After the fact, but...

I know class is over, but i was looking around for information on Rauschenberg and found this. It relates to our discussion on Rauschenberg's homosexuality, the show that he did not support, and even references to interview we read.

Romare Bearden Interview

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcp1pW8I_tI

This is an excellent interview with Romare Bearden. Check the youtube link above. It's about an hour long but from my standpoint Bearden's answers are really interesting. Tell me what you think.

Duane Deterville

gene simmons/terry gross

the interview mentioned in class

Some Links

this is meatpaper
artforum.com / home
Artkrush | Twice-monthly News, Reviews, and Features
thestarkguide
ARCADE
Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net
gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine
les presses du réel – Permanent Food magazine
The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
nthWord - Adjust your Thinking.
plastic antinomy
WM | whitehot magazine of contemporary art

On ethnography, ethics..

Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance

Brilliant New Interview Tips, News, More!

In discussion with Mika Hannula, a Social Practice visitor, we mentioned that many of us were conducting interviews.
The following suggestions were posed:
1. Create 3 minutes of silence somewhere within the interview. A great deal can be unveiled with this.
2. Ask the same question several times, phrased differently. Oftentimes, someone thinks the answer is complete. To delve below the surface, re-ask the same question differently, and you will be surprised by what you get.


Here is the interview release form I used for my faculty interview.

My peer interview was distributed, by said peer, here. I warn, it is not for the faint of heart.

unethical editing?

This super-interesting article, discusses the ethical issues of  editing,  in the interviews of  Deborah Solomon of the New York Times.

Questions for the Questioner

Interview Release Agreement



I ______________________________ grant ______________________ permission to use this material for publication/scholarship/educational or artistic purposes.


I_____________________________ agree to submit the transcription of this interview to ¬¬¬¬¬_________ ____________________ for review and to make factual corrections.


Date of Agreement _______________


Signed __________________________________________________, interviewer

Signed__________________________________________________ , interviewee

Contact Information¬¬__________________


Stipulations:

TIPS

Based on a presentation by Neal Conan, host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation" at the National Conference on Public Radio Talk Shows held April, 2002 at The Poynter Institute.
DIFFERENT WAYS TO ASK QUESTIONS

Keep your questions short. Do not lard your questions ahead of time with facts. Most of us learned to do interviews when we were reporters and our questions rarely, if ever, made it on the air: "Mr. Mayor, considering the fact that councilman blah blah blah says blah blah blah and the other councilman says blah blah blah and you lost the vote blah blah blah…." Those kinds of questions never made it on the air. If you go back to your tape cuts you'll figure out that the questions that did make it on the air are questions like, "No!" "Go on!" "You're kidding!" These are not exactly models of articulate Socratic dialogue, but they keep the conversation moving. And that is the critical point of what we're trying to do in interviews, so keep those questions short.

Ask only one question at a time. I do this all the time and it drives me crazy; I say, "Why did you do it, and what do you think is going to happen next?" That gives the guest the option of answering neither or either. If they're any good at all at avoiding questions, by the time they've finished their answer, you've forgotten the other question.

Do you have prewritten questions? Absolutely you have prewritten questions. The more questions you have written down however, the less you generally use them. It's a little like underlining. The more questions I have for the interview, the fewer I use. The ones I do tend to use are questions one and two, as I'm trying to get everything stabilized in front of me in the chaos that is call-in radio. There is a psychological comfort, of course, seeing a long list of questions there, in case you go empty.

Quotes are very handy things to pull out during an interview. "You said something interesting on that subject in your book, and here it is."

Have an example tucked in your back pocket so you can say, "Well what about that program over on the West Side?" The fact of the matter is, most professional interviewers know the answer to the question before they ask it. You should. So if you're asking for examples, you should probably know one.

Another good question when people start talking in the abstract, is "Give me a for instance." Concrete examples. These help the listeners establish what was an abstract idea as concrete.

You've got to be able to ask those difficult and awkward questions. For example, if any of us have Stephen Ambrose on a show right now, you can't ask him anything about his new book until he talks about plagiarism. You simply can't. That's the expectation of yourself, your audience, everybody else. It's his expectation too. He knows he's not going to get away with not talking about it. That has to be a subject. It has to be broached, and you just have to be open and honest about it.

SHAPING A NARRATIVE STRUCTURE FOR INTERVIEWS AND YOUR SHOW

Think as much as you can about the interview that you're going to do. This sounds elementary, but as you're coming to work, as you're driving, as you're eating breakfast and drinking coffee in the morning, think about how you want to write the intro, about the structure of the interview, and how you're going to get to that. The fact of the matter is that's extremely helpful.

Try to anticipate how to navigate from one idea to the next. This is often difficult. We tend to write down 15 questions and they aren't necessarily in a narrative order. The thing we have to remember about our programs and the thing we have to remember about our interviews is that they are narratives. We are trying to tell stories. They have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There should be a structure there. Thought A leads to thought B leads to thought C. Now there are reasons why you don't do these things in chronological order sometimes, but my rule of thumb for structuring any kind of a story has always been that you can depart from chronological order, but have a reason.

