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Matthew Coolidge: An Interview

Video Data Bank

2004 01:00:16 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Installation, Landscape, Conceptual Art, Art Collective, VDB Interviews, Visiting Artists Program

Description

Matthew Coolidge is a founder and director of The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), an organization dedicated to raising awareness about how land is apportioned, used and perceived by its inhabitants. Through exhibitions, publications, and guided tours, Coolidge and the CLUI seek to foster and encourage a heightened sense of awareness of natural surroundings. In this interview, Coolidge defines a ‘land art spillover effect,’ in which the perceived significance of the landscape seems to increase the closer people get to a piece of environmental art.

Seeking to avoid this fetishization of the land only when in association with a spectacular object, Coolidge and CLUI use various projects to activate their audience’s desire to form their own site-based interpretations. By creating scenarios through which the audience can examine and experiment, Coolidge hopes to foster an awareness of how beliefs about the land are mediated by scientific, artistic, and cinematic narratives. - Kyle Riley

Interview by Romi Crawford in November 2004, edited in 2014.

 

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.