I'm John Jonas a visual artist and this
is my studio
Right now it's quite cluttered and because of my show at the Tate
I'm trying to put things in order now so I usually work on these tables.
These objects are all going to goto the Tate to be shown.
I collect things so I'm constantly
trying to manage my collection.
Whenever I go to a place I collect a lot of objects.
I like cities that have holes in them and places that are slightly falling apart
New York was like that in the early seventies
I studied art history
and I worked in sculpture for a while at
that time many of the visual artists and
dancers were involved in happenings and
performances.
Yeah I was immediately
drawn to performance and felt that this
was a language that I could develop when
When I did switch people think it's such -
at the time - a big switch but I saw it as
just stepping over a line.
I saw the possibilities of the structure
performance could relate to music and
include kind of content of literature or
the structure of poetry and film and the
history of film so I related all these
other media to performance and so when I
began to work with video I related the
language of video and possibly the
technology of video to film and so I
thought of everything as a kind of
development from film like there's a
piece called vertical roll you see the
frames of the fit and I think of them as
frames of the film going back but
they're not it's not a film it's a video
When I got my first video camera in
1978, a Porter Peck and I started making
videos in my loft. Video at that time
allowed me to make what I called my own
films by myself. I could just make them
in my loft and also perform by myself
in front of the monitor in this closed-circuit situation.
I always make models when I do an
installation.
I make models and I design
the installation in the model and so
these are models of the Tate.
I really have to work really hard for this and if you get excited you can't
concentrate so at the moment I'm sure
I'll get very excited when I see it
start going up but I have to concentrate
now because of these performances.
There's the show, the installations that
we've been working on for almost two
years getting it all together and then
the performances.
I've done big shows
like this and then had performances
later on after the opening but I've
never done a show with four performances.
The first one is an improvisational
piece with Jason Moran then the mirror
piece too which will be in the Tanks based
on a piece in 1969.
Then there's a piece called Mirage which is a solo piece first done in 1976 and the last
one is called Delay Delay.
Delay Delay was a combination of different works that I did outdoors.
It's going to be on the banks of the
Thames at low tide and so although it's
using old material it's a new work in a way.
How do you stay interested in life? I
just I'm just very interested in life
and curious about many things and when I finish one piece I'm challenged to do
the next one and to explore and experiment and to go into the unknown continuously.
I mean one
never knows when one begins a piece what
it's really gonna be at the end. I find
the images as I work.
From the very beginning when I first started with the video, I was involved with this idea of
layering and saying more than one thing at once either simultaneously side
by side or now layered on top of each
other. It's the way the brain works you
think of one thing and you see another
or you know one's mind is layered in
that way.
I'm very inspired by travel, by seeing
new things, new places.
Stream or River, Flight or Pattern: I travel led quite a bit during the year that I was making
that or the two years and in all those
places I had my camera and I recorded
things that interested me. Not just
anything but I was interested in birds
for instance and trees and rituals which
are in the video. That's how I stay inspired.
What I try to do is state as clearly as
possible my vision or depict or
represent my vision through images and some words.
I think I would only ask the people take the time to experience it and not try to understand it
totally in the very beginning of the
first view. I think it takes some time
and sometimes multiple viewings. Not
everybody has time for that but I hope
they take some understanding of what I'm
trying to to say
