Joan Jonas’s Ecological Portraits: Echo and Narcissus

Across various projects in the 1960s and ’70s, Joan Jonas created forms of self-portraiture enmeshed within environments. Engaging a range of media including mirrors, water, and video, Jonas repeatedly emphasized her body’s interrelation with surrounding natural and media ecologies. The resultant ecological portraits offer a model of being that encourages audiences to acknowledge their own embodiment in encounters with nature, whether experienced directly or through mediation. This article excavates this intermedia practice and explores the forms of ecocritical thought her performances and records might produce. Working in an era of expanding media experiments across performance, sculpture, and video, Jonas’s multimedia projects collaborate with the surrounding environment to explore the emergent openness of art in the 1970s. This article takes Jonas’s Disturbances (1974) as its starting point, arguing that Jonas featured the reflective and refractive properties of water to meditate upon the ecological resonances of the myth of Narcissus, the distorting optics of video, and the mediation of nature broadly. Similarly, in recent projection-based projects, Jonas has continued her exploration of the body’s relationship to both nature and media by incorporating her body into projected nature videos. In keeping with her stated unwillingness to “penetrate space,” ecological portraits across Jonas’s career reveal her multidirectional entanglements with spaces near and far, from waves in a pool to global oceanic crises.