Text by Robert Storr, Senior Curator, Museum of Modern Art

In the collective memory of each creative generation there exists a distinctive icon of the Artist. A product of student "first impressions," most often such archetypes are, in their embryonic form, the composite portrait of vanguard figures of the day. Sometimes, however, they derive from a singular image. For many who went to school in the 1950s and 60s, a dervish-like Jackson Pollock attacking his canvas was "Action Painting" incarnate. Those pictures, and the febrile energy that they evoked, indelibly marked the consciousnesses of all who saw them. As the art of the past decade has taught, however, the mythic aura of Pollack's stance, and the many (although sometimes fertile) misconceptions regarding his persona and studio practice that have emanated from these pictures, are in truth more a reflection of the medium than of the "facts." More than Pollock's agon, their content is a matter of Hans Namuth's theatrical use of "decisive moment photography" to personify the vigor of a new avant-garde.

The image of the artist carried by many of us who went to school in the 1970s is radically different, not least for the technology by which it was first transmitted and the conscious demystification of the bohemian ideal it embodies. Projected in our minds is the spectre of a large head. Whether specific and detailed or the flickering average of several countenances overlaid like William Wegman's genealogical self-portrait, the picture we conjure up moves, pauses, thinks, confides, and jokes. Frequently out of focus, often grainy, it is an image as deliberately un-dramatic as Namuth's is heroic, as intimate as his seems romantically remote, as articulate as his is mute. A genie that escaped from the "tube," this restive "talking-head" is the creation of the Video Data Bank.

My first encounter with the Data Bank interviews was at the Art Institute of Chicago, where, in a denuded utility room, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, Data Bank's founders and at the time sole representatives, screened tapes during lunch hour to a random and self-selected audience of painters, sculptors, media artists and lost souls. As it happened, the voice I first overheard from the corridor outside, and which drew me into this circle, was that of Louise Bourgeois. Familiar to me only as a name credited to a large marble piece I had once seen at the museum, Bourgeois was otherwise completely unknown to meÑtoo famous to be considered a part of the world we as students inhabited, yet still not famous enough for us to have ever been taught about her work or its importance. It was a limbo, I subsequently learned, that harbored more artists of importance to my development. Meanwhile, there in the dark safety of a room permeated by the sweet stink of adjacent painting studios, Bourgeois spoke in the most personal and at times breathtakingly frank way about her life, her motivations and her struggles. It was a revelation to me, as were many of the other tapes I watched during the next months.

To understand the impact of these tapes on students of my generation and our feeling that the vast gap separating us from the art world had suddenly been reduced to near zero, it's crucial to appreciate how different the Data Bank material was and still is from the common run of "interviews" available to the public. Most of the latter are found in magazines and on educational TV, which, of course, guarantees that the artists featured address their imagined interlocutors as laymen, if not an audience to be entertained, teased, and otherwise seduced. By contrast, the circumstances inscribed in the Data Bank interviews are those of a direct exchange between the artist-speaker and an off-camera artist-interviewer, over whose shoulders one looks. In short, it is a dialogue among peers, in which the subject understands that their usual shtick is neither needed nor called for, and the listener knows that deference is not required.

Serving as that listener's unobtrusive proxy, while gently pressing for information of particular concern to other artists, Lyn and Kate's achievement is inextricably connected to the simplicity of their format and their paradoxically warm use of a cool medium. Concentrating in each tape on a single individual, the choice of those included in the series, and the implicit dialectic established among their separate aesthetic positions, reflects a clear and comprehensive agenda basic to the value of the archive as an artistic and social document. Following their own instincts, curiosity and doubts, Lyn and Kate spoke for a generation whose frustration with the notion of an aesthetic mainstream led to the rediscovery of the vitality of the so-called margins of the art world, a process that in the end helped to upset the institutional hierarchies of the 1960s and 70s. Specifically, this meant that special attention was paid to women, to the older artists working in the shadows of their more lionized contemporaries, to artists of "eccentric" sensibilities, and to younger artists who had chosen new materials, new technologies, and new situations in which to do their work. Moving backward and forward in time across disciplines, the catalog entries of the early interviews plainly manifest this will to see art in terms of its possibilities rather than in narrowly stylistic or art historically deterministic ways. On that list along with Bourgeois (who fits almost all of these misfit-categories), one also finds Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin, Alice Neel, Robert Irwin, Hans Haacke, Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt, Betty Parsons, Meredith Monk, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Laurie Anderson, and Joseph BeuysÑall of whom, though well known now, were by no means so when Lyn and Kate first sought them out.

