Interview by Claudia SteinbergPhotography by Kenyon Anderson

Not even the 19,000 square feet of exhibition space that MoMA devoted recently to the enormously popular Joan Jonas retrospective, Good Night Good Morning, were enough to present her entire oeuvre. Even in conjunction with Empty Rooms, the exhibition of her sculpture, works on paper and video work at Gladstone Gallery, it’s impossible to represent her trailblazing career. Working from the same SoHo loft since 1968, Jonas has – for decades – created seminal art in media ranging from performance to video to drawing to sculpture. She describes these works as personal but not autobiographical, despite her frequent use of her body as an instrument, sometimes in close  contact with electronic media. Jonas often reanimates older works, expanding on their complexity by adding layers of time and material. Her loft on Mercer Street is alive with props and images, as well as a very animated and devoted white poodle named Ozu, her constant companion. In this history-filled place of casual abundance, Jonas creates the detailed models for all her exhibitions, exerting full control over the presentation of her work – her precision being the equal of her inventiveness.

CS You are always returning to older works, mining your archive, which seems not at all like a passive repository, but like an incubator. What prompts the reanimation of a specific work? Is it based on a systematic approach, on a context, or is it spontaneous?

JJ I don’t revisit everything, but I do when it’s appropriate. There are some works that I never go back into, such as Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy. I could give you a couple of examples. Reanimation is a work based on a novel by Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier. When I was reading that book, written in the 1960s, I realised that I had to make a piece about the fact that glaciers are now melting. I made a piece in the 1970s called Disturbances, in which women were swimming underwater in a swimming pool. I thought that imagery would be appropriate because everything is melting. So, for that reason, I went back and took some of those images, but just a few. I had a video that I reworked a few years ago, and it hasn’t been seen very much, so I included it in my recent show at Gladstone Gallery. It was a work that was part of the performance aspect of my show for the Venice Biennale in 2015, They Come To Us Without a Word. There are two aspects to my work, the installations and the performances, in which the same or similar material is re-edited or rearranged. The performance, in general, uses the installation material as a backdrop, with live performance in relation to it. Later in New York, when I presented the performance, we worked on this video quite a bit with the performers. If something has been seen many times, I don’t bring it back. 

CS You have lived in SoHo forever and have experienced the transformation of an industrial neighbourhood into a gallery zone, and, more recently, into an expensive retail area. Is there still a local artist community that you engage with?

JJ I have some friends here, some artists, so there is still a small community. The other day, I saw the artist Tony Oursler, and I went over to his house with his friend Alice Nien-Pu Ko – we talked and did some work. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time as he lives way over in the East Village. It was great to see him and spend time with him. There are few artists left here – however, I see familiar people on the street all the time.

Joan Jonas, Stage Sets II, 1976, printed 2019, Photo by Gwenn Thomas © Joan Jonas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone

I did want to enter the monitor, to enter that box. I was interacting with the technology

CS Have once-revolutionary media like video retained their aura when we are inundated with electronic images? Have they even acquired something a certain patina that makes them more special?

JJ I don’t think they have a patina, and I wouldn’t think of it that way, but it’s a very different look. Early video was black and white, and very grainy and very flat. Video has been transformed, of course, into a more sophisticated technology, although not necessarily more interesting. But I like both the past and the present. I work with the technology as it develops through the years: I first had a Portapak because I couldn’t afford a colour camera; colour cameras were very expensive at the time. The Portapak was affordable and very important in relation to video and those of us working with the Portapak accepted and liked its special quality. The early Portapak and its link to a monitor enabled us to see ourselves on the monitor in a live situation.

CS Economic restrictions can be interesting because they might lead to inventiveness. You created a now legendary piece called Vertical Roll, which conceptually deconstructs an image down to its technological basis. You said that you practically wanted to crawl into the monitor – not really a hospitable place for a human.

JJ Oh, yes, I did want to enter the monitor, to enter that box. I was interacting with the technology, and I thought I could get into the box – virtually, of course, not physically.

CS The viewer certainly has a sense that you are trapped, and that notion is amplified by a dry clapping sound that emphasises the rhythm of the bars moving upward. The sound reminded me of the hard clacks that accentuate and accelerate Noh drama.

JJ It was Noh theatre in Japan that gave me the idea to work with wooden clappers. I was very influenced by Japan, and especially moved and inspired by Noh drama. When I came back to New York, I started working with wooden blocks to generate sound. In Noh, a lot of the sound is made by wood and the stages are also all wood, so you hear the sound of wood in every way.

CS Although you work primarily in visual media, you emphasise the auditory aspects, as in the percussive sound of Noh. Can you give other examples?

