Joan Jonas’s Ecological Portraits: Echo and Narcissus

Jonas has described three performances on beaches—Jones Beach Piece (1970), Beach Dance (1971), and Delay Delay (1972)—as part of a shift in her art following a trip to Japan toward “working in the medium of deep landscape space.”²² Her concept of landscape as medium emerged in these early outdoor performance pieces, and interacts with contemporaneous projects undertaken by various installation earthwork artists with whom she was friendly and with whom she sometimes collaborated. Consequently, we must situate her video and performance projects that deal with space from the 1970s within contemporaneous discourses of space in the field of sculpture.²³ There are a number of similarities between how Jonas conceived of space and how these artists explored new sculptural effects. Arguably, this similarity is even more enhanced in academic hindsight due to Jonas’s connection with Rosalind Krauss. Jonas cowrote an article on her use of space with Krauss, and a decade later Krauss wrote “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which has subsequently profoundly shaped the way 1970s sculpture has been understood.²⁴

Environmental artworks emerged at a time when sculpture was in tremendous flux, particularly with regard to preconceived ideas of architecture, landscape, and structural engagement. Krauss writes that in the 1960s “sculpture had entered a categorical no-man’s-land: it was what was on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the landscape.”²⁵ Mirrors were a crucial part of this spatial distortion, much as they came to be for Jonas’s performance work. For example, Robert Morris’s Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1965) placed cubes out in a field, with mirrored surfaces that reflect the surrounding grass and sky, making it hard to decipher where the cubes begin and end. Krauss describes these cubes as “forms which are distinct from the setting only because, though visually continuous with grass and trees, they are not in fact part of the landscape.”²⁶ Here, the mirror is a form that gestures away from the cubes’ status as built architecture since the cubes almost disappear into the landscape. The mirrors can be attached to freestanding structures, but they can also be disparate elements distributed within space, which is a technique that is even less obtrusive. For example, Morris also placed mirrors amid a sea of discarded matter, allowing the mirrors to merge with the space in his “thread waste” pieces (c. 1968). Similarly, Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1–9) (1969) featured small mirrors that were not freestanding and had to be propped against roots or buried in sand; thus, they were not “architecture,” only elements in a landscape.²⁷

Rather than structures performing interventions in architectural space, these projects, like Jonas’s performances, are temporary interventions in the landscape. Smithson in the Yucatán refuses to shape the environment himself, submitting more and more to the situation already there. Jonas’s practice in the 1960s also utilized mirrors that she moved out into nature. For example, in various versions of performed Mirror Pieces, Jonas takes the mirror outside.²⁸ Chrissie Iles compares the photograph of Mirror Piece I with Smithson’s Yucatán mirror project through their shared interest in ritual and myth²⁹; however, one can relate the two formally in their shared attention to redirecting the eye out to physical space, a function of their shared use of mirrors as a form of practice divorced from medium. Jennifer L. Roberts eloquently describes how Smithson’s mirrors function: “In each of these constructions, he had rejected the specular potential of mirrors, emphasizing instead their capacity to ‘generate incapacity’—their tendency toward dispersion, fragmentation, or cancellation of visual data.”³⁰ Jonas similarly describes the mirror as her first “technological tool” that is “a device that transmits light.”³¹

This effect can be seen in Jonas’s performance Mirror Check (1970). Jonas stands in front of an audience, undressed and using a hand mirror to inspect her body. Here she is Vanitas, perhaps, but even then an ecological focus emerges. When she looks at her hand mirror she sees an image of herself, but this self-check is “an image which no one else can see.”³² At most times, the mirror is not showing her body to the audience. Thus, by holding the mirror, Jonas presents two images to those who watch her: her physical body and whatever the mirror catches, be it glimpses of her skin, the room, or even the audience. With larger mirrors, this second “image” is even larger, an effect captured during a Mirror Piece performance in which a photograph documenting the event catches Smithson’s whole seated body in the audience.³³

If we focus on the photographic results from Smithson’s project, we notice that there is a proliferation of images within each image. As Roberts has argued:

Smithson’s photographs of the landscape fail as singular views, a term here intended in the possessive sense contained by nineteenth-century images like stereographs, for example. Historically such photographs—often called “views”—“were means of appropriating some distant place through an image, of seeming to be somewhere else by being absorbed in a ‘view.’”³⁵ Now, in Smithson’s project, we do not have such a view since the mirrors are disrupting the unitary, un-tainted image of the landscape that this tradition of nineteenth-century travel imagery expects.³⁶ His square mirrors seem to create miniature square photos within the square photo format, the better to publish in the square-printed Artforum from which he received his commission.

