Interview

Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007)  was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman.  She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (1958–62) and at Mills College, Oakland, CA (1962–4). Elizabeth Murray’s paintings have been referred to as “dandyish abstraction.” Her work is distinctive in its use of color, shape, and surface to evoke human characteristics, personalities or humor. Murray is particularly well known for her shaped canvases, which date from 1976, on to which are painted both figurative and non-figurative elements.

Horace Bristol discusses his long career in photography, which began with shooting for Life and Fortune magazines in the 1930s. His photojournalism took him to the Dutch East Indies and post-war Japan. His documents of Depression-era workers famously inspired John Steinbeck to write the classic The Grapes of Wrath.  “I felt I was not an artist but a worker, so as a photojournalist, I had a job to do,” Bristol says.

Produced by the Fellows of Contemporary Art on artists exhibiting in a Pasadena Armory exhibition.

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was born in Kleve, Germany. After serving as a volunteer in the German military, Beuys attended the Dusseldorf Academy of Art to study sculpture, where in 1959 he became a professor. Much of his artwork reflects his attempt to come to terms with his involvement in the war. During the ’60s, Beuys became acquainted with the group Fluxus and artists such as Nam June Paik.

Elizabeth LeCompte is the director of the Wooster Group, an experimental theater company that operates out of its own theater, the Performing Garage, in New York City. The group’s working process begins with "source" texts which are quoted, reworked, and juxtaposed with fragments of popular, cultural and social history, and combined with personal and collective experiences of the group. The resulting productions reflect a continuing refinement of a non-linear, abstract aesthetic that at once subverts and pays homage to modern theatrical "realism."

Interview by Lin Hixson.

A pioneer of the small-format camera, Andre Kertesz’s photographic vision shaped the course of contemporary photojournalism. Self-taught and non-conformist, he began photographing in Hungary in 1912 and remained there until 1925, at which time he moved to Paris. In 1936 he moved to New York City, where he felt displaced and forgotten. It wasn’t until 1964 that he was “rediscovered” and began showing in London, Paris, and New York. This video was shot five weeks before Kertesz’s death in 1985 at the age of 91.

Hal Foster is Professor of Modern Art at Princeton University, and has written and edited numerous influential books on postmodernism, art, and culture. His books include Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985); The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996); and, as editor, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983); Vision and Visuality (1988); and Richard Serra (2000).

Interview by David Raskin.

A historical interview originally recorded in 2001 and re-edited in 2008.

Taiwanese artist Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954) tackles conceptions of racial assimilation in American culture, examining the political underbelly of everyday situations that affect the relationship between individuals and society.

Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was an important member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters and was, for a number of years, head of the Yale University art program. During the Depression, Tworkov worked for the WPA Federal Art Project, and became friends with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and Mark Rothko; their work was the foundation of the New York School of painting.  Late in his career, his work became more geometric, as the mark and gesture was increasingly determined by isometric grid structures.

Originally trained as a musical composer, receiving her MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1952) is a world-renowned documentary feminist filmmaker and expert on avant-garde and third world post-colonial film theory. In 1970, Minh-ha came to the United States from Vietnam at the age of seventeen. Since then she has been involved in film, musical composition, social theory, and critical writing.

The word-based art and performances crafted by world-renowned artist Alison Knowles (b.1933) are central to the 1960s international Fluxus movement and its enduring legacy. Describing her experience as a student at Pratt University in the 1950s where she learned from Richard Lindner and Adolf Gottlieb, Knowles recalls her transition from Abstract Expressionist painting to the chance operations initiated by John Cage and Bertolt Brecht.

Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are precise articulations of cinematic qualities: the surprise of an edit, the composition of framing, and the flash of the image. Dubbed the “filmmaker’s filmmaker”, Dorsky’s work captures the fleeting moments of everyday life in its poetic chaos in such films as Pneuma (1976-82), Triste (1974-96), Alaya (1976-87), and Variations (1992-98). Using a spring-wound Bolex and 16mm reversal stock film, Dorsky’s films operate in the realm of the purely visual.