JJ Video can record sound, so I could incorporate sound into my work – the human voice, environmental sounds, music. I work with making sounds in different ways, not just the Noh-inspired wood clapping. I also listen to music a lot, and I work with composers, too. I started working with composers I already knew – Alvin Lucier, for example – and then later I began working with Jason Moran, the jazz musician. While I also made sounds integral to the image, the music made by composers became an accompaniment which continues to inform the making and direction of the work.

CS In your early career, were you in communication with other video and multi-media pioneers? I’m thinking especially of Nam June Paik.

JJ Nam June lived right across the courtyard from me, so I could see through his windows, where the opposite image of this loft existed. He was way ahead of everybody. He was the first person to say that video is art. He was Korean, and he really considered himself part of the Beuys generation, the John Cage generation. That’s what he wanted to be associated with. But he was also a real elf, very mischievous and wonderful. So, yes, I knew him, but he was in a different category in a certain way.

CS You say that your work is all about layering, mimicking the way our brain functions, building complexity. Can you give an example?

JJ The mirrors began with the idea of having a double image. You see the real and then the reflection. As soon as I started working with video, I saw the same relationship between the live and the recorded. The monitor was an ongoing mirror I was interested in; the audience seeing the simultaneous detail of a live performance, while also viewing the entire performance. This detail would be played on a monitor or in the projection while the live performance would be going on in relation to it. I worked that way from the very beginning.

CS You are interested in how writers use myths, and you have been especially drawn to the myth of Sisyphus. 

JJ I became interested in myth in relation to art history, but also in relation to literature. I was inspired by the way James Joyce uses the myth of Sisyphus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – that’s what really sent me off. I was reading Irish literature, which I loved, especially this book, which was a seminal book for me. It prompted me to do a lot of research and read a lot of mythology: the beginning of my early work is all based on myth. It’s not visible, but it’s based on it, inspired by it. I never used the myth of Sisyphus myself, but I was intrigued by the way Joyce used myth as an aspect of storytelling – to make a point, to add content to the subject. An example would be the myth of Osiris. When I started working with fairy tales, I really analysed the stories. I see what the sources are, and I trace them. “The Juniper Tree” is one of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales which, as you know, were collected from women storytellers who were telling them to children. Many of those Brothers Grimm fairy tales are based on themes and stories that have been around for a long time. “The Juniper Tree” is about a child who is taken apart, eaten, and then put back together again, and finally turned into a bird. I traced the story in relation to migrations across northern Europe from the East. The myth of Osiris, which comes from Egypt, is about Osiris being cut up into little pieces and scattered all over. His wife, Isis, collected all the pieces and put them back together. So, when I worked on “The Juniper Tree” – the favourite fairy tale of Susan Howe’s son Mark von Schlegell, by the way – I took the story apart, and put it back together.

Installation view of Joan Jonas: Empty Rooms, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2025 © Joan Jonas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone. Photo by David Regen

In Canada, if it’s a windy day, I get dressed up and go out in the wind with my flags and my costumes

CS Can you talk about your use of mirrors? You have clad collaborators in mirrored garments. You have staged performances with your collaborators holding tall, narrow mirrors facing the spectators. Are mirrors still part of your arsenal?

JJ Of course. I would use a mirror if it occurred to me. I haven’t worked with mirrors as I once did, but I have a collection, and I often incorporate a mirror into a work. The idea for doing the mirror pieces came after a friend gave me a copy of Borges’ Labyrinths, which was translated to English in the 1960s. I read it right away, as everyone did. The mirror became my first prop, partly because of how Borges references mirrors. I started with making mirror costumes for my film Wind, which was filmed on the Long Island shore on the coldest, windiest day of the year.

CS It was part of your recent show at MoMA. Your protagonists are wearing mirror-clad armature and are performing choreographed movements while battling that wild wind – a brave, Sisyphean endeavour. Wind is an element that appears as a force in other areas of your work: there is the video of the wind turbine rotating its three giant blades, recently shown at Gladstone Gallery in New York. What do you like about wind? 

JJ It is an independent force – it has to come to you, you can’t order it. It’s like a companion force in my work. I wouldn’t do it in New York now, but in the country, in Canada, if it’s a windy day, I get dressed up and go out in the wind with my flags and my costumes, because wind manipulates and moves things around, and it creates a different picture. So, the wind is one of my collaborators.

CS At the beginning of your career as an artist, you used to go to happenings and performances – watching films by Jack Smith, studying dance at the legendary Judson Memorial Church with Yvonne Rainer and other influential choreographers. At the same time, you were fascinated by Renaissance painting, and interested in framing space like a painting – an aesthetic sensibility that is very noticeable in your videos. You read everything from Moby Dick to Icelandic sagas and fairy tales from everywhere. Have these influences remained with you?

