Joan Jonas’ Glass Puzzle is a video of a video. In fact, it is a video of an unrehearsed performance that occurs in the virtual space of the television, and in the real space of an installation. Glass Puzzle is flat, it is physical, it is mute and it is musical, it is in colour and black and white. It exists as original work and as reassembled work. So given these multiple forms, its tight structure, and its playful impenetrability, Glass Puzzle requires not just clarification of its components and composition – details which wryly undermine the very ability to speak about the work in a concrete manner – but also an analysis of the context of its development, its intentions, and its function. Shot in Joan Jonas’ Soho loft over an uninterrupted period of three weeks, the first version of Glass Puzzle is a single-channel black and white video that depicts Jonas and her friend and artist Lois Lane performing a mute double act. Jonas used a video camera to feed a live performance into a monitor, while another camera recorded not only the action of the monitor’s feed, but also the reflection of the performance visible on the glass screen of the monitor. Using simple techniques to produce dense, visually rich spaces, the work is startling in its freshness and its game-playing complexity.

Like Manet’s Bar at Folies-Bergère, the gap between the mirror and the double is muddied and exploited: a threshold between real and imagined space. Video sequences are layered on top of one another until they appear as apparitions; gesture is replicated and inverted; shadows ape silhouettes. The work has an almost sculptural relationship to light and shadow, one which extends early artist’s film experiments, such as Moholy Nagy’s Lightplay: Black, White, Grey (1930), into video. Glass Puzzle uses the monitor as both presentation object and reflective presentation surface, seamlessly assimilating its physical display into the realm of the image. “I was interested in making the illusion of space within the flat screen,” Jonas recalls. “I made paper constructions that divided the space that I saw as the inside of the monitor.” Echoing Virilio’s idea that machines for seeing modify perception, Jonas’ multiple surfaces create an alternative perception of space that is neither collapsed nor expanded, but instead entirely virtual and simultaneous. Appearing as an ambiguous mesh