Air and Electronics

Jonas Investigates Media

The elemental media that appear in Jonas’s body of work are numerous. In a 1971 working notebook, Jonas recorded a list of elements—“wood, earth, metal, fire, water”—that foreshadowed those delineated in Reanimation many decades later (Jonas Reference Jonas1971:n.p.).Footnote ¹⁰ This brief set would rapidly expand over the course of Jonas’s career. A list of significant natural phenomena, provided by David Macauley in his book on Elemental Philosophy, offers what can be read as an effective summary of Jonas’s artistic materials: “stone, wood, ice and snow, clouds, heat and cold, light and shadow, night, and space” (2010:xiii). We might take as a case study just one element, mundane in its omnipresent familiarity but deceptively complex in its possible effects: the medium of air. From the earliest of Jonas’s films and performances to her most recent, air has served to articulate what the artist describes as “issues of space,” which she first invoked in connection with her outdoor performances of the early 1970s (in Jonas and Krauss Reference Krauss1975:13).

Figure 4.

Joan Jonas’s working notebook from 1971. Joan Jonas Archive. © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo by Molly Superfine; courtesy of Joan Jonas)

Jonas’s artworks from this era make clear that for the artist, the exploration of “space” meant exploring the qualities and capacities of elemental media. The performances Jones Beach Piece (1970) and Delay Delay (1972) are built around a playful exposition of the way that sound and light move differently through air. Both works positioned performers at a significant distance away from the audience. In Jones Beach Piece, which took place on the oceanfront in Long Island, viewers stood about “a quarter of a mile away” from the performers, whereas in Delay Delay—occurring in the urban landscape of lower Manhattan—viewers gathered on a loft rooftop to view performers far below on the streets and docks of the Lower West Side (in Quaytman Reference Quaytman2014). As Douglas Crimp explained, in these works “performers made loud noises by clapping blocks of wood together in wide overhead arcs. Because of the vast distance between performers and spectators, the gesture was seen well in advance of the sound it produced, making the gesture one of silence and the sound seem to come from nowhere” (1983:8). For Crimp, these practices marked a turn away from questions of the medium—that is, of “painting and sculpture”—in favor of “hybrid forms” (1983:8).

Yet Jonas herself emphasized what Crimp did not: that the desynchronization of sound and light in these works, caused by their different speeds when traveling through air, was an inquiry into a kind of (elemental) medium-specificity.Footnote ¹¹ Jonas’s simple but highly effective employment of distance served to disaggregate the passage of light and sound through the medium of air, creating a sensory scission that was dramatized by the performers’ highly articulated actions and the palpable disjunction between the actions and the resulting sonic effects. The following year, in 1973, Jonas would adapt Delay Delay into a short filmic version entitled Songdelay, which restaged the original work in Manhattan and drew on the additional visual resources afforded by film lenses to accentuate the sense of atmospheric mediation. Telephoto lenses, for example, were used to compress the recorded image of space: far-away performers loomed large in the telescoped frame, but the sound recorded from their actions was again oddly divorced from the apparent immediacy of their actions.

Figure 5.

Joan Jonas, Jones Beach Piece (1970). Performance at Jones Beach, Long Island, New York. © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Photo by Richard “Dickie” Landry; courtesy of Joan Jonas)

In a text from 1975, Jonas describes one of her principal techniques as the “transmission of signals through a dislocating medium, such as very deep landscape […] or video feedback” (in Jonas and Krauss Reference Krauss1975:13; emphasis added). Here, Jonas explicitly identifies two media whose effects are registered in her art. The latter example—video feedback—is familiar to observers of Jonas’s practice, and of video art more broadly. The artist’s canonical video works of the 1970s, such as Vertical Roll and Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (both 1972), are recognized as pathbreaking explorations of the emerging medium of video. Yet Jonas placed video alongside another medium in her practice, subject to a parallel process of investigation: “deep landscape,” or, more simply, the elemental medium of air.

