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Doug Hall: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2005 01:54:08 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:3DV video
Tags:
Autobiography, Film or Videomaking, Installation, Media Analysis, Photography, Art Collective, VDB Interviews

Description

This extensive interview with California artist Doug Hall (b. 1944) provides unique insight into the culture and politics of experimental artistic production during the 1970s. Discussing the founding of the performance group TR Uthco, Hall offers context for his contribution to the field of video art, and shares stories of his collaborations with Ant Farm, Videofreex, and others. Ranging from his early years as an art student, to his romance with artist Diane Andrews Hall, to reflections on technology in art, this interview importantly extends the discourse surrounding topics of archive, performativity, and autobiography—subjects that have come to define the contours of video art today. 

Hall’s more recent art practice, discussed in the second half of this interview, investigates the politics of vision and our engagement with representation. In his work, Hall seeks ways to better understand the workings of images and archives which subtly condition our perception of visual reality. Doug Hall currently lives in San Francisco He is Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute where he taught until his retirement in 2008. 

— Faye Gleisser

Interview conducted by Steve Seid and Pamela Jean Smith in 2005, edited in 2013.

This interview is contained on 2 DVDs due to length

The Video Data Bank is the leading resource in the United States for videotapes by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection features innovative video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. The collection includes seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. Works in the collection employ innovative uses of form and technology, mixed with original visual style to address contemporary art and cultural themes.

Founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement in the United States, the Video Data Bank is one of the nation's largest providers of alternative and art-based video. Through a successful national and international distribution service, the VDB distributes video art, documentaries made by artists, and recorded interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics.