Taking a duvet day… As yesterday’s artist interview with Nick Hornby attracted so many readers (yes, I love my stats machine!), I thought you might like to browse through my artist, sculptor, painter, writer interview archives…
Mark Dion, TROPICAL COLLECTORS, (Bates, Spruce and Wallace), 2009, Various equipment, sand, Courtesy of the artist and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Photography by Colin Davison
Institutional Critique artist Mark Dion, interviewed at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, September 2009
Becky Hunter: You’ve said that it’s part of an artist’s role to ‘go against the grain of the dominant culture’. Do you think artists have an ethical responsibility in that regard?
Mark Dion: I think artists are generally critical people who often don’t come from places that are well represented in the centre, and who have ideas that aren’t well represented in the mainstream. The role of the artist has been to challenge that mainstream and to push things over, to challenge those values. The kind of work that I like is not decorative and affirmative; it’s critical and takes a position. For me, that’s the most vital art. When I look back over the history of art I’m not really interested in someone like Matisse who thought that art should be like a comfortable armchair. I’m more interested in someone like Goya who was able to have a very ambivalent position in relation to power – both being critical and at the same time having a close relationship to it. I think that’s how art functions in a very productive way…
To read more click here.
Marco Maggi, PreColumbian & PostClintonian ( drawing on aluminum foil), photograph by Ding Musa
Drawing and installation artist Marco Maggi, interviewed via email between November 2008 and February 2009
Becky Hunter: “Maggi is not about walking on or picking up, but crouching down and looking at.” I found this quote about you from a 2003 Hosfelt Gallery press release. It caught my eye because it described the way images of your work affect me, drawing me down and in to explore detail, yet it is describing a large scale paper installation, not something shy or tiny. Is this your intention for the work, to draw people into quite an intimate viewing relationship?
Marco Maggi: Scale changes the relationship between the viewer and the work. This reduction of scale intends to humanize the visual arts. Fast viewers see, from far away, a drawing as a blank sheet. Slow viewers can read the same drawing ten times, switching perspectives and conclusions. My main issue is protocol; my main focus is not the object or subject. I focus on the space in between the object and the viewer. I am interested in the particular protocol of manners and pace in the viewing process. [Click on this link to see a letter-size paper carpet and people walking very slowly on the piece, ‘Snow Walking Protocol’] To watch theater, a movie or video, or to hear a symphony, you need to spend a specific amount of time with the work…
To find out more, click here.
Tina Gharavi, Last of the Dictionary Men, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Filmmaker Tina Gharavi, interviewed at her studio in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, March 2008
‘I’m editing The King of South Shields at the moment,’ says film-maker Tina Gharavi, playing me vintage footage of former heavyweight champion of the world and all-round hero Muhammad Ali’s wedding. She’s getting the film ready for screening at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art this month.
Captured with that distinctive Super-8 tint, a crowd of thousands jostle to catch a glimpse of the man himself as he makes his way into the mosque. This is a scene that should be etched into North-East folk-memory, for Ali’s ceremony took place in our very own South Shields mosque. Gharavi is shocked when I tell her that my South Shields born and bred Dad couldn’t remember the big day. ‘What! Was he in a coma or something?’ But part of her mission is to record these fantastic stories that are on the brink of being lost…
To read more, click here.
Interview with Itinerant Poetry Librarian Sara Wingate Gray (Leipzig, Germany), conducted on Skype, Monday 17th November 2008
Sara Wingate Gray, aka the Itinerant Poetry Librarian, describes herself as a writer, artist and independent research scholar. One of the Guardian Newspaper’s Top 15 Inspiring, Creative, Dynamic Women in 2006, she has performed and toured with The Poetry Cubicle, ‘an artist-led, not for profit, interactive performance space and poetry organisation’ since 2002, and in 2006 set up the project entitled ‘The Itinerant Poetry Librarian’. This world-travelling, free poetry library has made it possible for members in San Francisco, USA, and Vancouver BC, Canada, to read poems collected by Sara on her travels in Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Belgium amongst others.
The project also facilitates her research interests, which include library and archive science, live art installation, field recordings and digitization, and the ephemeral nature of sound. In 2007-08 Gray was Visiting Research Scholar at The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives, San Francisco.
Becky Hunter: Can you explain to me how you view these different elements of your practice – writing, art and research? Are the boundaries quite blurred?
Sara Wingate Gray: I started out from quite an early age, writing, being published and being involved in publishing. All the other things that I did alongside my writing – organising events, creating things, happenings and installations – I saw as part of the writing; other people assumed that they were secondary to my writing, but I knew that they went hand in hand. I guess because people couldn’t really put a finger on exactly who I was or what I was doing, it was easier for them just to say, ‘Oh she’s a writer…’ When I put some time into thinking about it and looking back at the things I had done, the things that were almost innate to me, I realised, fuck, actually I am an artist. We’ve shifted the nature of what an artist is: in twentieth century language it’s quite specific to the visual arts, whereas really the concept of an artist referred to someone who was creative, which might encompass all of the art forms – theatre, writing, the visual arts, etc…
RUN Gallery
Interview: RUN Gallery’s Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot speak to Becky Hunter in a pub in North London, 25th November 2008
Becky Hunter: Can you say something about the beginnings of RUN and where the very appropriate name came from?
Hana Noorali: RUN started off with someone that I studied with at Chelsea College of Art, a woman called Rebecca Ribichini. We moved to Berlin for six months, and both of us at the time were feeling really unsure about what were making as artists and decided to make exhibitions… It was very spur of the moment, we got convinced that you didn’t have to pay for space, you could just, kind of, do it, and we did do it. We had a show in our apartment in Berlin; we had a show in someone else’s apartment; we had two shows in this old ballroom… that’s how RUN became peripatetic: we would move around, see what we could get for free, people that we knew. But the story behind the name… We had this slightly drunk conversation about what we would call the project: my surname is Noorali, which begins with an N, and Ribichini begins with an R.
Lynton Talbot: …it could be Ribichini Noorali… or maybe [that’s] a bit too much for a gallery that doesn’t have a gallery.
HN: And then R & N, and then…
LT: RUN seemed the obvious thing. And also that tied in with the fact that we were peripatetic. But also I think at that stage, the idea that you could be a gallery without having a gallery, that became a conversation about having a gallery being more about an ideology or an intention than actually having four walls to hang artwork on. So then the word RUN became fitting in terms of that kind of thing; it worked… But I guess if we’re talking about how it started, the current or more recent incarnation of it: when Hana was doing those kinds of things in Berlin, the Whitechapel contacted her via Myspace or something, saying, ‘this sounds quite exciting, do you want to do this in London, do you want to use the Whitechapel Gallery? Perhaps you could call part of the Whitechapel Gallery RUN Gallery for a night.’
HN: We had a show [in Berlin] that was opening three days before the Whitechapel show and we couldn’t afford the flight back for both of us, so I called Lynton and said, ‘how do you feel about curating a show with RUN?’
Continue reading about RUN
here.
If you’d like to see more interviews do let me know. I have plenty more of them tucked away… Alternatively if you are a brilliant creative drop me a line and we’ll talk!