With this comparison, Jonas invokes an older history of media that expands beyond the narrow frame of modernity. In his book The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters quotes German media theorist Jochen Hörisch to remind us that “well into the nineteenth century, when one spoke of media, one typically meant the natural elements such as water and earth, fire and air” (Hörisch Reference Hörisch1999:134; in Peters Reference Peters2015:2). This older conception of media does not preclude the newer, more familiar sort, such as the medium of video for which Jonas is better known. Giuliana Bruno, for example, seeks to reground the genealogy of the projected image in a more capacious history of environmentality. “In the art of projection,” writes Bruno, “an ‘elemental’ atmospheric filtering takes place […] I foreground the fact that atmospheric conceptions, including the transmission of light and energy, are at the very root of the invention of modern media” (2022:10–11).

Scholars like Bruno and Peters advocate for an ecumenical understanding of media that runs from air to electricity; in her art and writing of the 1970s, Jonas was already working in a similar vein. With her frequent use of the “vertical roll” effect—a rolling line that cuts through the video image caused by manipulation of the television monitor’s settings—Jonas exposed the mediating effects intrinsic to the videotaped image.Footnote ¹² The artist describes this explicitly as an investigation of the medium: “[I was] exploring what the medium of video was. So I was questioning that medium all the time” (Mink Reference Mink2007:39). As Lee has argued, Jonas’s articulation of video ran counter to the era’s predominant “rhetoric of [video’s] immediacy,” according to which the technology was “seen as a mode of representation that shored up the transparency of communication” (2004:82). Jonas made clear that she was not seeking transparency, but its inverse: “I was interested in the discrepancies between the performed activity and the constant duplicating, changing, and altering of information in the video” (2003:125; emphasis added).

Figure 6.

Still from Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll (1972). © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas and Electronic Arts Intermix)

These “discrepancies,” i.e., the transformative effects of various media, form the common basis for both Jonas’s video works and her performance pieces of the early 1970s. The language Jonas used to explain her outdoor works blurred the natural and the technical: Jones Beach Piece (1970) “was shaped by the way that the space related to or intervened in the processing of these signals” (in Jonas and Krauss Reference Krauss1975:14; emphasis added). Like video, air appears as a communicative medium whose effects are far from neutral or transparent. Yet never do these various media appear in Jonas’s work as a juxtaposition of old and new, or as the assertion of some linear history of technological progress. No less than video, air is a matrix for the creation of shared meaning and experience; even in the modern world, elemental media do not yield the primordial power and complexity they have always possessed.

Alchemy as Method

What kind of medium specificity is uncovered in these works? And what, more precisely, is the methodology of Jonas’s inquiry? The artist’s own repeated description of her practice in terms of esoteric knowledge is indicative: she has named “the idea of alchemy or transformation of material and psyche” as an underlying influence (2003:116), and stated that the “ritualistic” qualities of her outdoor performances were inspired by “magic shows and witches, those women who were outside of the culture and who were knowledgeable” (in Schneider 2010). In his history of magi in early modern Europe, Anthony Grafton describes the extensive study conducted by Renaissance humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) on forms of magical practice. According to Pico, summarizes Grafton, “the art of magic gave its practitioners not power over nature but access to her secret gardens and the ability to cultivate them by her rules […Magic] did not promise a violent transformation of the natural world but the full realization of its powers” (2023:98–99). Or as Pico himself put it, “the magus is Nature’s minister, not her Artificer” (in Copenhaver Reference Copenhaver2019:477). This attitude, a curiosity tempered with respect for the deep secrets and ineliminable agency of nature, captures something of the exploratory spirit with which Jonas approaches elemental media.

Jonas’s artworks betray an affinity with early modern experimentation on the elements, in which an older, more philosophical conception of elemental media made contact with an emerging scientific impulse. Crucially, however, the elements under investigation had not yet fully shed their occult qualities under the pressure of Enlightenment rationality; nature was not wholly transparent to mankind’s analytical gaze.Footnote ¹³ As Steven Connor summarizes in his book The Matter of Air, the distinction between alchemy and science was still tenuous in this period, “for the alchemists developed to a high degree many of the techniques that would continue to be important in chemistry” (2010:21).Footnote ¹⁴ These investigations helped to make air palpable as a kind of omnipresent ur-medium; as Connor argues, “the air has become mediation itself” (2010:31).

