Interviews

  • Amalia Ulman

    May 18, 2018 • Amalia Ulman on her new book and internet performances

    Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections, 2014, a durational performance that took place on her Instagram account, featured the artist playing a young ingénue with the kinds of finely calibrated displays of taste we’ve come to recognize as typical of the pageantry of aspiration many people gamely engage in across social media platforms. By virtue of the work's placement on Instagram, the artist garnered attention for being a person she wasn’t, just as the rest of us do all the time. The posts, along with public comments, were published earlier this month in a book by Prestel that also includes

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  • Hermann Nitsch

    May 15, 2018 • Hermann Nitsch talks about his work at Massimo De Carlo in London

    Hermann Nitsch, one of Viennese Actionism’s principal and last-surviving members, has been making his visceral and ceremonious work for decades. His art dives into the heart of human history and experience, plumbing its excruciating depths while celebrating its most ecstatic heights. The artist’s show at Massimo De Carlo in London, which runs through May 25, 2018, outlines the artist’s DAS ORGIEN MYSTERIEN THEATER performances, spanning almost sixty years. Here, Nitsch talks about the London show and the core philosophy of his work.

    MY LONDON SHOW, at Massimo De Carlo, features different types

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  • Gordon Hall

    May 11, 2018 • Gordon Hall discusses The Number of Inches Between Them at the List Center

    Gordon Hall’s The Number of Inches Between Them, 2018, replicates a found sculptural bench and serves as a platform for choreography. It is on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through May 20, 2018. Below, Hall addresses their integrative approach to object making and performance.

    THE SHOW AT THE LIST CENTER, which includes sculptures, a letter, and a performance, is quiet and slow. I think of it both as a space of grief and a space to grieve. The performance features four people in their seventies and eighties, who sit on and use a concrete bench in a variety

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  • Nick Mauss

    May 09, 2018 • Nick Mauss talks about Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art

    For “Transmissions,” his first museum solo exhibition, New York–based artist Nick Mauss juxtaposes his own works with those from public and private collections to reinterpret New York modernism during the first half of the twentieth century. On view through May 14 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the show encompasses dance and visual art. Here, Mauss considers the connections to be found across artistic histories.

    I CONCEIVED OF TRANSMISSIONS as a new work for the museum that is continually in process. I wanted a title that immediately signaled away from received ideas about ballet, to open

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  • Cody Critcheloe

    May 07, 2018 • Cody Critcheloe discusses his new album, O

    Artist Cody Critcheloe—the figurehead behind the music, video, and performance pop group SSION, which he founded in 1999 while he was in high school—is releasing O, his first album in five years, on May 11, 2018 through DERO Arcade. The thirteen-track record features collaborations with artists such as Ariel Pink, Róisín Murphy, and Contessa Stuto, and draws inspiration from musicians including Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, Atari Teenage Riot, and Hole. Here, Critcheloe talks about the making of O and the magic involved in crafting the perfect song.

    THERE WASN’T

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  • BRYAN STEVENSON

    PRINT May 2018 • TALKS ABOUT THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE AND THE LEGACY MUSEUM: FROM ENSLAVEMENT TO MASS INCARCERATION

    AT THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL for Peace and Justice, which overlooks downtown Montgomery, Alabama, more than eight hundred steel monuments hang, bearing the weight of over four thousand lynchings. A few blocks away, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration chronicles the history and continued presence of racial violence in America. Opened in April, these two cultural sites were created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) under the leadership of Bryan Stevenson in order to rewrite, and set right, the narratives regarding the African American experience. EJI was founded in 1989 and

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  • Suzanne Bocanegra

    April 30, 2018 • Suzanne Bocanegra talks about her “Artist Lectures”

    Known for her paintings, costume designs, installations, and solo performances, Suzanne Bocanegra has more recently ventured into the world of theater with her “Artist Lectures,” 2011–16, a series of three meandering, memoiristic essays that are performed by professional actors. On May 5, 2018, all three talks will be presented together at Bard College’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Here, Bocanegra discusses her creative process, which involves gleaning, collaging, and plenty of collaborating. A solo show of her work will open at the Fabric Workshop

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  • Alice Shaw

    April 27, 2018 • Alice Shaw on her current exhibition at Gallery 16 in San Francisco

    With wry wit and deceptive literalness, Alice Shaw has been making work for over twenty-five years that cleverly focuses on a few core issues: doubles, photography, and the hegemonic history of landscape photography in her native Golden State. Her current exhibition at Gallery 16 in San Francisco, “Cloned,” is on view through May 26, 2018. Here, among other things, she reveals some reasons for her current focus on sheep.

    IMAGERY OF FARM ANIMALS seems somewhat unpopular these days. I was watching some Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton films a while back and noticed how much animals used to play

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  • 1000 Words: Bryan Stevenson

    April 27, 2018 • Bryan Stevenson talks about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

    AT THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL for Peace and Justice, which overlooks downtown Montgomery, Alabama, more than eight hundred steel monuments hang, bearing the weight of over four thousand lynchings. A few blocks away, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration chronicles the history and continued presence of racial violence in America. Opened in April, these two cultural sites were created by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) under the leadership of Bryan Stevenson in order to rewrite, and set right, the narratives regarding the African American experience. EJI was founded in 1989 and

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  • Katinka Bock

    April 24, 2018 • Katinka Bock on her exhibition for Glasgow International 2018

    Katinka Bock is a German, Paris-based artist whose debut exhibition in Scotland, “Radio Piombino,” is currently on view at the Common Guild in Glasgow through July 8, 2018. The show is presented as part of Glasgow International 2018, which runs until May 7, 2018. Here, she discusses her approach to materials and sites, as well as the effects of natural processes, such as the weather, on her works.

    THE INSIDE AND THE OUTSIDE, the dry and the wet, the hot and the cold, the visible and the invisible: these oppositional modes have dramatic effects in the world. However, I want to bring my work back

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  • Harmony Hammond

    April 17, 2018 • Harmony Hammond talks about her show at Alexander Gray Associates in New York

    As a cofounder of A.I.R. Gallery in New York and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in the 1970s, Harmony Hammond was at the forefront of a feminist revolution in contemporary art. From her early sculptures that incorporate gendered notions of craft, such as her series of “Floorpieces” and hanging textile sculptures, to her book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000), to her more recent, almost monochromatic paintings, Hammond has expanded the possibilities of what might be considered queer art, often championing the idea that abstraction has the power to signify

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  • Elaine Reichek

    April 10, 2018 • Elaine Reichek talks about her show at the Secession in Vienna

    Everything old is new again, and vice versa. Elaine Reichek is a New York–born and –bred artist who has long engaged with some of the women of ancient Greek myths in her works, often via hand embroidery and digital sewing. Her latest exhibition, “Now If I Had Been Writing This Story,” which takes its title from a poem by Stevie Smith, features ten works from the past eleven years and is on view at the Secession in Vienna from April 13 to June 3, 2018.

    FOR THIS SHOW, I wanted to spotlight part of a long ongoing body of work. It consists of two series: “Ariadne’s Thread” and “Minoan Girls.” They’re

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