Drawing My Way In
- Drawing My Way In
Trained as a sculptor, Joan Jonas has been a pioneering force in video and performance for more than four decades. Early on she explored the use of live camera during performance and incorporated drawing as part of the process, and for the last two decades she has made installations featuring video, objects, photographs, and drawings. In recent years, the artist’s work has been shown at WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution, the fifty-third Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, and dOCUMENTA. Since 2005, Jonas has worked with the innovative musician and composer Jason Moran to develop pieces with live music, namely The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things at DIA: Beacon, and Reanimation, seen during the recent Performa 13. A retrospective of her work will open at Milan’s HangarBicocca in September, accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, edited by Joan Simon, entitled In the Shadow a Shadow. This interview was conducted by PAJ editor, Bonnie Marranca, and PAJ Contributing Editor and UK writer, Claire MacDonald, in New York City, September 7, 2010, and for Reanimation, December 20, 2013.
What seems ongoing from many of the earliest pieces, over four decades, is the practice of drawing in performance, and on so many surfaces. Drawing while holding a blackboard in front of you, sometimes not even looking, drawing projected before the audience, drawing on sand, drawing on your face. Can we begin by speaking about the place of drawing in your work?
I am a visual artist. Drawing was important to me before I stepped into performance. I was interested in how to draw and what to draw. When I started doing performance I saw that it could be a place for drawing in a new way. I became interested in what it was to draw in front of an audience and to draw while I was being witnessed. I also make drawings in my studio that are autonomous, but I felt like what I was exploring was how to make a drawing in relation to the particular performance that I was working on, which meant how to make it in relation to the technology or to the subject or the space.
Visual artists have always been educated through drawing. I want to ask you about your own education. When did drawing start? How important was it as a way of thinking? [End Page 35]
It started when I was a child. It was very important. Recently, I’ve been looking at all these drawings from the fourth grade.
Did you keep them?
Oh yes. I am doing something in Norway, and I just found this notebook with a cartoon-like narrative about the Vikings, made in the fourth grade. I’m thinking about using it in Norway. I went to a progressive school in the kindergarten and first grade—the Walt Whitman School on East 78th Street. They said, “What do you want to do today?” and I said, “I just want to paint.” I enjoyed that. Children draw naturally.
Was drawing absolutely essential to that education, as it was for Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf education? Was it drawing from observation?
No, it wasn’t from observation. Later I went to a school called Brearley, a girl’s school. They had art classes there. Art was very important to me early, and I went back to it later.
But then you ended up at the university studying sculpture.
Yes, I studied sculpture, art history, and literature. After that when I went to The Museum School in Boston I focused on drawing. In a way, you have to learn how you are going to draw.
What does it mean to learn to draw?
For me, specifically, I studied with an artist named Harold Tovish. His way of teaching how to draw was to meticulously follow the outer contour of the figure. Not to make a typical art school rendering. At The Museum School we were working from the model. It was about the line and how to depict what one saw. I draw a lot because...