Giuliana Bruno explains how the term “atmosphere” came to mark the understanding of air in the 17th century. As in Jonas’s work, the transmission of light through air was a primary means by which to test the properties of the medium:

because luminous refraction requires light to pass through a substance, atmosphere was engaged, analyzed, and mathematically measured. Interestingly, it did not emerge as ethereal, nor as pure air, diaphanous or transparent. It was rather assigned degrees of limpidity and deemed opaque, turbid, or even gloomy, in more affective terms. (Bruno Reference Bruno2022:46)

A similar conclusion is easily drawn from Jonas’s outdoor performances, including Jones Beach Piece and Delay Delay, where the delay of sound creates an impression of air not as pure immediacy, but as a resistant and material medium.

Neither air nor any other element appears in Jonas’s work as a purely scientific, fully explicable object: rather, in Jonas’s art these media take on an intransigent, unpredictable agency. They are characterized by a mysterious and impermeable performativity, with which they resist attempts at comprehensive explication and rationalization. Consider the work by Jonas that most directly addresses the medium of air: the film Wind, from 1968. Performers are shown walking back and forth in front of the camera as they are buffeted by swirling gales, whose fickle power nearly sweeps the figures off their feet. As Jonas later stated, “wind is a character—mysterious and frightening—and a very strong element in my work” (in Schaffner Reference Schaffner and Farver2015:116). Indeed, the agency of the wind in this film is such that the usual relation between performer and setting is essentially reversed: the humans become objects with which the air itself performs. This effect is heightened by the mirrored costumes worn by some of the performers, which reflect the surrounding, blustery landscape—the human form nearly recedes into the elements themselves.

Figure 7.

Still from Joan Jonas, Wind (1968). © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas and Electronic Arts Intermix)

Figure 8.

Still from Joan Jonas, Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972). © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas and Electronic Arts Intermix)

Even in Jonas’s works that seem focused on modern media, the elements intervene repeatedly. In the video Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), Jonas devotes an extended sequence to exploring a simple jar of water. “Water is everywhere,” Jonas explains—“and it’s a medium” (in Schaffner Reference Schaffner and Farver2015:116). The effects of this liquid on light and matter are revealed as Jonas’s alter-ego (the character Organic Honey) places her masked face behind the jar, thus refracting her image through the medium of water. Jonas then drops coins into the jar, attempting to make them fall into a small cup placed at the bottom. Yet the viscosity of the water subverts the trajectory of the coins, causing them to float unpredictably away from the cup. Alongside the Portapak camera whose new capacities for instantaneous recording and playback helped spur her work in video, Jonas continued to investigate media like air and water—and as always, these media refused the role of passive object.

Figure 9.

Still from Joan Jonas, Volcano Saga (1989). © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas and Electronic Arts Intermix)

As the elements reappear throughout Jonas’s career, they tend to assume even more unruly, agential qualities. In her 1989 video Volcano Saga, the artist describes an incident during a trip to Iceland, where a powerful arctic gust overturns her car as she is driving. “I lost control,” the artist states in voice-over. “The wind was blowing like mad […] They told me I had been blown off the road by the wind.” Indeed, the entire video is replete with natural elements that take on uncanny powers of agency over human bystanders. “As in Wind,” wrote Jonas of the piece, “the elements become characters” (2015:300). Based on the 13th-century Laxdæla saga, the video depicts a woman (played by Tilda Swinton) who relates four prophetic dreams, each of which involves her interaction with Iceland’s natural elements. In one dream, for example, Swinton’s character dips her hand into the water of a lake, only to have the silver ring on her finger slip off and disappear. In this work, the mystery and power of nature is met appropriately by occult practices of divination, embodied in the figure of a wise man (played by Ron Vawter) who offers interpretations of the various dreams. The characters in the video employ a kind of pragmatic hermeneutics when faced with the opaque agency of the natural world: seeking not to control or subdue it, but rather to achieve a cautious coexistence maintained by practical understanding of elemental forces.

