In Conversation: Joan Jonas and Shirin Neshat in celebration of Snakes and Butterflies

A conversation between artists Joan Jonas and Shirin Neshat recorded March 29, 2024 in occasion of Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and Jonas' Snakes and Butterflies, a special limited edition print portfolio published by Noire Edition/Gallery in collaboration with Giulia Theodoli.

Rebecca DiGiovanna:
Hello everyone, welcome to The Drawing Center. I am Rebecca DiGiovanna, co-organizer of this exhibition along with Laura Hoptman, our Executive Director and our fearless leader here at The Drawing Center. We are thrilled this evening to welcome the visionary Joan Jonas and Shirin Neshat, who will be discussing Joan's 2023 Project, "Snakes and Butterflies", a limited edition print portfolio published by Noire Editions in collaboration with Giulia Theodoli. This portfolio is available for purchase with a beautiful selection on display outside in our bookstore. Please see the bookstore counter if you are interested.

Joan, who has been a Drawing Center neighbor and resident of SoHo since 1968, has created a cachet of more than 2,000 works on paper, drawn over a 60-year period. As you can see around you, many of Joan's drawings depict dogs, fish, birds of various species, which exist along equal numbers of sketches and studies of rivulets of water, leaves, snowflakes, and snakes and butterflies, as in this print edition by Noire. Inspired by the writings of German art historian Aby Warburg, this edition in particular is influenced by Joan's travels to Arizona in the 1960s during which she observed a Snake Dance at a Hopi Pueblo.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker who also lives in New York City. Shirin works variously in the mediums of photography, video and film, which she imbues with poetic and politically charged images that question issues of power, religion, race, and gender through the lens of her personal experience as an Iranian woman living in exile. In 2018, Shirin produced an extraordinary artist book with Noire consisting of a selection of beautiful black and white portraits of people from her homeland. Shirin and Joan are joined by Silvia Chessa, Marco and Matteo Noire of Noire Editions and Gallery. Also here with us tonight is Giulia Theodoli, who collaborated with Joan on this project, as well as a concurrent presentation of Snakes and Butterflies on view earlier this year at Noire. Please join me in welcoming Joan, Shirin, Giulia, Silvia, Marco and Matteo. Matteo is going to give a brief overview of Noire Edition before turning it over to Joan and Shirin.

Matteo Noire:
Thank you very much, Rebecca. Thank you everyone for being here and thank you Joan Jonas, Shirin and The Drawing Center for making this happen, and Giulia, of course, for this connection with these two amazing personalities, which I would say they cross the boundaries of contemporary art, and I would say also the borders of East and West and also the borders of people. And I would say they cross the borders of society as well because the works of Jonas is wider than heart, I would say, and more about wind, about the connection of magic and meet. And it's such an honor to be here because I'm telling this because I'm just a humble artisan, and Noire Edition started in 1969. I'm not the founder, of course, but I'm the last of the legacy. And I will just introduce what we do and is following all the Renaissance ateliers of Florence and of the artisan making the things with their hand and then the passion for books and printing books following the path of Vollard in France.

And here we are, some centuries later, and it's such a honor to work with such big personalities, international artists. What we do is try to embrace the art where we're producing limited edition with most passion way and using all the materials related also to their times. So it could be bronze, it could be paper, it could be the ink, it could be plastic. And nowadays also with new technologies, and there's pixels, so probably now. And everything, it doesn't matter when it happened, is about to bring a little show that you can keep between your hands. And this also what is about this last portfolio we just presenting right now that you can see in the entrance, which is a little show you can port everywhere with you. And what can I say? I'm just honored to be here and thank you very much.

Shirin Neshat:
Good evening.

Joan Jonas:
Good evening. I'm very honored to have Shirin here with me.

Shirin Neshat:
Oh, it's the opposite.

Joan Jonas:
Really. It's wonderful to have my friend Shirin, who's a wonderful artist.

Shirin Neshat:
It's interesting that two people from Italy, or four people from Italy, Noire Contemporary Art has brought us together in New York at The Drawing Center who I worked with. But thank you everyone for coming. So many faces I see and I know, so many artists, curators. I just want to say that Joan and I know each other for a long time and we have a lot in common. We were neighbors before. We are woman artists. We love dogs. We absolutely love dogs, and we work with the same gallery. And a lot of our work. I think along this conversation, I think we share a lot in what we do. And tonight is about you. Joan, you rock. You are the coolest artist I know today and this is your moment.

And I'm absolutely blessed. And I just want to make it clear, because we have some heavy-duty critics in this room that tonight is not from the perspective of an academic or a critic, but an artist talking to another artist. And someone who has known Joan's work for a very long time, but through this tremendous survey of her work here at The Drawing Center, and at MoMA, it's so overwhelming and such a rich experience. And the other day... Oh, can I backtrack a little bit? I think the first time I met you was you had tied your dog outside of that cafe on Grand Street, and this was the last dog. It was such a beautiful dog, and I went to pet him, he almost bit me and you rushed out and said, "Please, don't touch my dog."

