JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS JOAN JONAS AS PART OF VAI GET TOGETHER 2024. 

Joanne Laws: Perhaps I could ask you, first of all, about growing up in New York in the 1930s and 40s. I imagine it was a completely different city to the one we know now?

Joan Jonas: Yes, it was a much more beautiful city. It didn’t have all those terrible glass buildings. I loved New York growing up there. We lived on the Upper East Side near the East River. I remember hearing the tugboats on the river at night, which I loved. I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art as a child, and I remember liking it.

JL: You previously described the existence of a hole in the city, any city, be it New York, London, Berlin, where happenings and movements can occur under the radar.

JJ: Yeah, I called them holes in the cities. I lived in New York, but Berlin was where I got that idea because I had a residency in Berlin in the early 80s. And Berlin was full of holes, including bullet marks on the walls. Performances and events took place in these situations because they were interesting outdoors places. There was a group of young artists called Bureau Berlin, who looked for interesting locations. And I did that in New York, too. Everybody did.

JL: Can you share with us some of your memories of New York’s downtown art scene at this time, potentially in relation to space, which is such a massive consideration for all artists?

JJ: Well, in the 60s and early 70s, it was very inexpensive to live in New York and produce work. Now it’s become impossible, probably, for young artists, which is too bad. But then you could go out in the street to make work. For one piece, I took my friend Pat Steir, who was a painter, and we brought my props of tubes, cones, and hoops onto the streets of Wall Street at night, and nobody questioned us. Now, you couldn’t do that without getting permission; there’s not the same feeling of freedom. But for me, it was access to a certain kind of culture in New York that was important. And going to the Philharmonic – I mean, classical music and the opera – with my mother, and then later on, contemporary music, in the early 70s; people like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and many others. One went to hear live music all the time. The audience was a group of artists of all sorts; composers, visual artists, and we all went to each other’s work. The composer La Monte Young had a huge effect on me. 

JL: I believe one of your first performances involved you looking into a mirror and laughing. Can I ask about mirrors as props in your work?

JJ: I began to be interested in and inspired by mirrors by reading [Jorge Luis] Borges. His book, Labyrinths (1962) was translated around that time, and was given to me. I immediately loved the stories. I took all the references to mirrors out of that book, copied them out, memorised them, and then I did a performance in a mirror costume. Mirrors interested me because they distorted the space; they reflected everything else. Borges called them mysterious and threatening – he believed in the infinite multiplication of space. In the early performances, there are about 17 people carrying large, heavy mirrors. They reflected the audience, and the audience saw themselves. I just did ten of the mirror performances at MoMA, and I went to see them all. Sometimes, when you see your own work years later, it’s amazing to think you actually had the energy to go through that!

JL: Your first film was a black and white, soundless, 16 mm film from 1968 called Wind. Maybe you could share with us the appeal and also the limitations of 16mm for you as an artist?

JJ: Long before I came here in the 80s, I was interested in film. But I didn’t go to school to study film. When I went to college, I was studying sculpture, working in clay from the figure. They didn’t have a film course then. I began to I study film by just going to films. There was the Anthology Film Archives in my neighbourhood in SoHo – Jonas Mekas gave a tremendous amount to us by having these archives – so, I went to see all of those. I made two 16mm films: Wind (1968) and Songdelay (1973), but I always had to work with filmmakers because the film camera is so elaborate and complicated. Wind was based on an indoor piece that we took outdoors. It’s called Wind because it was the coldest day of the year, and the wind was blowing. And from then on, the wind became one of my collaborators. So, when I’m in Canada in the summer, and whenever the wind blows, I rush out with my costumes and whatever, and my dog comes with me.

JL: In 1970, you travelled to Japan with your friend, the artist Richard Serra, and that’s where you bought a Sony Portapak, a battery-operated videotape analogue recording system that could be carried and operated by one person. I’m guessing this gave a whole new dimension and level of autonomy to your filmmaking? 