By contrast, Jonas’s Mirror Piece mirrors are full-length and therefore more anthropomorphic. The images in the mirror seem to comment upon and alter her body—a focus not on how images might render the world, but rather how bodies exist in the world in and between images. If Mirror Check emphasizes “dispersion” by catching the light of the room or the audience, then the photograph Mirror Piece I from 1969 seems to emphasize “fragmentation” and “cancellation” by reshaping (the image of) her body. Rather than show her face—the locus of identity, the source of Narcissus’s fixation—she turns the mirror out, toward the photographer (/audience), thereby causing the mirror to instead capture her legs.

On one hand, the mirror doubles her legs, but we can also think of the mirror, following Smithson’s “incapacities,” as “a cancellation of visual data.”³⁷ With this framework, the mirror cancels her head and torso, replacing them with an image not just of her legs but also the grass, which then replaces her body with the grassy space Jonas has placed herself within. Like Smithson’s non-intervention, Jonas advocates for interrogations of space that do not penetrate space: “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 permission to penetrate it.”³⁸ Rather than allow her and her performers to appear as clear figures in the landscape in this work, Jonas produces orientations that instead allow space to enter them. Like Echo who cannot speak but can only respond to her environment, Jonas produces effects that are minimally intrusive, yet reactive to other bodies, beings, and natural features around her. Through the mirror, different aspects of the landscape are captured, offering multiple directions of views in the act of photographing the space. The photograph is no longer a view of a narrow angle before the camera, but can capture and demonstrate aspects of the environment beyond its original orientation, including that which is behind the camera.

I want to turn to a schematic framework offered by J. Sage Elwell about the relation between body and nature in art of the 1970s. Writing about Hans Breder’s mirror photographs and Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas series (1970–78), Elwell writes: “Breder juxtaposes body and nature. Mendieta fuses body and nature.”³⁹ Breder’s images feature nude bodies with mirrors in different landscapes—doubled, fragmented, and embedded in nature—and are strikingly similar to Jonas’s work, so much so that we can test Elwell’s schematic on Jonas’s 1960s performances. While Mendieta’s portraits do fuse body and nature, this framing overlooks the illusion of continuity Breder’s (and Jonas’s) mirror can sometimes afford. While some examples of Breder’s work emphasizes strong disruptions between mirror and non-mirror landscape space, others are like photographs of Mirror Piece I, which create leg-creatures that seem whole, at least for a moment. Like Mendieta’s Siluetas, which surround the body in plants, dirt, and other facets of the environment, mirrors too can achieve assimilating effects by returning reflected images of a continuous environment.⁴⁰

But even in the most creaturely of resultant images, distortions are noticeable. All of these photographs use the locus of the body to manifest the mirror’s presence and thus the mirror’s distortions. Without Jonas’s body, the doubled grass in the mirror might be indistinguishable from the rest of the lawn. For example, in Smithson’s Yucatán project, some mirrors do seem to disappear while others capture bits of sky—consequently only in using several at different angles could he ensure their presence would be obvious. In featuring body and mirror together, the body and landscape are simultaneously overlapping, distinct, and co-constitutive. Like Roberts’s concept of “di-vision” in Smithson’s work, the body blocks visual access to some of the landscape in Mirror Piece I while other pieces of the landscape (seen in the mirror) enter where we expect to see the body. By manipulating mirrors like Mendieta manipulated elements of nature around her, Breder and Jonas produce records of interactions that, to paraphrase Elwell, mark “fusions” that are always also slight “juxtapositions.”

