Joan Jonas
dal 12/10/2007 al 30/7/2008
Segnalato da
12/10/2007
Joan Jonas
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley
Incorporating five-channel video projection with sound, drawings, photography, and found objects, the work finds its origins in a journey the artist made in the 1960s to the Southwest, where she witnessed several Hopi rituals. It reflects Jonas's interest in the persistence of past experience and, in her words, "how stories come down to us in fragmented forms..."
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things. Video installation.
Since the late 1960s, Joan Jonas (b. 1936) has been a pioneer on the frontiers of video and performance art, focusing on the performing body and its relationships with media and space. Jonas carries these abiding concerns through the terrain of the American Southwest in her multimedia installation The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004/05), recently acquired by BAM/PFA in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and opening this fall in Gallery 6.
Incorporating five-channel video projection with sound, drawings, photography, and found objects, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things finds its origins in a journey the artist made in the 1960s to the Southwest, where she witnessed several Hopi rituals; it also responds to an essay by the German art historian Aby Warburg, whose own nineteenth-century visit to the region shaped his later view of the history of art. The work reflects Jonas's interest in the persistence of past experience and, in her words, "how stories come down to us in fragmented forms. . . . I was thinking about memories of the American landscape, by which I mean memories from before the Europeans came here. The Southwest is a perfect example of different cultures layered on top of each other, and next to each other. I'm very interested in how stories are retold. . . . That's what we do—we retell stories."
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things is itself a retelling, iterative and open-ended: after its original 2004 presentation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago and Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, Jonas continued to develop the piece, adding live performances with music composed by jazz musician Jason Moran. Footage from these performances at Dia: Beacon in 2005 and 2006 is now incorporated into the work. In a sense, the acquisition and presentation of The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things at BAM/PFA represents yet another iteration and another return: several of the artist's earlier works are in the museum's collection, and her first retrospective was organized by BAM/PFA in 1982. A program of Jonas's video works will be presented at PFA in November.
Image: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2004–05; video installation; dimensions variable
Opening 13 october 2007
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2626 Bancroft Way, just below College Avenue near the UC Berkeley campus.
General admission is $8