East of Borneo

Link: Allan Sekula interviewed by Edward Dimendberg

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:08:08 +0000

posted by Tom on 02/23/12

Two linked themes have long dominated Allan Sekula’s photographic investigations; Los Angeles and maritime trade. Over the years he has documented the social and political landscape of his hometown, and traveled the world to better understand the ebb and flow of the international trade that gives shape to its economy. In many ways the unveiling of Frank O. Gehry’s Disney Hall, back in 2003, provided Sekula with an unrivaled opportunity to bring the two themes together under the metaphoric sails of the shiny new building on the crest of Bunker Hill, the old residential quarter long ago demolished to make way for corporate tower blocks and cultural jewel boxes. In a precursor to the Pacific Standard Time project, the Getty Trust gave Sekula a grant to mount an exhibition exploring the story surrounding the new concert hall, and in this interview with Ed Dimendberg, Sekula discusses the results.

http://bombsite.com/issues/92/articles/2754

Image: Bas Jan Ader, "Primary Time" (1974)

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 19:53:24 +0000

posted by Stacey on 02/14/12

Still from Bas Jan Ader, Primary Time, 1974. Umatic tape transferred to DVD, silent. 25 min, 47 sec. More images can be found at Patrick Painter Editions.

Text: The Artist as Adolescent by Howard Singerman

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:26:33 +0000

posted by EoB on 02/13/12

In this 1981 essay in REAL LIFE magazine, art historian Howard Singerman proposes "the adolescent [as] the role model for Post Modernism" and assesses the early performance work of artists Chris Burden and Mike Kelley. He writes that Kelley and Burden "are smart, serious and sane and their willfulness and childishness, while it is poignant and energized, is in part a rhetorical and tactical critique of Modernism. Post Modernism is neither a coup nor a cure for art or its superstructure." Source: Howard Singerman, "The Artist as Adolescent," REAL LIFE magazine, 1981. Image: Mike Kelley, The Poltergeist, 1979.

Experiments in Print: A Survey of Los Angeles Artists’ Magazines from 1955 to 1986

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

by Gwen L. Allen

The emergence of Los Angeles as the “second city” of American art, as art historian Barbara Rose once called it, was witnessed by Artforum’s tenure here. Founded in San Francisco in 1962, the magazine focused almost exclusively on West Coast art during its first few years and sought to be an alternative to the mainstream New York–based art press. Yet Artforum’s short stint in Los Angeles, from 1965 to 1967, proved merely a stepping-stone on the way to New York, where it was soon lured by East Coast prestige and advertising revenue.

Image: Jerry Dreva: Hartman-Smith Campaign, 1976

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:11:23 +0000

posted by Stacey on 02/01/12

"Dreva livens up the most boring presidential election in memory with two flyers promoting the candidacy of Mary Hartman for president and Patti Smith for vice-president of the United States. Smith accepts nomination as "president of vice" during Milwaukee concert. Edition 1500" Source: Suzan Carson, "Have You Heard From Dreva?" High Performance vol. 2, no. 2 (1984), p. 17-30.

Image: CalArts dorm with Metamorphokit modular furniture

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:22:23 +0000

posted by Stacey on 01/30/12

CalArts dorm room interior featuring Metamorphokit modular furniture designed by Peter de Bretteville and Toby Cowan (1972).

The Importance of the Work: An interview with Rosamund Felsen

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

by Anne Ayres

In this interview, Rosamund Felsen describes engaging in the nascent 1960s Los Angeles art world; the founding of Gemini GEL with her husband, Sidney, and Stanley and Elyse Grinstein; working in the now-defunct Pasadena Art Museum and that museum’s downfall; starting a gallery to show younger artists making nontraditional forms of art; the financial difficulties of exhibiting Conceptual art; and the importance of art schools in forming a regional art scene.

Video: Charles Gaines - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:23:00 +0000

posted by Stacey on 12/15/11

Charles Gaines interviewed by Fiona Connor, 2011.

http://youtu.be/kunDzXEFwAE

Suzanne Lacy on the Feminist Program at Fresno State and CalArts

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 00:10:04 +0000

by Moira Roth

In this interview Suzanne Lacy offers a thorough discussion of the development of feminism in California and the California art world in the early 1970s. She describes her introduction to Judy Chicago and her subsequent involvement in the Feminist Art Program at Fresno State and later at CalArts, as well as the development of her own performance-based work and the influence of other artists such as Faith Wilding and Allan Kaprow.

