Art History

The Badger Series has issues and attempts, each episode, to resolve them. Recasting a glove puppet show through his own present day sensibilities, Paul assumes the role of kindly uncle mentor to a household of capersome woodland creatures. Mortality, self-sacrfice, depression, altered states of consciousness and transgressive art practices are all explored as part of their everyday lives together.

Video Data Bank

Hollis Sigler 1995: An Interview

In 1985, Hollis Sigler, a leading feminist artist in Chicago, was diagnosed with breast cancer, a disease that had also stricken her mother and great-grandmother. This interview with Hollis Sigler focuses on the period of her life beginning with the work entitled Breast Cancer Journals, a series of paintings, drawings, and collages expressing a wide range of emotional responses to the various stages of her struggle with cancer encompassing more than 100 works.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Craig Owens: An Interview

Craig Owens 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. “I’m arguing for an art that is culturally relevant.

Jeanne C. Finley

At the Museum: A Pilgrimage of Vanquished Objects

Commissioned by the Oakland Museum, this video provides an artist’s interpretation of the museum’s displays and collections. The voice of a friendly narrator enlarges the image-objects with historical and social information, while a written text provides ironic commentary. “The term curator is derived from the Latin ‘curatus’ —one responsible for the care of souls.” The daughter represented in the famous Dorthea Lange photograph of the Migrant Mother recounts the circumstance surrounding the now-celebrated photograph and how it impacted her life.

Long Beach Museum of Art

The Artists: Part 1 (Belinkoff, Krusoe, Holmes, and Clark)

This video features California artists: drawer and painter Deanne Belinoff, sculptor and poet Sana Krusoe, wood relief carver and painter Palema Holmes, and New York-based video artist Shirley Clark.

The Artists: Part 1 was produced in concert with the exhibition Four Solo Exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1988. The artists are introduced by LBMA’s senior curator Josine Ianco-Starrels. The video presents and contrasts the diverse styles, media, and personalities of these four women artists.

Hermine Freed

Art Herstory

“In her brilliant video Art Herstory, [Freed] has restaged art history, putting herself in the model’s role in numerous paintings.... Time dissolves under her humorous assault—one moment in the painting, then out of the canvas and into that period, then back in the studio."

—Jonathan Price, “Video Art: a Medium Discovering Itself,” Art News 76 (January 1977)

An excerpt of this title (14:49) is also included on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

Nancy Holt

East Coast, West Coast

In this rare and humorous record of the art dialogue of the late 1960s, Holt and "guest" Robert Smithson assume opposing artistic viewpoints: the uptight, intellectual New Yorker versus the laid-back Californian. Their play-acting lays bare the cliches and stereotypes of a "bi-coastal" art world. While Holt stresses analytic, systematic thinking, Smithson represents the polar opposite, privileging visceral experience and instinct, saying, "I never read books; I just go out and look at the clouds." and "Why don't you stop thinking and start feeling?"

Artists Television Network

Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim was a prominent figure in various art developments throughout the ’70s. Oppenheim moved through body/performance art and related video work to earthworks to his current large-scale “factories.” In all of his work, the transference of energy is an underlying concern.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Lucy Lippard 1979: An Interview

In this interview with Kate Horsfield, Lippard, author of From the Center: Feminist Essays on Womens’ Art (1976), discusses the journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and her novel, I See/You Mean (1979). Lippard published a second anthology of her essays on feminist art, The Pink Glass Swan, in 1995. Interview by Kate Horsfield.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1979 and re-edited in 2003.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Louise Bourgeois: An Interview

Louise Bourgeois has utilized wood, metal, plaster, and bronze in creating her sculptures. Among the many themes in her work are the house (or lair) and the so-called “toi-et-moi” or “you and me.” Both of these subjects derive from a self-defined problem in Bourgeois’s life, the desire to find and express a means of getting along with other people. For Bourgeois, the relationship of one person to another is all-important, and life has little meaning without it. Louise Bourgeois’s remarkable career spans both the modern and postmodern eras.

Rebecca Baron, Douglas Goodwin

Lossless #2

Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik

Jennifer Fisher

Linda M. Montano: 14 Years of Living Art

Linda M. Montano: 14 Years of Living Art is a video catalog of the artist’s exhibition, performance and workshop in Montreal in 2003. Produced in the context of a retrospective exhibition at the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery, the video presents a close view of Montano’s signture art/life counseling performance, interviews with participants, and views of the artworks in situ. It also documents Montano’s performance pedagogy during her all-night sleepover workshop which was collaboratively hosted by La Centrale and Rad’a.

Bill Page

Larry Poons - His Endless Creativity

This tape includes an interview with Larry Poons in his "barn" studio, combined with at a talk he gave at the New School. Poons is highly charged, articulate, and doesn't give a damn about the New York art world that made him famous in the 1960s for this dot paintings. Shown speaking and in creative action, Poons addresses his own history in this video and tells anecdotes along the way, revealing himself as a notoriously feisty, creative person. Poons is simple but distinguished, forceful, blunt, streetwise, and intelligent.

Sterling Ruby

Landscape Annihilates Consciousness

A celebrated landscape painter hypnotizes through brush stroke and voice.

This title is also available on Sterling Ruby: Interventionist Works 2001-2002.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Joan Mitchell: An Interview

Joan Mitchell was the daughter of physician James Herbert Mitchell and poet Marion Strobel. Mitchell spent much of the ’50s in New York, living on St. Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side, and was deeply involved with the second generation of the New York School. While other members of the second generation moved painting toward cool, formalist images, Mitchell persisted in maintaining the basis of her style in action painting and achieved paintings of great emotional and intellectual intensity. During the 1960s Mitchell moved to France, where she lived until her death in 1992.

Art History

Search