Grad Seminar: Talk, Talk, Talk

This graduate seminar takes as its subject matter
the art of the interview and the interview of
the artist. Interviews are both a tool of artists
in contextualizing their work and can be the
artwork itself. By their nature, they are the
realm of discourse and, as such, a place where
ideas
can be developed and drawn out. This class will
start with the history of interview as form and
its
use in art. For practitioners as diverse as Allen
Funt, Studs Terkel, Paul Thek, Dick Cavett,
Andy Warhol, Terry Gross, Fischli and Weiss, Hans
Ulrich Obrist, Laura Poitras, Frances Stark,
and Erroll Morris, the interview has been part
information and part performance; a way of
delivering texts and a way of undermining them. In
the conceptualist era of the late sixties,
interviews became a way of unearthing the textual.
Magazines like Avalanche, co-founded by
Willoughby Sharp and Lisa Bear, and Andy Warhol's
Interview were efforts to create a new form.
In anthropology, experimental film, and other
mediums, the push and pull between disclosure and
performance makes the interview one of the more
dynamic and compelling ways of challenging the
authority of the camera and the hierarchy of
speakers and listeners, writers and readers. With
this theoretical understanding of the interview in
place, we will visit some of LA's most prominent
artists in their work space in order to conduct
interviews. These interviews will be created and
developed by the students in conjunction with the
subject, forming a working relationship that
will last long after the interview is over. This
is an exclusive opportunity to see a variety of
artists' studios and get an inside look at their
practice as well as developing a new approach to
text.