The mysterious will of the elements—one might say their subjectivity—is fully manifest in Reanimation (2010/2012/2013). Like so many of Jonas’s works, Reanimation has assumed many forms since its inception in 2010 as a performance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Jonas is a professor emerita. Its current manifestation as an installation in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art entails four video projections onto latticed frames inspired by Japanese shoji architecture. Two more wooden structures display additional videos alongside the main projections, and ink drawings of fish, bees, and rams adorn the gallery walls. The videos themselves are a collage of Norwegian landscapes shot by Jonas, found illustrations of animal and human figures, and Jonas’s own hands as she manipulates chunks of ice, liquid ink, and toy figurines. The entire installation is speckled with a gently rippling field of light, reflected from hanging crystals that refract the beam of one of the video projections. This sparkling light suggests a pulsing energy that flows through animal and environment, perceptible to the human visitor but also indifferent to any pretensions of mastery or comprehension any visitor may harbor.

In one of these videos, Jonas reads another quotation from the Laxness novel: “when a dandelion calls to a bee with its scent to give it honey, and the bee goes off with the pollen from the flower and sows it somewhere far away—that I call a Supercommunion. It would be remarkable if a more super communion could be established, even though intergalactic communications were put in order” ([1968] 2022:137). The wondrous yet unnoticed interactions of plant, insect, and air precede and exceed any futuristic media that could be imagined by science fiction.Footnote ¹⁵ The landscapes in Jonas’s work are revealed as palimpsests of elemental media, which facilitate the communicative interchange of countless species whose meaning-making renders the environment dense with hidden significance. In the Laxness quote Jonas refers to—“the spiritual in the natural world”—spirituality is no theological ascription, but an invocation of the nonhuman intelligence and performativity that animates water, ice, and air. The eponymous frozen entity in Laxness’s novel is “an active agent,” according to Marina Warner. “The glacier […] acts as a living, breathing organism” (2015:34). In Reanimation, nature itself appears constituted as a vast collage of various communicative media, interwoven with a vitality that is shared by organisms and elements alike.

Figure 10.

Installation view of the exhibition “Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning,” 17 March–6 July 2024. IN2555.58. The Museum of Modern Art/New York, NY/USA. (Photo by Jonathan Dorado; Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY)

Medium-Reflexivity Unbound

There is, then, a clear medium-reflexivity that marks and motivates Jonas’s practice—but it is one limited neither to traditional artistic forms nor to modern technological media. Yet this apparent revenant of an outmoded modernist narrative, whose desideratum of purity appears self-evidently incongruent with Jonas’s capaciously multimedia practice, recalls the Greenbergian paradigm of medium-specificity only in its playful subversion of it. A brief recollection of this older approach is necessary, if only to throw into sharper relief the alternative proposed in Jonas’s practice. To a “profound degree,” wrote Clement Greenberg in 1961, “Modernist art belongs to the same specific cultural tendency as modern science” ([1961] 1995:91). This is a vision of medium-reflexivity as rational inquiry: the intrinsic characteristics that ground each medium are to be uncovered and recognized as axiomatic.

There is indeed a rational impulse to be found in Jonas’s art—but it does not exist unalloyed by the forces of magic. The arcane and the enlightened are constant bedfellows in her work, as the elemental media she explores both offer their secrets and yet deny full disclosure. This fact has always been recognized by Jonas herself: as she wrote in 1975, “my own thinking and production has focused on issues of space—ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it without ever giving to myself or to others the permission to penetrate it” (in Jonas and Krauss Reference Krauss1975:13; emphasis added). The medium of air, whose properties Jonas manipulated and exposed in her performances of the late 1960s and 1970s, was never meant to submit fully to the analytical gaze of the artist or her audience.

In her essay “Air as Medium,” Eva Horn urges us to take this omnipresent yet precious element seriously “not only as an environment but also as an intrinsic element of human civilization, human knowledge, and phenomenological experience” (2018:8). In an era of mounting environmental degradation, there is renewed value in recognizing the air as a profound “medium of life,” which means bringing it “from a state of latency into manifestation—yet without externalizing it into pure matter or just another scientific object” (21). The danger that Horn warns against is “‘explication’ taken to the extreme,” in which a rationalizing project of medium-reflexivity strips the air of its manifold qualities—cultural, historical, as well as material—to render it a fully manipulable object (21).

Jonas is not interested in explication of the sort censured by Horn’s essay. Indeed, Jonas guards herself against it: hence, her stated unwillingness to “penetrate” the elemental media that appear in her work. For Greenberg, medium-reflexivity should transpire in the post-Enlightenment mode set by Immanuel Kant’s first Critique, wherein the philosopher sought to ground the possibility of knowledge by seeking its limits: “I identify Modernism,” Greenberg declared, “with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant” ([1961] 1995:85). A self-reflexive interrogation of each artistic medium’s essential characteristics would guarantee, for Greenberg, the legitimacy of modern art’s quasi-scientific inquiry.