Joan Jonas:
No, I just want to mention that. It's nice that you told that story. Well, I was inside that place and all of a sudden I heard my dog,... And I rushed out and Shirin had bent down, put her face in her face. Anyway, and I said to myself, "What if my dog had bit Shirin in the face? Oh my God, that would be the worst things that could happen."

Shirin Neshat:
That was one of the first memories I have of meeting you because we literally live two blocks from each other. So I wanted to say tonight the idea is that it's about her, not about me. So I'm going to ask her some questions, but definitely we have plenty of time for you to be able to ask your questions. But I want to say that I created my questions, obviously according to my relationship to your work, my perception and interest in what you're doing. So it's very selfish in that way, the way I framed it. But what I was trying to say earlier was when I was looking at your exhibition at MoMA, and here, it is such intelligent, provocative work, yet it feels so utterly relevant and fresh as if it was made today for us. And this couldn't be a better timing for an exhibition of John Jonas.

I'm sorry if the art institutions took their time to catch up with you, but I'm glad they did, and I think that this is really perfect timing. And I keep thinking about the younger generation of artists and how your exhibition is such a groundbreaking opening into what art could be, both in terms of form and concept and more than anything as a community. We're sitting here at Drawing Center. Joan, when I arrived in New York in the eighties and in the nineties, there were all of these meetings here about feminist movements, political events when Ann Philbin was here. And I kept thinking, your exhibition is a breath of fresh air at a time where the art world is dominated by the market. And you're bringing that touch of grassroots and the ability of being connected as a community. In terms of the way you work, in the way that you push the boundary in bringing video, installation, performance, drawing, objects, texts, music, choreography.

It's the way that a lot of the young artists are learning to be today that, no, you don't have to be faithful to that convention of being a photographer or a painter or a sculptor, that you could make films and make art and write a novel and you could do multiple things. But you are doing that for so long, and this is really unbelievable as I saw your exhibition here and at MoMA. Another thing that... Again, I bring things that interest me personally, and I'm going to stop talking soon, I'm going to ask you questions... Is the ritualistic aspect of your work, because I'm really interested in rituals and I always feel like, and the way in which you create this tension between the lived, the present and the image, the performance, the image and the recorded, and then you throw it back at the audience where they cannot be passive but active in their perception and relationship and you create this ritual that doesn't quite make sense, but is really asking the audience to use their imagination, and in the most poetic, mystical, I believe way.

And that reminds me of how I like to work, where I believe everything I've done, especially in video work, is about creating this non-rational rituals. And the most important question that I have that is coming to you is the time. I remember that, I think your risk-taking, your experimentation form, your persistence in grassroots in community, your history of shooting films and doing performance at your loft, on the streets, on the beach with your friends, it's what Linda here calls the market-defying arts. Is that what Linda Yablonsky that said in her review that this is art that is not to be shown but to be shared. And so it makes me think about, when I arrived in New York in the eighties and later in the nineties, I worked at a not-for-profit organization, and Robert Longo, who's here, always told me, "Make sure as an artist you work at a not-for-profit organization before you becoming an artist."

And it really reminds me of how things used to be, how they almost felt like a resistance against the mainstream, not only by the utilizing of technology and the form, but the way that the artists relied on themselves. It wasn't about making commodities. Like, for example, to this day, I don't know how anyone collects your work. I want you to share with us when you arrived in New York in the late sixties, in the seventies, how it felt at that time in comparison to today and what you can share with the young artists or how does the atmosphere or the environment of the art world informs and impacts an artist's work? Because I'm Iranian, I'm very politically active. I work with a lot of Iranian people, so obviously, I make very politically-charged work and I have a great distance from the art world. I make movies. But I want to ask you is, was that a political act or was it just an artistic passion to work in this way at the time when you arrived that was sort of against the mainstream?

Joan Jonas:
Well, it's a combination of some of those things. I studied art history and sculpture, and then when I decided to switch to what I do now, performance, was working with media and so on, it was in the early sixties and I spent... At that time, there were many... Well, I said this, I'll say some names. I was married to somebody named Jerry Jonas, and he was a friend of Henry Geldzahler who was the first modernist curator at the Met, and then Calvin Trillin who maybe some of you know from The New Yorker and Henry would call because there was a kind of separation. They all went to Yale together. But Henry would call Bud to tell him the happenings that were going on because there was a lot going on downtown and there were happenings, and then Bud would call us because he didn't care about it.