Video: Ice Cube Celebrates The Eameses

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:54:16 +0000

posted by Stacey on 12/08/11

In Ice Cube's tribute video to Charles and Ray Eames, he explains "Before I did rap music, I studied architectural drafting and one thing I learned is that you always gotta have a plan. [The Eameses used] off-the-shelf factory windows, prefabricated walls...they were doing mashups before mashups even existed." This is my favorite in the series of celebrity promo videos for Pacific Standard Time that also includes "Jason Schwartzman Celebrates John Baldessari" and "Anthony Kiedis Celebrates Ed Ruscha." You can view them all at pacificstandardtime.org.

http://youtu.be/FRWatw_ZEQI

Video: Mary Kelly - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:04:53 +0000

posted by Gavin on 12/07/11

Mary Kelly - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxKarmQ_T-I

Senga Nengudi's "Ceremony for Freeway Fets" and Other Los Angeles Collaborations

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

by Nick Stillman

Probably like most who are aware of her art, I’m an admirer of Senga Nengudi’s great RSVP series from the late 1970s. But for all the celebration of the RSVP installations as scrappier takes on formlessness in the manner of Louise Bourgeois and Lynda Benglis⎯and heavily filtered through assemblage art’s employment of freighted materials with a past life⎯it isn’t easy to find out much more about Nengudi’s other work.

On Everything: An interview with Terry Allen

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:06:12 +0000

by Paul Karlstrom

Artist and musician Terry Allen describes his friendship with Al Ruppersberg when they were students at Chouinard Art Institute and talks about Ruppersberg’s seminal environmental project, Al’s Café. While still students, he and Ruppersberg operated a storefront gallery, and he remembers late-night visits from Walter Hopps. He also talks about teachers like Emerson Woelffer and the day Marcel Duchamp visited his art history class.

A Grand Melee of Radical Procedures: Miriam Schapiro on CalArts and the Feminist Art Program

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:11:41 +0000

by Ruth Bowman

In this interview, Miriam Schapiro describes her discovery of a new, more engaged way of teaching when she moved to Southern California from New York, and how that was inspired by what she witnessed visiting Judy Chicago’s class at Fresno State. This meeting led to the two artists collaborating on the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, and Schapiro discusses the program and describes some of the student projects, including Womanhouse and Anonymous Was a Woman. She then discusses her return to New York and her role in establishing the feminist art journal Heresies.

Pat Steir on CalArts

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:00:33 +0000

by Judith Olch Richards

In this brief extract from a long discussion of a painting career spanning several decades, Pat Steir describes her first visit to Los Angeles and the four years she subsequently stayed there on and off, both painting and teaching at CalArts.

Link: Interview with Linda Frye Burnham and Stephen Durland, co-founders of High Performance Magazine

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 21:21:04 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

High Performance was founded in Los Angeles in 1978 as a quarterly arts magazine devoted to documenting performance art. Its editorial mission was to provide support and a critical context for new, innovative and unrecognized work in the arts. Linda Frye Burnham served as the magazine's founding editor from 1978 to 1985 and Stephen Durland was the editor from 1986 until the magazine ceased publication in 1997. This interview with Burnham and Durland was conducted by Jenni Sorkin in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, September 16, 2007. This transcript is in the public domain and is hosted by the Art Spaces Archives Project (AS-AP).  

http://www.as-ap.org/content/high-performance-oral-history-interview-linda-frye-burnham-and-stephen-durland-september-1-0

Text: David Askevold: The California Years

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 20:55:49 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

The conceptual artist David Askevold employed video, photography and performance in his allusive explorations of both the natural and the cultural landscape. He used fragmented images and texts, collaborative performance, and chance to create implied narratives of suggestive power. He began teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1968 where he helped shape that school’s conceptually oriented studio program. For his Projects Class he asked a group of New York based artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson, and Joseph Kosuth, to submit projects for his students to carry out. He travelled to Los Angeles in 1976 to teach at UCIrvine, and while there he developed the piece he showed at LAICA the following year. By that time he was also teaching at CalArts, where he met and befriended a younger group of artists like Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler. Askevold and Kelley collaborated on The Poltergeist that was presented by Foundation Art Resources (FAR) in 1979.

Link: An Interview With Dick Higgins, 1971

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:56:53 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

An interview with intermedia artist Dick Higgins, who discusses his views about California Institute of the Arts, artists and his company, Something Else Press, with Richard Friedman and Anthony Gnazzo. This was recorded Sunday, June 13, 1971, at the KPFA studios, after Higgins resigned his post at Cal Arts. He discusses his reasons for leaving and the problems he faced there. He also gives his ideas on what an arts institute should be like, and why he and his press were moving to Vermont. Dick Higgins died in 1998 at the age of 60. 

http://www.archive.org/details/DickHigginsInterview

From Mary Poppins to Easy Rider: Paul Brach on CalArts

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 18:04:43 +0000

by Barry Schwartz

Paul Brach was a painter from New York hired to be the founding dean of the art school at CalArts. In this interview, he discusses his earlier career in New York in the 1950s and early ’60s, as well as his move to California in the late ’60s. He discusses his own inability to make more politically relevant work at a time of social unrest but admires the experiment his wife, Miriam Schapiro, had begun, along with Judy Chicago—the creation of the Feminist Art Program within the school. He also has some interesting thoughts—good and bad—on artists who teach.