Chronological order is the most fundamental human storytelling form. The fundamental question of the story is, "And then?" It's our job to keep that tension going, so people will want to find out what happened next.

Cause and effect is another obvious way to structure, and it's another function of chronology. I can't over-emphasize this idea, and it's such an easy concept for the listener to grasp; this happened, then that happened.

Artists/curators who use interviews in their work:

Tirza
Richard Fung, My Mother’s Place (1990); the artist calls this an exercise in “autoethnography.” He interviews his mother about her life and introduces home movies and snapshots as “evidence” of their family history; in voice-over he explains that these images reflect the way his family wished to live more than any lived reality.

Duane
Vanessa Beecroft—casting call, interview part of process of assembling her performance pieces. The film The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins follows Vanessa Beecroft’s quest to adopt orphaned twins, Madit and Mongor Akot, and how this interfaces with her art practices. Interviews with Beecroft who herself employs interviews in the work are figured centrally.

Nicole
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Curator who relies on interviews in his curatorial practice. “The point of departure for all of my work is conversations with artists.” He has conducted over 300 interviews since 1993. His book Interviews is a compendium containing many of these. The uncontextualized documents are an important component of the catalogs accompanying his exhibitions. He never writes curatorial essays. He has curated several live round-the-clock interview marathons and incorporates interviews in his “lectures” by calling artists on a speaker phone.

Rio
Compares the experience of interviewing with the process of portrait photography. This spurred thoughts about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who collected a series of phrases and dates that “add up” to a portrait of the subject (who is invited to supplement the composite with additional information). FGT’s Self-Portrait (1993) unfolds as a list of dates with significant people, events, spectacles, news items, pets, itineraries, encounters, glimpses of poignant objects and environments associated.

Rebecca
Anna Deavere Smith, responds to Crown Heights riots, reenacts Al Sharpton discussing James Brown’s hair and an Hasidic Jew about the significance of conventions of women’s coiffure, among other interview subjects, in Fires in the Mirror (1993).

Comment by TL
Oral history as the basis of creative performance practice, other egs:
• E. Patrick Johnson
• Laremie Project

Kaif
Sophie Ernst interviews people in Pakistan about how they perceive Allah, death, spirituality. Projects images of her interview subjects on the ground of classical sculpture such as The Dying Gaul. In another project, she projects images of people with whom she has questioned about their ideas of what it is like in America. In Jannat (2006), she interviews men about their concept of heaven and creates a multimedia environment with animated and sculptural components.

Jade
Jim Goldberg, uses interviews in works as Raised by Wolves, picture and text narratives of street life in LA and San Francisco. Hospice and Nursing Home in conjunction with Nan Goldin.

Nicola
Sophie Calle, French conceptual artist creates projects that are loosely based on interviews. One key example: Address Book (1983)departs from a found address book, which she xeroxes and returns. She then calls the people whose numbers she has culled and asks them what they think of the owner of the address book.

Gabrielle
Errol Morris, director of Pet Cemetary. Fog of War is another example of his work in which, typically, unnarated stories are told purely through interviews. The interrogator is hardly heard or seen in the film.

Michael
Josh Greene, Consultation; this piece revolves around his conversation (consultation) with a chimp about career options. Adopts filmic conventions such as the close-up and shot-reverse-shot that elicit viewer identification with one or more participants, establishing the power dynamics in an exchange. Another eg is the project unlicensed therapy which reproduces the therapeutic dialog.

Courtney
Beatriz Santiago Munoz video documents three locations in the East Bay, conducting interviews with inhabitants, then stages reenactments of these exchanges in an attempt to construct a collage-like history of anarchy in the Bay Area. Her own voice is rarely heard. Her subjects sometimes perform their own stories and sometimes swap with other participants, decentering the origin points of these urban stories.

Rory
Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson East Coast West Coast (1969) collaborative experiment in video in which Holt and Smithson impersonate the subjects of an artist-interviewer exchange.

Jennine [absent, but participating electronically]
Sophie Calle’s work has manifested in various ways, the interview being one form of inquiry that she has returned to several times. A recent piece, from 2007, entitled Take Care of Yourself was inspired by a break-up letter from a boyfriend. The title of the work was drawn from the letter’s closing sentence. She requested responses to the letter from various professionals, who analyzed or responded to the letter in various ways. The resulting texts were shown in juxtaposition with photographs of their writers. The project also included video of several performers acting the letter out. Calle defines this work as an “investigation” saying “The idea came to me to develop an investigation through various women's professional vocabulary. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/141769.html”
Although it doesn’t follow a traditional interview format it seems to me to fit into the broad definition on interview “An interview is a conversation between two or more people (the interviewer and the interviewee) where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interview. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interview” What results is a composite response that reflects on love and loss.
In an earlier work Calle interviewed random people on the street eliciting recollections of monuments that were now destroyed - The Detachment (1996)
Another early work, Art Museum (1995), consisted of descriptions of several paintings which had been stolen. For this project she interviewed various museum staff members.

Crossfire

This is the John Stewart-Crossfire interview.  It is quite a scathing critique of the media, the news interview format, and responsibility. 

If so, then, why?