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Gregg Bordowitz: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2018 02:24:48 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Activism, AIDS/HIV, Interview, LGBTQ, Television, VDB Interviews

Description

Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, AIDS activist, and film and videomaker. His work, including Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), documents his personal experiences of testing positive and living with HIV within the context of a personal and global crisis. His writings are collected in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings:1986-2003. 

Bordowitz talks with interviewer Solveig Nelson about his art education at home and his exposure to art and culture as a young adult living in New York City in the 1980s. Naming the artists and friends who supported and influenced his work, he talks about queer culture, making television, developing a video art practice, and becoming an activist with ACT-UP and in the gay community in NYC. This interview covers Bordowitz's early career and is intended to eventually have a follow up to examine his later work.

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.