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Linda M. Montano 2016: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2016 00:46:20 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video
Tags:
Death and Dying, Interview, Performance, Religion/Spirituality, VDB Interviews

Description

Linda Montano is interviewed by Janet Dees, Curator at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Northwestern University.

Since the 1960s, Linda Montano has aimed to blur the distinction between art and life with her performance and video work. Delving deep into subjects like death, spirituality and personal trauma, she is seen as an influential figure in feminist performance art.

In this interview about interviews, Montano discusses her use of the interview in her work. She describes her piece Learning to Talk as a “sort of Freudian talking cure” in response to her “creative schizophrenia” and recounts evolving from this to interviewing others as a way to curtail her volitional reclusiveness. Montano goes on to describe her impetus for and feelings about inhabiting other personas for her latest video works.

 

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.