Joan Jonas: Making the Image Visible

THE RECENT, UNTITLED VIDEO/PERFORMANCE PIECE by Joan Jonas is more striking for its video than for its performance elements. Theatrically, the video imagery dominates the spectacle insofar as the live performance is most interesting in terms of the way it is reconstituted on video. This enables Jonas to focus on what might be thought of as anesthetic interrogation of the conditions of representation in video. Her video imagery is predominantly representational, but her treatment of it bypasses a concern with the referential or representational significance of the imagery in favor of a preoccupation

print January 1973

For God and Country

The critique of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism . . . . The foundation of this critique is the following: man makes religion, religion does not make man.
—Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (opening lines)

THE CRITIQUE OF COMPETITIVE CAPITALISM, in Marx, is motivated by a root concern with the topic of alienation, or, rather more abstractly, with the relation between human activity and human accomplishment. Human activity creates a range of “objects” including not only trucks and trains but social systems, values, technologies. Though these “