Interview

From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s varied work has been seminal in the field of conceptual art. Integrating semiology and mass media imagery, he employed such strategies as appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality, and text/image juxtaposition. With an ironic wit, Baldessari’s work considers the gathering, sorting, and reorganizing of information.

Joe Sacco is a cartoonist who has contributed to a wide range of comic magazines including Drawn and Quarterly, Prime Cuts, Real Stuff, Buzzard, and R. Crumb’s Weirdo; he continues to illustrate the semi-regular Painfully Portland cartoon strip for the Willamette Week. He was a recipient of the prestigious American Book Award in 1996 for his work Palestine (1996), which combines techniques of eyewitness reportage with comic strip storytelling.

Joe Gibbons, videomaker, conveys his dry humor through obsessive monologues that suggest a monomaniacal mind spilling forth with fantasies of power, destruction, and death. In his videos, the hand-held camera allows Gibbons's alter ego to surface as he gives vent to tyrannical rants that comically invert social values.

Interview by Kate Horsfield.

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.

Joan Brown was born in 1938 in San Francisco, CA. She attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and received her BFA in painting. Brown has long been recognized as one of the most important artists to emerge from the creative milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 1950s. She created a body of work distinguished by its breadth and personal vision. Brown’s style incorporated abstract expressionism and figurative painting. One of California's pre-eminent figurative artists, she died in October 1990, at the age of 52, in India.

Jim Dine first emerged as an avant-garde artist creating Happenings and performances with Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and others in the early 1960s. Ultimately, he rejected the performances that led to his early success in favor of an introspective search for identity. Using banal objects as subjects for his paintings and prints, Dine displayed a growing sense of self-awareness.

This is a three-part tape shot in 1975, ’76, and ’78 as Winsor was working on three pieces: 50/50, Copper Piece, and Burnt Piece. The rhythms and rituals of her working process as well as her comments on the work are documented. Part III is the only filmic record of the final stage of construction of Burnt Piece.