An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas engages in an elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity. Employing an idiosyncratic vocabulary of ritualized gesture and symbolic objects that include masks, mirrors, and costuming, she explores the self and the body through layers of meaning.

Wind is a 1968 performance film, recently restored and newly available on video. Cutting between snowy fields and a raw seashore, Jonas focuses on a group of performers moving through a stark, windswept landscape. The 16mm film — silent, black and white, jerky and sped-up — evokes ...

Newly re-mastered through EAI's Videotape Preservation Program, this tape is a classic early video performance. In this seminal exploration of the phenomenology of video as a mirror and as "reality," Jonas, face-to-face with her own recorded image, performs a duet with herself.

In this early work, Jonas translates her performance strategies to video, applying the inherent properties of the medium to her investigations of the self and the body. Jonas performs in a direct, one-on-one confrontation with the viewer, using the immediacy and intimacy of video as conceptual const ...

Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy is based on Jonas' 1972 performance of the same name, the first in which she used video. In an enigmatic ritual of identity, Jonas performs as herself and as her masked double, Organic Honey. Dressed in a feathered headdress and costumes, Organic Honey is the ...

Vertical Roll is a seminal work. In a startling collusion of form and content, Jonas constructs a theater of female identity by deconstructing representations of the female body and the technology of video. Using an interrupted electronic signal — or "vertical roll" — as a dynamic ...

This complex and enigmatic work, which is performed by Jonas and Lois Lane, explores female gestures, poses, the body and narcissism. Mirroring each other with synchronized movements as they perform as alter-egos, Jonas and Lane reference archetypal female gestures and poses from popular and traditi ...

This 1973 black-and-white film is a rediscovered classic. Performing with a "cast" that includes Gordon Matta-Clark, Jonas choreographs a theater of space, movement, and sound, with the urban landscape of New York in a featured role. Jonas creates a highl ...

In these two minimalist exercises, Jonas addresses perceptual phenomena in natural landscapes, and questions the camera's recording of reality. In Three Returns, she ritualistically charts sound, space and time in the topology of landscape. A boy playing bagpipes emerges from behind the camer ...

This documentation of a 1972 performance, in which Jonas performs as "Organic Honey," includes many of her signature devices: mirrors, masks, and the use of video for spatial, temporal, and psychological layering. In this prescient work, Jonas relates the theatrical space of her live performance to ...

Disturbances extends Jonas' investigation of mirrored surfaces and spaces, as she explores reflections of movement and images in water. The tape begins with Jonas, like Narcissus, leaning over a reflecting pool. Throughout this lyrical exercise, the viewer sees only reflected images and inver ...

Produced at the seminal video art studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Merlo is an early piece in which Jonas performs alone in several dramatic outdoor locations: a rocky gorge, a wind-tossed river, a balcony looking out over a valley. Cloaked in a dark, hooded robe, Jonas employs a long paper cone as a megaphone, singing melodies and keening, animal-like, into the landscape. The cone figure and the specific melodies that Jonas uses are recurring motifs in her performance vocabulary.

In Good Night Good Morning, Jonas uses video as a diaristic construct to chart the passing of personal time through quotidian ritual. Over three different periods in New York and Nova Scotia, she videotaped herself every day, briefly addressing the camera upon waking in the morning and before ...

Loss, displacement, time and memory permeate this haunting nonlinear narrative, which unfolds like a dream in the process of telling itself. Jonas is seen watching video images — shot in a New York studio and in rural Nova Scotia — that metaphorically relate to the dreams, reveries and m ...

Writes Jonas: "For Mirage I made a film of drawing, again and again, images on a blackboard, and then erasing them. Reading the essays collected in Spiritual Disciplines, I got another idea to use drawings, also in Mirage, which I called 'Endless Drawings' after those described in the ...

Mirage 2, which Jonas edited at EAI in 2000 for simultaneous projection with her 1976 film Mirage, is a montage composed of video dating from the era of the original film and performance. A kaleidoscopic and hypnotic piece, it revisits footage recorded in the 1970s: fragments of off-a ...

