Visual Art

Hollis Sigler 1983: An Interview

Chicago-based painter Hollis Sigler discusses the influences and development of her work, from her early huge paintings of underwater swimmers to the wild, explosive, scratchy, dramatic autobiographical paintings of interiors for which she is known. “The sexuality that exists in the drawings isn’t meant as a focus, except for the feeling part of it. How it’s read by other people I never intended to be important. Some people look at them and wonder if it is a man and a woman or a woman and a woman—what’s the sexuality of these people?

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Hans Haacke: An Interview

Conceptual artist Hans Haacke’s two most notorious works took unsavory Manhattan real-estate dealing as their subject, which triggered the cancellation of his exhibition Real Time Social System at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. With the conscientiousness of an investigative reporter, Haacke continues to scrutinize the rough edges between art and life.

Video Data Bank

Hal Foster: An Interview

Hal Foster is Professor of Modern Art at Princeton University and has written and edited numerous influential books on postmodernism, art, and culture. His books include Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985); The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996); and, as editor, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983); Vision and Visuality (1988); and Richard Serra (2000).

Interview by David Raskin.

A historical interview originally recorded in 2001 and re-edited in 2008.

Video Data Bank

Fred Tomaselli: An Interview

Fred Tomaselli’s mosaics and collages compose patterns and images that suggest ancient global influences. His materials, however, are products of modern consumption, addiction, bodily abuse, and pleasure: pills, nicotine patches, bandages, and the like. The surfaces are coated with a lacquered veneer, making these mundane sources of highs or healing gleam. Interview by James Rondeau. A historical interview originally recorded in 1999 and re-edited in 2007.

Video Data Bank

Filipe Ehrenberg: An Interview

Filipe Ehrenberg is a prominent Mexican artist who has been actively producing interactive political art, installations, and murals for more than 30 years. Also a writer, Ehrenberg has run a small press in Mexico City and has published numerous articles for art journals in the United States.

Interview by Carol Becker.

Tom Kalin

Excerpts from Behold Goliath

In Excerpts from Behold Goliath, Tom Kalin presents four experimental short films inspired by American writer Alfred Chester (1928-71), who in 1964 published a collection of short stories of the same name. Each of Kalin's films, Some Desperate Crime on My Head (2003), The Robots of Sodom (2002), Every Evening Freedom (2002), and Salad Days (2004), devotedly exploits Chester's words with computer voice-synthesizers, and juxtaposes them with music, film and hand-drawn images.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Eric Fischl: An Interview

Eric Fischl's early works were large-scale abstract paintings. While teaching in Nova Scotia, Fischl began to shift from abstraction to smaller, image-oriented paintings, beginning with narrative works that investigated a fisherman's family. By the time Fischl left Halifax the narrative element was gone, but the middle-class melodrama centered on the family matrix remained. In the '80s Fischl's large figurative paintings, aggressive in their confrontation with the viewer, began to receive attention.

Antonio Muntadas

Between the Frames, Chapter 8: Epilogue

Between the Frames is a series that offers a glimpse into contemporary history that is already past, a portrait of personalities and opinions shaping what and how art reaches a public forum.

Epilogue: Between the Frames, Chapter 8

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

Lucy Lippard 1974: An Interview

One of the most influential and up-to-the-moment art critics, Lucy Lippard was among the first writers to recognize the de-materialization at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art. She has written numerous influential books of art history and criticism, including Pop Art (1966), Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (1971), and Six Years, the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973). Interview by Lyn Blumenthal.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1974 and re-edited in 2006.

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.

George Kuchar

Treasures of Creepy Hollow

A collection of literary and visual art is exhibited in the home of a noted author who displays great hospitality to the horrors and kinks of artistic expression. The viewer gets an up-close look at things best left behind the sofas of decent housing.

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.

Video Data Bank

Kori Newkirk: An Interview

Kori Newkirk is currently gaining recognition for his mixed-media paintings and sculpture installations. Many of his paintings are urban landscapes in the form of beaded curtains made with plastic pony beads (typically used as hair ornaments) strung on stands of artificial braid. Newkirk also uses hair pomade to create wall paintings. Evocative in both texture and smell, this sensual material embodies cultural references that are both personal and political. His installations resonate with underlying social implications that speak to issues of self, identity, race, and urbanity.

Blumenthal/Horsfield

Judy Chicago: An Interview

Judy Chicago’s large-scale, collaborative artwork has brought greater prominence to feminist themes and craft arts such as needlework and ceramics. Her most famous work, The Dinner Party (1979), was an enormous collaboration with hundreds of volunteers including ceramicists, china painters and needleworkers. The monumental finished piece has place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women, writing them back into the heroic history usually reserved for men. Earlier in her career, Chicago was part of the Finish Fetish movement within Minimalism.

Visual Art

Search