The resulting photographs are simultaneously portraits of people and portraits of place, with the two impossible to disentangle: a landscape with a person and a person (or leg-creature) produced out of the landscape. Jonas’s mirror interventions achieve impermanent interactions with space, yet remain legible to us because of photographic documentation that captures that brief moment in time. While Oppenheim’s sunburn photograph successfully captures time-based effects of his environment—as sunlight imprints on his body, in a way reminiscent of photography⁴¹—Jonas’s photographs are often less temporal in scope. Instead, moving image recordings of other performances are what allow us access to her more dynamic, processual ecological portraits, as in her film Wind (1968) or the video Disturbances. Jonas’s interest in temporal change and environmental flux is manifest in Wind, which focuses on environmental effects visible at human-perceptible timescales as performers attempt to stand upright against strong winds. In Wind, “Nature was given a psychological role”⁴² as the wind batters actors on a shoreline, forcing performers to react to their surrounding environment. In this work, Jonas used natural features as the “props” or even fellow actors around which performances were structured, surrendering some artistic agency to her surroundings. We see wind at work and watch as people are forced to react to ecological space. In recording it on film, we see how chance affects a performance, but also receive a portrait of a place and time that preserves random weather effects as well as individual actions and reactions. Thus, much like Mirror Piece I, a film like Wind can be understood as an ecological portrait in two senses: offering portraits of ecologically attuned figures responding to a place and a portrait of that site-specific ecology and its constituent assembly.

Jonas’s Disturbances operates in a similar way to Wind by focusing on a prolonged interaction with space. Shifting from the beach to the pool, Jonas explores similar concepts as performers respond to a resistant surrounding, immersive medium. Both works capitalize on a moving image medium’s capacity to show movement, waves, and other time-based effects of the film and video mediums. In Wind, we cannot see the other actor, only its effects.⁴³ With water, however, we have a slightly more legible character that allows Disturbances to not simply show how people react to space, but also examine the visual logics of that space.

In shifting from mirror portraits of a person in an ecological relationship to what might be better understood as a portrait of various ecological relationships, we might ask who or what constitutes the Disturbances of the title? Anthropologist Anna Tsing encourages humanists to think like ecologists who consider disturbances not simply as harmful events to a landscape (though manmade ones often can be, disastrously so) but as actions or events in an ever-shifting ecology.⁴⁴ The performers disturb the water, the water disturbs our view of the swimmers, and the resultant video further disturbs those elements.

In Disturbances, it is difficult to track who is performing when. Without a clear narrative, we cannot think simplistically about the disturbance as a cause and effect; instead, Disturbances forces us to think about the multiplicity of encounters in a space, embracing heterogeneity and multifocal storytelling. Jonas appears at the start of the video, and several other people outside and inside the pool are not clearly definable—dressed in all-encompassing fabrics or nude, and only ever shown through reflection and refraction. Jonas and Jonas’s performers surrender to the visuality of the space that Jonas has selected, allowing bodies to warp in the resulting video she produces. The video is assembled from several different shots, and in each one the camera is mostly fixed in place and always focused down onto the pool where performers jump in and swim. This vantage point allows us to see how their bodies are reflected on the water’s surface (a narcissistic effect) as well as distorted by the surface as they swim underneath it (an environmental one). While it starts with a figure staring at her reflection (Narcissus), it proceeds through various other effects that distort and dissolve the body (Echo, who crucially remained as just a voice after her body disappeared). For example, at times in this video project, no body is in the frame and the audience only sees the water. At others, Jonas (or someone else) is entirely illegible under the ripples of the surface, thus drawing our attention to the boundary of air and water. Often, both effects overlap, as when a figure pacing left to right above the pool’s ledge just outside the frame is then joined by a swimmer also making tight loops in the water.

As discussed above, Jonas believes that video shifted her work to focus on “female imagery,” but in Disturbances, we strangely see a form of “female imagery” that does not have a strong figure-ground distinction from space.⁴⁵ In her recording of herself and others, the environment is an essential constituent part of her self, so we might ask what the environment, specifically a watery one, offers to Jonas.