Yet in Jonas’s work, the axioms of elemental media are never laid bare, its structures never organized into any table of categories. On the contrary, the opaque but palpable agency of Jonas’s elements consistently deny the possibility of any comprehensive critique. The media in Jonas’s work are, in a sense, self-constituting subjects as much as they are objects; this makes them historical rather than transcendental, open to contingent flux and transmutation. This tendency to continuously invert the dichotomy of subject and object runs throughout Jonas’s practice.Footnote ¹⁶ It is the basis, for example, of her early Mirror Piece works (begun in 1969), in which the audience unexpectedly finds itself reflected in the wall of mirrors held by the performers: who here is performer, and who is observer? Describing the work Oad Lau (1968)—a predecessor to the Mirror Pieces, and the artist’s first public performance—Jonas summarized: “the subject/object reversal became apparent as the members of the audience continued to watch themselves” (in Jonas and Krauss Reference Krauss1975:16; emphasis added).

Insofar as this reversal is extended to elements of nature such as wind and water, it forms part of what Lee has termed Jonas’s “posthumanist” attitude—which is simultaneously prehumanist (Lee Reference Lee2015). Elemental media are never the inert objects of Jonas’s manipulation; she makes inquiries of them, and in return they answer—but never fully, never transparently. In this way, Jonas’s methodology calls us back to an epistemological moment prior to the Kantian rationality embraced by Greenberg. Silvia Federici draws out the implications of a world denuded of its magic by Kant’s Enlightenment predecessors:

[M]agic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable, and that there is a force in all things […] Aiming at controlling nature, the capitalist organization of work must refuse the unpredictability implicit in the practice of magic, and of the possibility of establishing a privileged relation with the natural elements. (2004:173–74)

For Jonas, these unpredictable occult forces are to be conjured rather than banished; the enigmas preserved in their esoteric power rather than penetrated and illuminated. This is the media-theoretical outlook resurrected in Jonas’s work: that of early modern magic, where a practical knowledge of the elements did not presume total access to their deepest secrets.

Writing on alchemy in the Middle Ages and early modernity was famously cryptic in its presentation of occult methods of investigation and transformation, continuously employing metaphor and personification to describe the elements of nature and their behavior. As Lawrence Principe records, “by the end of the Middle Ages […] alchemical texts appeared in greater numbers and guises, many of them intentionally secretive, using allegory, Decknamen, allegorical images, and dispersion to guard their secrets” (2013:107). This allowed for a constant ambiguity and slippage of interpretation at odds with the resolutely clarifying impulses of modern science. Principe provides an example of one such system used to indicate alchemical ingredients, which could be linked to celestial bodies and corresponding symbols. Silver metal, for example, might be referred to as “Moon” or by a crescent symbol (111).

For an observer of Jonas’s art, such symbols are immediately recognizable. In the performance and installation Mirage (1976/1994/2005/2019)—a work dedicated to the idea of transformation of materials, ideas, and natural forces—Jonas draws a series of mysterious symbols onto a chalkboard, sometimes labeling them with text before modifying or erasing the image. The installation version of the work features six videos, some of which depict the artist making these drawings, while another shows stock footage of a volcanic eruption where lava pours over the earth’s surface. These videos, which are both projected onto screens and displayed on monitors, are interspersed with installed objects such as tall metal cones, a wooden mask, and a horizontal black surface with numbers drawn onto it—altogether, conjuring an atmosphere of obscure power and ritualistic action. One of Jonas’s videotaped chalk drawings takes the form of a simple circle, which she labels beneath as “sun”: the alchemical symbol for gold. A few moments later, however, the artist erases one edge of the symbol and adds another curving line, transforming it into a crescent moon, the symbol for silver. Accordingly, Jonas then erases the text she had written beneath. With this simple gesture, Jonas crystallizes the alchemical act: the mysterious transmogrification of one element into another, conducted with skill and precision but without any pretense of absolute scientific comprehension.

