American Art Tapes

In 1965, British artist John Jones left the UK with his young family to live in the USA. There they settled in Greenwich Village, New York, and spent several months on a road trip west, seeking out artists and interviewing as many as they could. All revealed something unique about their work and practice. Many spoke of the times they were living in – 1960s America, a political and cultural crucible. Some (Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono, for instance) became Jones’s personal friends.

Published here for the first time, this book presents a fascinating selection of Jones’s conversations with those artists, as chosen by his daughter, Nicolette. This is the story of art presented not through the filter of art critics, but from the mouths of the practitioners. Featuring an array of well known voices, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, The American Art Tapes offers an intimate portrait of the American art scene in the mid 1960s – a pivotal moment in twentieth-century art – and the thinking that gave rise to one of the most fertile creative periods in our recent history.