The underwater imagery in the 1974 Disturbances evokes photography and film of the early twentieth century that Jonas has cited as an influence on her early video projects. In an interview, Jonas stated that her video work was influenced from the start by early Russian and French films, and she specifically mentions an underwater scene from Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934).⁴⁶ Again, in a 2005 interview, Jonas describes L’Atalante as an influence, explaining that Vigo’s ability to create what she calls “another fantasy world” and “another magical world” inspired her to construct her “private world” in video.⁴⁷ Similarly, in her recent work Moving Off the Land (2016–20), Jonas included a film from 1928 by the French marine documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé, perhaps in a nod to the avant-garde’s fixation on the underwater in this earlier period across documentaries, short films, and feature-length films. And though Jonas does not reference it explicitly in interviews, Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Château de Dé (1929) might be a further potential reference point. A figure from Disturbances who walks underwater and paddles with their arms in wide arcs evokes the balletic movements recorded in a section of Man Ray’s film recorded in and around a pool, specifically an underwater juggler whose hands move in sweeping arcs and a woman walking on the pool’s bottom who uses precisely the same gestures.

Jonas has made this direct connection between avant-garde aesthetics of the 1920s and her era of videomaking around the time of Disturbances through Vigo. Regardless of exactly when Jonas encountered the films of the Parisian avant-garde—and if she saw Painlevé’s and Man Ray’s films before Disturbances—taking the analytic tools of feminist scholars of surrealism offers us a way to read Jonas’s images from the 1970s through to the present. There is a form of proto-ecological portraiture in surrealism that embraces indeterminacy and foregrounds relationships to outside space. Margaret Cohen proposes that the more well-known formless qualities of surrealist photography (achieved largely through the use of mirrors and close-ups) were frequently produced in that same period through visions of the underwater world: “The physical qualities of underwater optics, indeed, have an extraordinary resonance with a number of visual effects important in surrealist art.”⁴⁸

Cohen adds to key ideas from Krauss’s 1985 essay “Corpus Delicti,” which had described how surrealists were interested in animal mimicry that merges self and setting in a way that resonates with Georges Bataille’s idea of the informe.⁴⁹ Krauss does not discuss watery images, but does trace a wider practice in 1920s photography in which bodies are shown “as if submitting to the possession by space.”⁵⁰ Krauss offers a media theory explanation for this crisis, suggesting that the proliferation of photography created this crisis of representation, quoting Roger Caillois, who wrote that “the living being, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but is one point among others.”⁵¹ This framework perhaps helps explain not just the desire for the dissolution of the self achieved by images taken of people underwater, but also the positive valences of re-embedding oneself into other, more familiar forms of media like water. Relatedly, Mary Ann Caws describes an interpenetrative mode of “seeing one thing through another”⁵² in surrealist practice that almost perfectly describes the visual imagery in Disturbances showing overlapping images of bodies above and below the water. In the pool, there are both immaterial reflections and bodies swimming below, demonstrating that water is a medium of reflection (when above) and buoyancy (when within). If ecology should be understood as a field showing the interconnections between all matter,⁵³ then Disturbances reveals how the artist and her artwork are inseparable from the environmental qualities that shape her creative work.

Krauss suggests that the concept of the informe might help dissolve gender, but her analysis of a crisis of representation does not discuss the possibility that this rejection of traditional representational models might have been more enticing for women artists.⁵⁴ The male filmmakers cited above sought out new aesthetic possibilities in the underwater world, but the alternative possibilities and visualities achieved underwater were perhaps even more liberating for photographer Rogi André and artist Jacqueline Lamba—women artists who, like Jonas, used the underwater world to dissolve categories of gender and humanity, and even space and body. For example, André produces a photograph of Lamba in which her limbs become unrecognizable as she swims underwater, escaping gendered imagery through an escape from the human.⁵⁵ Cohen argues that water produces these perceptions of hybridity. Lamba’s body, which is both human and creaturely, is very much like Jonas’s intermingling of the pair of performers or their bodies intermingling with space. Thus, water offers up hybridity by producing a sense of susceptibility or permeability of figure and space—especially in Jonas’s work.

Whitney Chadwick suggests that dissolving bodily representation was a strategy of surrealist women artists that emerged again in the second half of the twentieth century. She writes that “women deeply internalized this refusal of bodily and psychic fixity” proposed by post-Enlightenment thinking and surrealism in particular, suggesting these strategies had an afterlife in contemporary art from the 1980s onward (although arguably it is already present in the 1970s with Disturbances and performance art more broadly).⁵⁶

Like Vito Acconci’s claim that performance caused him to be “at least invaded by the space around me,”⁵⁷ Jonas consciously creates a similar effect in Disturbances—as a performance in a pool acting with water, but also in the visual record she produces that captures the refraction that further confuses boundaries. This effect of surrendering to space is a product of any performance (like the phenomenological component in Acconci’s performances) as well as the medium of water (through the distortions it creates). Jonas’s other performance work is staged in different settings, so in a real and conceptual sense, it is contextual and variable. But the use of the disorienting and destabilizing effects of the pool brings instability into the work itself on a formal level. Now it is not just the unique qualities of each performance that reveal art’s susceptibility to time and space, but the record itself—the watery video Disturbances—that visually captures Jonas’s own openness to outside space.