Figure 11.

Still from Joan Jonas, Mirage (1976/1994/2005/2019). © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas and Electronic Arts Intermix)

Figure 12.

Still from Joan Jonas, Mirage (1976/1994/2005/2019). © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas and Electronic Arts Intermix)

Principe records the gradual suppression of alchemy by emerging Enlightenment principles. “Many eighteenth-century writers,” says Principe, “cast alchemy into a common bin with everything else considered unworthy of the so-called Age of Reason: witchcraft, necromancy, astrology, prophecy, magic, divination, and so forth” (2013:89). According to Federici, the pronounced epistemological shift away from the occult was distinctly gendered: in the early modern period, feminine practices of magic offered symbolic and practical technologies that resisted instrumentalization by the rationalizing forces of capitalist production.Footnote ¹⁷ The demand to perform unwaged reproductive labor, for example, might be effectively countered by knowledge of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives (Federici Reference Federici2004:180). “Their claim to magical power,” writes Federici of the witches, “undermined the power of the authorities and the state, giving confidence to the poor in their ability to manipulate the natural and social environment and possibly subvert the constituted order” (174). Jonas’s elemental “witchcraft,” then, invokes a politicized history of women’s autonomy: as the artist explained, “I explored the place of women in history as outsiders—healers, witches, storytellers” (Jonas Reference Jonas and Malloy2003:127). Yet there is no naive nostalgia to be found in this project, for Jonas’s interest in magic is accompanied by her appropriation of modern media as equal tools for a project of feminist media-reflexivity, represented most famously by the “erotic electronic seductress” Organic Honey (123).

The emphatically performative, subject-like powers that characterize Jonas’s media likewise have their feminist implications. Zoë Sofia writes in her essay “Container Technologies” that space, and environmental media more generally, have often been figured as “passive, feminine, and unintelligent” (2000:198). In Jonas’s rejoinder to this denigrating formula, air is no transparent and docile conduit but contains the mercurial force of wind.Footnote ¹⁸ As Sofia argues: “the environment itself is a bearer of intelligence” (183). In Jonas’s alchemy of the elements, media are coconspirators, performers, and instigators; never are they stripped of the willful and mysterious spirit that animates them.

Media Temporalities

The Ephemeral and the Ancient

The proposition that Jonas is an alchemist of the elements, sustaining an idiosyncratic practice of media reflexivity, implies that her experiments will produce certain results, though, as per her occult methodology, they are neither transcendentally axiomatic nor rigorously verifiable. Nonetheless, they teach us something about the properties of media, both natural and technical. Jonas’s art points us toward the question of temporality, structured around two poles: the very long, and the unexpectedly short. On the one hand, Jonas’s insistent refusal to hierarchize her media—the video camera holds no priority over the elements of air or water, for example—reopens the question of a history of media. What kind of methodology could be adequate to a history that does not elevate mankind’s inventions over the earthly elements that have always sustained human and nonhuman life? Jonas asks us to consider the deep history of media;Footnote ¹⁹ and in so doing, to burst open the anthropocentric strictures that tend to underwrite even self-professed posthumanist approaches to media studies.

At the other end of this temporal spectrum, we find a paradoxical emphasis on ephemerality in Jonas’s work with media. That is, she insistently draws our attention to the tendency of media to fail to perform the very task that they are, by definition, meant to achieve: capturing and fixing the flux of experience, holding fleeting memory in material form so as to transmit and preserve it. For Jonas, this transience is intrinsic to all media in a manner that is distinctively performative: “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, draw, erase—memory erased” (1983:137). If media appear for Jonas as endowed with their own agency and intelligence, then they are unpredictably self-constituting rather than fixed: their mediation of human thoughts and deeds does not amount to a linear history of mounting accomplishment, but an ongoing cycle of fragile significance and its inevitable loss.

This theme finds constant expression throughout Jonas’s career. In Reanimation, for example, Jonas uses arctic snow as a medium for her drawings of sheep and other Norwegian animals.

Figure 13.