And so we went to see. That was how I saw the happenings in downtown by... And also, I became aware of dancers who are working with artists. All the artists were doing... Like Rauschenberg was doing little performances. Robert Whitman, I'm sure you all know a little bit of that. The dancers like Simone Forti...

Shirin Neshat:
Trisha Brown.

Joan Jonas:
Trisha Brown, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm a little wiped out. Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer. Anyway, and so they were all giving workshops... Then Steve Paxton. They were giving workshops because it was a way to support themselves. So I took workshops from every one of them that I could in order to make this transition because I had never been in theater or performance or anything. So I had to educate myself and get ideas about how am I going to do this? How am I going to start? So that's how it began. And because of my background and loving literature, I also, at the very beginning, I saw all these things together, the forms, like literature, film. I was inspired by the structure of film in my work and by literature, storytelling. And you mentioned... I could go on and on, but I just want to say, you mentioned ritual. And I don't really often mention that the Hopi Snake Dance, I never touched it in my work, but I did see the Hopi Snake Dance.

I was interested in ritual before I even started doing this. When I was studying art history, I was always interested in how things begin. It begins as ritual. In Japan the Noh drama began in ritual, and same in our culture and in different levels of the culture began in ritual. And that interested me a lot. And so, I looked and studied as much as possible ritual, and I went to see the Hopi Snake Dance because it was an amazing experience. And I don't think that's possible. I don't know if they're still doing it for outsiders, but when the Hopi, they dance with snakes in their mouths.

Well, of course, I couldn't touch that, but it haunted me. And so Aby Warburg was mentioned too. We don't have to discuss him at great length, but Aby Warburg also made a trip to the Southwest in the beginning of the 20th century and was also taken by the Hopi and taken out of his own very conservative art history culture. And it changed his life. So, when I began, my statement that I make is, I didn't see a major difference between a film, a story, a drawing, a performance. To me, all these forms were intertwined, and I referred to them in my work and structured my work and poetry. Poetry is certainly a big influence.

Shirin Neshat:
But at the time when you first arrived and the community of artists like Richard Serra and many other minimalist artists, conceptual artists, dancers, writers, it makes me think of a very vibrant time where artists of different nature were interacting with each other like you just explained. But this is not the case anymore today. Most of us artists are working alone at our studios, and we see each other at openings. So what I'm really trying to get at is, how much do you think that... You've done a lot of collaborations with musicians, with dancers and all, or how much that sense of community, the grassroot, the constant dialogue with the writers, with the dancers, with the sculptors, with the other performance artists were influential to your development as an artist? And how do you feel today about how can you function as an artist in the absence of that kind of grassroot community?

Joan Jonas:
I think that artists at a certain point are on their own trajectory, so I don't really need that in a way. I'm interested, I go to see shows and I'm very interested in what people do. But in the beginning, when I first started in the sixties or even in the fifties, I did not want to go in the direction of minimalism. I was really working against minimalism. I didn't want to be a minimalist, although they inspired me and they informed me, and I love the work, but I did not want to... So the way I put it is that I wanted to develop my own language outside of that system.

So just to compare what it was like, then also, it was a much smaller community. You probably know that, and it was all below 14th Street. Most of the work that you saw was below 14th Street. It wasn't the same world. The art world has expanded now tremendously, and it's good that it did. It's wonderful that everybody makes art, but it wasn't like that then. And so it was a very different atmosphere, and if you went to a performance or happening, the audience would consist of artists from all the different... There'd be musicians, singers, dancers, sculptors, and painters in the audience. That still happens, but it's not for the same reason and it's not the same kind of atmosphere.

Shirin Neshat:
The next questions I have for you is, you are the artwork and the artwork is you, but it's not really in that way that you just use your body as a performer, like you do at times, because it's so much about your obsessions, your obsessions with different things, including wildlife, animals, and the kind of stories that you tell. I want you to talk about the way your obsession works with your audience and how... Your drawings and how you communicate through your drawings to your audience versus those performances and how... I've listened to your talks where you talk about how you're not really interested in creating symbolism or having the audience take away something very specific from your work. But what would be that ultimate perception that you would like the audience to leave your work with, considering that a lot of your work, especially the installation work, needs multiple viewing? Can you talk about how you see yourself in relation to your audience and in between?

Joan Jonas:
I always find that question difficult. I don't know why. The audience is necessary to exchange and be inspired, the audience. I used to be terrified when I first started performing, I was terrified to be in front, so I started using masks to hide my face. And also, I didn't want to be Joan Jonas, so I always step into another role. That's one way to distance myself from the audience. So, for me, it was distancing myself, and it's never been interactive with the audience. I love the audience. The audience is necessary and it gives you... The thing about the audience is it depends. It could be... I remember some nights sometimes when it would be, "Oh my god, they a terrible audience." Because it would be like a dead... No energy. But then the audience gives you energy and it's an exchange. I don't know if that answers your questions.