Joan Jonas

“Jonas’ video performances between 1972 and 1976 pared the cast to one actor, the artist herself performing in her New York loft as Organic Honey, her seminal alter-ego invented as an ‘electronic erotic seductress,’ whose doll-like visage seen reflected bits on camera explored the fragmented female image and women’s shifting roles.” source

“Like a subsuming kaleidoscope, Vertical Roll (1972), Jonas’s most rigorous and notable video work, appropriates a technical flaw—a destabilized signal—and reinvents it as an energetic formal device. Inside the ever-rolling image, Jonas, using several guises reminiscent of her alter ego Organic Honey, constructs a self-portrait that seems impossibly disjunctive. Her identity is prisoner to a (reproductive) mechanism that resists stabilization, resists the calm of integration. The rhythmic crack of a spoon hitting a hard surface accompanies the unnerving picture ‘roll,’ at once a signal of distress and a tapping to readjust the technology.” source

i’ve been looking for joan jonas’s work online for a while now and it’s really difficult to find any video or good images. there’s a copy of vertical roll in the tape collection at school, but i’m really interested in seeing her organic honey stuff. it’s interesting how these quotes (especially the second one) kind of present fragmentation of identity as a “bad thing”, because i’m really interested in that kind of fluidity/destabilization. i wonder if it actually comes across so negatively in the work itself?