Joan Jonas/Affinities

• Published in: C magazine (1992) 2017-01 (132), p.34
• Main Authors: Boudreau, Olivia, Clausen, Barbara, ti, Simone, Gerber, Corinn, Jonas, Joan, Linklater, Tanya Lukin, Silver, Erin, Simpson, Robin
• Format: Magazinearticle
• Language: English
• Subjects: Audiences; Cameras
• ISSN: 1480-5472; 1923-3795

Joan Jonas' From Away, on exhibition at DHC/ART in Montreal from April 28 - September 18, 2016, put five decades ofjonas' practice on view, from the late 1960s to her installation for the 2015 Venice Biennale, They Come to Us without a Word. In her exhibition text, curator Barbara Clausen describes Jonas' visionary use of performance in film and video as rooted in the artist's physical engagement with everyday materials, gestures and technologies. Jonas's understanding of art as a hybrid practice is embedded in the wider context of culture, history, mythology, poetry, literature and film. The accompanying events program, Affinities, which combined dance, performance, movement, film screenings and dialogue, pivoted around the resonances of Jonas' work with contemporary artists. Performances by Jonas with Jason Moran, Tanya Lukin Linklater, taisha paggett and Simone Forti engaged with and extended the exhibition's "liveness," alongside a series of conversations and screenings. Maybe, in order to become deflectable and multipliable in black mirrors, the questions, "How do we conceptualize 'force' in relation to the material, social and political body? How do we resist the aestheticization/anesthetization of political urgency? And how to we make a magazine that 'moves' in time with political movement?" need to be complemented by another question: "How to move on from 'prototypes' to 'figures'?" SIMONE FORTI: That statement expressing interest in finding a new way that was not taking for granted the proscenium and the costume and the virtuosity, that was part of the moment in New York. I'm going to go back a little bit because I really started with Anna Halprin and improvisation. We were working outdoors. Anna still works on her wonderful outdoor deck. And we were working outdoors in the woods on this beautiful deck and exploring movement and it wasn't so much pedestrian. Before I met Anna Halprin, I had been making big Abstract Expressionist paintings and they were big, and then they were very wet, and they were very oily. I was jumping around, laying paint on the canvases and then I had all these wet canvases that I didn't know what to do with, and then I came across Anna and we were moving around and jumping and being big and being tiny and then we'd put our shoes back on and that would be that and we wouldn't have these big floppy wet things to deal with. And there was an aspect of Expressionism in the work, there was something about it that had a certain m