ny times interview with laurie anderson. i like her. and i really agree with what she says about space. this is exactly what geology does for me. i can look at the ground and feel comforted probably just like she can look at the sky and feel comforted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/magazine/30QUESTIONS.html?_r=2&scp=13&sq=artist+interview&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Since you don't identify with astronauts, what moved you to spend a year at NASA?
I like the scale of space. I like thinking about human beings and what worms we are. We are really worms and specks. I find a certain comfort in that.
Whom is your art intended for?
I think I do my work for some sadder version of myself, a woman who would be sitting in Row K. I am trying to make her laugh.
At 57, do you worry about aging and wrinkles?
Not really. I think some prunish people look pretty good. I am more worried about turning into a schlump than into a prune.
How would you define a schlump?
A schlump is someone who doesn't care about anything and who is just protecting their own turf, which is getting smaller and more meaningless, and then they disappear.
Do you find this to be a schlumpy era compared with the 80's, when you were part of a creatively inspired New York art scene?
I don't miss the 80's. I don't miss anything right now. I have zero time for nostalgia.
i thought this was a good question to end on for an interviewer interviewing an interviewer.
interview with ira glass
How much of a person’s authentic self do you think can be conveyed in an interview? I don’t think you necessarily get to the deepest truth of every person. I don’t think there is a deepest truth, often. But you can get to something revealing.
Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Howard Becker
[This interview was conducted at the Hotel de la Perle in Paris, October 20, 2004. It is published as part of the catalogue of "The Welfare Show," Ariane Beyn, editor, published by Elmgreen & Dragset and a list of others in 2005. Hans Ulrich Obrist is Curator Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and an author and editor, who has published HuO: Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Interviews and Do It.]
HUO The first question I wanted to ask you is about interviews, as I am recording this ‘infinite conversation’ with philosophers and architects and artists – so far 900 hours. When I researched your interviews, I found a few interviews but I found a lot of literature on you and interviews and the use of interviews in your work. So I wanted in the first chapter of this interview to interview you about your interviews! Could tell me a little about how you use interviews in your work and the importance of interviews?
HB I use interviews for lack of something better. Something better would be to see it myself. If I can’t be there, if I want to know about something that happened to you five years ago or yesterday or sometime when I wasn’t there, then I would have to talk to you. What I really want to find out is how people organise themselves to get something done. What I have been thinking about now for many years is how people organise themselves to get a work of art done: everybody who is involved, how they co-operate. The best way to do that is to be there, to watch them do it, to watch the false starts, the mistakes.
HUO To be in the studio?
HB Yes. You see, I am a piano-player originally; my original trade was playing the piano, playing jazz, and I played in bars and nightclubs, in striptease joints, for weddings and bar mitzvahs and company parties, all of that, for many years. So when I was doing that I was there. I saw exactly, as best I could, what happened, who did what, how people responded to various pressures, and that’s what I want to know about when I investigate something. If I can’t be there, then I have to talk to people and say, ‘What happened? I wasn’t here’. So in a piece I did fifty years ago I was interested in how people learned to smoke marijuana. I couldn’t be there when they all learned, so I interviewed them and said to them, ‘How did you first happen to smoke marijuana? Who introduced you to it? What did you think about it and when you first lit up a joint what did you do? And then what happened?’ My favourite style of interviewing is [the style I used when] I did a study of actors and theatre people some years ago. They all claimed that they were very busy and they didn’t have a lot of time to talk to me but they would make an hour. When I sat down with them they almost always asked me, ‘How long is this going to take? I am very busy’. So I said, ‘I’ve only got maybe two questions: the first one is, “How did you get into it?” and, “Then what happened?”’ So they laughed and then they started talking and they talked for maybe two or three hours! I only asked questions to clarify things. So that is what the interviews are for. I don’t think of it as a very complex or complicated thing to do; it’s really just a conversation. You are sitting next to somebody on an aeroplane and you start talking to them: ‘What kind of work do you do? Oh, you are an art curator. How did you get started doing that?’ I mean it’s just that kind of conversation.
HUO Beginnings often, questions about the beginnings.
