Interview

Pat Steir (b.1938) is an American painter and printmaker, whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades while maintaining enthusiastic critical support. She graduated from Pratt in 1962 and in 1964 was included in the show Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York. She first came to prominence in the 1970s, when her work concentrated on signs and symbols and was close to minimal and conceptual art.

Consisting of 13 brief spots, Experience: Perception, Interpretation, Illusion features works by artists included in a Pasadena Armory exhibition. Curator Noel Korten explains that the artists in the show have all reached mid-career and are now less concerned with expanding the boundaries of contemporary art than on reflecting back on culture through their own perspectives. Artists include Karen Carsen, John Outterbridge, Michael C.

A video collage that chronicles the issues and events that arose in Linda M. Montano’s life while she devoted a year to each of the seven chakras. Beginning as a piece devoted to themes of commitment and limitation, the work becomes a fascinating hybrid of art and life, as Montano experiences the onset of menopause, her mother’s death, her choice to enter and then leave a convent, the suffering of a stroke, and thoughts of her own death—all within the structural confines of an intense work of art.

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.

Cindy Sherman received an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1976, where she studied photography. During this time she was also involved with HallWalls, an alternative gallery space in Buffalo. She is best known for her black and white Untitled Film Stills, which she made in the late 70s and early 80s. In carefully designed settings, Sherman placed herself, using costumes, wigs, and makeup, in various scenarios suggetive of B-movies from the 1950s.

Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1975; it has subsequently become one of the most influential work in film theory. Using a psychoanalytic methodology to discuss spectatorship, it was groundbreaking in its feminist critique of the sadistic, misogynistic mode of classical Hollywood cinema in which women were objects of fetishistic display for male viewers’ pleasure. She has also written extensively on melodrama, published three books, and co-directed six films, including Riddles of the Sphinx with Peter Wollen (1974).

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades, while expanding its reach and maintaining enthusiastic critical support. She graduated from Pratt in 1962, and in 1964 was included in the show Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York.

The 1970s witnessed unprecedented artistic development of non-traditional media – chief among them were textiles and fabrics. Diane Itter was at the forefront of this boom in craft-oriented art making, designing colorful, geometric and exceedingly intricate fiber works that demanded near countless hours of time to execute. In this interview she discusses her practice, as well as the pitfalls that are encountered while working in what was – at the time of the interview – a still largely marginalized art form.

Charles Simonds (b.1945) majored in art at the University of California at Berkeley. There he discovered an area of clay pits that had once provided the raw material for some of Manhattan's older buildings. He literally immersed himself in the subject, burying himself in a pool of wet clay to get a feel for the material. Simonds's sculptures are enchanting architectural minatures. Most are landforms with small chambers and towers; some are abstract organic shapes. Carefully built brick by tiny brick, Simonds's sculptures engage the child in everyone.

The Videofreex conducted this interview with Fred Hampton, the Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, in October 1969, just over a month before he was killed by the Chicago police.

Ron Gorchov (b. 1930) is an American artist who has been working with curved surface paintings and shaped canvases since 1967. He paints on convex/concave saddle-shape canvases with recurring pairs of symmetrical, oar-like images.

Jim Dine (b. 1935) first emerged as an avant-garde artist creating Happenings and performances with Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and others in the early 1960s. Ultimately, he rejected the performances that led to his early success in favor of an introspective search for identity. Using banal objects as subjects for his paintings and prints, Dine displayed a growing sense of self-awareness.

The artwork on trial is Richard Serra's public sculpture, Tilted Arc, commissioned and installed by the U.S. government in 1981. Four years later, a public hearing was held to consider the removal of the sculpture from its site in Federal Plaza in New York City. In documenting the climatic General Services Administration hearing, The Trial Of Tilted Arc is a thought-provoking indictment of the state of the arts.

In collaboration with art historian Dore Bowen, a video recording of her phone interview with Yoko Ono during which a discussion of John Cage and chance operations intervene. Shot in 2002, this document was released in 2007.

In this interview video and performance artist Nancy Buchanan discusses her feminist and political work. Buchanan comments upon the advantages of video over performance in terms of accessibility—the ability for her videos to circulate and reach audiences she physically cannot, and their brevity and completed form—and her strategies to create an atmosphere for change. This Video Portrait features two of Buchanan’s videos in their entireties: the anti-nuclear weapons work An End to All Our Dreams (1982) and the more straightforwardly feminist Webs (1983).

Miranda July (b.1974) makes performances, movies, and recordings—often in combination. Her videos (The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, Getting Stronger Every Day) present complicated parallel narratives with characters who experience loneliness, exploitation, unexpected phobias, and often inexplicable relationships. July has also recorded several performance albums released by Kill Rock Stars and K Records. In 1995 she founded Joanie 4 Jackie, an on-going movie distribution network for independent women movie makers.

Washington, D.C.-based African-American artist Sylvia Snowden paints what she calls “figural or structural abstract expressionist” works. Three years after this tape was produced, her son was shot to death, and she spent the next three years producing 87 works in a variety of media.

Ree Morton (1936-77) was an American artist working with large-scale mixed media installations.  Her mature career was brief, extending from 1971 to 1977.  However, her output and growth during these years was unusually large.  This was the first of two interviews Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield conducted with Morton; the second was for the journal Heresies in 1977.

Dan Sandin designed the Image Processor that, partly because of his decision to give away the building plans, has effected an energetic and aesthetic investigation of the technological structures of electronic media. He sees the Image Processor as both an event and an environment for artists to explore and experience. During the interview, Sandin spontaneously synthesizes his own image.

Interview by John Manning. Shot by Christine DeLignieres.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1980.

Electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello (b.1964) creates sonic installations that function to give a physical form or space to audio. In this interview, Vitiello discusses his beginnings as a film student, and his transition from music to fine art through his investment in storytelling aspects of soundtracks. As a teacher, artist, and long-time curator at Electronic Arts Intermix, Vitiello’s insights and anecdotes offer up sentimental reflection and hard-learned life lessons, as well as perspective on the historic landscape of music and art in the 1980s and 90s. By discussing his partnerships with Tony Oursler, Jem Cohen, and Nam June Paik, Vitello provides entry into the myriad influences and collaborations that have shaped his working process and artistic career.

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.”

Joel Shapiro (b.1941) came to prominence in the early 1970s with his representational miniatures of everyday objects like chairs and houses. Since then he has become one of the most exhibited American sculptors. Shapiro’s vocabulary consists largely of rectangular volumes, with which he has created a body of work dancing on the line between abstraction and figuration. The human form has been a major theme in Shapiro’s geometric expression.

This video features California artists: drawer and painter Deanne Belinoff, sculptor and poet Sana Krusoe, wood relief carver and painter Palema Holmes, and New York-based video artist Shirley Clarke.

The Artists: Part 1 was produced in concert with the exhibition Four Solo Exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1988. The artists are introduced by LBMA’s senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels. The video presents and contrasts the diverse styles, media, and personalities of these four women artists.

Alice Neel (1900-1984) is known for portrait paintings of well-known persons and eccentric New York street types. Neel worked as a figurative painter throughout the decades of WPA realism, postwar abstract expressionism, 1960s Pop, and 1970s minimalism. She persevered in her work despite a turbulent personal life and critical neglect that continued until the 1960s. Neel lived and worked in New York City from 1932 until her death in 1984.

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.