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  • Sites of Desire
  • Nicholas Birns (bio)

The distinct contribution of Joan Jonas to postmodern performance has been the introduction of a defined narrative and a complicated relationship with anterior source material into tableaux, without yielding to conventional storytelling. In works such as The Juniper Tree, inspired by the Brothers Grimm, and the more recent Lines In The Sand based on the poet H. D.'s modernist-feminist epic Helen In Egypt (whose enactment of modernity's critical quest for primal, archaic nurturing is a clear precursor to The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things), Jonas has been inspired by literary sources without simply adapting them. She performs in her own pieces with other actors, theatrical props, and a complicated series of video presentations. Furthermore, Jonas's films, drawings, and sound effects are part of these presentations and provide multiple conduits for her response to the source material.

The central subject of The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things is Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the scholar of images who founded the Warburg Institute, an interdisciplinary research center located for many years in London. Warburg is pictured near the end of his life, when he is undergoing psychoanalysis by Ludwig Binswanger, himself a distinguished figure in the history of psychiatry. Within the frame of the analysis, Warburg (played by José Luis Blondel with an intellectual, slightly fish-out-of-water air) lies on a wooden couch, and recalls a pivotal trip to the American Southwest nearly 30 years before. Both Binswanger and the nurses who take care of Warburg are performed by women: Ragani Haas and Jonas herself. Jonas dances in various roles played towards the recesses of the performance space, and provides the narrative voiceover, inevitably lending it an air of framing and "authority" in both senses of the word. [End Page 74]

Warburg was drawn to the desert of the Southwest out of a sense that its natural beauty and Native American heritage possessed a reinvigorating wonder. This sacral authenticity could inject new spiritual vitality into the bloodstream of Western man. Jonas herself has researched Hopi artistic production for many years, including once observing the Hopi Snake Dance. Jonas, like Warburg, is interested in intercultural communication and a desire to expand the repertory of images available to our perception. In both cases, there is a search both for artistic beauty and anthropological knowledge. The otherness of the Southwest reveals an arena where the European quest for meaning can be carried out in exotic guise. It is also a space in which the self-conscious Warburg, who says at one point that "my intellectual training will not permit me to do so," can feel himself a real man. In the Southwest, he is in touch with the ground (as figured by the seismograph that he holds from time to time). Thus Jonas's probing look into the stitching of Warburg's psyche provides a sense of critique as a counterweight to any suggestion of engrossing spectacle.

Jonas is spectacularly resourceful in evoking Warburg's dreams. While the actors representing individuals are near the audience, providing both the initial focus of our attention and the prism through which we see the live and recorded action in the interior of the cavernous space, Jonas, when not playing the nurse, is always in motion, gesturing toward and evoking the total effect of the performance. Whereas Haas and Blondel are tentatively formal in their movements, Jonas is kaleidoscopic, gyrating between patterned and spontaneous motion. Yet there is acknowledgment and gestural dialogue between the three actors. Jonas's own drawing, video, dancing, and spoken words are all employed to create a hallucinatory atmosphere in which live action and film interact. A braid of inspiration and wonder is paramount in The Shape, The Feel, The Scent of Things. Jonas as performer is inside the action; though she certainly does not appear to us as framing what goes on, yet in performing, she knits together the live and recorded action and objects in the sensory manifestations embodied in the work's title.

Dia has produced a handsome catalogue containing the full text (most of it Warburg's) spoken in the performance. It also offers photographs of...

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