Interviews

  • Barbara Hammer

    June 15, 2010 • Barbara Hammer discusses ambitions and Maya Deren

    Barbara Hammer is an experimental filmmaker whose groundbreaking work includes Dyketatics (1974) and Nitrate Kisses (1992). A retrospective of her films will play at MoMA from September 15 through October 11, with a Modern Monday presentation, on October 4, of her little-known work in performance, installation, and photography. Additionally, there are screenings at the museum of her films on June 19 and 23 for the series “Maya Deren and Her Legacy: Experimental Films by Women.” Her autobiography, HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, was recently published by The Feminist Press.

    AFTER

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  • Kathrin Rhomberg

    June 08, 2010 • Kathrin Rhomberg discusses the Sixth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

    Kathrin Rhomberg is the curator of the Sixth Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, which opens in various venues around the city on June 11. Here, she talks about the exhibition, her addition of the nineteenth-century painter Adolph Menzel, and why she’s staging most of the Biennial in Kreuzberg.

    THE BERLIN BIENNIAL is inspired by my observations of the past ten years, not just of the art world but also of the social and political developments in the region where it will occur. One of the dominant tendencies in the art world over the past ten years has been a kind of “new historicism”: a

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  • Damien Hirst and Michael Joo

    June 03, 2010 • Damien Hirst and Michael Joo talk about their first collaborative exhibition

    Damien Hirst and Michael Joo have organized an exhibition of their works at Haunch of Venison’s cavernous Berlin branch, and have titled it “Have You Ever Really Looked at the Sun?” Here, both artists discuss the show, which is on view until August 14, as well as their long friendship.

    “HAVE YOU EVER REALLY LOOKED AT THE SUN?” is derived from a joke about snowmen. One asks another: “Can you smell carrots?” Of course, snowmen can’t smell carrots, not only because they can’t smell but also because it’s the very material their noses are made of. So in response to that, we’re asking this question

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  • Larissa Harris

    May 27, 2010 • Larissa Harris discusses “The Curse of Bigness”

    Larissa Harris is a curator at the Queens Museum of Art and has recently organized “The Curse of Bigness” with the curatorial counsel of Jodie Vicenta Jacobson. Here, Harris discusses a few of the projects in the exhibition, which closes October 3.

    THE QUEENS MUSEUM HAS a lot of individual character and, in a city full of contemporary art institutions, my impulse is to do something that could only be done here. In these projects, the artists and I attempt to embrace certain facts about the place: the play with scale, embodied in the Panorama of the City of New York, the 900,000-building scale

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  • Dominic Nurre

    May 22, 2010 • Dominic Nurre discusses his work in “Greater New York”

    Dominic Nurre is a Brooklyn-based artist participating in the third iteration of MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York.” Here, he discusses Objection Room, his contribution to the exhibition, which opens on Sunday, May 23. Nurre will perform The Funambulist on August 8, walking from the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn to the museum in Queens while carrying a three-foot metal pipe.

    A YEAR AGO, I went with my father and a few of his buddies to Zimbabwe for a big game hunt. I’m not a hunter—I went just to document. I wanted to experience the culture of hunting, the searching and stalking of animals.

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  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul

    May 19, 2010 • Apichatpong Weerasethakul discusses his latest exhibition

    Apichatpong Weerasethakul is an acclaimed Thai filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer whose films include Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) and Tropical Malady (2004). His latest video installation, Phantoms of Nabua, is on view at the BFI Gallery in London until July 3, and his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives recently won the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Here, he discusses both works as well as recent political unrest in Bangkok.

    PHANTOMS OF NABUA is a very different undertaking than my film at Cannes. The idea behind my large-scale project Primitive, of which

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  • Phil Chang

    May 13, 2010 • Phil Chang talks about Four over One

    Los Angeles-based artist Phil Chang considers the recession by imaging economy and obsolescence in his first artist’s book, Four over One, published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A launch party for the project will be held at Printed Matter on Saturday, May 15, 5–7 PM; Art Catalogues at LACMA will host a reception on Sunday, May 23, 4–6 PM.

    THIS PROJECT STARTED IN 2007. I was very interested in what was happening in the world of economics––namely the recession and the jolting destabilization of our collective notion of something as seemingly basic as a house. I wondered whether I could

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  • Mira Schor

    May 09, 2010 • Mira Schor talks about her latest book and new blog

    Recognized for her contributions to painting theory and to feminist art history, the painter and writer Mira Schor has a new book available from Duke University Press. Here she discusses A Decade of Negative Thinking and her new blog, A Year of Positive Thinking.

    AM I A NEGATIVE THINKER, AS THE TITLE OF MY BOOK SUGGESTS? I don’t think so, although it may seem that way because I speak out when I suspect that other people are just drinking the Kool-Aid. It’s necessary to dig beneath press-release culture, and not just take the promotional sound bite as gospel and let it go viral into art discourse.

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  • Peter Eleey

    May 05, 2010 • Peter Eleey discusses “The Talent Show”

    Peter Eleey has worked as a curator for Creative Time and, since 2007, at the Walker Art Center. Recently Eleey was appointed the curator of MoMA PS1, a position he’ll begin on July 1. Here he discusses his most recent exhibition at the Walker, “The Talent Show,” which runs until August 15.

    I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT GRACIELA CARNEVALE’S PIECE a number of years ago in Lucy R. Lippard’s book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, where she mentions the 1968 action in Rosario, Argentina. It is also described in Mari Carmen Ramírez’s writings, and Claire Bishop included

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  • Cai Guo-Qiang

    May 03, 2010 • Cai Guo-Qiang discusses “Peasant Da Vincis”

    Concurrent with the opening of the 2010 Shanghai Expo, Cai Guo-Qiang has invited more than fifty rural engineers to display their homemade submarines, airplanes, and various robotic creations in “Peasant Da Vincis,” the inaugural exhibition of the Rockbund Art Museum. Cai began collecting peasant-made works in 2005 and has traveled extensively through the countryside to document these objects and their creators, whose stories will also be on display. The show runs May 4–July 25.

    ALL OF THE PEASANTS will come for the opening reception of this show, including Wu Shuzai, who made a wooden helicopter;

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  • 1000 WORDS: MONIKA SOSNOWSKA

    PRINT May 2010 • Michał Woliński

    IMAGINE WALKING THROUGH an exhibition in zigzags, not because you have to slalom between freely arranged objects or chaotically wandering viewers, but because the space itself dictates a meandering path. The only thing you can do is move alongside walls that are at various angles to one another, with recesses and niches here and there. You make some sharp turns, some gentle ones, as if you were riding a roller coaster, only horizontally and through art history. Pictures appear around corners, the eye gliding over successive surfaces, successive narratives that converge, forming transgenerational

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  • Harmony Korine

    April 27, 2010 • Harmony Korine talks about Trash Humpers

    After runs at the Toronto International, New York, and SXSW film festivals, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers opens in New York on May 7 at Cinema Village and at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles on May 14. Korine directed, wrote, and also stars in the film.

    THERE ARE THESE REALLY LARGE TRASH CANS in the alleyway behind my house and they have lights shining on them, like they’re in a play or something. While walking my dog, I would often stare at them and they started to take on a human form, a kind of human identity. They looked like they’d been kicked around, shoved, or punched in the gut, like in

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