Still from Joan Jonas, Reanimation (2010/2012/2013) video installation. © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas)

In the installation version of the work, videos show the artist dripping ink onto the surface of her frozen canvas, forming the faces of various arctic creatures; yet it is clear to every viewer that this is a medium fated to dissolution, bound to melt as soon as the spring sun makes its appearance. Similar gestures are to be found in Jonas’s earliest works, as well as her latest: as Barbara Clausen recalls, Jonas’s early outdoor works involved “tracing and marking out circles and lines on the sandy beaches of Long Island and Cape Breton [such as] in the performances Jones Beach Piece (1970) and Nova Scotia Beach Dance (1971)” (2023:82). This is a practice of mark-making that accepts, indeed embraces, its own impermanence. What medium could more effectively emblematize the ephemeral than sand on a beach, continually erased by wind and wave?

A recurring visual motif in Jonas’s art is the shadow: the most basic and primordial of inscription techniques and also the most ephemeral, produced by the shifting interplay of sun and earth.Footnote ²⁰

In the video installation Lines in the Sand (2002), Jonas uses a long stick to draw shapes into the sand; but this action is only discernible by her shadow cast against the ground, outlining the artist and her dog.Footnote ²¹ Similar shadows reappear in Reanimation, where the elongated outline of a human form is stretched across the arctic landscape. As Bruno recounts, images made by light and shadow are at the very origin of the artistic medium: many Renaissance art historians traced the first appearance of painting to the story of Dibutades, a woman in Ancient Greece who “casts a shadow of [her lover’s] figure onto the wall and traces its outline” (2022:1). Her purpose is to retain the presence of a person whom she fears will soon be gone. And yet, the resulting shadow-image is “preserved in a shrine until it is destroyed, along with the city of Corinth” (1). At the mythic origin of technical media, then, is nothing other than the ineluctable cycle of inscription and ruination that Jonas invokes in her work.Footnote ²²

Figure 14.

Joan Jonas, Nova Scotia Beach Dance (1971). Performance at Inverness, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. (Photo by Roberta Neiman; courtesy of Joan Jonas)

Jonas’s approach resonates with a line of thinking that, as Peters writes, sees media as “most interesting when they reveal what defies materialization […] The history of media is the history of the productive impossibility of capturing what exists” (2015:11). Media’s allure rests in their futile promise to break the temporal horizon of all earthly existence, the finitude that haunts every human accomplishment. “Above all,” Peters continues, “media capture and fail to capture time, whose fleetingness is the most beautiful and difficult of all natural facts” (11–12). The inevitability of decay and dissolution is at the heart of Jonas’s media aesthetics, which are grounded in “the poignant beauty of things that are ephemeral,” as the artist says in her 2019 video installation Moving Off the Land II.Footnote ²³ Again, Jonas has articulated this insight from very early on in her career. In her 1964 MFA thesis at Columbia University, she wrote: “Nature is continually changing and flowing, undulating back on itself, and in the experiencing of this endless variety there is the pain of loss in the pleasure felt in the transitory beauty” (1964:6).

This is an epistemology of media that privileges humility rather than humanistic conceit. Jonas’s media-reflexive experiments produce neither complete knowledge of media, nor of media’s intended objects—the affects, ideas, and experiences that constantly elude capture as they slip into the ceaseless stream of temporal change. As the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler writes: “as temporal beings nothing is denied more to us than to know time” (2006:64). All media is bound to a natural temporality of decay and regeneration, before which every human accomplishment must eventually give way. Or as Jonas puts it in Reanimation, quoting Laxness’s novel: there is “the Weather; and there is the Law of Gravity; and last but not least, Time […] No one is a match for them” (Laxness [Reference Laxness1968] 2022:69).

There is, somewhat unexpectedly, an inverse correlate to the ephemerality that marks Jonas’s media. This other temporality is distinguished not by its fleeting brevity, but by its expansive and cyclical longevity: the longue durée of media that extends not merely beyond the technology of modernity, but also beyond human existence itself. There is therefore a nascent model of media history palpable within Jonas’s art; her practice holds several implications for the discipline of media studies more broadly, which Jonas refracts through performance and performativity. These implications turn on two key points so often advanced in histories of media: the assumption of temporal linearity, and the projection of humanistic triumph that such chronologies underwrite. Both tenets run counter to the pre-Enlightenment, alchemical methodology that subtends Jonas’s artistic practice.

