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Laurie Anderson: An Interview

Blumenthal/Horsfield

1977 00:43:30 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3Video
Tags:
Art Criticism, Blumenthal/Horsfield Interviews, Conceptual Art, Interview, Music

Description

Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) began her career as a gallery artist specializing in photography, before moving to critical work as a writer for Art News and Art in America. She later returned to the art world, making groundbreaking multimedia performance art. Her most widely known work dates back to the early-to-mid-’80s, and is marked by an innovative use of technology in blending media-based and staged performance. The range of her subject matter—from politically charged critiques of American society to more personal themes—has inspired many artists, and secured her position as an icon of American performance art.

In this interview by Kate Horsfield Anderson recalls her early sound experiments. She describes one of her many manipulated violin instruments: “At that point I was really involved with audio tape.  It was mostly whatever sound I could make at the time.  I had just built a violin that I had just taken apart and put a speaker inside, so that it was self playing, and also its strings, and it went out to a little cassette tape recorder.” 

A historical interview originally recorded in 1977 and re-edited in 2004 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.

About Blumenthal/Horsfield

Lyn Blumenthal has been recognized as a leading and innovative experimental feminist media artist and teacher. Her multi-disciplinary body of work included videos, sculpture, drawings and critical essays.  She forged new directions and objectives for the field of independent video—not only creating important video pieces, but also envisioning alternative video as a critical voice within the culture, capable of exposing the numerous foibles and blind spots of mainstream media. Committed to the application of feminist theory to video practice, Blumenthal’s early ’80s art tapes investigate issues of women’s identity and sexuality as a crisis of representation. Her tapes weave together stunning visuals and theoretical analysis, most with an incisive humor that tears away the veil from cultural institutions such as television and the family.  Blumenthal was co-director of the Video Data Bank with Kate Horsfield from its founding in 1976 until her death in 1988.

Kate Horsfield received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 and in the same year co-founded the Video Data Bank with the late Lyn Blumenthal. Horsfield was Executive Director of the Video Data Bank from 1988 to 2006.  Horsfield and Blumenthal began their research in contemporary art in video by producing over 200 video interviews with contemporary artists, photographers and critics, including artists such as Lee Krasner, Romare Bearden, Alice Neel, Joseph Beuys, Buckminster Fuller, and Vito Acconci. This group of interviews has become one of the largest and most valuable primary collections of resource material on contemporary artists in the country.  Horsfield has also produced serveral thematic anthologies of video and collaborated with Nereyda Garcia-Ferraz on Ana Medieta: Fuego de Tierra.  From 1980 to 1999, she taught courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Texas, Austin.  After her retirement from Video Data Bank in 2006, Horsfield has split her time between New York, NY and Austin, TX.