To the Ends of the Earth

In many respects, Larry Bell and Joan Jonas might seem to be diametrically opposed artists. He came up on the West Coast, she on the East. He’s a minimalist sculptor; she’s a maximalist performance, video, and installation artist.

‍

Bell, 85, was part of the rambunctious group of young male artists who set up studios near the beach in Venice, California in the 1960s, and who have latterly been historicized under such romantic rubrics as Light and Space or Cool School or Finish Fetish. His first solo show of mirrored glass sculptures at the storied Ferus Gallery was in 1962, when he was just 22.

‍

In the ’60s, Jonas, 88, was immersed in the downtown New York scene. She studied for two years with the choreographer Trisha Brown and mixed with artists including Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Claes Oldenburg. In two breakthrough early works, she experimented, like Bell, with mirrors: for Mirror Piece I, 1969, and Mirror Piece II, 1970, performers carried long mirrors which simultaneously reflected the bodies of the audience and obscured their own. A committed feminist, she wove in poetic and mythological narratives, often alluding to gender. In 1970, she traveled to Japan with her then-partner Richard Serra, who recently passed away, and acquired a Sony Portapak video camera, a revelatory tool that would place her at the forefront of the emergent genre of video art.

‍

As this momentous conversation proves the pair have more in common than one might expect. Jonas says that, like Bell, one of her primary concerns is perception—how we perceive space and bodies within it. The latter’s sculptures and installations, usually made with mirrored or colored glass, have never involved performance, but to approach them is to experience a heightened awareness of one’s movement through space.

‍

Both artists, too, have found ways to remove themselves from the metropolitan centers where they had their starts. In the ’70s, Bell began spending time in Taos, New Mexico, a place long beloved by artists. That same decade, Jonas was introduced to the Canadian island of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia by friends including the composer Philip Glass and his wife JoAnne Akalaitis. For Jonas and Bell, getting away from it all entails arriving at somewhere special, somewhere that, as Bell puts it, is akin to a “natural environment” for making art.

‍Joan Jonas: Everybody knew each other in the early ’70s, when we met. Robert Irwin had given me his studio to make my work Vertical Roll, 1972, and it was right next door to your studio in Venice, California. That’s when I really got to know you. To say that we’re very different, that’s true, but we all overlapped and knew each other’s work at that time. There wasn’t a distance: I was very interested in Minimalism, and I liked your mirror boxes very much. I worked with mirrors myself.

‍

Larry Bell: I remember a performance at Ace Gallery in 1972, Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll, where Janet, my wife, was one of your assistants.

‍

JJ: You had a new camera back then. Do you remember?

‍

LB: Yeah, I took some pictures of you.

‍

JJ: You took a lot of pictures of me with that camera while I was rehearsing. We published them in one of my catalogs.

“My work is not social, and it's not motivated by any kind of intellectual thought. I think I work better in isolation.”
— Larry Bell

LB: I respect just about anybody who follows their work. That’s what I saw in your activities, that you were a student of yourself and in fact lived, in a sense, with your work as your teacher.

‍

JJ: You know, I am showing old work continuously. But of course, I go on and try to continue inventing. It probably gets harder, but that’s what we do. That’s our life. Some artists do the same thing their whole lives, the same thing over and over again. I’m very eclectic in that sense, but I’m not afraid of repeating myself.

‍

LB: I’m fascinated with the quality of light and its interface with surfaces, and that’s what I’ve explored all my life. My work is not social, and it’s not motivated by any kind of intellectual thought. I think I work better in isolation.

‍

JJ: All artists have to spend a lot of time alone. You can’t be with other people all the time. You have to be in your studio alone in order to do your work, in order to develop it. The work does not get developed in a social situation. I work with live situations often, but not always. I’m often called a performance artist. That’s not accurate. I do maybe one or two performances a year. Most of the time I’m working in my studio, often drawing.

I go to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia every summer to be in a beautiful place. It takes 18 hours to drive there. It’s regenerative to be in a place like that. I do a lot of work there, and so do others. Everybody works. We don’t call ourselves an artist community, but we all knew each other. Once I did one performance on a cliff, and in the audience was Keith Sonnier, Richard [Serra], Phil Glass, and JoAnne. It was a very small audience, but a wonderful audience.

