Interview

Roger Brown’s quirky, stylized paintings were influenced by such disparate sources as comic strips, hypnotic wallpaper patterns, medieval panel paintings, and early works of Magritte. His work is epitomized by a series of claustrophobic urban scenes with their drop-curtain-like gray clouds and cardboard-box apartment buildings, suggesting an amalgamation of boyish enthusiasm for model making and adult despondency.

Robert Snyder’s accomplished films on the lives of artists have received wide recognition, from Gene Youngblood’s praise (“your work is important to humanity for reasons which transcend the medium”) to a 1951 Oscar for his first of two documentary films on Michelangelo. Other biographical subjects include Pablo Casals, Buckminster Fuller, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Claudio Arrau, and Will and Ariel Durant. Snyder’s second film on Michelangelo, long in production, takes its narration from the diaries and writings of the artist himself.

Robert Irwin’s early art followed in the Abstract Expressionist tradition until he shifted his focus onto installation projects that play upon site-specific uses of light. Since the 1980s, he has created large-scale public space designs that use natural light, plants, and garden architecture; his monumental garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, opened in 1997, ranks as perhaps his most famous public project to date. In this interview, he discusses his work as a painter and uses of light in an art historical context.

Robert Colescott paints expressive parodies of Western masterpieces. His work—which has transformed Leutze’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) into George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware (1975), Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) into Eat Dem Taters, (1975), and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) as Les Demoiselles d’Alabama (1985)—deals with stereotypes and the role of blacks in American culture.

Interview by Jim Johnson.

Richard Prince appropriates images from commercial advertising and travelogues for his photographs. Choosing these images for their melodramatic, super-real power, he then isolates their stylistic realism to accentuate its rhetoric. In this portrait/performance, Prince narrates experiences that demonstrate his extreme sensitivity to appearances and context. He relates the event of buying his first car as the imprinting of a certain aesthetic impression.

This title is also available on Crossover Series.

Ree Morton (1936-77) was an American artist working with large-scale mixed media installations. Her mature career was brief—from 1971 to 1977. However, her output and growth during these years was unusually large. This was the first of two interviews Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal conducted with Morton; the second was for the journal Heresies in 1977. “You can see how I collect just junk—over there. I have things around, and then as I work, it’s almost a kind of drawing process.

Rachel Rosenthal is a performance artist and director of the Rachel Rosenthal Company. Her ensemble produces text, voice, and movement-based work rooted in the spectacular of theater. Her work addresses subversion of the natural order through vocal experimentation and by varying the performer’s relation to objects in space. In this performative interview, Matthew Goulish plays word association with Rosenthal, offering 39 names, concepts, and phrases for Rosenthal to address.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1999.