Joan Jonas

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  print September 2022

  THE ART WE LOVE

  ADRIAN PIPER

  I found Booth Tarkington’s Penrod tucked away in my parents’ library, on a shelf that I was not supposed to reach until I was at least tall enough to see its contents. But I found it much sooner than that, around the time I was nearing Penrod’s age of eleven. In every respect, I was and remain Penrod, as well as his two friends Herman and his younger tongue-tied brother, Verman, who live with their family across the alley from Penrod’s family’s backyard. I am most especially Verman when he takes revenge on Rupe Collins, a local bully, for calling him and Herman “nigs” by earnestly

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  passages June 11, 2020

  Susan Rothenberg (1945–2020)

  SUSAN ROTHENBERG was a visionary artist. We met around 1969 in New York and became friends. I asked her to work with me. Working together brings closeness.

  Susan made a beautiful contribution to one of my catalogues in 1994. Reading it now reminds me of the wonderful times we shared. “I wandered into one of the richest periods of the avant-garde music/sculpture/dance/performance/theater, separate and combined, that New York has ever known,” she wrote. “#10 Chatham Square. We ate at Tina Girouard’s and Dickie Landry’s kitchen on the second floor, or Mary Heilmann’s on six. We were Sonnier, Smithson,

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  print September 2012

  Joan Jonas

  AFTER I BOUGHT my first Porta-Pak in 1970, I imagined I was still making films while I worked with the qualities peculiar to video—the flat, grainy, black-and-white space, the moving bar of the vertical roll, the closed circuit with instant feedback. Camera, deck, monitor/projector, and artist formed a circle of circuitry. I thought about the discrepancy between live action and the detail of that action which was captured by a video camera. These considerations were translated into performances for a live audience.

  All of my performed actions were for the camera; the audience witnessed the

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  print December 2008

  THEIR FAVORITE EXHIBITIONS OF 2008

  To take stock of the past year, Artforum contacted an international group of artists to find out which exhibitions were, in their eyes, the very best of 2008.

  DUNCAN CAMPBELL

  James Coleman, Background, 1991–94 (Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin) Existential photo-novel? Soap opera? Mail-order-catalogue photo shoot? Coleman’s installations, pairing slide projection with synchronized audio, don’t lend themselves to easy categorization. In Background, shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art this year, the male narrator’s voice adds to the general dislocation, straining earnestly to convey some sort

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  print December 2004

  the best books of the year

  WHAT BOOKS STOOD OUT IN THE PAST TWELVE MONTHS? ARTFORUM ASKED A HANDFUL OF HISTORIANS, CRITICS, AND ARTISTS TO NAME THE TITLE (AND, IN SOME CASES, TITLES) THEY MOST REMEMBERED FROM THE PREVIOUS YEAR.

  Arthur C. Danto

  The title of Joseph Leo Koerner’s extraordinary study The Reformation of the Image (University of Chicago Press) refers to the way Martin Luther “reformed” religious pictures to make them consistent with the Second Commandment, thus protecting them against the wave of iconoclasm that swept Protestant churches in the early sixteenth century. Luther’s remedy consisted in treating images

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  print September 1971

  “Paul Revere”

  The film is an adaptation from two sources: Kinesics and Context by Ray L. Birdwhistell, and Choreomania, a performance by Joan Jonas.

  Off-camera narration determines actions, (some direction given by cameraman)

  narration off-camera

  THE FILM YOU ARE VIEWING will demonstrate, with your attention and cooperation, aspects of an operative process in communication. A simple two-message system will be employed: The informational model of Paul Revere’s signaling light tower will be the example, that is a lone light signaling that the British are coming by land △ two lights conveying the warning that they