Performance/Video, a new exhibition by Joan Jonas that highlights the role of drawing in the artist’s performance and video work.
March 24th at 7 pm
Linda Nochlin speaks with Joan Jonas, moderated by Jovana Stokic, curator of the Abramovic Studio at Location One
April 8th at 7 pm
Bonnie Marranca and Claire MacDonald speak with Joan Jonas
Drawing is an underlying practice and ongoing concern that Jonas has pursued
throughout her life. All of Jonas’s performance drawings retain a working relationship to her individual video and installation projects. For Jonas, drawings can be lasting and autonomous objects or they may be ephemeral and destroyed during a performance.
Jonas considers the act of drawing and the physical objects themselves (media on
substrate), in terms of their relation to the camera, the monitor, the space, as well as their status of being descriptive, diagrammatic or iconic.
Drawing/Performance/Video will look at Jonas’s drawings within the context of her performance and video work, including the groundbreaking work Double Lunar Dogs, originally performed in 1984, Lines in the Sand, The Shape the Scent the Feel of Things, Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll and others.
About the Artist: Joan Jonas is a pioneer of video performance art. Her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were essential to the formulation of the genre. Threads of Jonas’s influence can be found in many genres; from performance and video to conceptual art and theater.
Jonas has worked with composers such as Alvin Lucier and Jason Moran to develop video-performance works. Her work continues to explore the relationship of digital media to performance.
Jonas has had major retrospectives at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1994), and Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Germany (2000), and was represented in Documenta V, VI, VII and XI in Kassel, Germany. In 2004, the Queens Museum of Art presented Joan Jonas: Five Works, the first major exhibition of the Joan Jonas’s work in a New York museum. The exhibition included a selection of the artist’s most significant installations, a video room, and a survey of Jonas’ drawings, photographs, and sketchbooks.
The first installation and performance of Jonas’s Reading Dante was at the 2008
Biennale of Sydney. Later that year Jonas performed the work at the Yokohama
Triennale, and also performed a reading at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Jonas was featured in the International Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale where she installed Reading Dante II. Most recently, the artist presented Reading Dante II at the Performing Garage in New York as part of Performa ’09, and selected elements of this performance are featured in Reading Dante III at Yvon Lambert New York. Also at the Museum of Modern Art, through May 31, 2010, Performance 7: Mirage, which is a reimagining of the groundbreaking performance originally created in 1976. In 2009 Jonas was awarded the Guggenheim’s first annual Lifetime Achievement Award.
Joan Jonas is represented by Yvon Lambert Gallery, and was Senior Artist in Residence at Location One in 2008-09.
