They Come to Us Without a Word: Joan Jonas at the 56th Venice Biennale
It’s hot. I’m standing in line in the sunny Giardini in front of the US Pavilion, where the queue has been so persistent, I’ve decided it might just be part of the installation. All around me people are recording and taking pictures, tweeting and posting to instagram—not surprising behavior, especially during press week, but I’m struck by how completely people adapt to innovation, and the repercussions that tendency has on older methodologies. To wit, the ballpoint I brought from Boston is making frustrated scribbles that score paper without leaving behind any ink, and no one around me has a pen to borrow.
The presence of technology in our daily lives contributes to a shift in how we see ourselves within the context of our peers, hold public discourse, and disseminate ideas. It’s no big deal to “jet” around the world, to “skype” with my husband, or to take a “selfie” as a document what I’ve been doing today. Languages are fluid; they adapt and reflect how we move, speak, and reinvent ourselves. We create or repurpose words to describe new things, and words drop from common parlance as they cease to be relevant to our experiences.
I’m moving ahead, inching closer to the entrance. The pen will stay behind. Known for her contributions to performance and video, Joan Jonas is a relentless innovator. Her early video work in the 70s pioneered the phenomenon of space, perception and identity, playing with the representation of 3-dimensional space within the frame. Jonas treats video as a collage wherein images are abutted to test their boundaries, or transformed into the ground in a composition of installed forms. Performance, poetry, video, music, and drawing are the diverse elements that make up the ABCs of Jonas’ aesthetic. While throughout her venerable career there have been an array of influences and references, the persistent thrust of Joan Jonas’ oevre has been the hybridization of these disciplines into a vocabulary of her own. Her work reminds us that our eyes are merely the organs of vision; it is our minds that assemble images into thoughts, patterns into language.
The written word provides a point of departure for many of Jonas’ video performances. Her literary antecedents flirt with historical narratives, making her pieces a retelling of a retelling of a story. Volcano Saga (1989) centers on the 13th century Icelandic Laxdeala Saga, Lines in the Sand (2004) reimagines poet HD’s portral of Helen of Troy, Revolted by the thought of known places (2003) on “Sweeney Astray” by Seamus Heaney. Double Lunar Dogs (1984), based on a story by Robert Heinlein and Reanimation (2013) references “Under the Glacier” by Icelandic laureate Halldor Laxness.
She readily adds to her repertoire, undaunted by a new medium or by technological shifts, in a long, slow unfolding of experimentation. If not known quantities, then familiar ones. guided by her curiosity. Her performance of 2013’s Drawing without Looking was the first available live for a worldwide audience via streaming in conjunction with the Tate Modern.
Within the layout of the US Pavilion is an opportunity to set the relationship between the “stage” and the audience in a less delineated way. The interior arrangement of the rooms seems especially considered. Each room in the exhibition orbits around a theme (bees, fish, wind, mirrors,) and contains 2 video pieces, as well as 2-dimensional drawings, 3-dimensional physical props, and a fourth dimension of time. Free-standing screens allow the drawings to be seen behind and also separately from the video work. Props and objects from the narrative are placed in the open, juxtaposed by the screen or in separated in display cases. The Biennale crowds shuffle around and through each section, quieted as they tease out a narrative—snippets of ghost stories told by adults of Cape Breton, play-acting by children dressed in white, animals going about their routines— bees doing bee-things, dogs out for a walk.
They Come to Us Without a Word continues to find inspiration in Laxness as well as personal accounts of ghost stories. As in a poetic structure, the audience is required to contribute their perspective to complete these phrasings. The layering of fragmented sources, flowing by small degrees of variation within ritualistic praxis, becomes a fertile loam for associations.
Throughout Jonas remains a director and rather than a dictator; she surrenders outright control of meaning in favor of fostering intimate moments of mystery.