JJ: I loved it, and so did everybody who worked with video. Filmmakers hated it because of the quality of the video. It was black and white and very grainy and indistinct. It wasn’t like film, but we all loved it. I think the most important thing about the Portapak was that an artist could sit in their studio with the camera and look at what they were doing on the monitor or in the projection. That was radical and revolutionary. It really was, for artists to be able to see themselves as they worked. And that’s what my early work is all based on.

JL: In the mid-70s, wearing a doll like mask, you performed as Organic Honey, whom you described as an “electronic, erotic seductress.” In Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy from 1972, your own fragmented image appeared onscreen. In hindsight, how do you situate your alter ego, Organic Honey within your then evolving practice?

JJ: Because it was my first video piece, it was one of the most important works. I began to insert vertical rolls into one of the video works. That’s an autonomous video work, but I put it in the performance. I’m not a theorist, so I wasn’t reading theory; it just was in the technology at that time, and in the places where some of us were going. It was also the time of the women’s movement, so Organic Honey was based on the idea of questioning what is female imagery. I dressed up in costumes that I found in flea markets, and masks. I was influenced by Noh theatre, and I still look at texts from Noh plays, because they’re an ongoing inspiration for me.

JL: We should mention that you lived in Dublin in 1994, when you were preparing for your first retrospective in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. While you were here, it seems you were quite engaged with the Irish literary scene?

JJ: Well, let me just say something about Ireland. For a long time now, I’ve been interested in Irish mythology and content. It’s because I’m part Irish – I’m sorry to mention it! There are hundreds of thousands of us scattered all over the place. My [family] name is Huguenot, and my grandmother’s name is in the Huguenot Cemetery [in Dublin]. It doesn’t mean anything, but for me it was a connection. And I was always drawn to Irish themes and Irish literature. James Joyce, of course, was a huge influence. The fact that he had mythology in his stories; that really influenced me to include mythology in my work. Rudi Fuchs [then director of the Stedelijk Museum] introduced me to the work of Seamus Heaney, so I based a piece on his poem, Sweeney Astray. I came here to work on that, and I went to the Aran Islands and photographed all those beautiful stone walls.

JL: I’m curious about your relationship to art criticism over the years. Your work was so pioneering that I expect critics really struggled to find the terminology to write about it. Is that something you particularly cared about as an artist?

JJ: Well, I’ll just say first, I felt bad they didn’t write about me more! And that’s true; they didn’t know how to write about what I did. Jonas Mekas was the first person, a filmmaker, who understood what I was trying to do. He saw my early video performances, the Organic Honey ones, and he wrote about it in the newspaper. For me, that was important because everybody would say, “I can’t figure out what you do.” They didn’t know how to approach it. I didn’t have a dialogue, so I didn’t talk to them because I’m not a theorist. 

JL: Across your multi-dimensional performance and installations, there’s been an impulse to revisit and revise, and more specifically to restage and reanimate some of your earlier works. I’m curious to know how have you been able to construct and maintain this dialogue between past and present works?

JJ: I mean, it’s not a new method. But the Organic Honey group of videos – I don’t redo those ever. There are certain pieces that I don’t touch. A very concrete example is a recent series about the ocean, based on a book called Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness, who is a wonderful Icelandic writer. Of course, I had to put my work in the present, but he wrote that book in the 60s. The first thing you think of is that glaciers are melting now. So, I had to take that into consideration. The piece became about ecological impact, and I included footage from Disturbances (1972), which was filmed in a swimming pool, with young women (myself included) swimming around naked or in white nightgowns. I wanted to indicate that everything is melting and that we’re all going to be living underwater. Water is a big issue.

JL: How did you feel when MoMA mounted your retrospective earlier this year, ‘Good night. Good morning’? Was it a self-reflective, nostalgic, triumphant moment?

JJ: Not at all nostalgic – please – I don’t want any nostalgia! No, I was very happy about it. I’d done retrospectives in the Tate and in Munich and Portugal, but it was very different to do it in my hometown. The curators came to my loft every week for two years, just doing their own research. They were able to put more material into it, making it richer. Because of the way my work is constructed, you can’t see these installations unless they’re set up. So, for me, it was very important that people finally saw my work as it should be, at last in New York, where I come from. 

