Interview

Painter and multi-media artist Jack Goldstein lived and worked in New York City. His airbrushed paintings of lightning and night skies are shown here accompanied by synthetic music, which the artist also composed. Goldstein committed suicide in 2003.

Interviewed by Jim Johnson.

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.

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker, whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades while expanding its reach and maintaining enthusiastic critical support. She graduated from Pratt in 1962 and in 1964 was included in the show Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York.

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker, whose work has resisted artworld currents and factions for decades while expanding its reach and maintaining enthusiastic critical support. She graduated from Pratt in 1962 and in 1964 was included in the show Drawing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had her first solo exhibition at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York.

Shortly after they arrived in the United States from Prague in 1965, Steina and Woody Vasulka began documenting New York City's underground theater and music scenes with a portapak. Steina has remarked that she learned the craft of camerawork as documentarian of these celebratory, countercultural scenes of the "sexual avant-garde." These excerpts from Participation feature a performance by an anonymous rhythm & blues group led by a young, charismatic singer, a pulsing light show projection at the Fillmore East, and a scene from Off-Broadway drag theater.

French performance artist Orlan uses her own body as a sculptural medium. Since 1990, she has worked on La Reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan, a process of plastic surgeries that she “performs,” making elaborate spectacles with surgeons dressed in sci-fi costumes and broadcasting the operations live via satellite to galleries worldwide. By exploring a total transformation of self, Orlan delves into issues of identity and the malleability of the flesh. She lives and works in Paris, exhibiting and performing internationally.

Nathan Lyons has contributed to the field of photography as a critic, author, curator, educator, and photographer. He has published several books and catalogs, including Photographers on Photography (1966), Photography in the 20th Century (1967), Towards a Social Landscape (1967), Persistence of Vision (1968), and Notations in Passing (1974).

Interview by Alex Sweetman.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1978 and re-edited in 2007.