Jonas’s image of inverted inner and outer space achieved by the movement of water over her body almost literally invokes a wider dissolution of the self in theatrical productions of the 1960s and ’70s. Gillian Turner Young locates Jonas’s work within this era of theater, citing the scholarship of Elinor Fuchs who writes that the “interior space known as ‘the subject’ was no longer an essence, an in-dwelling human endowment, but flattened into a social construction or marker in language, the unoccupied occupant of the subject position.”⁵⁸ This vacant self is then constituted by social situations or—as in Jonas’s work—environments. Rather than something totally intrinsic, the vacant self shifts attention toward the conditions that constitute the subject in her context: on stage, in daily life, in pools of water, or floating within a video monitor.

Reading the pool as a way to theorize the openness of 1970s performance also opens its formal qualities to questions about 1970s video. Jonas has since used a pool as a metaphor for the early years of video: “It was also fascinating to see yourself. It was like looking into the pool and not being able to look away.”⁵⁹ Whether this thought is what sparked Disturbances or whether Disturbances has since structured her thoughts on video, we cannot know. However, the distortions of water are enhanced by the video’s black-and-white imagery, which compresses tonalities and renders the aqueous refractions even more disorienting. Consequently, in Disturbances, Jonas is never interacting with just an aquatic space, but also always with the video medium itself.

The environment shown in the video is a real space, but I argue it also functions as a metaphor, a space for theorizing video’s modes of representations. Jonas theorizes through performance by standing by the pool and staging actors who swim, play, look around, etc. From an investigation into milieu, we also get an investigation into a modern technological medium that is simultaneously physical and metaphoric.

This orientation of the Narcissus story toward ecology but also technology (or media ecology) is in keeping with Marshall McLuhan’s description of Narcissus as a myth about technological extensions. Most succinctly, he says: “Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”⁶⁰ This line of thinking resonates with Krauss’s invocation of narcissism as the medium of video, and in this sense is perhaps a technological trend that can be applied to all new technologies that might always drive new modes of (self-)portraiture. But McLuhan’s more significant analysis is the way Narcissus is understood as part of a closed system:

By contrast, Disturbances does not present reflections in this way, because the figures who gaze at their reflections eventually look away and even dive into the pool. Thus, the water as a mirror and video as a mirror both fail to create McLuhan’s closed systems, a possible shift that Jonas stages from Narcissus to Echo that enables the work to be a meditation on water and video. Rather than a meditation on one or the other, Disturbances permeates and flows between the layers of mediation, understanding each medium as part of an interrelated system in which Jonas is performing. We also do not get any undistorted views of bodies—recorded through transparent air—rather, we only ever see Jonas and her performers through a reflection or refraction. By refusing to present herself directly to the camera, she evades the type of clear, video-mirror-Narcissus imagery that Krauss critiques, of figures staring directly at cameras and televisions that capture and share their own likeness. Instead, through the water-Narcissus image, transmitted on video, Jonas produces a work that theorizes issues within video through wider notions of medium more broadly, in this case through water.

In the 1970s, television produced a crisis of representation since this new reproductive technology includes the possibility of presenting “lively”/live versions of one’s self and can also broadcast in multiple places at the same time. Similarly, Acconci describes a naive fear that television and video projects might hold real creatures: “Television space is fishbowl space. There’s a world going on in there: that exclamation might be made by a child-person looking, from out of the large world he/she is in, into the small world behind either the aquarium glass or the TV screen.”⁶² These ideas—perhaps even fear—of people manifested by the television set is made more real in Lynda Benglis’s Now (1973), where the artist stages her performance by acting with her own image. By confronting the multiplication of the body head on, Benglis emphasizes the secondary, reproductive nature of video.

