On entering the Whitney’s “America is Hard to See,” your eye is continuously caught by touchtones from the visible art spectrum of the past 100 years. But out of this feast my attention was grabbed not by an image, but a sound. A loud, percussive clanging, coming from a screen continually moving in tune to the sound with the vertical roll of a mis-calibrated analog tv —Joan Jonas’ 1972 video Vertical Roll.
In his late-career essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, Gilles Deleuze attempts to draw a line between the old and new bogeymen of western society — from Foucault’s “disciplinary societies” to his own “societies of control.” The essay leaves us not with a solution but with an unasked question: “[t]here is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” What weapons? Direct democracy? Molotov cocktails? Dirty words? He doesn’t specify, but his question has been on the tongue of much of the contemporary art that followed him.
At the beginning of Vertical Roll we see Jonas’ face looking sideways onto the camera, interrupted by the vertical movement if a miscalibrated analog tv, seemingly clanging on the screen with a metal spoon. The sound continues, but from there it cuts to various shots of Jonas in costume, reclining nude, her feet dancing and jumping, and finally a long shot of her torso rotating for the camera. After this, we see Jonas’ face enter the frame once more — but this time in front the vertical roll — tracing her gaze straight to the viewer.
Vertical Roll manages to be hypnotically musical in it rhythm and repetition, while maintaining a narrative structure that moves the viewer along a trajectory. Jonas forces us to become aware of video as material by exploiting its idiosyncrasies (vertical calibration), while also creating an illusion of “breaking out” of the medium in her final gesture. While it seems carefully choreographed, the style of the video also maintains a sense of improvisation and intimacy. We can see her embodying her own gendered media representation behind the horizontal bars of the video signal. She begins and ends with a clear gesture of transgression; not only breaking the “fourth wall” but banging on it with a spoon.
Reading “Societies of Control” today involves a bit of time-shifting — while television was the mass media at the time it was written, the text also reads as a premonition of our current time; a mass-media that is networked, digital, and (to borrow Deleuze’s term) dividualized. Rather than moving through the institutions of discipline, we bring control with us to the office, to the home, and anywhere we carry our smartphones.
Jonas’ work simultaneously appropriates and subverts the mass media of her time, and perhaps can give us some clues as to how we may disrupt our own. And sadly many of the issues she addresses are still present today, unresolved. While it may not quite be a “new weapon”, Vertical Roll still comes fully loaded.
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