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
