SITES OF DESIRE

Nicholas Birns

T he Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, a performance based on the
writings of Aby Warburg, conceived and directed by Joan Jonas, with
an original piano score composed and performed by Jason Moran. Dia:
Beacon Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York, October 2005 and October
2006.

The distinct contribution of Joan

Jonas to postmodern perfor-
mance has been the introduction
of a defined narrative and a complicated
relationship with anterior source mate-
rial 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 nurtur-
ing is a clear precursor to The Shape, 这
Scent, The Feel of Things), Jonas has been
inspired by literary sources without sim-
ply adapting them. She performs in her
own pieces with other actors, theatrical
props, and a complicated series of video
presentations. Furthermore, Jonas’s films,
图纸, and sound effects are part of
these presentations and provide multiple
conduits for her response to the source
材料.

The central subject of The Shape, 这
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 fig-
ure 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
空气) 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 vari-
ous 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.

74  PAJ 86 (2007), pp. 74–80.

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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 observ-
ing 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 other-
ness 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 sug-
gestion of engrossing spectacle.

Jonas is spectacularly resourceful in evok-
ing Warburg’s dreams. While the actors
representing individuals are near the
观众, 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 perfor-
mance. 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 spo-
ken 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 the images,
live and onscreen, deployed during the
performance as well as drawings not
actually shown live. The catalogue serves
as documentation and also as a corollary
to Warburg’s own attempts to archive
and inventory images. Edited by Karen
Kelly and Lynne Cooke, it contains an
insightful essay by Cooke as well as a dia-
logue between Jonas and the composer
for the piece, Jason Moran. The effect
of both performance and catalogue is to
conjure visceral emotions about artmak-
ing and the eye’s relation to the image,
and then to contemplate those emotions.
The catalogue doubles the experience
of watching the performance, with its
layered representation, as both first-hand
and second-hand: the afterimage, yet the
live image as well.

The image was Warburg’s intellectual
stock in trade. In fact, the contemporary
idea of “visual culture” as something
resembling art history but including a
broader range of reference and analysis

BIRNS / Sites of Desire  75

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Joan Jonas’s The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things. Photos: Courtesy Paula Court.

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76  PAJ 86

is inconceivable without Warburg, as is
literacy with images and words. War-
burg collected a multiplicity of images,
converging towards the lofty goal of a
Mnemosyne Atlas that would contain all
images and braid together the past, the
展示, and the imagining of the future.
His goal was a mapping of memes that
would have been an imaginative equiva-
lent of what scientists are now doing
with the mapping of genes.

As the video pans over a Southwest
景观, the possibility of luxuriating
in a sublime panorama presents itself.
Yet soon the image shifts, and our
absorption stops. What comes next on
the scene next is the image of Albrecht
Dürer’s Melancholia (personified by a
woman). This is a substantive shift in
tone. Not only does Dürer’s meticu-
lous draftsmanship militate against any
Romantic sense of creative totality, but
the felt sadness of the image serves to
ward off any excessive identification on
the part of the audience. Melancholy
hovers over Warburg’s fantasies as a
monitor, a warning, and a grace note.

Warburg’s need for the desert is a quest
for psychic health. Yet it is also a symp-
tom of European malaise. He dramati-
cally incants: “All humanity is schizo-
phrenic.” What can be shattering on
the level of the individual soul, though,
is sublimated to a more constructive
sense of plurality on the methodologi-
cal level. There is a connection between
interdisciplinary study in academia as
performed by Warburg and multimedia
performance as performed by Jonas.
Both harness creative perception as a
mode of intellectual investigation. Jonas’s
use of sound, music, and screen has a
synthesizing aspect, bringing together

multiple aspects of perception in an
overall experience.

Moran, an experimental jazz pianist,
who played the musical score for the
片, and was seated to the audience’s
正确的, mirroring the interpretive role his
music plays in the performance. Hav-
ing original music in the piece made its
visions of Warburg’s psyche less archival,
more contemporary—a projection as
well as a retrospection.

