Joan Jonas in "Fiction" - Season 7 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

JOAN JONAS: In the mirror pieces the main
idea is the visual of the mirrors in the space

and how they’re reflecting and how they look.

Is this a space because there’s nobody there?

WOMAN #1: Yeah…(INAUD)

JOAN JONAS: Oh, ok…

The movement is very simple, you don’t have
to be a skilled performer, but you have to

be somewhat at ease.

We should establish a space that you should move in.

I draw from many sources.

Literature.

Film.

Myth.

When I decided to switch to performance it
was in the ‘60s and I had never done any

performing or theater work ever.

So I did workshops with Trisha Brown, Yvonne
Rainer, Steve Paxton.

Maybe just one or two classes with some of
them, to learn now to move and to be in public.

At the same time I was making my own performances.

Do you dance back there in the back row?

Yeah, behind the back row.

All right.

So just walk through that.

Okay.

This is a rehearsal for a piece called Mirror
Piece I which I did originally in 1969.

You’re in these rows.

On the floor.

You slowly rise and move to the first position
for the improv.

That’s the key.

Always keep the mirrors facing the audience,
remember that.

I was inspired by Borges for this first piece,
reading his Labyrinths.

The original impetus was to take all the quotes
about mirrors and I memorized them and perform them.

The mirror was a perfect vehicle to begin with.

I liked the way the audience is uneasy seeing
themselves in the mirror.

They’re not just reflecting the audience,
the mirrors are reflecting the space

and the other performers.

So I like the dimensionality of this.

All my work, from the beginning, involved
dealing with a space.

The whole piece is planned as far as the movements.

How does it end?

That’s planned ahead of time.

It evolves.

A lot of my work is intuitive.

A very long time ago in the ‘60s, just as
I was going through the transition from sculpture

to performance I went to the southwest because
I was doing research about other cultures

and rituals.

I saw the Hopi Snake Dance.

They wear masks.

It not only transforms the body but they become
something else.

Masks made me feel more at ease and gave me
the chance to create a kind of alter ego.

I went to Japan.

I went to the Noh theater a lot and was very
influenced by that.

Organic Honey, when I started doing that project,
in the early ‘70s,

I started drawing for the camera.

Performance gives me ideas for drawings.

This is the beginning of my collection of
screen masks.

I like that double vision of seeing the face
through the mask.

When I was constructing the character of Organic
Honey, I went to an erotic store and bought

a mask like this.

It transforms your body movements.

It means that I can move in a different way
and really feel very differently about my

body and myself.

I made this mask one summer and this mask
another summer.

So these I use in Reanimation.

I was working with landscape and the idea
of what’s happening with the animals in

the landscape and also the spirit of the landscape.

And so I put on a mask and I become that spirit in a way.

And then Jason’s music inspires me to move
in a certain way.

And that’s part of our working together.

JASON MORAN: I wasn’t prepared for how rigorous
the process is.

And Joan really toils over this material through
the text, through the images, through her

movements, through the wardrobe, through the
sounds that she’s going to make.

There’s a lot kind of going around in her
mind to make these pieces.

And you know I just am trying to show up and
play some piano.

Through that summer we spent, I don’t know
however many.....

JOAN JONAS: Six weeks.

JASON MORAN: Six weeks.

JOAN JONAS: Every day.

JASON MORAN: Every day, you know nine to five,
you know sitting at....

I sat at the piano.....

JOAN JONAS: He sat at the piano, we played
like for seven hours a day.

Now I loved it, I mean for me to have live
music is very inspiring, it gives me energy.

And Jason was younger then, so.

So he could do it, but he told me that he
never played the piano so much in his life.

Right?

JASON MORAN: Yeah.

In one sitting.

JOAN JONAS: In one sitting.

JASON MORAN: Because, because playing in an
old factory parking lot at the bottom of Dia:Beacon.

The sound is carrying everywhere.

And I hadn’t played in spaces like that.

I was just trying to make sounds that could
resonate in that space in a way that would

make sense.

And so when I would fall upon something, Joan
would say, well I like, I like that.

