press release
The John Hansard Gallery presents the
first major exhibition in the UK of one of the most influential
artists working today. Joan Jonas is a key
figure in performance, installation and video art and has maintained
her position as a pioneer in these genres since the 1960s -
her influence crucial to the development of important aspects
of contemporary art.
Joan Jonas uses interlocking strands of choreographed
movements, video and narrative in an exploration of technology,
fragmentation of physical space and female identity. Often the
performer, Jonas examines the self and the body through layers
of meaning, using recurring themes in an idiosyncratic vocabulary
of ritualized gesture and symbolic objects that include masks,
mirrors, and costuming.
This exhibition of recent works will include two installation
based pieces, Lines in the Sand and The
Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things. Based on the
poem ‘Helen in Egypt’ written by H.D. in 1955, Lines
in the Sand blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, presented
in a contemporary reworking of the myth. This multimedia installation
features emblematic objects and imagery, shifting between different
times and locations, combining Las Vegas kitsch with Egyptian
history to represent the ‘fake’ and the ‘real’.
The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things premiers this reworked
installation and follows on from Lines in the Sand. Set in the
American Southwest with inspiration from Aby Warburg’s
1895 trip to the Hopi reservation in Arizona, the installation
comprises a four screen film installation and further explores
Jonas’ interest in working cross-culturally.
A series of Jonas’ earlier influential experimental film
works will also be screened during the exhibition.
Concurrent with the exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery,
Wilkinson Gallery, London will be showing Mirror Works, 1969–2004
from 18 November to 23 January 2005. Joan Jonas will also perform
the piece, Lines in the Sand, at Tate Modern on 23 and 24 November
2004.
Exhibitions at the John Hansard Gallery and Wilkinson Gallery
have been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.
Performances at Tate Modern have been funded by The Felix Trust
for Art.
An illustrated catalogue will be published to accompany the
exhibition, including texts by Tracey Warr, Jonathan Dronsfield
and Robert Ayres.
artist interview
“That’s what we do - we retell stories.”
Listening to Joan Jonas.
Robert Ayers.
While planning her shows in England this autumn, Joan Jonas
took time to talk at length to Robert Ayers about some of the
issues raised by her work. This transcript of their conversation,
which was video-recorded at Joan Jonas’ home in New York
City on September 17, 2004, has been edited by both Robert Ayers
and Joan Jonas, published by the John Hansard Gallery
and is reproduced with the kind permission of Robert Ayers.
Robert Ayers: Joan, I’d like to focus in our conversation
today on the pieces you’re going to be showing in Southampton
and London. Do you think I could begin by asking you about the
relationship that exists between pieces that were originally
done as performances or videos but which are now finding a renewed
life as installations? How did that process begin?
Joan Jonas: Originally I had made some small installations,
but never as major work. The work had concentrated on performance
and single channel video works. But in 1994, I was asked to
do a retrospective show of five works plus one new work, at
the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I had to find a way to show
the original pieces, and in thinking about it and talking it
over with Dorine Mignot, the curator, we decided together that
it wouldn’t make sense to show drawings for example, separated
from the original videos, objects, or ‘stage sets’.
So, because I’m a visual artist really, and I’ve
always made my own stages and my own objects, I decided that
the natural step would be to install each work – slightly
adjusted – like a stage set, as it were.
So the installations are a sort of stage set? Was that
sort of set actually the starting point for the earlier performances?
In some cases I found a space – a gymnasium or
a factory, or outdoors, for instance, while in others I constructed
a place for the action: it really became my sculpture. I made
a stage set for The Juniper Tree, and the same for the Organic
Honey series. I always had to begin with a defined place to
perform. I was very conscious of what the audience would perceive.
In between the Stedelijk Show and the Queens Museum
show earlier this year it’s been ten years. I was working
out ideas in those years. By the time I got to Queens, (and
after a similar show in Stuttgart) I was playing a bit more
successfully in arrangements between the main works. I continued
to work on installations and showing in spaces that were mostly
not theatre spaces; and I continued to make performances, but
instead of that being my main focus, it was a source for ideas.
