Joan Jonas
Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea , Trento, Italy
Three wooden sculptures, squared-off cones posing on workbenches, stand in a sparsely-lit room. Joan Jonas terms these video-sculptures or portable theatres ‘worlds in miniature’, places where the ‘space and form of the box represent an extension of the studio.’ An eerie atmosphere of distant intimacy surrounds the works: monitors hidden in the bellies of the conical vessels tug at the viewer and yet these long funnels also seem like infinite corridors that render insurmountable the space between artist and audience. Designed by Jonas for the series ‘My New Theater’ (1997-2006), they are the focus of an exhibition currently at the Galleria Civica in Trento.
‘From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us,’ recounts Jorge Luis Borges in Tlon, Uqbar,Orbis Tertius. ‘We discovered […] that mirrors have something monstrous about them.’ ‘Monstrous’ because they reveal what Borges calls man’s ‘intimate ignorance,’ the sense that ‘no human being is capable of declaring with certitude who he really is.’ In My New Theater VI, Good Night Good Morning ’06 (2006), Jonas seems to fix the viewer in a wide-eyed stare, but she is really scrutinizing her own disfigured reflection in a convex mirror. We realize that Jonas’ intermittent ‘good mornings’ and ‘good nights’ are just an awkward monologue recited by her double; we identify with the camera, feeling the uncanny sensation that the artist is looking over our shoulders.
The mirror was Jonas’ first major prop and played protagonist to her first performances, ‘Mirror Pieces’ (1968-2004). An early version of the series plays on a small monitor reflected in the same mirrored panels, carried by performers for the piece. Hanging among the panels is a black tunic, adorned with fragments of reflective glass, worn by Jonas in another version for which she recited passages about mirrors from Borges’ Labyrinths.
Jonas’ work is filled with literary references: in My New Theater II, Big Mirror (1998) she draws on a black canvas with chalk, cued by poet William Carlos Williams’ step-by-step account of a man painting a landscape on a mirror. Even in the mirror’s physical absence, the simulacrum is always present, often manifested in the act of drawing. In My New Theater III, In the Shadow a Shadow (1999) the artist reclines, a sheet covering her from face to feet, and traces over her own figure with charcoal.
An homage to Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29), Jonas’ most recent performance, The Hand Reverts to Its Own Movement (2007), recalls the self-reflexive nature of the artist’s practice, a spiralling trajectory through time and space that ignores fixed chronologies. Staged in Como’s Church of San Francesco, the performance also featured 20 young artists, participants in a three-week workshop with the 72-year old Jonas. The workshop aimed at ‘revealing the invisible miracles’ of everyday materials and resulted in an exhibition in Milan of work created by the participants.
In workshop participant Alberto Tadiello’s Come abitando in prossimità (2007), a sheet of black paper pasted at the foot of a wall seems like a tiny doorway to the unknown. Flecks of dust on a scanner’s glass surface are projected in slides onto the paper, at once magically transformed into a starry night sky. ‘The terrifying immensity of the firmament’s abyss is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived “in a mirror,”’ writes Léon Bloy in Borges’ The Mirrors of Enigma. ‘We should invert our eyes and practise a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts […] If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.’
Emily Verla Bovino
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