For the last piece, Reanimation, I had like
a shard of an idea,

but it wouldn’t make sense until we actually got together.

I just pulled a book off of the shelf, you know.

It may have been like Schubert or something
and then played it backwards.

And I was like, this is so perfect.

And so now I have a new like catalog of music
that’s all, you know, well this is Joan

Jonas’s song.

You know like songs I wrote for Joan.

JOAN JONAS: I work back and forth between
performance and installation and

autonomous ideo work.

And each feeds into the other.

I get ideas from the performance that I put
into the video and then ideas when I’m making

the video that I put back into the performances.

And then all of that is part of the installation.

“It is often said of people with second
sight that their soul leaves the body.

That doesn’t happen to the glacier.

But the next time one looks at it, the body
has left the glacier and nothing remains except

the soul clad in air.

Wasn’t the ferry ram actually the glacier?”

I think of different ways that I can bring
drawing or image-making into the actual performance.

Well I put a little bit of ink on the page
and then put ice cubes in the ink to make

these different configurations.

So it comes out differently each time, I never
know exactly how.

Reanimation is based on a text by an Icelandic
author, Halldor Laxness.

It’s about a glacier.

So the subject is snow and ice and nature.

I should just go on the edge.

Let me, there’s a picture of it here.

I did this once before and I don’t want
to decide again.

Just do it the same way I did it.

Installation means an arrangement of objects
and projections.

I drew animal heads when I went to Norway
to shoot the landscape for Reanimation.

Animal heads in the snow, that are based on
my dog drawings.

I can do it very spontaneously.

There was a aquarium where I went to shoot
the Norwegian landscape.

And it had fish from the local waters.

I wanted to deal with the watery world because
the glaciers are melting.

The year before, I’d found this book of
Japanese fish.

I had this idea, I have to make a hundred
ink drawings.

Lately I’ve been making these drawings using
this Rorschach method.

You put ink on one side of the page and then
you fold the paper over.

I very deliberately make a configuration that
is going to be like an insect of some sort.

I’m aware of what could be read into things.

I don’t like to talk about the symbolism,
it puts too much meaning into it.

I like it to be what it is in a very concrete way.

MAN #1: We all know the story of Helen of Troy.

JOAN JONAS: Lines in the Sand is from a poem
about Helen going to Egypt and not to Troy.

So instead of going to Egypt, I actually went
to Las Vegas, as a kind of representation

of American sensibility and commercialism.

We found these abandoned recreations of Egyptian statues.

I had photographs of my grandmother’s trip
to Egypt at the beginning of the 20th Century

and that represented the real Egypt.

Two Egypts, the real Egypt and Las Vegas,
because I wanted to refer to colonialism in

relation to our involvement with Egypt.

I had a costume and some things.

And then here we are inside Luxor.

JOAN JONAS: ...the reason that brought us here.

Was the fall of Troy the reason?

Can one wave a thousand ships against one
kiss in the night?

WOMAN #1: It was a trade war.

JOAN JONAS: Another video was me drawing on
the blackboard.

Again, I drew with a stick.

That was a way to extend my body onto the
surface of the blackboard.

I really am interested in the whole idea of
erasure, drawing and erasing.

And I drew and erased over and over again
the Sphinx and the pyramid, obsessed with

one image.

I also drew it live in the performance.

And then the couple in bed based on an Irish
8th Century epic, The Táin.

It’s a king and a queen arguing about who
has more possessions.

WOMAN #1: It still remains, oh husband of
mine, that my fortune is greater than yours.

JOAN JONAS: I like humor also.

It’s kind of humorous, but serious at the
same time.

Lines In The Sand has to do with how they
made boundaries in the Middle East.

When you draw a line in the sand, you dare
somebody to walk over it, but you also make

the boundary between countries.

The shape, the scent.

The feel of things.

The actuality of the present.

A lot of the pieces

–Its bearing on the past.

are based on text..

–Their bearing on the future.

from centuries ago.

–Past.

But I want to bring them into the present.

–Present.

They’re poetic.

–Future.

But political.