In the Shadow a Shadow: The Work of Joan Jonas

One of the most continuously influential figures of the past half century, Joan Jonas was among the first artists to embrace the forms of video, performance and installation. From her beginnings as a sculptor, and her emergence in the New York art and performance scenes of the 1960s and 70s (including the seminal "Vertical Roll" video piece of 1972, in which the titular television malfunction enacted a memorably fractured female identity), up through her six appearances at Documenta and her performance at the Performa 13 biennial, her work has always been surprising, groundbreaking and necessary. This extensively illustrated volume, containing hundreds of full-color photographs, drawings, scripts and diagrams, presents the definitive collection of Jonas' work. The first and authoritative career-spanning monograph of the multimedia pioneer, it covers more than 40 years of performances, films, videos, installations, texts and video sculptures. Art writer Joan Simon has painstakingly researched every one of Jonas' works and includes notes on each piece, along with new and never-before-published writings by the artist that provide extensive background. In the Shadow a Shadow also contains essays by Douglas Crimp, Barbara Clausen and Johanna Burton, and unpublished photographs and drawings from Jonas' archives. With a detailed production and exhibition history of the video and performance works, as well as the first comprehensive bibliography and biography of the artist, this intensively researched and authoritative book documents the range, breadth and depth of one of the most prolifically original artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

New York–born and based, Joan Jonas (born 1936) has taught at UCLA School of the Arts, in Stuttgart, Germany and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is a professor emerita. She has lived and worked in Greece, Morocco, India, Germany, Holland, Iceland, Poland, Japan, Italy, Hungary and Ireland.

a genuine colossus of contemporary practice...For Jonas, making, performing and imagining are themselves acts of resistance to the establishment. (Rachel Spence Financial Times)

This massive and copiously researched volume records all of Jonas’ work visually and textually–including performance scripts and scores for pieces which involved simultaneous visual, verbal and aural components, all with accompanying notes by the artist and annotations by Simon... This monograph is an invaluable record of Jonas’ work. (Andrea Kirsh Artblog)

...a monumental art-historical achievement. (Maya Harakawa The Brooklyn Rail)