In Upsidedown and Backwards, two fairy tales — The Frog Prince and The Boy Who Went Out to Learn Fear — are told simultaneously, one backwards and one forwards, each interrupting the other. Jonas' ironic use of visual symbolism further inverts the structure and conte ...

He Saw Her Burning, which is based on a 1983 performance, is a provocative narrative collage, a surreal juxtaposition of two narrated texts. A man and a woman begin their respective tales: He saw a woman burst into flames on the street; she saw an American soldier go berserk and drive a tank ...

Big Market is an evocative travel journal and a formalist study, as Jonas transforms time and space in a document of Budapest's marketplace. A multilayered portrait of place is conveyed through images of the market's produce displays, transaction rituals, faces and gestures, as well as the ci ...

Inspired by the science fiction story Universe by Robert Heinlein, Double Lunar Dogs is an Orwellian vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a drifting spaceship whose timeless travellers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. To recapture memory and create a continuum between ...

Still photographs, live video, and superimposed drawings created on a Quantel Paintbox are fused in this visual poem dedicated to a New York City landmark, the Brooklyn Bridge. Emphasizing its strength and beauty, Jonas locates the bridge as an iconic site in this meditative, cryptic study of identi ...

Based on the thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdeala Saga, this narrative reverie is a televisual retelling of a medieval myth about a young woman (played by Tilda Swinton) whose dreams foretell the future. Shot in the dramatic natural landscapes of Iceland and in New York, this performance-based work ...

Note: This work is only available for purchase as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Jonas's performance piece, an homage to 18th-century French outdoor theater, incorporates mythology as well as spontaneously occurr ...

Inverting the form, style and time frame of commercial television advertising, Logue has produced a unique series of dynamic video portraits of avant-garde artists, writers, musicians and performers. In 30 Second Spots: New York, which Logue terms "commercials for artists," each of the succin ...

30 Second Spots: Paris focuses on prominent artists, writers, philosophers and musicians working in Paris. Using elegant special effects, close-ups, and a highly condensed time frame, Logue captures her subjects in moments of intimacy and contemplation. Pierre Boulez ponders the rhythms of St ...

San Francisco artists Starr Sutherland, Diamanda Galas and Don Buchla are among the subjects featured in 30 Second Spots: San Francisco. Logue tailors the style and content of each succinct "spot" to complement the idiosyncratic nature of the artist's work: Sutherland delivers a terse aphoris ...

5 Composers: 5 Countries portrays five contemporary composers from around the world. Logue visits Michael Nyman in London, Carlos Santos in Spain, Alvin Curran in Rome, Michael Levinas in Paris, and Tod Machover in Boston, documenting the fabric of their creative lives. Concentrating on their ...

In this collaborative "verbal drawing," Fluxus artist, painter and poet Emmett Williams is profiled by his friends and colleagues. Fifteen artists, poets and writers convened in the Form Hotel in Warsaw, Poland to pay tribute to Williams in the form of personal anecdotes.

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Kentridge's hauntingly beautiful series of animated black and white drawings brings viewers into the artist's unconscious. The DVD ...

Writes Jonas Mekas: "In 1964 Film Culture magazine chose Andy Warhol for its annual Independent Film award. The plan was to show some of Andy's films and have Andy come on stage and hand him the award. Andy said, no, he didn't want a public presentation. So I decided to hand him the award at the Fac ...

Shot in rural Nova Scotia, Barking is infused with a sense of mystery, the anticipation that something is about to happen. Suggesting an off-screen narrative, the scenario carries an unsettling implication of the limit of vision and the power of what is not seen.

Big Market is an evocative travel journal and a formalist study, as Jonas transforms time and space in a document of Budapest's marketplace. A multilayered portrait of place is conveyed through images of the market's produce displays, transaction rituals, faces and gestures, as well as the ci ...

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

A short encounter between the artist and a man on a North African street is slowed down, forcing the viewer into an intimate relat ...