JJ I’m always looking for new material. I studied art history, and that’s when I looked at Renaissance painting a lot, and art in general. That’s something I continue to do. You never stop learning – we’re all like that. I was very influenced by how Renaissance painters composed their canvases, and I probably learned all about framing, composition and depth from there. There’s something very specific not only about how the Renaissance painters created depth by using perspective, but also in the way figures are standing in different places. I like an early Renaissance artist known as Sassetta who painted flying figures. There are other painters like that who were also magical, like Piero della Francesca. That was before I started working with performance. I look at everything now, so it’s not just the past – it’s the present. 

Above, Joan Jonas, Melancholia (2004) and below, Wolf Lights (2004-2005). Film stills © Joan Jonas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone

CS You say that whenever you perform, you step over a line. How do you make this switch? Do you have a ritual? 

JJ I don’t actually think I am fully aware of my movements and everything going on. But we have a funny ritual when I’m working with a little group – before we perform, we hold hands and we jump up and down and make a lot of noise. As for myself, I don’t have a ritual. I only said that because you have to separate yourself from your everyday life. And so, I thought of it metaphorically, of just stepping into another mental space. That’s why I had to make these stage sets. If I create another space here, I have to rearrange any place. My loft is not that big, so I can only use part of it. I have made some of my most important recorded video and performance in this space. But right now, it’s got too much furniture and too many books. I must clear it out. I need emptiness.

CS You wanted to get away from the white cube gallery spaces already in the 1970s. Where do you like to show now? And do you usually alter a space away from its institutional blandness?

JJ Before New York became gentrified, I used to do a lot of performances outdoors, along the river and in the Wall Street area, because those spaces interested me. Once they became gentrified, I wasn’t interested anymore. I called them “holes”. Berlin had a lot of holes because of the bombings in the Second World War. Now, I don’t know any holes around here. There’s nothing. But when I go to Canada, where I spend the summer, there are vast expanses with many nooks and crannies. I work outdoors, and I use that space.

CS As a teenager, I went to East Berlin all the time because the war and its history was denied in the West, where I grew up, and I wanted to see it, or the traces of it. What kind of risk would you feel ready to take on now? What is urgent?

JJ I don’t look for risks, but we take them when we work. I have this phrase I’ve worked with: I ask my students, and myself: what are you afraid of? What am I afraid of? If I’m afraid of something, I’m attracted to it. You shouldn’t always work with what you’re afraid of because it could be dangerous. But I like the idea that “fear eats the soul,” which is taken from the title of a Fassbinder film, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. I used to be afraid of getting on stage. Then I thought, if you’re afraid of it, you have to do it.

CS I read about your interest in Aby Warburg, the 19th-century writer and historian, who tried to create an atlas of images – you created a performance for Dia Beacon, The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things, devoted to his research. Can you talk about those sensory interests that are not tied to the rational, conceptual self and may even broach the supernatural?

JJ I was curious about Aby Warburg because I’m interested in outsider art, and his theories about art history. I found his book, Images From The Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, translated by Michael P. Steinberg, in which he wrote about his visit to the Hopi at the end of the 19th century. It was very inspiring. But I cannot make something about the Hopi, about anything indigenous – you just don’t touch it. However, I had already been to the Hopi Snake Dance in New Mexico, and it was an amazing experience. When I went, white people were there. It was an odd situation. The women spectators all wore a lot of Navajo jewellery they had bought in the pawn shops – it was a very strange picture. The Hopi dance was the most fantastic thing. They dance with live snakes in their mouths. It’s an incredible ceremony.

CS Venomous snakes?

JJ They are, but they have them for I don’t know how many months in captivity, and they train them not to attack. Anyway, I couldn’t do anything about it directly. But then I read Warburg’s book, and although he never saw the Snake Dance, he wrote about it and spent time in the Hopi village. There’s a limitation to working with his texts because he never mentioned how Native Americans were treated in this country – how they were pushed off their land and so on. He was simply fascinated with what he saw. He couldn’t write about it because he was writing from a very rigid aspect of art history that existed at that time. So, my piece was based, indirectly, through Aby Warburg, on that tradition, without any kind of visuals – I didn’t copy the movements or anything. However, I did do something I call Snake Dancing, as I made a painting of the snake on a huge piece of paper in the performance. 

CS Is there a project you are working on now that you would be willing to talk about?

JJ No, I have not yet started on something. I don’t like to talk about things before they’re made, but I’m thinking of making a work with Jason Moran, and I’m still thinking about what it will be. It can’t be the same, because I’m much older, and I don’t have the same physical energy. So I’m thinking about how I can work with my voice, how I can draw, and how those two things can work together, with Jason’s music.  .