Disturbances confronts the multiplying and disembodying effects of television through a double exploration of medium. While Benglis confronts her double, Jonas asks what would it be like for her image to be doubled, transformed, and dislocated from herself as it changes across various media conditions—first water and then video. Jonas explores doubling metaphorically by featuring doubled acting partners who are indistinguishable. The pair stand as one reflection at certain moments, then move apart, revealing themselves as two bodies. At other points, while underwater, they are similarly indistinguishable. Rather than just create a double with technology—with video as Benglis does with the video she performs with, or with mirrors as Jonas herself has often done—in Disturbances Jonas chooses instead to make a “double” in reality. This real double is then doubly doubled as each performer confronts their reflection in the water, staging the exact imagery that Jonas referenced to make sense of first encountering video.

Disturbances is also concerned with the spatial dislocation of one’s image as light proliferates through different media: light passing through water and air, and then light emitted by electronic signals. The first real-world approximation of television’s/video’s dislocation is achieved with the refraction of the pool. This shimmering space makes her image (viewed from air) dislocated from where she actually is underwater. Seen through the boundary of air and water, Jonas appears as a distorted play of light through the real effects of refraction. Then finally, the resulting video truly disintegrates her representation further, rendering this already distorted appearance in three-dimensional space as black-and-white patterns on a bulging video monitor. Similarly, several scenes of static appear in the video, emphasizing the media condition of video as another layer of mediation essential to Disturbances as a performance in space. In one shot, white horizontal lines on a black screen appear between two shots taken from further away. The ripples on the water appear horizontal to the camera, making the types of disruptions to video (the static) and water (the ripples) appear visually equivalent.

While “fragmentation and transformation were at the core of Jonas’s early tapes and performances”⁶³ such as Left Side Right Side (1972) or Duet (1972), there are different effects of that transformation in Disturbances. Jonas’s approach to her self-image in Disturbances is distinct from the fragmentation in her other projects such as Mirror Check or Vertical Roll (1972), works that often create “a series of ridiculous abstractions.”⁶⁴ Rather than just fragment herself, Disturbances assimilates the surrounding space into her body as the ripples interfere with her reflection or refract the body’s presence underneath. Disturbances shows her body as it is affected and changed—but not destroyed—by the milieu in which she immerses herself. Since video (and especially broadcast television) can dislocate images and transmit them elsewhere, perhaps Jonas consciously sought to stage performances that specifically emphasized place, thereby regrounding herself in surrounding grass or water. Though the image of her body and bodies generally often disappear in Disturbances, they are always replaced by an elemental return to a watery ur-form.

These translations and distortions speak to the self-reflexive practices of early video. Dora Imhof argues that Jonas’s Disturbances focuses on process, while, for example, Nam June Paik’s related works with television-aquariums emphasize the apparatus.⁶⁵ Also focused on watery environments, Paik’s TV Fish (1975–88) and Real Fish/Live Fish (1982) staged live fish inside of televisions that have been converted into aquariums, exposing their similar shapes and logics. While Imhof’s framework captures the sense of waves that Jonas theorizes in the recording process, it does not capture the sense of real dislocation that Jonas encourages us to see in the confrontation with the video monitor. This dislocated quality is especially relevant since Disturbances would be displayed inside of one of these—as Acconci says—“fishbowl” devices. While I propose the video Disturbances (as an autographic entity) is a conceptual meditation on media, the video display (as an allographic performance, requiring a viewing public) contributes a secondary layer of meaning.

Reynolds reminds us that in the original viewing context there would be yet another reflection in the Disturbances, namely that of the viewers on the television screen: “it would also have been eventually overlaid with reflections on the glass surface of the video monitor of the people and other aspects of the larger environment surrounding it in the exhibition space.”⁶⁶ The appearance of their own reflections on the television screen might be a key moment of rupture that implicates other systems, media, and apparatuses for viewers of the work. Rather than watching a performance recording—simply viewing performers’ bodies in motion, watching the water—the audience might be triggered to see the video as being about video self-reflexively only by this quality of their own reflection (in the double sense of the word, literally on the monitor and then conceptually). Jonas believed seeing her image in video evoked a reflection in a pool, and for the audience, their reflections on the monitor might evoke the reverse, moving from a reflection on the video apparatus to imagining their image within video or recalling other videos they had seen.

