Interview

Miranda July (b.1974) makes performances, movies, and recordings—often in combination. Her videos (The Amateurist, Nest of Tens, Getting Stronger Every Day) present complicated parallel narratives with characters who experience loneliness, exploitation, unexpected phobias, and often inexplicable relationships. July has also recorded several performance albums released by Kill Rock Stars and K Records. In 1995 she founded Joanie 4 Jackie, an on-going movie distribution network for independent women movie makers.

Washington, D.C.-based African-American artist Sylvia Snowden paints what she calls “figural or structural abstract expressionist” works. Three years after this tape was produced, her son was shot to death, and she spent the next three years producing 87 works in a variety of media.

Lee Krasner (1908-1984) was born in New York and attended Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, and the Hofmann School to study painting. Married to Jackson Pollack, Krasner's own practice was largely overlooked by the art world during her lifetime. She is one of the few women to play a major part in the transition from Modernist painting of the 1930s to the eventual triumph of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. Krasner, with Pollack, launched the New York School after World War II.

Paul D. Miller (b. 1970) is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician better known as DJ Spooky. A popular and prolific recording artist, he has collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), Kool Keith, and Killa Priest (of Wu Tang Clan). Miller’s work uses a wide variety of digitally created music as a form of postmodern sculpture.

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) gained international recognition with her three-and-a-half hour masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which portrays a housewife’s dull existence and eventual violent action. She has continued to be one of Europe’s most innovative filmmakers with more than forty film and television projects to her credit. Akerman’s work is minimalist, structuralist, and feminist. Major themes in her films include women at work and at home; women’s relationships to men, other women, and children; food, love, sex, romance, art, and storytelling. In this interview from 1976 Akerman discusses her early films, and the development of her particular vision.

Ingrid Sischy was editor of Artforum in the 1980s and has been editor-in-chief of Interview magazine since the 1990s. In this interview with Robin White, Sischy discusses Artforum’s priorities, purpose, and goals.

“It’s an intricate history where painting, sculpture, performance, video, and photography are extremely connected to each other. As the editor of Artforum, I would feel at great fault to not include the best and the most interesting questions of each because they affect each other, and artists’ choices are not made in a vacuum.”

Joel Shapiro (b.1941) came to prominence in the early 1970s with his representational miniatures of everyday objects like chairs and houses. Since then he has become one of the most exhibited American sculptors. Shapiro’s vocabulary consists largely of rectangular volumes, with which he has created a body of work dancing on the line between abstraction and figuration. The human form has been a major theme in Shapiro’s geometric expression.

Fiber artist Claire Zeisler discusses her techniques, ideas on art, and training; the conversation is inter-cut with images from her 1979 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I... realized I cannot change my techniques too often. I would rather use techniques that I know and keep on perfecting them because I feel that in keeping on and perfecting them, I’m going to find something else to say,” Zeisler says in this interview with Rhona Hoffman.

Danny Tisdale is a performance artist from New York City. His performances challenge prevailing ideas of race, assimilation, appropriation and success by offering passers-by the chance to racially change their appearance as a means to achieve greater financial success. The mimicry of museological practices of cataloguing and preservation, display and presentation provides one of a range of rhetorical frameworks upon which Danny Tisdale hangs his practice of social critique.

Sphinxes Without Secrets is an energetic and transgressive acount of outstanding female performance artists, and an invaluable document of feminist avant-garde work of the 70s and 80s. No Mona Lisa smiles here, as performance artists spill their guts about what outrages and delights them. Performers, curators, and critics unravel the mysteries of a new art form and ponder the world women confront today. Since its inception, performance art has provided a forum for artists who create work that challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo.

Born in 1943 in Poland, Wodiczko lives and works in New York and Cambridge, MA, where he has been professor at MIT since 1991. Wodiczko is best known for his large-scale slide and video projections, which amplify political issues locally to their place of installation. Rather than use a screen or gallery wall as backdrop, Wodiczko projects these pieces onto public edifices and monuments, making explicit on their very surfaces the communal contexts and myths or ideologies that they represent.

Confrontation is the element that defines Acconci’s work, from explorations of the body and self to his performances, videos, and installations to the more recent “transporting and self-erecting architecture.” Throughout his work Acconci has aggressively challenged the status quo: he has violated sexual/cultural roles and has pointed out social/political ambivalence—and in doing so, his notorious activities have stretched the boundaries of what we accept as art.

