Joan Jonas: Drawing/Performance/Video at Location One

Published by Gallery Crawl, April 08, 2010

“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance. A gesture has for me the same weight as a drawing: draw, erase, erase-memory erased.”
– Joan Jonas

In Drawing/Performance/Video, Joan Jonas, former senior artist in Location One’s artist residence program, was asked to select her performance pieces that related to drawing. Upon viewing these, I was immediately reminded of the 1956 documentary Le mystère Picasso (Jonas assured me she saw the film after beginning her career as a video performance artist). In Le mystère Picasso, French director Henri Georges Clouzot situates the camera in front of a transparent screen which Picasso then paints on from behind. While Clouzot was documenting Picasso’s artistic process, Jonas’s process is the actual documentation; the artistic act of producing a work becomes the work itself.