Joan Jonas Drawing and Performance

Joan Jonas: Performance drawing

Drawings have long been integrated into performance but it takes courage and a lot of confidence in what you are doing. Sometimes this means just growing into the role. Joan Jonas is a mature artist and this video is typical of her work. Since the 1960s, Jonas has worked using space, movement, ritual and gesture. She pioneered the use of film and video in performance, and later began to incorporate fairy-tales and folklore into her work, turning away from the camera toward a more drawing led, narrative and text-based practice. She has always combined traditional and new media in her work and you often get the feeling that she has ‘just left the premises’ when you visit one of her installations. She has a way of leaving things as if she just stepped out of the room. When drawing she tends to just see what comes off the end of the brush, stick or whatever she is making marks with. As her work is as much about the ritual of tapping into the subconscious as it is developing a clear narrative, she just lets things happen.

This can mean that her work at first looks childish, but it is in fact child like. I.e. it taps into a freshness of discovery that is vital if you are to keep work alive and operating in the now. 

I particularly think her horses are very funny, I can almost hear them clomping along. The addition of the heavy black horseshoes is what always gets me, they are horse shoes or perhaps even horse slippers.

Joan Jonas: Horses

The power of repetition is also part of a performance ritual. By drawing things over and over again, they gain an authenticity and aggregated weight, which makes them more memorable. 

Joan Jonas: Dogs

The dogs are drawn with charcoal and chalk fixed to the end of sticks, They hold on to the action of each drawing as a performance, each image a trace of her arm making its way through a space of its making. As she gets older things get shakier and that's part of the point. 

See also:
Joan Jonas drawing 
Joan Jonas Venice Biennale

Performance drawing

Draw to perform

Compare her performance ideas with the work of Caroline Denervaud.

Compare to these Robert Morris drawings of gestural mark making that are about the limitations of the body over time. 

The amazing performance magazine archive