In England there’ll be the installation version of
Lines in the Sand in Southampton at the same time that the performance
version is happening at the Tate. That was how it worked here
in New York in the spring when the installation was part of
the Queens Museum show and you were performing at the Kitchen.
How do the two experiences work for you? Do you learn things
about the installation by doing the performance, and vice versa?
Well, remember that I had already seen the two together
at Documenta in Kassel in 2002, so I had already gone through
that process. I found new ways to deal with the material. I
knew that the Kassel audience would see the installation, so
because I didn’t want to repeat the installation exactly,
I purposely left video sequences out to include new scenes.
I used some of the same elements, but I was thinking about what
the differences could be. Particularly in the use of time. In
the installation the main tape is short, only twenty minutes,
and the edits mostly fast, so the performance gave me the opportunity
– which I missed in the editing of the installation –
to deal with time in a different way, to lengthen time, to consider
duration. An audience has a different concentration in a gallery
space. They pass through. And of course live performers alter
the material. So yes, I understood the piece in a new way.
But I think this brings us straight away to something very
particular about your work. I’ve always been struck by
the fact that in your pieces, because there are always a number
of elements at play at any one time people are allowed to find
their own connections between the various elements. Is that
something that you do consciously?
Yes, I do. It’s something that I’ve worked
with for a long time. As soon as I started working with video
I started working with the idea of layers: different simultaneous
actions and images that related to and reinforced each other.
I think it’s simply that I got more interested in complexity
and in building the links between things.
But doesn’t it also mean that no two people see the
performance in the same way?
Of course. That’s when people start having different
experiences because they can’t watch the whole thing.
They watch one thing and they miss something else going on over
here. I can’t look at my pieces that way. I don’t
know what that experience is. I know everything that’s
going on. When I rehearse the pieces I’m looking at everything
at once – and I can do that because I know it so well
– so I’m looking at the all-over picture. But it
interests me that people can see the performance in such different
ways – they can miss one thing and see something else
– and that one person’s interpretation and experience
of it can be slightly different to the next. But I think that’s
what is true of all perception of art, even if you do see the
whole thing at once.
But does it worry you that there might be too much in the
performance for any one individual to appreciate?
No, it doesn’t worry me, not really. It doesn’t
look so complex to me, but I guess it is. I work on the different
visual and aural threads - I work on the video editing and that
layer, and then I work on the performance layer. One of my main
concerns is how the work is perceived - what it looks like to
the audience. I really would like people to understand the piece,
but I can’t really get too involved with this issue, I
can only make something that is interesting to me, and that
means something.
I also think that it comes from the whole history of
performance art, or of happenings anyway. It doesn’t come
out of nowhere. The happenings involved several things going
on at the same time. In the happenings there wasn’t such
a logical connection between the actions. And I was also thinking
of the three ringed circus, like other artists were in the early
twentieth century. That wasn’t narrative – it was
really based on actions, a lot of actions – but I’m
trying to build a narrative out of these things. It’s
a poetic narrative, which is not necessarily linear. It’s
really about me wanting to say certain things.
Yes, it always seems to me that when we apply the word
‘narrative’ to your work, we have to put it in inverted
commas. It’s the same with the word ‘theatre’.
I think my pieces have become closer to theatre because
theatre itself has changed a lot in the last thirty or forty
years. Some theatre has been influenced by performance art.
Don’t you think? I think there’s a sliding scale
between say, a purely conceptual piece and theatre. I love theatre,
but I don’t want to do theatre. For me, the difference
between my work and theatre comes down to the way that theatre
works with text, and acting. In my work performing is not acting,
it’s like behaving, or simply action, and it’s not
working with text in the same way at all.
Well, if acting was the principle, presumably you wouldn’t
be able to use masks as much as you do?
I started using masks when I went to Japan in 1970.
