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Joan Jonas

Mirage
1976/2001

Not on view

Date
1976/2001

Classification
Installations

Medium
16mm film and three-channel video installation, black-and-white, sound and silent, 31 min., 30 min., 14 min., and 12 min. looped

Dimensions
Dimensions variable

Accession number
2002.158

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Film and Video Committee

Rights and reproductions
© Joan Jonas. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

API
artworks/16018

Mirage was designed specifically for the screening room of Anthology Film Archives in New York's SoHo neighborhood, where Joan Jonas first performed the piece on several nights over a few weeks in 1976, for an audience of her friends: local artists, musicians, and dancers. In the first performances, Jonas projected images of herself drawing and erasing her marks on a chalkboard—some appropriated from her past works—as well as a five-minute documentary loop of volcanoes erupting and a film of a television turned on its side. She also stepped through a small wooden hoop and completed other live actions. Mirage was the last of a series of black and white video performances completed by Jonas; she would subsequently adopt color technologies. In 2001, Jonas made a new version of Mirage, consisting of a silent, approximately thirty-minute loop which, in the artist’s words, “is a combination of old performances, more chalk drawings and footage shot off the television at that time.”