JL: I wanted to ask what advice you would give to younger artists – or indeed, artists of any career stage – about how to just keep going, throughout the many challenges we all face in life.

JJ: Well, one thing I would say is you have to love what you do, because you may never be recognised. I hate to say that, but you really have to love it. And even if you are recognised, you have to continue to love what you do, because it’s hard work to keep going and to go through the bad periods; there are ups and downs, for sure. But I think the main reason for doing what you do is because you are drawn to it and you can’t resist it, you know. 

Audience Question: Can you talk about the crossover between drawing and performative drawing and the film work?

JJ: Well, drawing was part of my practice from the very beginning. It’s the one thing I brought from studying sculpture and art history. For me, drawing is a process; I’m always learning how to draw and practicing how to draw. And so, I make drawings consciously for each of my works that have to do with the content, with the technology, like drawing for video and so on. Drawing is part of my basic language. I have thousands of drawings that I’ve kept, that have been hidden away, and they just show up in performances. But I also make autonomous drawings. I get obsessed with certain subjects, like dogs.

Audience Question: You work so much with words and stories, but you also work with performance, drawing, and the body. Can you talk to us about this tension?

JJ: Words are only important to me when I use them, but I don’t think they’re at all necessary. It just seems to flow, you know, from one form to another. Poetry has been huge. When I say poetry, I mean how poems are structured. Someone said a poem is a telegram; a shorter way of saying something very complicated and beautiful, maybe. I see it more as a flow than a tension between those two. I started out with no words in my early work, and then they gradually seeped in. 

JL: I want to thank you sincerely for being here to speak with us in such an honest and inspiring way about your work.

JJ: Thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here and thank you. I love being in Ireland. 

Joanne Laws is Editor of The Visual Artists’ News Sheet. 

visualartistsireland.com

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of performance and video art who was a central figure in New York’s performance art movement of the 1960s. Joan has performed and exhibited extensively throughout the world. Her retrospective, ‘Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning’, was presented at MoMA from 17 March to 6 July 2024.

moma.org

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Like many other arts organisations, the VAI staff debated at length on how to host our Get Together event – Ireland’s annual forum for visual artists, which was cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The benefits and disadvantages of physical and virtual events were discussed in detail; however, since the possibility of further lockdowns and cancellations in autumn 2021 could not be ruled out, it was decided to proceed with a three-day online event, hosted through the digital conference platform, Balloon. 

This online format had the added advantage of allowing contributors to beam in from across the world, including speakers in America, Europe and the UK, who otherwise might not have been able to attend. For the most part, the platform was user-friendly, offering a festival-like format, with talks happening on different ‘stages’. Other functions allowed direct messaging, one-to-one video chats, or ad hoc group discussions – perceived as the closest virtual equivalent of going for a coffee with someone. 

Staple Get Together formats – such as Artists Speak, Speed Curating, panel discussions and specialist clinics – were all hosted virtually, and while attendees missed the spontaneity of real-life encounters, everyone seemed to enjoy the events, nonetheless.

Artists Speak

The three-day event was officially launched by Kevin Rafter, Chair of The Arts Council, on the morning of Tuesday 5 October. Atoosa Pour Hosseini commenced the first Artists Speak session, offering vibrant insights into her moving image practice, with a focus on themes of displacement and alienation. Atoosa outlined recent exhibitions, and the purchase of a suitcase containing 50 reels of Super 8 film (comprising footage of insects, birds and plants) which the artist spent six months digitising for future use.

Responding to a core theme of Get Together 2021, Andi McGarry explained how his practice is sustained through meaningful collaborations, including a project in summer 2020 with Lar O’Toole. ‘CATCH / The First Fathom’ involved a series of installations on a beach, with painted canvases mounted on sticks to resemble flags. Andi discussed his involvement with the DIY and punk scenes in the northeast of England, and his ongoing interest in ‘music with a social conscience’ which has roots in folk music, protest songs and grass roots activism. 

Caoimhe Kilfeather reflected on the dichotomy of sculptural practice as utility or ornamentation. She also discussed practical issues like storage and the necessity for artworks to occasionally be dismantled and repurposed, as part of her material process. In a similar vein, Kathryn Nelson considered how artists can maintain more sustainable practices by refusing to reproduce a culture of overconsumption and challenging the model of the globally agile artist, while glass artist, Elke Westen, added that artists should be mindful of using environmentally friendly materials and processes. 

