Independently Produced Interviews

Cyclops / "monitor" / minotaur.

Note: A 20-second video loop self-portrait.

In collaboration with fellow camera operator Alan Gerberg, Freed visits George Segal at his North Brunswick, N.J studio in October 1972. While preparing a model Segal discusses Hebrew mystic spirituality in relation to abstract painting and defends his position as a long term figurative artist. He suggests that his work is an ongoing search for spirituality and while describing his influences, Segal muses on the use of form in art to propose that a deep, intimate feeling should preside over aesthetic judgements in the creation of art works.

The fifth in a series of cross-cultural symposia organized by Lucy Lippard, the four artists interviewed here–Tejana tableaux artist Santa Barranza, Taiwanese video and interactive installation artist Shu Lea Cheang, African-American sculptor and installation artist Joyce Scott, Native-American photographer Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie–discuss their work and its cultural contexts. Moderated by Lucy Lippard.

Between the Frames is a series that offers a glimpse into contemporary history that is already past, a portrait of personalities and opinions shaping what and how art reaches a public forum.

The Museum: Between the Frames, Chapter 4

A philosopher and intermedia artist, Adrian Piper focuses on xenophobia, racism, and racial stereotyping

“As a black woman who can 'pass' and a Professor of Philosophy who leads a double life as an avant-garde artist, Piper has understandably focused on self-analysis and social boundaries. Over the years her work in performance, texts, newspaper, unannounced street events, videos, and photographs has developed an increasingly politicized and universalized image of what the self can mean.”

An intimate interview with filmmaker, videomaker, film critic, poet, lecturer, and curator Jonas Mekas. Born into a farming family in Lithuania on December 24, 1922, Mekas was imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Nazi Germany from 1944 to 1945, studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from 1946 to 1948, and relocated to the U. S. in 1949. In 1954, Mekas became editor-in-chief of Film Culture magazine and wrote a film column in The Village Voice from 1958 to 1975.

The fourth in a series of cross-cultural symposia organized by Lucy Lippard, the four artists interviewed hereÑJapanese-American painter and political activist Betty Kano, conceptual and performance artist Lorraine O'Grady, Hopi weaver Ramona Sakiestewa, and Chicana narrative and installation artist Celia Alvarez Muñoz–discuss their work and its cultural contexts.

Painter and multi-media artist Jack Goldstein lived and worked in New York City. His airbrushed paintings of lightning and night skies are shown here accompanied by synthetic music, which the artist also composed. Goldstein committed suicide in 2003.

Interviewed by Jim Johnson.

Between the Frames is a series that offers a glimpse into contemporary history that is already past, a portrait of personalities and opinions shaping what and how art reaches a public forum.

The Media: Between the Frames, Chapter 7

John Cage’s compositions and performances have had a profound influence on generations of musicians and artists. In this tape, he initiates For the Third Time as author Richard Kostelanetz interviews him. “I’ve left the punctuation out, but I’ve distributed it by chance operations on the page, like an explosion,” Cage says. “You can replace the punctuation where you wish.”

My film is a simple gathering of New York City street footage.  It was shot with a spring-wound 16mm Bolex on, above, and below the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn and includes footage of the ticker tape parade for astronaut John Glenn.

Cherokee-American artist Jimmie Durham has worked in performance since the mid-’60s. In the ‘70s, he immersed himself in activism, working for Native American rights as part of the American Indian Movement. In the ‘80s, his focus returned to producing art in multiple forms—performance, poetry, and mixed-media visual works—that consider Native American identity and critique American domestic colonialism. He has also published numerous critical essays.

Dad’s Stick features three objects that my father showed me shortly before he died. Two of these were so well-used that their original forms and functions were almost completely obscured. The third object seemed to be instantly recognizable, but it turned out to be something else entirely.

John Cage’s work has had an immeasurable influence on 20th Century music and art, and his formal and technological innovations were tied to his desire to push the boundaries of the art world. In 1951 he initiated the first recording on magnetic tape, and in 1952 he staged a theatrical event that is considered the first Happening. His invention of the prepared piano and his work with percussion instruments led him to imagine and explore many unique and fascinating ways of structuring the temporal dimension of music.