These relays between the recording context, natural visual effects, and the television apparatus produce a platform for a number of different media questions. Disturbances does not produce McLuhan’s closed loop or Krauss’s narcissistic relay of mirror and self; rather, it stages an openness between bodies and places at various levels of mediation. The multitude of possibilities Disturbances can produce is captured by the term “electronic elsewhere,” coined by Jeffrey Sconce and then used in a recent volume to open up the multiplicity of places—lived and imaginary—that video might engage, depending on whether we think about the viewing context, method of transmission, the apparatus, and so on through different frameworks.⁶⁷ While used to gather different methodological approaches to space and television, this term can also be used as a heuristic to capture the simultaneous placelessness and place-specificity of television and video both.

In an era of domestic televisions, viewers might situate Disturbances (and other video works experienced on monitors) within a wider televisual culture that relies upon the continuous dislocation and multiplication of distant people and places. This reflection might point to media ecologies within the home like the sensory environment of domesticity. Or, Disturbances’s watery milieu might specifically point viewers to consider the mediation of natural ecologies in newscasts or even nature documentaries—an environmentalist quality (in the sense of advocacy) that has become central to Jonas’s recent performances. All such interpretations, however, would likely engage questions of space, which Jonas had questioned through her body, pools, videos, television monitors, and galleries—always evoking ecology in an expansive sense that enables her commentary on mediation to go anywhere media are present (which is everywhere).

Across these early career projects, Jonas’s body continually retreats into the surroundings as she or her performers dance with the wind, blend into grass, and blur into aquatic then electronic waves. In recent performance works, Jonas extends this principle to efface her body almost entirely in Reanimation (2012–14) and Moving Off the Land (2016–20). Covering herself in a sheet, she achieves another fusion of self and environment, albeit this time within a highly mediated encounter with the natural world that involves film clips, old video projects, and projectors.

The blank sheet catches the projected material, with the image curving on her (now far less perceptible) body. In these projector-based projects, Jonas is not clearly legible, but her body and tools are nevertheless present as part of a larger media assemblage. Reynolds describes how these recent projects collapse space and time because of the simultaneous presentation of video and performance:

The time of the video is obviously different from the live performance, but the timescales evoked in the imagery are also vast. This temporality is achieved not just through an exploration of life and ecosystems that have emerged on large timescales, but also through a recycling of her own work that creates biographical timelines as well. Jonas’s interest in aquatic spaces has continued from some of her earliest work in Nova Scotia in the late 1960s and Disturbances in the 1970s through the more recent Reanimation and the Moving Off the Land performances. In Reanimation, Jonas reuses clips from Disturbances, thereby exploring both aqueous and media milieux. During her performance, she calls attention to the sense of watery movement in her earlier video by overlaying footage of four objects she arranges on stage with “slow and graceful movements” that make them appear to “float or swim to the bottom edge of the portfolio, or by default, to the bottom edge of the pool.”⁶⁹ In a recent interview, Jonas says of the reused footage from Disturbances that “in Reanimation it is more about representing a watery world,” which suggests that this aim of creating or describing a milieu was always there in her earlier video.⁷⁰

Similarly, in Moving Off the Land, she also creates drawings of sea creatures, reads texts about the sea from various authors, and interacts with (sometimes multiple) projected images of the underwater world. During the course of this performance, images of creatures leap off one screen and onto another, as Jonas moves a circular scrim between the projector and the main screen. She enlivens the images to make the entire stage simulate an underwater space, and—as throughout her career—submits her body to the process. Rather than engaging water directly as she did in Disturbances, in these recent performances, Jonas immerses herself within footage showing watery worlds. Images are made by projectors and screens, not water or mirrors. Yet Jonas still engages with and disturbs these images. Using her own body and a small scrim, Jonas enlarges certain parts of the projected images, thereby distorting the prerecorded videos throughout the performance. Like reacting to wind or water, in Moving Off the Land, Jonas says that her “movement is choreographed in a slightly different way in relation to the presence of fish in the projections.”⁷¹ The milieu is now the media milieu—an archive of images⁷² as well as the projection space audiences view them in—but this project is still invested in making interventions and submitting one’s body into one’s surroundings. Jonas now submits herself to her own curated media ecologies: substituting water for light, the pool for a projector, human doubles for projected animal actors.