Chanelle Walshe discussed recent departures in their painting practice, as well as ongoing involvement in self-organised exhibitions, aimed at showcasing the work of female painters. New York-based Irish artist, Jonah King, considered ecologies of the body in the contexts of climate change, Artificial Intelligence and the Anthropocene. Jonah’s practice is epistemologically underpinned by the ‘Upper Scene’ – a concept which proposes digital media as an ‘evolutionary conclusion’ of stones, minerals and deep time. Jonah’s interactive installation, All My Friends Are In The Cloud (2017 – ongoing), digitally archives moments of intimacy forever – a particularly moving gesture for those whose loved ones have since passed away.  

Dublin-based Vietnamese artist, Duc Van Pham, views the subjects of his portraits – including a pregnant friend, a homeless cousin, and his father-in-law, who is recovering from cancer – as co-conspirators in the painting process, with his expanded compositions incorporating multiple layers and political commentary. Martin Marley reflected on his long and varied career in the arts, as a designer, craftsperson and educator. While his background in furniture design taught him traditional skills, through his work in ceramics and sculpture, he has experienced the tactile and intuitive qualities of materials. 

Sinéad Brennan is a glass artist, who recently developed a series of sculptures with weaponry inserted into cosmetics – like a compact mirror with inbuilt flick-knife – as metaphors for equalising male and female powers. She discussed how the cutting, reshaping and etching of found glass has offered a more environmentally and financially sustainable way of working. 

Elaine Harrington is a ceramics artist interested in the material histories of making and objects. Despite extensive training in ceramics, photography and printmaking, the artist felt a disconnect with her materials and wanted to have more direct involvement, from source to product. Residencies in different countries showed how materials are embedded in landscape, practice, and community. She now wants to make fewer actual objects, and has begun exploring performance interventions and land art. 

Panel Discussions

‘Craft Crashing Through the Walls of Visual Art Galleries’ was moderated by Louise Allen (Director of the Creative Futures Academy) and featured London-based ceramic artist, Aaron Angell, in conversation with New York-based glass artist, Amber Cowan, who tuned in at 6:30am (Eastern Standard Time). 

Amber’s exquisite glass works involve various fabrication techniques, including the 600-year-old Venetian tradition of glassblowing, particularly flamework. Amber combines antique objects with recycled glass from now-defunct American glass factories. Quite often, people send heirlooms or broken ornaments for Amber to incorporate into her fantastical dioramas and grotto-like assemblages. The artist recently collaborated on a film with John Galliano and is represented by Heller Gallery, a glass-specific commercial gallery in New York.

Aaron describes his London-based studio, Troy Town Art Pottery, as “a radical and psychedelic workshop” where he has hosted over 80 artists-in-residence, while selling pots to fund the residency programme. In 2017, Aaron curated an exhibition at Tate St Ives, ‘That Continuous Thing: Artists and the Ceramics Studio, 1920 – Today’, featuring artists from the UK ceramic underground of the 1970s and 80s – an ungalvanised community considered irrelevant, both within ceramics and contemporary art circles. This form of practice is often categorised as ‘high craft’ or ‘ceramics in an expanded world’. Aaron noted that ceramics comes in and out of fashion at art fairs, adding that: “Art collection is essentially a speculative form of money laundering!” 

Sustaining a Practice and Working with Ambition 

Echoing this sentiment, artist Lindsay Seers commented that investment in art is perceived as a way of storing money safely, during her compelling conversation with Helen Pheby (Head of Curatorial Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park). Lindsay contrasted the millions spent on the current NFT craze with the contemporaneous reality of artist poverty, and the “vulnerability for the artist within the professional hierarchy”. As part of her campaign, which seeks commitment from galleries for fair payment to artists, Lindsay cited a letter written in 1972 by artist Hollis Frampton to Donald Richie, Curator of Film at MoMA, who said that Frampton’s solo exhibition at the museum would be “all for love and honour and no money is included at all”. In his reply, Frampton lists the cost of making an artwork – from the purchase of film to the museum invigilation – to highlight his lack of renumeration, despite generating income for others within the artworld. As Lindsay pointed out, there is not just one synchronised art world, but multiple economies; buying art is not an elite enterprise and we need to encourage wider approaches to redistribute the wealth. 

