Moira Roth

  • print Summer 1981

    “We’ll Think Of A Title After We Meet: L.A./London Lab”

    In the window of Franklin Furnace, Nina Sobel’s video installation catches and projects multiple views of New York City. Inside the gallery, London and Los Angeles women artists have covered the walls and floors with objects, statements and images: English and American potatoes bestrewn with small lights (Rose Finn-Kelcey), an offer of Art-Life Counseling (Linda Montano), messages written in invisible ink (Sonia Knox) and a wall of blooming sprouts (Leslie Labowitz). Performances, video and film showings are presented day after day to the public while in private we talk, argue and theorize about

  • print November 1980

    Visions and Re-Visions: Rosa Luxembourg and the Artist's Mother

    The rejection of the dualism, of the positive-negative polarities between which most of our intellectual training has taken place, has been an undercurrent of feminist thought. And rejecting them, we reaffirm the existence of all those who have through the centuries been negatively defined: not only women, but the “untouchable,” the “unmanly,” the “nonwhite,” the “illiterate”: the “invisible” which forces us to confront the problem of the essential dichotomy: power/powerlessness.
    —Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, 1976

    AT THE BEGINNING OF the feminist movement, the artists, art, issues and audiences

  • print November 1980

    Visions and Re-Visions: A Conversation with Suzanne Lacy

    Moira Roth: How would you describe the evolution of performance art and where do you place yourself in it?

    Suzanne Lacy: I am most familiar with California art, in which one of the major trends is the narrative movement. Artists began creating characters, and the boundaries between the artist’s life and the life of the character were often indistinct—as in the case of Bonnie Sherk, who became a waitress in a doughnut shop but called her employment there a performance. This kind of blurring of boundaries pushed people into exploring their own real-life activities as artists. The narrative art

  • print November 1977

    The Aesthetic of Indifference

    TWO NOVELS SET THE PARAMETERS of national feeling in the McCarthy period (1950–1954) and provide an index to an important new aesthetic impulse in American art during those years. In One Lonely Night (1951), Mickey Spillane’s hero, Mike Hammer, tells a friend: “I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hands. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it. I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of bastards you ever saw and here I am calmer than I’ve ever been and happy too. They were Commies, Lee. They were red sons-of-bitches who should have died long ago.”

    Holden Caulfield,

  • print October 1973

    Robert Smithson on Duchamp, An Interview

    THIS INTERVIEW WAS TAPED shortly before Robert Smithson’s tragic death in an aircraft accident, before the artist had an opportunity to revise or edit his spontaneous views. However, the interview as it stands is characteristic of Smithson’s independence of outlook.

    Why did you say you were interested in talking about Duchamp?

    Well, for one thing, I think in America we have a certain view of art history that comes down to us from the Armory Show, and Duchamp had a lot to do with that history. There is a whole lineage of artists coming out of the Armory Show. And the notion of art history itself