In a 1994 text on “technology in art & society,” Jonas comes close to giving a précis of her nonprogressivist approach to the history of media.

Once, stories were passed on by word of mouth, in pictures on walls, stones, and in the earth. Then they were written and printed, sent by wire, by air, and so on […] Now it seems like a return to the Middle Ages—anonymous stories coming in over the waves, wandering bards, fractured tribal behavior, and access to layers of information. (2015:342)

Against a vision of distinct technological eras, which succeed one another like steps on the ladder to some future technological singularity, Jonas suggests a profusion of historical media, a comingling of the ancient and the contemporary. As Heather Davis observes in an interview with Jonas: “You […] present times colliding, where the past is alive in the present” (in Davis, Jonas, and Todd Reference Davis, Jonas, Todd, Clausen, Poor and Kivland2023:154).

Jonas’s vision of historical time emerges logically from her embrace of pre-Enlightenment modes of investigating nature, her interest in magical practices and self-identification as a kind of sorceress. The “return to the Middle Ages” she evokes is not only a description of the contemporary world that cuts against progressivist chronologies, but also an apt term for the artist’s broader epistemological framework. The nonlinear collision of times this framework assumes accords with the historical outlook that preceded what Reinhart Koselleck has termed the “temporalization [Verzeitlichung] of history” so characteristic of European modernity, which put an end to the understanding of “the present and the past [as] enclosed within a common historical plane” (2004:10, 11).

But it is just such a common plane that Jonas describes in her writing on technology and instantiates in her artistic investigations of human and nonhuman (i.e., elemental) media, where the properties of video cameras are examined alongside those of water, air, and ice.

As various scholars have noted, an approach to media that is not confined to human invention alone, but which instead foregrounds the significance and agency of natural elements, demands a historical methodology attendant to nature’s temporal complexity.Footnote ²⁴ Bruno poses a question that echoes the sentiment of Jonas’s own writing: “What if the distinctions between different phases in the development of media were not so distinct?” (2022:24). The media techniques employed in Reanimation perfectly encapsulate this constant overlap of media histories. Jonas drips ink onto the snow, and then uses a digital luminance key effect to blend a second video into the white background: effectively employing the elemental medium of ice and snow as a video screen, conjoining natural media with the technical.Footnote ²⁵

Figure 15.

Still from Joan Jonas, Reanimation (2010/2012/2013) video installation. © Joan Jonas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Courtesy of Joan Jonas)

Clearly, Jonas’s profusion of media—weaving together the old and the new, the man-made and the elemental—takes viewers away from a model of sharply demarcated breaks, or history as the mounting succession of media epistemes, each of which is heralded by some new technological breakthrough (whether computer, camera, or printing press). The countermodel suggested in Jonas’s work stems not only from her engagement with nature and with magical practices, but also from what Marina Warner describes as “Jonas’s encounter with [Aby] Warburg,” whose writing was the inspiration for the artist’s 2004 performance The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2015:32). According to Warner, Jonas and Warburg “understood that artists do not make pictures of what is out there but work with natural forces and forms to keep them flowing” (2015:32). Famously, Warburg’s art historical methodology sought “a decisive rupture with the very notions of historical ‘progress’ and ‘development,’” as Georges Didi-Huberman summarizes (Didi-Huberman Reference Didi-Huberman and Mendelsohn2017:38). Hence, Warburg’s concept of Nachleben, the continued life of a given form across epochs of time, “a notion that cuts across any chronological scheme” (48). The enduring animacy of the elements in Jonas’s art—what Warner would call their “force” and their “flow”—is the Nachleben of these most ancient of media.

The expansive understanding of media advanced by Jonas runs from ocean currents to arctic wind to 20th-century video cameras, yet in this ensemble, there is no implicit hierarchy of human technology over the natural world, nor any valorizing narrative of scientific progress. For if the function of all media is ultimately to betray the human dream of achieving permanence over the ephemerality of nature, then these media cannot undergird any technological teleology. Of course, the nonlinear temporality described here is also the very principle of Jonas’s artmaking practice.Footnote ²⁶ Jonas constantly returns to older projects and reworks them into the new, allowing past and present to flow into and inflect one another. Or, as Jonas says more concisely in her 1976 video I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances): “development is cyclic, circular […] you always return to the beginning.”