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.
Carole S. Vance is an anthropologist and writer and Associate Research Scientist of Public Health and Director of the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Human Rights at Columbia University. She has written extensively on sexuality and public policy, as well as issues of gender, health, and medical anthropology. Her books include Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984 and 1993) and Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship (1988). Interview by Carole Tormollan. A historical interview originally recorded in 1989.
At nineteen, Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) worked as a commercial artist designing for Conde Nast. The risky combination of contemporary art, commercial appeal and social critique runs throughout Kruger’s photography, readings, poetry, collages, and conversation. Her works uses advertising both as a foil and a format. Language and image work together, referencing the manipulations of the advertising media.
Contemporary American composer and performance artist Robert Ashley (1930-2014) was a pioneer in the development of large-scale, collaborative performance works and new uses of language in operas and recordings. His landmark project, Perfect Lives, was opera produced for television in seven half-hour episodes.
Spanish artist Jaume Plensa (b. 1955) creates sculptures and installations that intend to unify individuals through their relationship to memory, the body, and spirituality. Often referencing literature, psychology, biology, and history, his practice speaks of a shared humanity despite the world’s complexity. In this way, language acts as a metaphor, and the human figure a universal symbol. Plensa is perhaps best known for works that engage groups of people in public spaces.
Tom Poole is an organizer of many things. Counting arts administrator, media facilitator, and activist among the many titles he has held over the years, Poole currently brings all these capacities to bear as the executive director of the Pittsburgh Community Television (PCTV) station. In his contribution to the On Art and Artists series, Poole discusses his early foray into media activism as a member of the video art collective Black Planet Productions.
Glenn Belverio is an independent filmmaker and drag artist who lives and works in New York City. In 1990, he began producing and co-hosting the popular Manhattan Cable series The Brenda and Glennda Show, a talk show that mixed activism with comedy as it took drag out of the clubs and onto the street. In 1993, the show became Glennda and Friends, a post-queer task show featuring provocative co-starts such as gay pornographer Bruce LaBruce and guerrilla scholar Camille Paglia.
Last Man is made of the raw footage of security cameras that stream online. During the spring 2020 lockdown imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Dana Levy, who lives in New York, monitored the images transmitted live from security cameras in city centers and at airports, beaches, universities, restaurants, and zoos around the world. In them, these key venues, which in normal times are bustling with life, appear nearly devoid of human presence.
Painter Peter Saul’s iconoclastic paintings parody various aspects of contemporary American life, from politics to sex to violence. He has been an inspiration to several generations of American painters and is retired from the Department of Fine Arts at University of Texas-Austin. Interview by Jim Johnson.
Lucy Lippard (b. 1937) earned degrees from Smith College and New York University before beginning her career as an art critic in 1962, when she began contributing to publications such as Art International and, later, Artforum. In 1966, she organized an exhibition entitled “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. “Eccentric Abstraction” set the standard for what would later be regarded as postminimalism, process, or antiform art.
Michele Wallace's attention to the invisibility and/or fetishization of black women in the gallery and museum worlds has made possible new critical thinking around the intersection of race and gender in African American visual and popular culture, particularly in what she has called "the gap around the psychoanalytic" in contemporary African-American critical discourse.
This tape compiles three profiles of performance artists: A Creative Synthesis: George Coates Performance Works (10:00), The Performance World of Rachel Rosenthal (16:00), and Paul Dresher Ensemble (08:00).
This video reveals John Baldessari's thoughts and intentions for his work over the course of his career, providing clues to the understanding of his paintings, books, and photos. What emerges is a portrait of a rebellious artist who attempts to undermine the catagories and dogmas of the art world--with the full realization that in the long run, some catagory or other will be named to label his work.
Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has performed, lectured, exhibited, and curated around the world since 1988. She is the author of English is Broken Here (The New Press,1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (Routledge/inIVA, 2001) and the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, 1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Abrams, 2003).
In this interview, Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) discusses his personal interests and motivations, as well as the larger cultural and philosophical concerns that shape his videos and their reception. Trecartin is known for his construction of non-linear narratives, campy costumes, and excessively visceral characters and environments. One of the most compelling aspects of this interview is his insistence that language and its verbal articulation, rather than the visual, anchor his process. Trecartin identifies the influences of 1990s retro-rave culture, hip-hop videos, and editing software tools on his work. He notes that the accelerated disintegration of high and low culture has played a major part in his growth as an artist.
Ingrid Pollard is a photographer living in London. Her photographic works, generally of people and landscape, serve to provide a human context for issues of transmigration and “fleeting” identity. Combining personal photographs with traditional views of the English countryside, Pollard questions as well as reconstructs the concept of “Britishness.” In doing so, Pollard also scrutinizes the location of the “other,” and contrasts actual physical similarity or material likeness of people and places with perceived or socially constructed difference.
John Cage’s compositions and performances have had a profound influence on generations of musicians and artists. In this tape, he initiates For the Third Time as author Richard Kostelanetz interviews him. “I’ve left the punctuation out, but I’ve distributed it by chance operations on the page, like an explosion,” Cage says. “You can replace the punctuation where you wish.”
Sirrocco was a drag performer and club icon in Cincinnati, Ohio during the 1980s and 1990s, and was also a close neighbor and friend of Teramana’s. In a series of short interviews, Sirrocco talks about visiting her hometown in Kentucky, hormone therapy, and dating as a transgender woman.
Alfredo Jaar is a politically motivated artist whose work includes installation, photography and film. Born in Chile and now living in the U.S., Jaar’s socio-critical installations explore global political issues, frequently focusing on the Third World and the relationship between consumption and power. A 1988 installation in a subway station in New York involved dramatic photographs of impoverished gold miners n Brazil interspersed with quotations of current gold prices, drawing an unexpected parallel between the material desires that motivate people in both poverty-stricken Br
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.
Since the 1970s Mary Kelly (b.1941) has worked at the fore of feminist art and theory. She has continued to address issues and methods of activist politics, psychoanalysis, political science, literature, and the history of women and gender. Kelly received recognition in the early ’80s for her epic six-year project, The Post Partum Document, a mixed-media work chronicling her and her son’s development. Kelly says her work revolves “around the recurring themes of body, money, history, and power” in this interview with Judith Russi Kirschner.
Vito Acconci (b. 1940) is known as a conceptual designer, installation and performance artist. In the 1960s he embraced performance in order to "define my body in space, find a ground for myself, an alternate ground from the page ground I had as a poet." Acconci’s early performances, including Claim (1971) and Seedbed (1972), were extremely controversial, transgressing assumed boundaries between public and private space and between audience and performer.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work explores the social role of the artist, and that role’s ability to create interactive spaces for people to come together. Focusing less on the construction of discrete objects, he maintains a practice predicated on diffuse forms of installation that facilitate the activities like cooking, reading, and general collectivity. The particularly conceptual nature of his work is a central theme in this interview. While in art school, a teacher Tiravanija greatly admired told him to “stop making art” and this was something he took very seriously.
Felipe Ehrenberg is a prominent Mexican artist who has been actively producing interactive political art, installations, and murals for more than 30 years. Also a writer, Ehrenberg has run a small press in Mexico City and has published numerous articles for art journals in the United States.
Interview by Carol Becker.
The later 1950s and early 1960s saw the development and proliferation of radically new forms of dance driven by a desire to understand the essentiality of movement divorced from traditional, balletic and modern syntaxes. At the forefront of this new wave of performance was Simone Forti, an artist with a hand in both improvisational techniques and choreographed task-maneuvers. This interview details her exploration of each – with a particular focus on her earliest investigations into movement, owing to time spent under the study of Anna Halprin.
