| We’re wishing Joan Jonas a happy 84th birthday today!
In her groundbreaking single-channel video work Vertical Roll (1972), Jonas disrupts the video’s electronic signal to create a “vertical roll,” a common problem on early television monitors. The roll disrupts our ordinary watching habits by obscuring our full view of the scene, reminding us that the flatness of the televisual image is an illusion.
Each “blink” offers a fleeting glimpse of a section of Jonas’s body as she performs in front of the camera—either garbed in a feather headdress, wearing a mask, in a belly dancer’s costume, or nude. By using the technology in this way, Jonas plays upon the female form, both inviting and repelling our gaze while mediating our access to the image of the woman onscreen. Jonas characterized this element of the work as “a poetic approach to . . . expressing my relationship to feminism, [involving] a search for whether or not there could be something such as female art, female imagery.”
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