Joan Jonas Interview: Advice to the Young

“Love what you do. Because it’s not easy. It’s not easy to make art.” Watch as the iconic video and performance artist Joan Jonas advises her younger colleagues to enjoy what they’re doing as you never know how people will respond to your work.
Moreover, it’s important to have a circle of friends that you can spar with: “Art is about communication. Art is a dialogue with art, a dialogue with other artists, a dialogue with the past, with the future, and it’s an important dialogue to have.”
Joan Jonas (b. 1936) is an American artist, who works with combinations of video, performance, installation, sculpture and drawing, often collaborating with musicians and dancers. Her cutting-edge ‘Mirror Pieces’ (late 1960’s) featured performers carrying mirrors on stage, slowly rotating them and thus transforming the audience into an image on glass. Jonas has had a number of solo exhibitions at prominent venues including Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, MoMA in New York, Tate Modern in London and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. Moreover, she has been represented in dOCUMENTA in Kassel, Germany, six times since 1972. Among numerous honours and awards, Jonas is the recipient of a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009). She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada. For more about her see: joanjonasvenice...
Joan Jonas was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden in November 2015 in connection to her exhibition ‘Light Time Tales’.
Camera: Jakob Solbakken
Produced and edited by: Kasper Bech Dyg
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2016
Supported by Nordea-fonden
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[@grithgough2990]

I think Joan makes a very important point when she talks about the importance of 'digesting' our experiences. This is a process which is vastly underestimated and one of the reasons, I believe, why people often don't understand a piece of art.

[@deelot1]

Great advice and love the other advice videos too.