Consonant with the process and the real-time approach of much post-minimal art of the 1970s, Data Bank's early tapes were shot one-to-one. An expression of their aesthetic moment, as well as the complete account of a sequence of lived moments, little editing was doneÑundertaken only to eliminate obvious repetition, further diminish the role of the interviewer, and narrow the distance between audience and subject. Refusing, beyond that, to stage-manage the conversations, or adjust their actual and often erratic flow, Data Bank's discreetly naturalistic methods allowed one to follow the pace of each artist's thinking, rather than simply presenting the viewer with the contents of that artist's mind, artificially packaged as a seamlessly joined series of sound bites or pithy remarks. One minute halting, the next racing full tilt, the variousness of an artist's imaginative rhythms is one of the things non-artists understand least, yet artists most want to know about one another. At first difficult to grasp for those in the habit of being fed facts stripped of any context, Data Bank tapes taught a lesson in paying attention, while to an ear already attuned to the silences of John Cage, they made immediate and perfect formal sense.

The very awkwardness of the Data Bank style underscored the authenticity of its project and, as much as anything, that frankness was an extension of Lyn's anarchic temperament. No split existed for her between survival work (Data Bank was, after all, a job) and artwork. The same resistance to convention, even "vanguard" convention, can be found in everything she did, but perhaps most of all in the tapes' visual syntax. Sometimes jarring, even annoying, the make-it-up-as-you-go-along mannerisms of the tapes are in the end completely winning. Those mannerisms could be revealingly funny too. The speech of "talking heads," for example, is not quite accurateÑor, at any rate, much of the time it was not. Instead, think of the muttering nostrils, laughing earlobes, expostulating stubble, and other off-grid Chuck Close-ups. Lyn's genius was to break the frontal and essentially static format of talk show videography in order to explore the simultaneity of optical, auditory and even tactile events that take place during a conversation. Allowing the camera eye to wander while the camera ear closely followed speech, she detailed the separate states of concentration that go into any prolonged exchange. Thus, while we listen attentively not merely to what is uttered but to all ambient sounds, we are equally free to inspect the physiognomy of the speaker at will and without embarrassment.

This sympathetic demystification of presence created an intimacy TV journalism seldom, if ever, risks. In time, of course, the mass media absorbs all things. It is curious now to watch telephone ads in which Lyn's chaotically inquisitive framing has been appropriated to hustle evermore integrated information systems when, in fact, the believable quirkiness of her takes had all along argued for freedom and a hopeful deconstruction of enforced social uniformity. Aware, before she died, of the commercial expropriation of her ideas, Lyn took a certain entrepreneurial pride in having affected mainstream media. Had she lived, however, one can be certain she would not only have found new techniques, but, in all likelihood, would have subverted the broadcast use of the very innovations for which she was partly responsible.

In the long run, perhaps, it is impossible to beat Hollywood and Madison Avenue at their own game; but, as the art of the late 1970s and early 80s proved, one can at least lay siege to them. Of late, even the will to do that seems to have weakened. In the art world publicity is all, and in publicity the look of "art" has the ultimate cachet. Now, as the audience for aesthetic "infotainment" swells, and the video programs proliferate and strive for the look of network TV, the Data Bank seems, more than ever, important as a model. That model was based on collaboration: between Lyn and Kate its two principals, first of all; then between them and the artists they approached for interviews; and finally between individual artists attempting to make sense of their commitment, and the viewers attempting to make sense of theirs. The test of the Data Bank's enduring relevance is the fact that after an avalanche of hype, and a decade of changes in the structure of art production, the community described by this manifold collaboration continues to survive, not only in archival permanence but as vital image. That image, imprinted in the minds of many who matured during the last decade, is a singular portrait of the ArtistÑplural.

— Robert Storr is an artist, critic and writer living in New York City. He is currently Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art