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