I saw a lot of Noh Theatre and Kabuki. Eastern theatre and the
work of other cultures had a tremendous influence on me. I came
back and I made my first outdoor piece, Jones Beach Piece,
and I started working with video while working on the Organic
Honey pieces. I really started using masks then because
of Japanese theatre. Masks served several purposes: one was
to hide my face because I wasn’t trained as a performer
– I never performed before I started working in this context,
in the artworld. Actors, the good ones, can create a character.
They have a certain control over their face and their speech.
I don’t have that. It takes a lot of skill and work. I
do perform a lot, and I also worked as an actor with the Wooster
Group, but I’m not really an actor. I could have a blank
face but I can’t do anything else with it. And I didn’t
want to be myself, Joan Jonas. I didn’t want to have people
look at me and think, ‘It’s her.’ The minute
that you put a mask on you erase the recognition that the audience
has of a person. I liked the idea that I could cover my face
and become another persona. I liked the visual effects of masks,
and I liked the fact that you could introduce strange characters.
But it wasn’t always about the psychology of those characters.
In the outdoor pieces, when I used a hockey mask, it was really
about creating a vision. The minute I started using masks I
realized their transformative nature, as anybody would: that
when you put a mask on, your body language is altered. The effect
of wearing a mask interests me a lot and I still use them. Over
the years I’ve found different masks for almost every
one of my pieces. I think they are incredible, very powerful
devices. The mask inspires me: if you put a mask on you can
enter a different world.
Yes. In fact, wouldn’t it be fair to say that Organic
Honey, who almost became your alter-ego at one stage, came
into existence when you put her mask on?
Well, Organic Honey did have psychology. In
Organic Honey I really created a character using the
mask. I worked on Organic Honey for two years. I began to produce
videotapes out of the process of performing. In other words,
while I was performing I worked out ideas for single channel
videotapes. They were a translation of the performance, and
they were works in themselves. They weren’t just a document.
Then I would take that material and put it back into the performance.
Organic Honey generated a number of single channel
works, and also particular ideas in relation to the technology
of video. Some actions and the costumes came out of the performance,
some from the process of making a tape. When I made Vertical
Roll for instance, I introduced the structure of the vertical
roll, and the movements that I had worked out, back into the
performance.
Yes, and movement has always been one of the key elements
in your performance, hasn’t it?
It’s always interested me as a performer to work
out movements relating to props and music. It’s pleasurable.
It’s something I really like to do. So yes, I’m
very interested in movement.
But it also seems to me that there are particular sorts
of movement that interest you most. And those are somewhat ritualized
activities – dance comes most obviously to mind –
out of which the human body might conjure new meanings.
Well, from the very beginning in the mid-sixties when
I decided that I wanted to do performance, I saw a lot of work
by dancers in New York: Simone Forti, Lucinda Childs, Deborah
Hay, and Yvonne Rainer. They were dancers and they worked in
collaboration with visual artists. Also, if you perform you
have to move in a certain way, and the kind of explorations
they were doing – because they were working with everyday
movement and very simple things – I could actually do.
I didn’t have to be a trained dancer. I also looked at
rituals of other cultures.
Yes. I was fascinated by My New Theater l: Tapdancing
that was included in the Queens Museum exhibition, the one with
the dancing feet.
Yes. The dancer from Cape Breton. He’s a step-dancer
from a Scottish and Irish tradition that exists in Canada. I
was very interested in his style, which is an older style. I
was also attracted, as I always have been, to folk traditions:
the idea that people can perform everyday. Everybody can make
those dances, and dance them. In our culture it’s different.
That’s been lost.
You’ve included a different My New Theater
here though, haven’t you? Though it’s obviously
related?
The My New Theater pieces are video sculptures,
little poetic video works. I made two in my studio up in Nova
Scotia. I saw the space and shape of the box as an extension
of the studio. So it’s as though you are looking into
a miniature world. That’s the indoor space, and then I
also include landscape space. This one, In the Shadow a
Shadow, (My New Theater II) was made with another performer,
a dancer. The soundtrack is the Kurt Schwitters piece, Ursonata.
It’s really like a small poem.
What do you mean by that, a poem?
