Interview
Ann Reynolds interviewed by Barbara Clausen, May 27, 2020.
Ann Reynolds is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Center for Womenâs and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In this interview, Reynolds speaks about teaching Jonasâs works and provides an in-depth account of Jonasâs 2014 retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan.
Transcript
- “Ann Reynolds interviewed by Barbara Clausen, May 27, 2020 (Interview Transcript).” Joan Jonas Knowledge Base, Artist Archives Initiative, 2021.
Abstract
The interview begins with Reynolds providing some background information on how she first encountered Jonasâs work in graduate school and seeing her perform The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things live for the first time at Dia:Beacon in fall of 2006 [0:00â01:57]. After this performance, Reynolds began engaging with Jonasâs work very intensely and the two co-taught a class where students are given the task of figuring out how to create an exhibition around a particular work or a type of work by Jonas. Reynolds goes into depth about her class and what it is like to teach through Jonasâs practice [01:58â2:47]. Reynolds explains that before co-teaching this class, she did not focus tremendously on performance and video. Her reading of existing literature on Jonas raised a lot of questions for her surrounding categorizing in the history of art, a precedent that makes it difficult to address work like Jonasâs [02:56]. After this, Reynolds touches on a public conversation she had with Jonas and Susan Howe about using analogy in their work and the importance of communication between art historians, critics, and artists [10:05â12:47]. Moving on to exhibitions, Reynolds shares her overall impressions of the 2014 retrospective curated by Andrea Lissoni at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan. She gives detailed descriptions of her experience of the installation and points out a carefully calibrated relationship among the works in terms of sound, scale, and space [12:48â31:06]. The conversation then turns to Reynoldsâs advice on restaging or exhibiting Jonasâs work, including her thoughts on the dynamic between Jonasâs work as something made at a particular point in the past and its existence in the present. Reynolds believes that the Milan retrospective was successful in striking this balance, as was Jonasâs show in Kyoto, Japan called Five Rooms: Joan Jonas [31:07â40.38]. The interview comes to an end with Clausen and Reynolds thinking about the networks in which artists participate, communicate with each other, and exert influence [40:39â46:30].