Joan Jonas: ‘You don’t know what you’re doing sometimes. You just begin’

At the beginning of the 21st century, New York’s SoHo has become just another shopping mall, Guess cosying up to Banana Republic, Dean & DeLuca arm in arm with Bloomingdale’s. Walking its streets, it’s impossible to believe that any artists live or work here now, let alone the kind who knew it back in the day, when it was all rusty factories and wild “happenings”. And yet they do. Behind a door in Mercer Street is an elevator that takes you up to the loft of the performance artist Joan Jonas, a space where she has lived and worked since the early 70s. To open this door, and to ride this elevator, is discombobulating: it’s time travel, of a kind. Surrounded by the dozens of objects she has accumulated over the decades – a realm of authenticity that includes pebbles, baskets, bowls, dolls and masks – you feel suddenly ashamed of the long minutes you just spent staring at the windows of the Prada store that stands on the site of the old SoHo Guggenheim.

It’s a sensation that isn’t exactly eased by Jonas herself, a coiled spring of a person with tousled grey hair and a veritable shadow of a poodle called Ozu, which barks proprietorially every time her hand loosens on its lead. She dislikes doing interviews, and her somewhat minimalist answers, at least at first, give me the strong sense that my questions are as dumb as any she has ever been asked. Add to this the essential problem that, like most of those who come to talk to her, I have seen her performances only in photographs (as she and I will discuss later, there is a sense in which her work can be said not really to exist beyond the moment of its production), and the potential for misunderstanding would seem to be bigger even than this vast room. Oh, well. At least I know the way out.

Source: theguardian