Lindsay’s work is experimental, immersive and site-responsive, fluctuating between documentary, narrative and fiction. Her artworks embody a “dynamic unfolding in response to site” while being imbued with the intensity of the journey, the travel and the many coincidences that happen along the way. She can hardly see the work until it is installed in the gallery, where it comes together for a short period of time, before returning to the artist’s imagination. 

Among many other fascinating points of discussion, the artist noted that everyone’s perception of reality is different, citing the term ‘the hallucinatory real’ to describe how we constantly reconstruct memories through a ‘faulty recall system’, adding that memory is simply “a set of misunderstandings that we hold onto”. Examples include looking back through old diaries, to reassess the truth as it was written at the time, or re-watching a film seen 20 years ago, and clearly observing the constructs through the lens of lived experience, which brings a different reading.

During lockdown, Lindsay took stock of her work, the “failures, chaos and exhaustion”, as well as the vulnerability she feels as a sole maker and woman in a male dominated space of sculptural fabrication. She began to see how obsessive making art can be; how artists share the world in a particular way and don’t clock off. The artist spoke of the raise in consciousness needed to recognise human supremacy as a damaging force on planet, and the pivotal but not widely understood concepts of Quantum Theory and metaphysical entanglement, which explain how our bodies share particles with the earth and the ocean. 

Practice & The Anthropocene 

Another interesting conversation unfolded between Jakob Fenger, a founding member of the Danish artist group, Superflex, and Chris Clarke, Senior Curator at The Glucksman. Over the course of three decades, Superflex has used a socially engaged model of collective practice to challenge the outmoded image of the lone artist, operating on the fringes of society. Superflex aims to reframe humans as the ‘centre of the world’, stating that “sometimes the best ideas may come from fish”.

An ongoing focus on water featured in Flooded McDonald’s (2009) which visualises the apocalyptic future of climate change through the submersion of a global fast-food chain. Similarly, Dive-In (2019) (commissioned by Desert X for Coachella Valley) is an installation and functional drive-in cinema that will later become an infrastructure for marine life, amid rising sea levels and a subaquatic future accelerated by climate change.

Interspecies Assembly (2021) was a series of sculptures, configured as a gathering site and installed in Central Park, New York City, to highlight ecological turmoil and human exceptionalism. An ‘Interspecies Contract’ was carved into one sculpture, encouraging a state of ‘human idleness’, to remedy dwindling biodiversity and allow other species to flourish.

Superflex is currently developing plans to rebuild a stone reef along the Danish coastline, depleted over the last century through human extraction of stone from the seabed. Given that sea creatures depend on hard surfaces, the artists want to build a city of sculptural infrastructure to encourage diversity. 

Being Part of Something

In his keynote presentation, ‘Being Part of Something’, Christian Jankowski discussed a range of previous projects, including The Hunt (1992) in which the artist – heroically armed with a bow and arrow – ‘hunted’ in a supermarket for essential goods. Sharing a similar sense of the absurd, Casting Jesus (2011) documented actors auditioning to play Jesus through a casting agency in Rome and employing a reality TV format. A judging panel of Vatican priests was tasked with selecting the ‘chosen one’. 

Christian was presenting from the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, just hours before the screening of his new film, Social Plastic Surgery (2021) commissioned by the museum to celebrate the 100th birthday of Joseph Beuys. The film features interviews with Beuys collectors about living with the artworks for over 40 years, while a series of photographs depicts surgeons (from the nearby Youth Fountain Clinic plastic surgery clinic) re-enacting famous poses by Beuys or naming operations after him. As noted by a Get Together attendee, this work seems particularly appropriate, given that Beuys himself was a great self-publicist who created layers of mythologising around his own legend.

Joanne Laws is Editor of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet.

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