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Michelle Stuart: An Interview

Blumenthal/Horsfield

1978 00:25:42 United StatesEnglishB&WStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Blumenthal/Horsfield Interviews, Installation, Interview, Mixed media

Description

Born in Los Angeles in 1933, Michelle Stuart spearheaded the use of non-traditional materials from nature in the early '70s, and has produced and exhibited her work internationally. Stuart has been grappling with ideas of land and space, history and myth, the atomic and the cosmic for more than four decades. Standing as an outsider to 'mainstream' art practice, Stuart focused on the natural world of quarries, waterfalls, and Indian mounds while revealing the cultural and geological history of these spaces, and how to trace these histories onto large paper scrolls and in books layered to parallel historical change.

In this interview with Kate Horsfield, Stuart wanders through her influences coming from the California landscape and culture of her childhood through her encounter with the New York art world.  "The pieces are named after places, but the place is really like putting your feet on the ground in order to fly.  Having a base for a flight of some sort that has an idea behind it."

A historical interview originally recorded in 1978. Re-edited in 2008 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.