Audio Arts: Volume 23 No 2

Joan Jonas discusses her installations and video pieces at the Wilkinson Gallery in London and an exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton. One of the key figures in performance, installation and video art, she talks about some of her seminal works from the 1960s and 1970s and her multifaceted artistic practice. She describes the relationship that the installation at the Wilkinson Gallery has with her concurrent exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery - an exhibition that marks the first major solo project of Joan Jonas' work in the UK for over 25 years. Her complex installation, Lines in the Sand (2002/2004) remade for the Hansard Gallery is discussed in relationship to her live performance of the work at Tate Modern and her excitement of continuing to work in the 'live art' arena. A dialogue concerning the activities of revision, reinvention and recreation emerges in relationship to her Mirror Pieces (1969-70) and the works reconfiguration at the Wilkinson Gallery. The process of displacing an object, Jonas' engagement with early video art and the discontinuity of the life of objects are all topics that weave their way through the conversation. Jonas' fascination with large scale installations and the relationships between her works from different eras - in particular work such as Glass Puzzle (1974) and the Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004) - becomes an important dialogue with the history of performance art. Interview by Jean Wainwright, November 2004.

Barry Martin talks about the nature of drawing with writer Mel Gooding. The conversation offers a rare and engaging insight into the thinking of an artist who has been an articulate force in British Art since the 1960s. Martin's drawings are characterised by a dynamic rigour, combining vivid evocation with poetic vision. The topics discussed include drawing as a system of signs parallel to that of natural language, and drawing as an intellectual process of enquiry, analysis and proposition. Martin recognises the centrality of drawing to his practice, as necessary to his thinking and to his questioning of the nature of space and of objective reality, and essential to the definition of his artistic purposes. The interview took place on the occasion of the opening of The Drawing Gallery, the first gallery in the UK devoted to drawing, located at the heart of the West End gallery scene, in Duke Street St James's, Piccadilly. Interview by Mel Gooding, October 2004.

Yvonne Crossley starts by responding to questions about why she decided to open a new Gallery dedicated to drawing in Duke Street St James's, London. She talks about such a gallery as being unique in London as well as within a National and International context. Her policy will be inclusive rather than exclusive by including a 'broad catholic spread' of artists' approaches to drawing. Among other artists the Gallery will show Alison Wilding, Richard Deacon, Rebecca Fortnum and Michael Ginsborg. She finally talks about her ambitions for the future and the reasons for the Gallery's central location, just down from the Royal Academy and in the street that White Cube originally opened. Interview by William Furlong, October 2004.

Laura Hoptman discusses the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh reflecting on her role as overall curator of the Triennial now in its 54th year. With a budget of over $3m the International is a major force in the art world and Hoptman explains how her overall vision and the Carnegie's remit is reflected by the work. Hoptman discusses the risks that an exhibition of this type poses with its emerging dialogues with 'violence, uncertainty - religious and otherwise extreme sexuality'. Her decision to include Maurizio Cattelan's Now 2004 depicting President John F Kennedy lying in state in the Founders Room and Chiho Aoshima's enormous apocalyptic mural Magma Spirit Explodes, Tsunami is Dreadful 2004 which uses computer technology and the vocabulary of Japanese comics, tidal waves, volcanoes, fires and people jumping from buildings to confront the viewer as they enter the exhibition are both discussed - as well as the inclusion of Robert Crumb as a social critic. Hoptman suggests that the International invites the audience to speculate on 'those unanswerable questions about the nature of life and death, the existence of God and the anatomy of belief' and the supposition that there are no fixed meanings only impulses. Hoptman's vision to address both ethics and the philosophical 'Ultimates' emerges as a strong theme in the conversation. Interview by Jean Wainwright, The Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA, October 2004.

Monika Sosnowska talks at the Serpentine Gallery about her commissioned site-specific installation Untitled 2004. Designed to alter the gallery like a 'parasite growing in the space and using it', its architecturally structured form and colour, its deceiving lines and perspectives are discussed with reference to Sosnowska's traditional art training in Poland. Sosnowska claims that she doesn't like categories and enjoys the way that her work is not easily classified, oscillating between architecture and sculpture. She talks both about the abstract painterly quality of her work as well as her influences from her traditional art school training in Poland where she used abstraction as a 'means of escape'. In discussing her work for the 2003 Venice Biennale she talks about the 'Alice in Wonderland' qualities of her Untitled Corridor 2002. The fact that people would want to crawl to the end of the corridor even though it was almost impossible and open the little door into the 'beyond' fascinated her. She declares 'all works start in reality, I borrow it. And I steal it'. Interview by Jean Wainwright, Serpentine Gallery, London, November 2004.

Nathaniel Mellors' installation Profondo Viola (Deep Purple) is part of an ongoing relationship established in 1979 between Matt's Gallery and invited artists to make site-specific work for the space. Mellors in conversation with Jean Wainwright takes a walk though his exhibition commenting on his working methods and the inter-relationships between sounds, colour and form. Partly playing with the idea of 'a mythology around the gallery', his exhibition includes work that fuses this privileged space as a set of critical dynamics harnessing mainstream entertainment, sculpture and modernist aesthetics and embedding them in work that require mediation and immersion. Mellors' 16 mm films, video, sculpture and sound works are all discussed with particular emphasis on the ways in which the 'coherent and structured plots at their core gradually disintegrate over time'. Real and fictional characters wrestle in his installation 'with language and environments that are slowly breaking down' as a way of 'exploring what art can become'. Against the background of the works in situ specific discussions ensue revolving around such pieces as Swiss Village, a socio-political manifesto against global politics set inside a local supermarket and The Maggot, a sculpture 'eaten from within'. Interview by Jean Wainwright, Matt's Gallery, September 2004.

Annely Juda is interviewed in her gallery in Dering Street, London. She discusses how she first became a dealer, her interest in the art world and her seminal participation in the first Documenta in 1955. Touching on some of her family background (her mother was a painter), Annely talks about the different galleries she has run and the changes that she has seen in the art world over the last 50 years. Annely Juda Gallery is well known for its representation of the Russian Constructivists as well as, more recently, contemporary British and European art. In this context she explains her desire to have a museum quality show of Moholy-Nagy's work A life in Motion 2004 which had been gestating in her mind since 1974, 'you have to have patience to get it right'. Noting the changes in the rise of the 'art fair' in terms of both their proliferation and the glamorous events they now stage, she talks about the differences between the sometimes intimidating space of the gallery and the re-modelled art fairs. Finally she discusses her new project space and the contemporary ideas that her son is bringing to it. Interview by Jean Wainwright, October 2004.