Video
Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, 1972. Single-channel video, black and white, sound, 19:38 min. Performer: Joan Jonas. Camera: Roberta Neiman. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Description
Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, 1972. Single-channel video, black and white, sound, 19:38 min. Performer: Joan Jonas. Camera: Roberta Neiman. Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
In this seminal piece, Jonas uses a technical feature of video—the vertical roll—as a structural device. This formal strategy creates fractured images caused by out-of-sync frequencies to expose a key material aspect of the medium. The result is a rolling image that presents fragmented and disjointed images of Jonas’s body (feet, torso, arms, and legs) as she performs repetitive gestures for the camera. In one sequence, for example, Jonas bangs a spoon against a mirror, an activity that she will continue to explore in her work. In another, she marches into the frame and then jumps up and down, but only her feet are visible in the rolling image. At another moment, Jonas exploits the vertical roll to create the illusion that her hands are clapping. At other points in the video, Jonas enacts simple gestures like extending her arms, which we see in a jilted staccato as the frame jumps and rolls.
In Vertical Roll Jonas performs masked and, in one sequence, costumed as a belly dancer. In this way, Jonas deconstructs representation as a concept—through the medium of video and in terms of the female body—to introduce a groundbreaking form of self-portraiture, one of the fractured self. The video begins with the sound of a spoon hitting a mirror. For the rest of the video, the sound of blocks of wood being hit together keeps rhythm with the vertical roll; Jonas recorded the sound of the blocks separately, as she watched the completed video. In the final minutes of the video, Jonas places her head between the camera and the monitor that it is filming, confronting the viewer and adding another spatial layer to the work.
Filmed in Robert Irwin’s studio in Los Angeles, after he moved out and before Ace Gallery moved in, the video Vertical Roll was not directly used in the performance Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1972), but the actions and gestures that Jonas first explored here were later incorporated into that piece. The video was later included as a component of the installation Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy / Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll (1972/1994).
—AK
When I started working with video, I continuously compared it to film, and questioned how video is peculiar and different from film. So when I made Vertical Roll, I thought of it in terms of film frames going by. It was a dysfunction of the monitor, but I compared it to film. This is important to the way I worked, and to the way I thought of video at the time.
Roberta Neiman, the camerawoman for Vertical Roll, was sitting in the middle of the space, filming my actions. It’s one continuous shot. The image she is filming is fed into the first monitor, on which there is a vertical roll. And I was performing in relation to the rhythm of that vertical roll, and also to the image of the vertical roll. A second camera is trained on the monitor, and filming that off the monitor. This is why I put my head in between that camera and the monitor at the end, to reveal the space.
—Joan Jonas, December 2020
Bibliographic References
“Vertical Roll.” In In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas, edited by Joan Simon and Joan Jonas, 160. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015.
“Vertical Roll.” Electronic Arts Intermix.
For further reading, see Organic Honey Bibliography.