The seventh in a series of cross-cultural symposia organized by Lucy Lippard, the four artists interviewed here–visual anthropologist Wendi Starr-Brown, Hapa video and performance artist Kip Fulbeck, Japanese-American artist Dorothy Imagire, Chicana mixed-media artist Yolanda López–address the role of mixed-race identity in their work. Moderated by Corissa Schweitz Gold.

Ingrid Sischy was editor of Artforum in the 1980s and has been editor-in-chief of Interview magazine since the 1990s. In this interview with Robin White, Sischy discusses Artforum’s priorities, purpose, and goals.

“It’s an intricate history where painting, sculpture, performance, video, and photography are extremely connected to each other. As the editor of Artforum, I would feel at great fault to not include the best and the most interesting questions of each because they affect each other, and artists’ choices are not made in a vacuum.”

Painter/mixed media artist David Dunlap creates installations and performances that draw from the notebooks he has kept since the mid-’70s—giving three-dimensional, public form to his intimate thoughts and diaries. He lives and works in Iowa City, where he is a professor of art at the University of Iowa.

Jonas Dos Santos is a performance and installation artist from Brazil who came to the U.S. in 1968. His early work consisted of sculptural pieces in atypical spaces—caves and parks. His work remains informed by Brazilian iconography and rituals such as Carnival while also integrating responses to American culture’s tendency toward waste. His work, in particular his performance art, comes out of improvisation and intuition. This video incorporates still images of Dos Santos’s sculptures and footage of his performances.

Interview by Toni Rosato.

Robert Colescott paints expressive parodies of Western masterpieces. His work—which has transformed Leutze’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) into George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975), Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) into Eat Dem Taters, (1975), and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) as Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (1985)—deals with stereotypes and the role of blacks in American culture.

Interview by Jim Johnson.

Horace Bristol discusses his long career in photography, which began with shooting for Life and Fortune magazines in the 1930s. His photojournalism took him to the Dutch East Indies and post-war Japan. His documents of Depression-era workers famously inspired John Steinbeck to write the classic The Grapes of Wrath.  “I felt I was not an artist but a worker, so as a photojournalist, I had a job to do,” Bristol says.

Produced by the Fellows of Contemporary Art on artists exhibiting in a Pasadena Armory exhibition.

Last Man is made of the raw footage of security cameras that stream online. During the spring 2020 lockdown imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Dana Levy, who lives in New York, monitored the images transmitted live from security cameras in city centers and at airports, beaches, universities, restaurants, and zoos around the world. In them, these key venues, which in normal times are bustling with life, appear nearly devoid of human presence.

Fiber artist Claire Zeisler discusses her techniques, ideas on art, and training; the conversation is inter-cut with images from her 1979 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I... realized I cannot change my techniques too often. I would rather use techniques that I know and keep on perfecting them because I feel that in keeping on and perfecting them, I’m going to find something else to say,” Zeisler says in this interview with Rhona Hoffman.

Freed intercuts still color imagery of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings with a close quarters interview conducted in Southampton, N.Y in Summer 1972.  Lichtenstein discusses the creation of his work, points of inspiration and his recurring aesthetic choices. Freed interrogates Lichtenstein’s overt references to the work of other artists in his painting, questioning his intentional evocation of cliche as he tried to define the genesis of this particular approach.

Guerilla Girls are artist activists who have dedicated themselves to informing the public of the gender and racial inequalities that persists in the art world. Dressed in gorilla masks, they discuss their postering activities and their collaborative projects.

Interview by Lucy Lippard.

Laurie Anderson is perhaps best known as a performance artist who works in both the art and commercial worlds. Anderson talks to Steven Poser through a voice manipulator, commenting on how performing abroad has informed her work and her perspective on American culture, especially regarding issues of language and voice in communication.

This video was produced for the Artists TV Network series Conversations.