Left Side, Right Side(1972)

Left Side, Right Side is an early performance video work that uses the medium's unique properties to explore identity and the body. Artist Joan Jonas performs in direct confrontation with the viewer, leveraging video's immediacy and intimacy as conceptual tools. She splits her image across the screen and plays with mirrors and non-reversed footage, creating spatial ambiguities that blur the line between self-reflection and performance. Jonas treats her body as an art object, investigating subjectivity and objectivity through formal, reductive means—yet her approach carries an ironic theatricality. The work examines video as both mirror and mask, establishing it as a phenomenological instrument. A landmark of early conceptual video art, Left Side, Right Side remains essential viewing for anyone interested in performance-based media and the foundations of video as fine art.