Artist Interviews

Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney - the sculptor, the filmmaker, the conceptual artist - is as much of an enigma as he is visionary.  Barney is notorious for his dislike of talking about his work.  So it goes without saying that interviews are not his favorite thing, either.  I have pieced together a random sampling of excerpts from articles and videos, and I must say, he articulates himself quite well.

Brandon Stosuy interviewed Barney for the Dec/Jan 2007 issue of the Believer:

THE BELIEVER: A friend pointed out to me that, in a way, you make action films about bodily processes. There’s no—or very little—dialogue, but there is a lot going on. Do you view your work as entertaining? How do you think the audience is reacting?

MATTHEW BARNEY: I tend to think of it in organic terms; I tend to think of it as a body. I think a lot of the decisions that are made in regards to duration and balance are about trying to describe an organism that has its own pulse and that has its own behavior. It’s something that keeps me coming back to the filmmaking process. I think working at that scale and working with a combination of media and working with a team of people makes it possible for the form of the project to drive itself at a certain point. Once everybody has put enough into it, the thing starts to have its own needs, its own desire, and its own behavior—and I find that really exciting. I think that can happen in the studio with object-making, but I think it’s often more difficult to get to that point. Ideally, that’s my relationship to the film: It’s not so much about approaching it from the outside and thinking about how it operates, it’s more about being inside the thing and trying to keep up with its demands. Not just in terms of production, but also in terms of the feeling that the film has. It’s difficult to describe.

…

Randy Kennedy interviewed both Barney and Bjork for a 2006 New York Times article:

“…In person, they are sometimes strikingly different. Mr. Barney, 38, is friendly but detached and analytical, exuding a conceptual coolness that is reflected in his films. On a recent Monday, dressed in black pants, black thermal shirt and an Indian Larry motorcycle cap, he seemed most comfortable with a sheaf of diagrams, describing the beehive of activity inside a Brooklyn warehouse. There, he and a dozen assistants were at work with sanders and soldering guns on two huge thermoplastic sculptures, related to the movie, that went on view Friday at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. (A major “Drawing Restraint” exhibition opens on June 23 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.)…”

Video and interview - Document filmed during the preparation of the exhibition “The Cremaster Cycle” at the Astrup Fearney Museum of Modern Art, Oslo:

Art:21 (PBS) episode on Matthew Barney - excerpt:

Robert Smithson

The great artist Robert Smithson, who died in 1973, was most known for his land art, including the Spiral Jetty.  His writings have become an important part of his oeuvre, particularly in describing sites versus non-sites.  I found a series of long interviews between Smithson and Paul Cummings from 1972 - an excerpt is below:

CUMMINGS: I’m curious also, about your interest in religion and theology since it was mentioned in so many kinds of oblique ways on the other side of the tape. Did you have a very strict religious upbringing?

SMITHSON: No. Actually, I was very skeptical even through high school. In high school they thought I was a Communist and an atheist, which I was actually. That problem always seemed to come up. In fact, while I was still going to high school, my friend Danny Donahue and did a joint project, a tape recording for a psychology class. And it was essentially a questioning of the premises of religion drawn mainly from Freud and H.G. Wells.

CUMMINGS: That’s good combination.

SMITHSON: I guess I was always interested in origins and primordial beginnings, you know, the archetypal nature of things. And I guess this was always haunting me all the way until about 1959 and 1960 when I got interested in. Catholicism through T.S. Eliot and through that range of thinking. T.E. Hulme sort of led me to an interest in the Byzantine and in notions of abstraction as a kind of counterpoint to the Humanism of the late Renaissance. I was interested I guess in a kind of iconic imagery that I felt was lurking or buried under a lot of a abstractions at the time.

CUMMINGS: In Pollock.

SMITHSON: Yes. Buried in Pollock and in de Kooning and in Newman, and to that extent still is. My first attempts were in the area of painting. But even in the Artists Gallery show there were paintings carrying titles like White Dinosaur, which I think carries through right now, a similar kind of preoccupation. But I hadn’t developed a conscious idea of abstractions. I was still really wrestling with a kind of anthropomorphic imagery. Then when I when to Rome I was exposed to all the church architecture and I enjoyed all the labyrinthine passageways, the sort of dusty decrepitude of the whole thing. It’s probably a kind of very romantic discovery, that whole world. Prior to the trip to Rome I had just faced the New York art worked and what was developing there. So my trip to Rome was sort of an encounter with European history as a nightmare, you know.

click here to keep reading the interviews

Live Forever - Elizabeth Peyton

This past year Elizabeth Peyton had a large survey of her work at the New Museum in New York.  Her beautiful portraits were stunning in such a large number, and I just came across an audio interview with Peyton with a curator from the museum .  Among other things, they talk about the accessibility of the work -  “Human beings know what human beings are and are infinitely fascinated in human beings.”