This tape is a media arts collaboration between Joe Leonardi, Cathleen Kane, and radio artist Joe Frank. It is a synthesis of three “dark humored” radio pieces adapted for video.

Subtitled A Rebellion against the Commodity, this engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift.

Richard Schechner is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University, author of numerous books including Performance Theory (1988) and The Future of Ritual (1993), and editor of The Drama Review. This interview with Nancy Forest Brown was conducted during an event at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Juliana Huxtable was born in Texas and studied at Bard College, NY. An artist working across video, photography, poetry, and music, her practice demands a reexamination of the canon of art history in order to break the cycle of misrepresentation and under-representation in the contemporary art world.

In October 1969, the Videofreex visited the home of wealthy political and social activist, Lucy Montgomery, as she was hosting the Black Panther Party of Chicago during one of their most fraught times – the period just after Chairman Bobby Seale was wrongfully imprisoned for inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention a year earlier. This video documents an interview with the wife of Bobby Seale, Artie Seale. The video opens with a statement by Mrs.

Craig Owens (1950-1990) was a critic who wrote and lectured extensively on contemporary art. He showed particular interest in the issues of photography, postmodernism, feminism, and Marxist thought. A former associate editor for October and senior editor for Art in America, as well as professor of art history at Yale University and Barnard College, his writings were collected in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (1994). Owens died of an AIDS-related illness in 1990.

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.

Pat Steir (b.1938) is an American painter and printmaker, whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades while maintaining enthusiastic critical support.

Although trained as an art historian, Jeff Wall has been working on his expansive photographic light boxes of staged scenes for more than 25 years. Using back-lit, photographic transparencies typically used for advertising display, Wall subverts their commercial association by filling them with quotidian objects.

Hokey Sapp Does SPEW features Kate Schechter performing her invented media personality Hokey Sapp interviewing some of the luminaries at SPEW: The Homographic Convergence, a queer zine convention hosted by Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago in May, 1991. SPEW brought together artists, writers, editors of zines, performers, video-makers, activists, and bands from throughout the US and Canada, and marked the explosion of queercore subcultures through unabashed fashion, outrageous politics, humor, and joy.

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was both a pioneer architect of the modern era and a global theorist. Fuller developed a system of geometry that he called “Energetic-Synergetic geometry,” the most famous example of which is the geodesic dome. His many designs for automobiles and living spaces were applications of a wider theory.

Freed intercuts still color imagery of Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings with a close quarters interview conducted in Southampton, N.Y in Summer 1972.  Lichtenstein discusses the creation of his work, points of inspiration and his recurring aesthetic choices. Freed interrogates Lichtenstein’s overt references to the work of other artists in his painting, questioning his intentional evocation of cliche as he tried to define the genesis of this particular approach.

Born and raised in Japan and a resident of New York since 1976, Eiko Otake is a movement-based, interdisciplinary artist. She worked for more than 40 years as Eiko & Koma, but since 2014 has been working on her own projects. Her works often investigate themes of death and dying, history, and the persistence of collective memory. Eiko has also broadened her collaborative practice to create interdisciplinary work with artists from different backgrounds and disciplines, both alive and deceased.

Marcia Tucker (1940 - 2006) was a curator, writer and art historian, known for founding the New Museum of Contemporary Art after her dismissal from her curatorial post at the Whitney Museum of American Art due to creative disagreements. Tucker served as the visionary director of the New Museum from 1977 to 1999, during which time she organized major exhibitions like The Time of Our Lives (1999), A Labor of Love (1996), and Bad Girls (1994), and edited the series Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art. As a curator,Tucker championed social engagement, exploration and artistic process. She considered the museum a “laboratory” organization where both art and the practices of the institution itself were always in question. After leaving the New Museum, and until her death in 2006, Tucker worked as a freelance art critic, writer, and lecturer.