Mirage by Joan Jonas

NEW YORK, December 16, 2009—The Museum of Modern Art presents Performance 7: Mirage by Joan Jonas, a gallery installation by the artist Joan Jonas (American, b. 1936), from December 18, 2009, through May 31, 2010, in The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Gallery. The installation, which recently entered MoMA’s collection, re-imagines Mirage, a groundbreaking performance originally created in 1976 for the screening room of New York’s Anthology Film Archives. For the original performance version of Mirage, Jonas carried out a series of movements—including percussive running and drawing—while interacting with a variety of sculptural components, films, and videos. In the MoMA installation, original objects and photographs from the 1976 performance are combined with six moving image works (May Windows, Good Night Good Morning, Car Tape, Volcano Film, Mirage 1, and Mirage 2), which are shown both on monitors in the gallery and projected onto the gallery walls. Performance 7 is organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art.

Ms. London states: “Joan Jonas has studied a wide range of subjects, and in the late 1960s she began to explore time as a material for art, both inspired by and part of an emerging practice that merged traditional performance mediums, such as dance, with avant-garde experimentation in the visual arts. Although she has been ever responsive to new ideas and mediums, for nearly 40 years Jonas has resolutely kept performance and video at the center of her practice.”

Jonas created Mirage following a trip to India in 1975, and designed it specifically for the Anthology screening room, where she had spent countless hours viewing film classics. In 1994 Jonas created a discrete installation in which she reconfigured some of the elements of Mirage within a gallery space—metal cones, footage of erupting volcanoes, wooden hoops, a Mexican mask, drawings on chalkboard, and photographs documenting the performance. After repurposing these materials for a 2005 exhibition, Jonas has again re-imagined Mirage for Performance 7, in a composition that combines concepts of ritual, memory, repetition, and rehearsal, with games, drawing, and syncopated rhythms.

JOAN JONAS’S MIRAGE REIMAGINES ORIGINAL 1976
Performance 7:

Mirage by Joan Jonas