Description
Joan Jonas, Glass Puzzle, 1974/2000. Multimedia Installation. Two-channel video (Betacam SP and DVD) shown in a projection (black and white, sound, 27:17 min.) and a TV monitor (color, silent, 13 min.), a wooden desk, metal rings, a top, a rattle, and a stereoscope. Collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid.
In Glass Puzzle, Jonas pushes the internal temporality of the aesthetic experience, by interweaving various spatial entities and realities, making the room legible through itself. This installation includes two video channels, one of which projects the recording of a performance by the artist in her studio in 1973, while the other shows unused footage from that first recording on a monitor. On both the monitor as well as on the screen, we see two women involved in various exercises and poses, their presence shifting between the reality of the studio spaces and the reflections of their recording in the monitor. As a resource for the staging of the piece, the artist used Ernest J. Bellocq’s turn of the century photographs of New Orleans prostitutes. Alongside performer Lois Lane, Jonas presents choreographic interpretations of evocative artificial poses that reference the idea of ritual, the double, and the narcissistic body. The installation includes an antique children’s school desk; from within, an orange light flows out into the gray space, suggesting a new, negotiable sculptural space. Glass Puzzle transgresses the dialectical hierarchy between object and subject and echoes the spaces within the video in the setup of the exhibition space.
—BC
Bibliographic References
“Glass Puzzle.” In In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas, edited by Joan Simon and Joan Jonas, 198–99. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015.
Hinojosa, Lola. “Glass Puzzle.” Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid.
Leaver-Yap, Mason. “Performing the Image: Joan Jonas’ Glass Puzzle.” Lux Journal, January 19, 2011.