Interview

Photographer, theorist, and lecturer Victor Burgin lives and works in London. A Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and former Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness at University of California-Santa Cruz, Burgin’s work explores the semiotics of meaning in visual art. His books include The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (1986), In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (1996) and, as editor, Thinking Photography (1986), Between (1986) and Formations of Fantasy (1986).

Kate Horsfield

Victor Burgin: An Interview

Burgin’s work has established him as both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of still and moving images. After 13 years in the United States, Burgin recently returned to live and work in Britain. Burgin returned to London to take up the prestigious post of Millard Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. In this 2002 interview, Victor Burgin discusses his continuing labor on the politics of representation, from his polemical photography in the '70s to his current theoretical and video work up to 2002’s Listen to Britain.

Jason Simon

Vera

Vera is an assisted self-portrait of consumption. The subject is a woman whose passions and compulsions are of spending and loss, taste and subjectivity.

Video Data Bank

Ute Eskildsen: An Interview

A historical interview originally recorded in 1987.

Jonathan Reiss

A Scenic Harvest from the Kingdom of Pain

Flesh meets robotics in this early video documentation of Survival Research Laboratory’s spectacular exhibitions of collective invention, anti-corporate technology, and satirical mass destruction. In the performances documented here, various animal corpses are integrated into the action as the clawed and spiked machines attack dummies, each other, and, occasionally, the audience. The video begins with the song Stairwell to Hell, an appropriate prologue.

Art Jones

#FFFFFF

The third in a series of interactive CD-ROMs, #FFFFFF is a collage/essay, in several parts, about the reception aesthetics of pixels, and some other things. Included is a photo essay on the male body as used in advertising, an instructional guide on how to gain success as an artist, computer karaoke, and a video interview with DJ Spooky.

Tony Cokes

Black Celebration

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.

Peter Kirby, Grand Canal

Binary Lives: Steina and Woody Vasulka

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.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Betty Parsons: An Interview

Betty Parsons was an influential art dealer in mid to late 20th century New York. She used her gallery as a constant and influential advocate for the abstract avant-garde, renowned for championing new styles and artists well before they received wider recognition or commercial success. Notable examples include abstract expressionist giants Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. And beyond these Parsons continued to pursue new and fresh artistic voices such as Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and Richard Tuttle, among many others.

Long Beach Museum of Art

Betty Asher

Part of the Long Beach Museum of Art’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources' Collectors of the Seventies series, this video focuses on the Betty Asher’s acquisitions. "I started collecting in 1939. I didn’t really start collecting per se," Asher says in this interview with David Ross, Virginia Dwan, and Alanna Heiss. "I bought things, and one morning I woke up and—all of a sudden—people were calling me a collector."

Antonio Muntadas

Benjamin Buchloh: An Interview

Benjamin Buchloh is an influential art critic and historian; he has written extensively on contemporary art for journals and exhibition catalogs, as well as his essay collection Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (2002). This interview with Buchloh is one of several collected by Antonio Muntadas for his series Between the Frames. In this video Buchloh discusses the relationship between people and institutions.

Video Data Bank

Ben Knapp and Andy Hope: An Interview

Media artists Ben Knapp and Andy Hope develop “human-computer interface designs”—or interactive computer installations. Knapp is Director of Technology for Moto Development Group.

Interview by Romi Crawford.

A historical interview originally recorded in 2001.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Barbara Kruger: An Interview

At 19 Kruger worked as a commercial artist designing for Conde Nast. The risky combination of contemporary art 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. Kruger is internationally recognized for her signature black, white, and red photomurals, which have been displayed internationally on billboards and posters as well as in galleries and museums.

Interview

Search