Still photographs, live video, and superimposed drawings created on a Quantel Paintbox are fused in this visual poem dedicated to a New York City landmark, the Brooklyn Bridge. Emphasizing its strength and beauty, Jonas locates the bridge as an iconic site in this meditative, cryptic study of identi ...

Disturbances extends Jonas' investigation of mirrored surfaces and spaces, as she explores reflections of movement and images in water. The tape begins with Jonas, like Narcissus, leaning over a reflecting pool. Throughout this lyrical exercise, the viewer sees only reflected images and inver ...

Inspired by the science fiction story Universe by Robert Heinlein, Double Lunar Dogs is an Orwellian vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a drifting spaceship whose timeless travellers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. To recapture memory and create a continuum between ...

Newly re-mastered through EAI's Videotape Preservation Program, this tape is a classic early video performance. In this seminal exploration of the phenomenology of video as a mirror and as "reality," Jonas, face-to-face with her own recorded image, performs a duet with herself.

Holt and Smithson's first collaborative experiment with video takes the form of a humorous bi-coastal art dialogue. Joined by their friends Joan Jonas and Peter Campus, the artists improvise a conversation based on opposing — and stereotypical — positions of East and West Coast art of the late 1960s. Holt assumes the role of an intellectual conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays the laid back Californian driven by feelings and instinct.

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

In El Gringo, viewers experience the discomfort of being an outsider when the camera is confronted by a pack of snarling dogs. The ...

Note: This work is only available for purchase as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

The stunning, color-saturated images that make up Julien's work refer to the African Diaspora and the quest to find roots in a New ...

This tape is a "feedback" dialogue inspired by the installations and single-channel works in the 1994 exhibition Gary Hill: Sites Recited at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

This complex and enigmatic work, which is performed by Jonas and Lois Lane, explores female gestures, poses, the body and narcissism. Mirroring each other with synchronized movements as they perform as alter-egos, Jonas and Lane reference archetypal female gestures and poses from popular and traditi ...

In Good Night Good Morning, Jonas uses video as a diaristic construct to chart the passing of personal time through quotidian ritual. Over three different periods in New York and Nova Scotia, she videotaped herself every day, briefly addressing the camera upon waking in the morning and before ...

He Saw Her Burning, which is based on a 1983 performance, is a provocative narrative collage, a surreal juxtaposition of two narrated texts. A man and a woman begin their respective tales: He saw a woman burst into flames on the street; she saw an American soldier go berserk and drive a tank ...

Note: This work is only available for purchase as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Jediism, a movement devoted to establishing an internationally recognized faith, was born in 1977, shortly after the release of Ge ...

Loss, displacement, time and memory permeate this haunting nonlinear narrative, which unfolds like a dream in the process of telling itself. Jonas is seen watching video images — shot in a New York studio and in rural Nova Scotia — that metaphorically relate to the dreams, reveries and m ...

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Rist explores the macrocosm of humanity in a video, art and music collaboration. A lyrical tale of a witch's coven is played over ima ...

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Claerbout uses cinematic techniques to create a suspenseful journey through a dimly lit forest that reaches an unexpected conclusio ...

In this early work, Jonas translates her performance strategies to video, applying the inherent properties of the medium to her investigations of the self and the body. Jonas performs in a direct, one-on-one confrontation with the viewer, using the immediacy and intimacy of video as conceptual const ...

Produced at the seminal video art studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Merlo is an early piece in which Jonas performs alone in several dramatic outdoor locations: a rocky gorge, a wind-tossed river, a balcony looking out over a valley. Cloaked in a dark, hooded robe, Jonas employs a long paper cone as a megaphone, singing melodies and keening, animal-like, into the landscape. The cone figure and the specific melodies that Jonas uses are recurring motifs in her performance vocabulary.

Writes Jonas: "For Mirage I made a film of drawing, again and again, images on a blackboard, and then erasing them. Reading the essays collected in Spiritual Disciplines, I got another idea to use drawings, also in Mirage, which I called 'Endless Drawings' after those described in the ...