HB Very often. Or another kind of question that I use a lot is to ask about problems, trouble: ‘You are an art curator. What do you have trouble with as an art curator?’ It’s a question that everyone has an answer for. So it’s not an interview in the survey meaning of interview. I don’t ask, ‘What do you think about this: a, b, c, or d?’ I ask. ‘What happened?’ ‘What did you do?’ Something that is open and that you can respond to in a way that makes sense to you.
this work was one we saw in venice. calle recieved a breakup email from a lover and had all these tons of women respond to the letter. it was bad ass. an archer lady shot at the letter. dancers coreographed dances for it and a female parrot ate a small version of the letter. a mime acted out the letter and aclown read it emphatically.
i liked the way it created a community of women in a way. i want something similar in my thesis show i think.
sophie calle
her collaborators are highlighted in a way, but her pieces are all about her.
"take care of yourself"
http://odeo.com/audio/13831723/view
5 comments:
WoW! lots of good material, I will work backwards... I wish I'd have seen this calle piece (been with you all in general) but it is interesting what you said about the collaborative aspect, and her creating a community of women. When I saw her work at PAM I was saying to my friend, that it was like she was collaborating with herself! Looking at how she was different people responding to the same event as time passed. When you say you would like to create something similar in your thesis show, do you mean in the sense of exposing your experience and creating a collaborative community around that? If you were to invite the viewer to become complicit in responding to your motivations, what might that look like? Or have I completely misunderstood your intenttion?
The Becker and Obrist interview reinforces for me the conversational approach for this interview we all agreed on when we met in your studio. That's great!
There were three other things this interview about intervbiews suggested that seemed worth exploring.
How would you feel about us spending some time with you in your studio while you are working, really witnessing you doing what you do? Would you be able to focus on your work while we were there, and asking you to talk to us while you worked?
Also, The "how do you organize yourself" question is really so simple, yet genius. I don't think this is a question that is best/asked answered directly, but rather a constant subtext in both questions and responses.
And the last thing is "how did it all start!"
And finally the Laurie Anderson interview, She talks about her interest in scale, which you mention also, she expresses the idea that knowing what worms and speck we are is somehow reassuring to her. Does this resonate with you?
Can you explain why the last question "comparing the 80's to now" seems a particularly good one to you?
exposing the experience is going to be important to the final display of the pproject. i want there to be small bits of evidence that bonding can happen over small stuff. hopefully the people involved will have a new expeience in common. that is a small form of community i think. even though each one of sophie calle's collaborators only had to do something with a letter, the end product made it seem like there was this new gang of people forming all with some seemingly trivial thing in common. but with deeper unlisted things too. as a viewer of that i looked to things like that that i had been involved in and felt a part of something larger.
oh and i'm totally cool with you guys hanging in my studio when i work. whittling and talking go well together. er better than welding i guess.
the question about the scale of space that laurie anderson speaks on is totaly up my alley. you might have gotten confused and thought this was here but i put this at the top of the post. "i really agree with what she says about space. this is exactly what geology does for me. i can look at the ground and feel comforted probably just like she can look at the sky and feel comforted."
so i think she's rad. and i just added that other question and her response about the eighties because she says she has no time for nostalgia. that's the true sign of a real hard working artist. i could probably elaborate on this idea a lot more.
i just thought that was cool and apropriate in association with what we read in Who Cares. some artists in that discussion were stuck in the past and kept saying things like "it was so much better back then". boring. deal with it. get in the now.
These interviews are really interesting.
I would be interested in hanging out in your studio and bringing work to work on also. It is something that I have done with some friends. Working in a studio can be really lonely sometimes so having friends join you and work at the same time sometimes seems like cheating. It can be distracting, but it feels good to be able to interact socially while still creating in the usual way. Then you also wouldn't feel so watched. We might pick up on something suddle that might not have been noticed.
So, after our readings, I was considering the idea of documenting all of our interactions and taking parts from our dialogs be that blogging, dinner chat, studio visits and then compile them into a magazine of shelby. This way, it shows the many aspects of Shelby. Since we are still in the idea area, I figured this might be something to process.
deeper unlisted things! I just reread your post about sophie calle and this phrase is such poetry!
It makes me realize that even though this interview is ultimately meant to be of benefit to you (at least that's how I see it) It is also a great opportunity for us/me to hunt! And your words, "deeper unlisted things"makes me want to find, to hunt like a dog, the poetry in your work, your practice. This is of course very selfish, because you my not want/intend what you do to be experienced in a poetic context.
I guess I am asking a question about what you want here, and also opening this all up to a dialog about the agenda of the interviewer!
well, i'm sure it is inevitable with you guys but it seems like the purpose of interviewers and critics and peers in general to shed new light and add different perspectives to work. one needs to break out of their own head sometimes and rather than seeing all that as threatening i like to call it help.
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