Joan Jonas — Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy

1972

Artists: Joan Jonas · Year: 1972 · Medium: Video-performance — live performance integrated with simultaneous video capture and playback · Substrate: Sony Portapak video; live performance with masks, props, and mirror interactions; real-time video feedback on monitor visible to audience · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Loeb Student Center NYU; various performance venues Joan Jonas performed Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy for the first time in April 1972 at the LoGiudice Gallery in New York, and then in the revised Organic Honey's Vertical Roll at Ace Gallery Los Angeles in October of the same year. Both versions used a closed-circuit video camera, a live monitor, a mask of a doll's face, a feather headdress, a small mirror, and, crucially, a monitor whose vertical hold was deliberately miscalibrated so the image rolled continuously from top to bottom. Jonas performed live; the camera fed the rolling monitor; the audience watched both Jonas and her rolling video double in the same room. The vertical-roll effect is the operational heart of the piece. On a working television the vertical hold locks the image in place; when the hold slips, the image scrolls, and the horizontal sync bar — a thick black line — passes across the screen at regular intervals. Jonas timed her gestures to the roll: she would raise her hand and the hand would rise on the monitor and then be cut off and reappear from the bottom, a body transected by a television defect. The rolling bar became a fourth performer. What matters for this archive is the specific argument. Video was new in 1972. The consumer portapak had been available for about five years. Jonas's insistence on the medium's idiosyncrasies — the vertical roll, the low resolution, the degraded color of tape-to-tape dubbing, the stutter of hand-held recording — was an argument that video was not a cheaper film but a different medium with its own native behaviors, and that an artist's job was to compose for those behaviors rather than hide them. This is the same argument being made simultaneously by the Vasulkas with their signal-based video experiments and by Paik's electronic television work, but Jonas made it through performance — as a live, bodily, one-night event — in a way those did not. Organic Honey's Vertical Roll is now one of the single most-cited works of early performance video, taught in every film and performance-art curriculum. Jonas, born in 1936, is still active, and continues to develop variants of the 1972 vocabulary in new installations through her representation at Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Amanda Wilkinson Gallery. Lore Jonas built the Organic Honey persona as a conscious distancing device — a masked, feathered, doll-faced alter ego through which she could perform movements too private to perform unmasked. She had been a sculpture student of the Japanese dancer Yvonne Rainer in the late 1960s and said, in a 1973 Avalanche interview, that the mask was what let her be on camera at all. The vertical roll was, in the first instance, an accident: she had borrowed a television from a neighbor, found its hold slipping, and decided the defect was a gift. She kept that specific television for years afterward and toured with it. After its picture tube died, she sourced a replacement from a repair shop in Manhattan. Jonas won the 2018 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, at 82, for the same vocabulary she had established in 1972. Sources • Iles, Chrissie — Joan Jonas: Five Works (Stedelijk Museum, 2003). • MIT List Visual Arts Center — Joan Jonas: In the Shadow a Shadow (exh. cat. 2015). • Electronic Arts Intermix — Joan Jonas catalogue.