A Situation Where Art Might Happen: John Baldessari on CalArts

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:46:42 +0000

by Christopher Knight

"The reason I got into teaching was that it was the closest thing to art I could be doing to make a living; it wasn’t art, and it wasn’t actually teaching. And then I just decided, “Well, listen, it looks like I’m going to be doing this most of my life, and I’m going to have fun doing it,” so I decided to make it as much like art as I could, given the parameters of the teaching situation. I finally think it came to a point like that, that one will loop back on through the other, that my art would be sort of an example or illustrative or a metaphor, for what things I was dealing with in class. And I was going at my class much like I would do art, which was basically trying to be as formed as possible but open to chance."

Video: Diana Zlotnick - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:41:48 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

The collector Diana Zlotnick talks about her education in art through meeting artists like George Herms and Llyn Foulkes, and the social challenges of collecting progressive art in middle class Los Angeles. She also talks about her engagement with the work of a younger generation of artists in the 1970s, especially the work of Chris Burden. This interview was conducted by Orlando Amador Tirado during a meeting of the Experimental Impulse seminar at CalArts, on May 2, 2011. Camera and sound by Larissa Brantner James.

http://youtu.be/PGJciTeESbc

Video: Dorit Cypis - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:39:20 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

In this wide-ranging interview Dorit Cypis talks about the separate, but similar art educations offered by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and CalArts, the Downtown Los Angeles art scene of the mid to late 70s, and her inheritance of, and subsequent decision to develop Foundation for Art Resources (FAR) in the late 70s and into the 80s. She describes projects with artists like Jack Goldstein, Matt Mullican , and Louise Lawler, while talking about the importance of dialogue in her conception of what an artist-run art space can best offer. She ends the interview describing a protest she organized against The New Art Space conference staged by Robert Smith of LAICA in April 1978. This interview was conducted by Thomas Lawson and Aram Moshayedi in the artist’s Los Angeles studio on August 24, 2011. Camera and sound by Larissa Brantner James.

http://youtu.be/KpKdn1VLl-s

Video: Marc Pally - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:15:00 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

Artist Marc Pally discusses the creation of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in the late 70s as an outgrowth of a loose collective of artists in East L.A. who had banded together to receive Federal funding for their work. Pally describes his role in shaping a cutting-edge exhibition and performance space controlled by artists, for artists, and the various ways they sought and found financial support. He also talks about various artist’s projects, including various food pieces by Anne Preston and others made for a fundraising event, and Tony Labat’s durational sunbathing piece. This interview was conducted by Thomas Lawson and Aram Moshayedi in the artist’s Los Angeles studio on August 29, 2011. Camera and sound by Larissa Brantner James.

http://youtu.be/H0MmI5MEvX0

Video: Judy and Stuart Spence - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:12:31 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

Judy and Stuart Spence reminisce about how they both first encountered contemporary art, and the emotional impact it had on their lives. In doing this they tell how they first came across the work of John Baldessari, and how, after a series of misunderstandings, they met him. They also talk about the impact of Allen Ruppersberg’s work on their lives, and also their relationship with Douglas Huebler. This interview was conducted by Thomas Lawson and Aram Moshayedi at the collectors’ Los Angeles home on August 2, 2011. Camera and sound by Larissa Brantner James.

http://youtu.be/WW6Y4GGLaGk

Video: Stanley Grinstein - EXPERIMENTAL IMPULSE Interview (2011)

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 03:06:56 +0000

posted by Tom on 11/19/11

One of the founding partners of Gemini G.E.L., Stanley Grinstein talks about the Los Angeles art world that he and his wife, Elyse, helped nurture and support. He talks about the dysfunction of LACMA, and in particular some of the highs and lows associated with the Art & Technology Exhibition. The Grinstein’s relationship with many significant artists working in the late 60s and throughout the 70s was warm and supportive and here he tells stories about a number of artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Allen Ruppersberg. This interview was conducted by Thomas Lawson and Aram Moshayedi in the Grinstein’s Los Angeles home on July 12, 2011. Camera and sound by Larissa Brantner James.

http://youtu.be/gIsYVa2GLpE