‍LB: One of my closest friends in LA was the sculptor Ken Price. Our friendship was very strong even though we really couldn’t have been two more different sculptors. By 1970, Kenny felt that Los Angeles was becoming unlivable because of the traffic and the smog and everything else. He moved to Taos. Two years later, when I went to see him for the first time in his new digs, I ended up just staying. This place—this little village in the upper desert of northern New Mexico, then a town of 2,500 from a city of millions—was just a completely different world. The population was Hispanic and Native American for the most part, and Caucasians were the minority. It was also mostly agrarian, where people actually made a living for their families off of what they grew, the alfalfa that they traded for a pig, you know. There was a whole different way of thinking about things. The rents were practically nothing. I traded one of my sculptures for the house I lived in for 30 years. Some of my closest friends and heroes live in other places, places like Iceland and France and Germany and so on, places that I’ve never spent that much time in.

‍

JJ: I first went to Japan around the same time I went to Los Angeles with Richard, and that had a huge effect on me. I did a piece [Lines in the Sand, 2004] based on Hilda Doolittle’s poem Helen in Egypt, 1961. Storytelling is a very important part of my work, and also locations, because I work with film and video. I don’t think of myself primarily as American. I’m an artist. I’m inspired by other cultures.

‍

LB: I think being an artist is kind of an international thing, but everybody is motivated by different kinds of circumstances.

‍

JJ: I’m not sure artists take vacations. Artists work all the time. Like when I go to Canada, it’s a place where I rest, but I work really hard. Working in that atmosphere where it’s very healthy and beautiful and relaxing is very different from working in a city like New York in which you’re under a certain stress. So in a way, my summers are my work periods, and I don’t call them vacations, but to get away from the city is a very privileged thing to be able to do.

‍

LB: I consider myself celebrating my 64th year of unemployment. I don’t believe I’ve had a better vacation than the one I’ve been on for 64 years.

‍

JJ: You’re lucky that you live in Taos. I often wish I lived in the country, actually. When I first went out west to the Grand Tetons [in Wyoming], I’ll never forget the sight of those mountains. I’d never seen anything like it. The scale, you know, was so different! And when I first was in the Southwest, and New Mexico, I realized why people are spiritual or religious. It’s an experience beyond description to see the landscape and the beauty of the landscape, the vastness of the landscape and the cruelty of it. Trees affect your mood and your state of mind. When I’m upset, I go walk in the trees, just in the park up the street, and it calms me down. Animals, too, are an important part of nature.

LB: I agree. It’s exactly the way I feel. Nature provides us with everything. But I don’t go climbing around in the trees, and I don’t do much of anything in terms of going out to explore nature, although the drives around New Mexico are fantastic. I’m a studio creature. I go every day, and there’s always something that I can play around with that leads to something else. It’s my natural environment. My materials and my equipment are all a little bit to me like my pets—carefully trained to deliver what I want to explore. And without fail, they surprise me. It’s those surprises that carry the work to the next step. I totally believe in the four most important tools of the studio: spontaneity, improvisation, intuition, and trust. I trust the work; the work follows suit.

‍

JJ: I was just thinking about this. I had to write a little memorial about Richard. Richard used to say that he responded to materials but that he was a sculptor. I’m not a sculptor, but I like that statement. I was also writing about the trees that were used in one of Richard’s pieces. The material itself has a life. It’s not exactly organic, but it has a life to it, and we enter that life and work with it. The material itself is transformed. I mean, everything is made of little atoms, and they say there’s no such thing as solid objects. We’re interacting with those materials in ways that we don’t know.

‍

LB: I’m not sure I know what I believe in, other than just working. I trust the adventure I’m on. I use a lot of industrial equipment. My main tool is a piece of hardware called a high vacuum thermal evaporator. It’s just a big chamber that I use to remove air. There are things that can be done in an airless environment that can’t be done in the presence of air. I had this device built for me to play around with the plating technique that I could use to change the nature of the way light interfaced with surfaces.

‍

JJ: Perception is one of my main concerns. I think that’s what art is, essentially: It alters our perception of the world. Like your beautiful boxes. For me, technology is a tool to transform what is in front of you. I remember when the video camera first came out, they had a conference at MoMA and invited me and other people, like John Baldessari. The conclusion was that the video camera was like a pencil.

‍

LB: I’m not really fond of either the telephone or this video meeting. I mean, I like seeing you and engaging in this discussion, but I don’t watch television or films. I’d rather just look at the sky.

‍

JJ: I call myself an old-fashioned video artist. I still work with narrative. I work with cameras. I use my phone as a way of communicating with other people, but I don’t use it in my work. People keep saying, “What are you doing with new media?” I don’t work with new media—I work with video. Film was my original love before the video camera. Of course, you can do things with video now that you can’t do with film, and everything is faster, and a little easier. You don’t have to send it to the lab. That’s what technology does. But I agree with you: You have to always remember that we’re dealing with very simple things, to go back to the beginning, to deal with light and shadow and drawing with a pencil, and so on.

‍

Artwork by LARRY BELL.