This video was produced for the Artists TV Network series Conversations.

A. D. Coleman started writing regularly on photography in 1967 for the Village Voice, at a time when very few critics took the medium seriously. His work, according to Joel Eisinger, qualified him as perhaps "the first postmodernist critic" in the field. After his tenure at the Voice, Coleman became the first photography critic at The New York Times, and has since published in numerous publications internationally on mass media, communication technologies, art, and photography.

Nancy Graves (1939-1995) was a New York sculptor, painter, and filmmaker who used natural history as a reference for dealing with the relationships between time, space, and form. Her work shows the formative influence of the natural sciences, history, art, and cultural studies that she encountered as a child. After majoring in English Literature at Vassar, Graves studied painting at Yale with Jack Tworkov, Alex Katz, and Al Held, among other artists and traveled extensively, spending time in Paris and Florence.

This work was produced in connection with Icono Negro, a three-artist show at Long Beach Museum of Art exploring the dynamics and distinctions of black video art. Three works featured in the show—Tony Cokes’s Black Celebration, Philip Mallory Jones’s What Goes Around, and Lawrence Andrews’s An I for an I—are shown in their entireties and commented upon by curator Claire Aguilar and video artists Ulysses Jenkins and O. Funmilayo Makarah.

Beloved by filmmakers such as John Waters and Todd Solondz, George Kuchar has been working with the moving image for nearly half a century. In the 1950s, Kuchar and his twin brother Mike began producing ultra-low-budget underground versions of Hollywood genre films, with names like I Was a Teenage Rumpot and The Devil's Cleavage.

Growing up in the early computer age, around machines like the Commodore 64, had a formative effect on Marisa Olson and her subsequent artistic career. Now operating across a diverse spectrum of media including video, performance, and even the internet itself, she creates work that simultaneously comments upon and instrumentalizes the potential of digital machines as well as the global networks they’re linked to. However, her work is not circumscribed within the boundaries of these systems’ technical specificity.

Douglas Hollis (b.1948) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and continued to live there throughout the years of his college education at the University of Michigan. From an early age he had a deep interest in Native American culture. His experiences traveling in Oklahoma to live with Indian families has strongly influenced his life and his art ever since. Hollis began working with natural phenomena and responsive environment structures in the later part of the 1960's. At that time he completed several projects with musicians, dancers, film makers, engineers, and physicists.

Eric Fischl's early works were large-scale abstract paintings. While teaching in Nova Scotia, Fischl began to shift from abstraction to smaller, image-oriented paintings, beginning with narrative works that investigated a fisherman's family. By the time Fischl left Halifax the narrative element was gone, but the subject of family melodrama remained. In the '80s Fischl's large figurative paintings, aggressive in their confrontation with the viewer, began to receive attention.

Philip Pearlstein (b.1924) began painting figures in the 1960s and is known as a leading figure in American Realism. Throughout his career, Pearlstein's paintings evolved from an expressionistic style to a meticulously analytical vision. His work attempts to present the model as a documentation of the painting session, and his paintings are closely rendered under the existing studio lighting.  Attuned to art history, Pearlstein is as interested in pattern and composition as he is in the body itself.

Painter and multi-media artist Jack Goldstein lived and worked in New York City. His airbrushed paintings of lightning and night skies are shown here accompanied by synthetic music, which the artist also composed. Goldstein committed suicide in 2003.

Interviewed by Jim Johnson.

The Luminous Image was an international exhibition of video installations held in the fall of 1984 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was a leading American poet who gained notoriety in the 1950s and ’60s through his association with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance.  One of the most controversial poets of his time, his book Howl and Other Poems faced an obscenity trial in 1957 and became one of the most widely read poems of the 20th Century. In the '60s and '70s, Ginsberg studied under gurus and Zen masters.

My film is a simple gathering of New York City street footage.  It was shot with a spring-wound 16mm Bolex on, above, and below the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn and includes footage of the ticker tape parade for astronaut John Glenn.

In 1964, Steina Vasulka (then Steinunn Bjarnadottir) married Woody Vasulka, a Czech engineer with a background in film. They later moved to New York where, with Andreas Mannik, they founded the Kitchen, a performance space dedicated to new media. The Vasulkas collaborated on a series of video works whose imagery arose primarily through the manipulation of the video signal at the level of the electron beam itself.