Mirage 2, which Jonas edited at EAI in 2000 for simultaneous projection with her 1976 film Mirage, is a montage composed of video dating from the era of the original film and performance. A kaleidoscopic and hypnotic piece, it revisits footage recorded in the 1970s: fragments of off-a ...

This documentation of a 1972 performance, in which Jonas performs as "Organic Honey," includes many of her signature devices: mirrors, masks, and the use of video for spatial, temporal, and psychological layering. In this prescient work, Jonas relates the theatrical space of her live performance to ...

Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy is based on Jonas' 1972 performance of the same name, the first in which she used video. In an enigmatic ritual of identity, Jonas performs as herself and as her masked double, Organic Honey. Dressed in a feathered headdress and costumes, Organic Honey is the ...

Note: This work is only available for purchase as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

In Over My Shoulder, Gordon uses hand gesticulations against a white sheet to communicate both violent and sensual emotions. ...

This anthology is a boxed set of eleven DVDs featuring newly-commissioned works by leading artists who are among the most important figures working in film, video, and digital imagery today: Francis Alys, David Claerbout, Douglas Gordon, Gary Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala.

Presented with a straightforward charm, Logue's abbreviated portraits of fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts are more than mere "fish stories." Seen on their boats in the open sea, the fishermen speak directly to the camera, relating anecdotes and observations that are alternately comic or poigna ...

Originally produced as a music video for Paul Simon's song René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After The War, this is a witty tribute to Magritte's work and a haunting visual interpretation of Simon's music and lyrics. A photograph of the Magrittes serves as the point of departure for ...

This extraordinary diary by avant-garde film legend Jonas Mekas chronicles Warhol's everyday life and work, and the social and cultural milieu that swirled around him. The film includes footage from the first public performance of the Velvet Underground at Delmonico's Hotel on January 13, 1966. Trac ...

Based on the 1998 Grand Jury testimony of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, small Lies, Big Truth unravels the web of meaning created by this media event. Multiple voices read lines from the court proceedings over lush Super-8 footage of animals in a zoo. The speakers, whose genders shif ...

This 1973 black-and-white film is a rediscovered classic. Performing with a "cast" that includes Gordon Matta-Clark, Jonas choreographs a theater of space, movement, and sound, with the urban landscape of New York in a featured role. Jonas creates a highl ...

This marathon performance soiree was organized by multimedia artist Jean Dupuy at the Kitchen in 1974. Dupuy invited over 30 downtown artists, musicians, and filmmakers to each give a two-minute performance. The audience was served a home-made dinner of soup, apple tarts and wine, followed by the performance "menu." Performers included Charles Atlas, Joan Jonas, Hannah Wilke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Serra, Philip Glass and Yvonne Rainer. This rare time capsule captures the SoHo art and music scene of the early 1970s.

Jonas addresses perceptual phenomena in the natural landscape and questions the camera's recording of reality. Here she ritualistically charts sound, space and time in the topology of landscape. A boy playing bagpipes emerges from behind the camera, circles a field and then returns to the camera.

In these two minimalist exercises, Jonas addresses perceptual phenomena in natural landscapes, and questions the camera's recording of reality. In Three Returns, she ritualistically charts sound, space and time in the topology of landscape. A boy playing bagpipes emerges from behind the camer ...

Note: This work is available for purchase only as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Literally depicting Point of View, Sala stimulates the viewers' senses of sight and sound by forcing them to concentrate on a sing ...

In Upsidedown and Backwards, two fairy tales — The Frog Prince and The Boy Who Went Out to Learn Fear — are told simultaneously, one backwards and one forwards, each interrupting the other. Jonas' ironic use of visual symbolism further inverts the structure and conte ...

Vertical Roll is a seminal work. In a startling collusion of form and content, Jonas constructs a theater of female identity by deconstructing representations of the female body and the technology of video. Using an interrupted electronic signal — or "vertical roll" — as a dynamic ...