Click here to listen to the Elizabeth Peyton interview at the New Museum

Shepard Fairey

The street artist Shepard Fairey was made very famous almost overnight when his image of Obama became the “Hope” picture that everyone associates with the historic campaign.  Currently locked in a battle with the Associated Press, who claims they should receive money because their image influenced the poster, Fairey has become known for questioning authority.

However, many have embraced Fairey as a valid artist, one whose contributions should be recognized.  Currently, Fairey has a retrospective of his work at the ICA in Boston - through August 15, 2009

Watch this great CBS piece about Shepard Fairey, featuring interesting interviews about his work, his scandals, and his life…

Watch CBS Videos Online

Emmet Gowin

The photographer Emmet Gowin, born in Danville, VA in 1941, came to be recognized for his work documenting his family and wife Edith in Virginia in the late 1960s.  Later, he made a series of aerial photographs of scarred land, resulting in a book entitled Changing the Earth.  Gowin now lives in Pennsylvania and teaches at Princeton University.

Gowin is known throughout the photography community as being a great speaker, whether in a casual setting or in a lecture hall.  His words, when talking about his life, or his work, resonate deeply with many artists.

In 1998, Gowin spoke with John Paul Caponigro, saying:

It might take us a lifetime to find out what it is we need to say. Most of us fall into where our feelings are headed while we’re quite young. But the beauty of all this uncertainty would be that in the process of exhausting all the possibilities, we might actually stumble unconsciously into the recognition of something that’s useful to us, that speaks to a deep need within ourselves. At the same time, I like to think that in order for any of us to really do anything new, we can’t know exactly what it is we are doing.

keep reading the Emmet Gowin / John Paul Capogrino interview

Alluvial Fan, Natural Drainage near the Yuma Proving Ground and the Arizona-California border, 1988, toned gelatin silver print, 9 5/8 x 9 9/16 inches

Nancy, Danville, Virginia, 1969, gelatin silver print, 5 1/2 x 7 inches

Edith and Ruth, Danville, Virginia, 1966, gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 inches

Ryan Trecartin on I-BE AREA

The young artist Ryan Trecartin has been the subject of much criticism (both positive and negative) over the past few years.  His videos combine the language of the internet, reality television, screaming antics, and parties - simply naming a few - to create brilliantly confusing narratives.  Whether or not you enjoy the work, Trecartin has most definitely contributed to the video world and forever changed a possible trajectory for artists working with new media

Below is an excerpt from a 2008 interview between Ryan Trecartin and Jennifer Lange from the Wexner Center:

I-Be Area is so dense, visually and as a narrative. In less than 2 hours you manage to construct a story using a huge cast that touches on everything from cloning to virtual identities to life in a mediated world. You also make just as many and as varied visual references. What’s the starting point? Is it one idea that leads to another or is there this grand vision that you set out to realize?

For I-Be Area—I didn’t have the title until the very end—I started the project thinking about the structure of areas and space, both virtual and physical, and how the logics of each inform the other in tension and how ideas of territory change as the idea of space, nature, realness, and time change in a post-industrial, pre-complete technologically integrated world. The first brainstorm for the movie was in celebrating the messy transition of an accelerated crash into a world nature 2.0 that jumps into use before we have the time to ease into it with no culture space to form general understandings of new collective manners and appropriateness or codes of conduct. I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people. It’s like the jumper being jumped before the onset of “jump”—and the whole world is doing that, like tradition out and unmarketable.

I use topics that are universally personal and, so far, I think, timeless to the human race such as family, identity, pregnancy, sexuality, business, money, ownership, trading, sharing, eating, dieting, friendship, back-stabbing,…and then I use them as tools to parallel and describe more in the moment and temporary attitudes and mentalities of transitions in cultural momentum today. I think I do a lot of translating vibes into visually narrative time sculptures that story shuffle questions into abstract plots of now.

click here for the rest of the Ryan Trecartin / Wexner Center article

Peter Halley talks about the 80s

Peter Halley, “Plan B”, Acrylic and roll-a-tex on canvas, 2001

In March of 2003, ArtForum published an interview with Dan Cameron and painter Peter Halley where they discussed Halley’s work in reference to the art of the 80s:

DAN CAMERON: Before we talk about the ’80s, we should talk about talking about the ’80s.