I work in different ways. Often I begin with objects
and sound, or a place, like in In the Shadow a Shadow. By contrast,
I began Lines in the Sand with that very complex text by H.D,
Helen in Egypt, and her Tribute to Freud. I started with a text,
then went to Las Vegas and shot video, and then I came back
and put it together here in my loft, editing, and also shooting
new scenes to insert, and constructing it that way, with the
text as a structure underneath. But with the My New Theater
II a small text was developed. Those two pieces were made in
different ways, but they were both made by building up images
and then finding ways to connect them, making a kind of poem.
When I say ‘poem’, I don’t mean that they
are‘poetic’. I mean the concept is partly the structure
of a poem. They’re put together like you would a poem,
which is the way that I put all my pieces together.
When I started doing performances I had studied poetry
- especially twentieth century poetry - and I was interested
in the formal structure of poetry. My models were also film
and music; time-based forms. And so I worked with the language
of film as well – the edit, the cut. But the poem in particular
is something you see on the page, like a haiku. How do you make
an image? Well, I think about poetry when I think about images.
How do you construct? It’s like a haiku, you put one thing
next to another and it makes something else, a third thing.
That’s what I mean when I say ‘poetry’. All
of my work is concerned with that. That’s how I work.
Can I just go back to what you were saying about folk culture
a couple of minutes ago, when we were talking about the dancer
in Cape Breton?
Yes. I was interested in the relationship between my
performance art and that culture.
Well, that was very much the starting point for my question.
You commented upon his relationship with his culture. How do
you think that we – performance artists working here in
New York City in 2004 – relate to the culture that we’re
a part of?
I think it’s really a subculture. I have a relationship
to the artworld, or the performing world, whatever that encompasses.
I don’t think I have a relationship to the culture at
large. I don’t have access to a larger public. I would
like to have, but performance art is even more incomprehensible
than sculpture or painting. However I do think there is another
audience out there, and some performance artists are tapping
into that public. Their work relates to popular culture.
And you persevere with performance as your principal artistic
focus. As your way of expressing meanings. Does it come back
to this issue of narrative that we were talking about?
In the late seventies and eighties I started working
with narrative texts, with fairy tales, with stories, but performance
is not straight illustrative story telling. It’s manipulating
the narrative in different ways. Lines in the Sand is not a
linear visual narrative. It’s made up of images that I
have brought to the text. It is my interpretation of that text.
This was rather what I was getting at, because it seems
to me that your work does have a potential meaning for that
broader audience, because it’s about presenting meanings
in new ways, or telling stories in new ways.
That interests me a lot, how those stories are retold
in modern or contemporary terms and how they can mean something
to us. This is what I have to deal with, because I have to interpret
them. It’s something that I’ve dealt with a lot
over the years: how stories have come down to us in fragmented
forms. For The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, I went
to Arizona and I was thinking about memories of the American
landscape, by which I mean memories from before the Europeans
came here. The southwest is a perfect example of different cultures
layered on top of each other, and next to each other. I’m
very interested in how stories are retold, of course. That’s
what we do - we retell stories.
external events
WilkinsonGallery
Mirror Works 1969-2004
18 November – 23 January 2005
In collaboration with the John Hansard Gallery, Wilkinson Gallery
will be showing a more historical based show of Joan Jonas’
work.
Tel: 020 8980 2662 E-mail: info@wilkinsongallery.com
www.anthonywilkinsongallery.com
Tate
Modern
Tuesday 16 November, 6.30 – 8pm
Join the artist Joan Jonas for this screening and discussion
of her videos and film collages.
£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended.
For tickets call 020 7887 8888.
Lines in the Sand
Tuesday 23 November, 8 – 9pm
and Wednesday 24 November, 8 – 9pm
Joan Jonas will perform the piece (as seen in the installation
at the John Hansard Gallery), Lines in the Sand.
£12 (£8.50 concessions), booking required.
For tickets call 020 7887 8888.
www.tate.org.uk/modern
Funding
Exhibitions at the John Hansard Gallery and
WilkinsonGallery have been supported by the
The
Henry Moore Foundation.
Performances at Tate Modern have been funded by The
Felix Trust for Art.