The pool in Disturbances allowed Jonas to stage a confrontation with the dislocation of the self that television and video threatened, and we can see her recent performances as continuing that legacy of interrogating media through aquatic world building—only now in response to an even more screen-dominated world that is dealing with greater ecological crises.

Like Donna Haraway’s idea of “situated knowledge,”⁷³ Jonas stages situated performances, making legible and explicit where the human body intersects with ecologies—whether natural beaches, manicured grass, or the water inside artificial pools. Similarly, hoping to ensure that bodies are foregrounded in scientific practice, Natasha Myers asks: “How might biological imaging technologies and practices engage bodies, rather than alienate them?”⁷⁴ Myers consequently proposes “body-full” vision as a model for visualizations that helps prevent conceptual abstractions and artificial distance. Like Myers, Jonas seeks a form of engagement that is bodily. Jonas’s specific practice of orienting herself and her performers toward wind, water, or projected animals also resonates with Eva Hayward’s concept of “fingeryeyes,” developed from an ethnographic study of a marine laboratory. As a mode of multispecies contact, “fingeryeyes” builds from the complicated sensory perceptions of coral to acknowledge the bidirectionality of scientific encounters.⁷⁵ Reacting to the movement of creatures on video, Jonas similarly ensures that recording is not a one-way engagement. While Jonas is not a scientist and is not participating in direct relationship to the animals that have been recorded and re-projected, her method refuses to allow a coherent presentation of a virtual world effaced of human presence.⁷⁶ What audiences encounter is a human body interceding into views of the underwater world, a step toward acknowledging the bodies and labor “behind the scenes” of science or any nature documentary and—in a wider sense—the human presence behind most ecological crises.⁷⁷

Jonas’s artistic projects bring her into seemingly direct contact with animals in a way that mirrors the immersion paradigm that is increasingly common in zoological enclosures.⁷⁸ Writing about an immersive exhibition of jellyfish, Hayward describes a scene that could just as well be a description of Jonas’s performances: “The Drifters exhibit, an immersion into ocean waters through sophisticated display technologies, constructs an interface, maintaining and blurring the distinction between being immersed in water and being immersed in built natures and display apparatuses.”⁷⁹ And here is the crucial point made by both the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Jonas: “immersion cannot happen without the body.”⁸⁰ Jonas immerses herself and explores what it means to be in contact with media, milieu, ecologies, etc.⁸¹ And by putting herself there, she asks the audience to do the same. After acknowledging Jonas’s body as part of each artwork’s ecology, viewers might begin to perform similar self-reflection about their own day-to-day impacts on their surroundings. Furthermore, with her recent performances, Jonas emphasizes that media help constitute these ecologies. Thus, the self-reflective, critical stance that immersed bodies encourage is not just reserved for physical immersion in natural milieu. Jonas shows herself being attuned to the movements of animals on screen, acknowledging their status as living (or perhaps, once-living) beings in a way that is media agnostic about how she encounters forms of life. We know to tread carefully around sensitive animal life in a national park. What Jonas instead encourages is to apply this sensitivity to all forms of life, whether encountered in person or through media.

The intimate worlds that Jonas produces in Disturbances and recent performances create spaces akin to how Timothy Morton has described their concept of queer ecology. Morton proposes that “life-forms constitute a mesh, a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment.”⁸² Coincidentally or perhaps tellingly, Morton calls this the “liquid life” of queer ecology.⁸³ By staging her own interrelationships with environments and images—frequently with watery imagery—Jonas shows how she always exists in something like Morton’s mesh, making clear the personal stakes she has in protecting creatures and ecosystems that are under threat.

Whether laying on a grassy field, moving around a pool, or performing within a multimedia installation, Joan Jonas—starting always with her own body—attempts to manifest ecological relationships at intimate and global scales. She repeatedly stages a form of (eco-)narcissistic presence that shows human bodies as part of landscapes, environmental interactions with those bodies, and the potential impacts of these interdependencies between and across media. In so doing, she foregrounded larger shifts in art of the 1970s toward indeterminacy and openness, while producing a model of ecological being that she has continued to practice in her mediated performances.