Logue merges image with spoken and written text in Video Portraits: French Writers, utilizing elegant video techniques to illustrate the words of such prominent authors and theorists as Jacques Derrida, Andre Du Bouchet, and Florence Delay. Whether filling the screen with Derrida's handwritte ...

"A subject being recorded cannot hide behind his smile for long; thoughts and feelings begin to be exposed without verbal expression. The viewer is confronted with this contemplation and silence and witnesses a psychological expression made visual." So writes Logue about this compilation of early vi ...

Video: The New Wave is a seminal compendium of independent video work in the early 1970s. Written and narrated by Brian O'Doherty, this overview of the emerging video field includes examples of guerrilla television and "street" documentaries, early explorations with image-processing and synth ...

Visions of Warhol presents scenes from the life of Andy Warhol, as seen by three pioneer avant-garde filmmakers and close friends of the artist. In this extraordinary compilation, Jonas Mekas creates an intimate chronicle of Warhol's life and social milieu over three decades; Willard Maas documents Warhol's seminal exhibition of silver balloons at Castelli Gallery; and Marie Menken records the artist in the process of creating some of his most famous works.

Based on the thirteenth-century Icelandic Laxdeala Saga, this narrative reverie is a televisual retelling of a medieval myth about a young woman (played by Tilda Swinton) whose dreams foretell the future. Shot in the dramatic natural landscapes of Iceland and in New York, this performance-based work ...

Note: This work is only available for purchase as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Jonas's performance piece, an homage to 18th-century French outdoor theater, incorporates mythology as well as spontaneously occurr ...

Note: This work is only available for purchase as part of Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.

Depicting a sailing party gone wrong, McCarthy questions the effects that violence and mutilation, both real and simulated, have o ...

Wind is a 1968 performance film, recently restored and newly available on video. Cutting between snowy fields and a raw seashore, Jonas focuses on a group of performers moving through a stark, windswept landscape. The 16mm film — silent, black and white, jerky and sped-up — evokes ...

EAI is pleased to present 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, a survey of four decades of artists' engagement with video and performance. This project is presented in conjunction with 100 Years, an exhibition on the history of performance art organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Perfor...

Dia and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) presented a day-long screening of video works from EAI's collection. The videos screened featured works by artists who participated in collaborative programming presented by Dia and EAI at Dia:Chelsea from the mid-1990s until 2004. Artists included Marina Abram...

EAI presented a one-day exhibition of works from its major collection of video by artists. This program focused on the unique cultural and physical landscape of downtown New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From candid chronicles of the downtown art and performance scenes to haunting studies ...

EAI partnered with Y-3 to present a program of video works from the EAI collection on the exterior of Y-3's newly opened location in Miami's Design District. Inside the Y-3 store, in its second level event space, an indoor video program featuring the influential and provocative video works of Dara B...

EAI presented nightly screenings of new video from the EAI collection by emerging and established artists. Works by Cory Arcangel, Bernadette Corporation, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Shana Moulton, Takeshi Murata, Paper Rad, Seth Price, and Lawrence Weiner were shown.

EAI held a day of panels and discussion that explored the changing landscape for exhibiting, collecting, distributing and preserving media art. Leading curators, artists, gallerists, distributors and critics examined new paradigms for media art practice and activated dialogue on how moving image art...

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging...

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presented a series of video programs at The Park Avenue Armory during the 20th annual Art Show, organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). EAI invited the first year graduate students in ...

EAI and Dia co-hosted an open-air screening of the early film and video works of Joan Jonas at Dia's Rooftop Urban Park Project. This free event included rarely-seen and newly restored film and video works, as well as a rare screening of Jonas' 1976 film Mirage, which was projected simultaneously wi...

EAI and Afterall presented a special evening with Joan Jonas, celebrating the launch of a new Afterall Book by Susan Morgan: Joan Jonas, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances). Morgan's book is based on Joan Jonas's 1976 video work, I Want to Live in the Country (And Other R...