PETER HALLEY: It’s interesting, because the ‘8os were really three different periods: 1980 to 1983 was dominated by the recession and by the emergence of new European painting and neo-expressionism. Then you had the mid-’80s, in which the robust economic recovery spurred the emergence of neo-Conceptualism—which included artists who were showing for the first time, Koons, myself, et cetera, but also marked the first widespread acceptance of artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, who were first shown around 1980. Then you had the end of the ’80s. After about ‘88, the economy was less good, the AIDS crisis emerged, and a more direct form of Conceptualism emerged, which defined itself in terms of a critical opposition.

DC: So, in fact, in that ten-year stretch, we’re talking about three distinct trends.

PH: Yes, it’s interesting to speculate on which version of the decade is going to win. Of course I’m rooting for the more optimistic, glamorous version, namely, the mid-’80s.

keep reading here

Louise Bourgeois

Born in 1911, the artist Louise Bourgeois is most famous for her large spider-like sculptures, as well as her contribution to feminist art.  At 97, Bourgeious is a marvel, still actively working. A documentary of her life was made in 2008 entitled Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.

In 2007, Rachel Cooke from The Guardian interviewed the artist.  Below is a preview:

RC: Do you think women artists have an easier time of it today, particularly in terms of the market?

LB: To survive as an artist is difficult. The market is only one issue, and it follows its own logic. Even though what I do does enter the market, it doesn’t interest me. I am exclusively concerned with the formal qualities of my work. It is about the need and the right to self-expression. There are plenty of good artists that don’t have a market at all. In terms of the market, things have improved for women, but there is still a big disparity.

RC: The main focus of your work, according to some, is the relationship between an entity and its surroundings. But you have also been influenced by human relationships. Can you explain more about this aspect of your work?

LB: My works are portraits of a relationship, and the most important one was my mother. Now, how these feelings for her are brought into my interaction with other people, and how these feelings for her feed into my work is both complex and mysterious. I’m still trying to understand the mechanism.

RC: In the Fifties and Sixties, the art market ignored you a little. Was this frustrating? Was it connected to your sex? How and why did things change?

LB: The Fifties were definitely macho and the Sixties less so. The fact that the market was not interested in my work because I was a woman was a blessing in disguise. It allowed me to work totally undisturbed. Don’t forget that there were plenty of women in a position of power in the art world: women were trustees of museums, the owners of galleries, and many were critics. Surely, the Women’s Movement affected the role of women in the art world. The art world is simply a microcosm of the larger world where men and women compete.

keep reading

John Cliett photographs Lightning Field

Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, completed in 1977, is an arrangement of 400 steel poles located in a large field in New Mexico designed to attract lightning bolts.  In 1978, photographer John Cliett was hired to move to the site and document the piece over the course of the summer.  His photographs, existing as documents of De Maria’s piece, were published in a 1980 issue of ArtForum, and are the most significant and famous images of Lightning Field.

Cliett sits down with Jeffrey Kastner for a 2001 interview in Cabinet magazine.

Below is a portion of the interview:

How did you get involved with De Maria?

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever been to The Lightning Field?

I never have been to The Lightning Field, which I think is part of the reason I’m so intrigued by it. Even though this is a work that was expressly designed to be experienced physically, it exists in the public imagination almost entirely through your images of it.

Well, that’s not necessarily true. Thousands of people have been there.

That’s true, thousands of people have been there, but millions of people haven’t. It’s fair to say at least that your images are an important vehicle through which people have come to know The Lightning Field, even if they’re not the only way.

Let me tell you a story. I’m at The Lightning Field in July of 1979, hired by the Dia Foundation to take pictures. At the time I was what you would call a self-educated advanced amateur. I had met Walter and he hired me to do the research on how The Lightning Field would be photographed. A lot of famous people like Ansel Adams had been approached, but they would not allow the foundation to control the photographs, and I worked myself into the situation as somebody who was willing to agree to the deal with the copyright.

continue here for the full interview

Frida Kahlo’s Diary

While this goes outside the strict definition of what an artist interview is, I was struck by an article about Frida Kahlo’s diary - and how they may answer questions about the artist better than an interview could ever do juctice.

According to an expert on diaristic writing, Cristina Secci, “An intimate diary is so personal that you hide it in the bottom drawer. But Frida didn’t. She read certain parts to her guests and friends, she allowed herself to be photographed with it and even gave away pages to her friends, so they say.”

Full article after the jump