Joan Jonas

Uncovering the artist’s innovations and legacies.

From mindful Minimalism to inaction as activism.

During a train ride from New York to Massachusetts, Rosa Barba and Joan Jonas exchanged thoughts on volcanoes, deserts, and poetry, on film versus video, and the layering of time and place in their works.

Jonas’s language gives us a fertile semiological value to reflect upon. It has an organic open-work structure of experimentation that necessitates play along with a system of signs. Its mythology offers a visual image of a new Gestalt.

Location: the spiral museum as space ship, audience below in the past looking up at a scroll unwinding on the different tracks, the ramps, the corridors, where illusion occurs …