Warburg’s and the voiceover’s utterances
have a sonic as well as semantic effect;
the combination of narration, liturgi-
cal chant, and confession generates a
response as much aural as intellectual.
This is driven home when Jonas emits
a harsh and sudden scream that embod-
ies the pain in Warburg’s psyche. Jonas
juggles image and sound to keep the
audience intrigued, yet continually on
the alert for new approaches to meaning.
Immediate and secondary perception,
live action and media, mix in thought-
provoking ways during the performance.
A white dog appears as a leitmotif in the
视频, matched by a stuffed coyote that
is passed around by the performers in the
performance space. The coyote is stuffed,
yet in front of the audience. The dog is
活, yet only on the screen. Active space
and screen confirm, contradict, reverber-
ate off each other. The coyote is not used
as a totem or a reference to indigenous
myth; it is set in a contemporary con-
text. The doubling, in many gestures,
of Warburg and the female Melancholia
figure not only crosses gender lines but
parallels a represented person and an
abstract concept. Similarly, the green
paper hats at one point worn by two
women onscreen (and also worn often in
表现), and the red paper snakes

BIRNS / Sites of Desire  77

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tossed around in a dithyrambic indica-
tion of the Hopi Snake Dance, are at
once disposable costume and archetypal
representations. The sense of the sacred
conveyed in these images is fortified by
Jonas’s use of Dia:Beacon’s cavernous
basement space. The altar-like position-
ing of the video screens at the back of
the space suggests the ambience of a
freshly hallowed sanctuary, quickened
and catalyzed by the technique of hav-
ing a large screen (12 by 18 feet) roll on
wheels, approaching andreceding from
the viewer, so the viewer’s eye is always
responsive. The Dia space is new for
表现, in a renovated factory only
recently opened as a museum. Jonas’s
piece (first performed in 2005, and
then shown again the following year) is
the second work to be performed there.
The newness of the space gave Jonas’s
exploration of it a probing quality, as if
what to make of the space was in itself an
aspect of the site-specific performance’s
unfolding.

The video aspect of the piece, live and
prerecorded, and visible across the floor
of the space from the audience, is played
out on both moving and stationary
screens. One screen is drawn back and
向前, left or right, while others remain
in fixed positions. Similarly, within the
视频, the shots are sometimes close-up
and stationary, sometimes moving to
convey withdrawal or abstention. At
other times they have a photographic
stasis that makes the audience’s eyes
inquire and canvass; as the camera
moves in or out, the audience feels it
is advancing on or retreating from the
image. This shifting sense of the image
also plays out in the bodily manifestation
of the live performer. The movements
are energetic, sometimes dance-like,

78  PAJ 86

sometimes more casual. But they have
a sculptural quality throughout. This
gives a sense of concrete weight to the
performers’ actions. What is happening
in the performance space appears as an
imaginary frieze. Warburg, at one point,
说, “Romantic visions arouse hunger
of adventure.” The characters seem to
be looking for something, indicating
Jonas’s own investigative processes in her
art. One of the frequent gestural actions
performed both live and prerecorded
is that of scooping—mining—just as
the wooden seismograph with the ball-
bearing pendulum in real space registers
the ground’s energies. These images sug-
gest a psychic and spiritual quest.

The early twentieth century felt, very
keenly, its loss of previous spiritual
certainties. There was a sense of depriva-
tion in the modern world that, Warburg
believed, could be replenished by the
greater spiritual connection felt by the
Hopi. But, even as Jonas conveys this
yearning to the audience, there is an
abrupt jolt. In the only spoken line
in the performance not taken from
Warburg’s texts, the voiceover men-
tions the 1929 Lateran Treaty, by which
Mussolini came to a concordat with the
Catholic Church. Is this another kind
of rapprochement between religion and
modern society? Does it give strength to
fascist political theology? It is announced
that four years later, in 1933, Warburg’s
library moved from Hamburg to Lon-
don. This was a consequence of the rise
of the Nazis in Germany. Jonas hints
那, while retrieving the sacred is laud-
有能力的, we have to be careful about what
we actually conjure.

Toward the end, an image of an aban-
doned casino, rusted over and spotted

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Top and middle:
Joan Jonas’s The
Shape, The Scent,
The Feel of Things.
Photos: Courtesy
Paula Court; Right:
Still from video
featured in the
performance.
照片: Courtesy
Joan Jonas.

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BIRNS / Sites of Desire  79

with graffiti, appears on screen. In the
图像, the white dog trots in front of
the casino, a mute witness to wreckage,
focusing the theme of spiritual thirst
amid desolation. A Woody Guthrie
song, “Pastures of Plenty,” sounds a heal-
ing yet still slightly melancholy note as

the casino is shown. Image and sound
convey redemption and ruin in counter-
point. History, art, and a sense of awe
reanimate Warburg’s process of catalogu-
ing visual meaning, helping Jonas define
a new model of sacred space.