Blithe Riley Lecture

My favorite part of Blithe Riley's lecture was the interview she showed with Lee Krasner. For one thing, it was cool to connect a face and a voice with a name and images that I've studied in art history classes. It was almost like being able to ask Lee Krasner those questions myself, with her so big and so direct up on that screen. It seems like the interview project that Blithe has been working on with the Video Data Bank is a really valuable resource for artists and art historians.

Then, the link between that work and the Belief Objects project where an interview is the central element of the "art" as it's been going thus far, makes sense. I wondered whether the two women who started the Video Data Bank had any training in how to interview, and what exactly Blithe has learned from remastering and editing all those videos. I also found Blithe's brief discussion of her collaborator's patented interview technique for advertising execs fascinating. I wodner whether the fact that the collaborator is doing an interview project separately form her company is.. legal.

I think it's interesting how both Blithe and Siobahn are using the interview format as a way of producing art... it's very much like the Critical Art Ensemble's absorption of scientific ways of knowing in their artworks. And other contempoary art folks, too, I guess.. it's a melding of the disciplines and a collapse of disicplinary boundaries. I was having a ocnversation the other day with a friend about somehting that Jason Watson said in his contemporary printmaking lecture about some artists being jacks of all trades and masters of none. While, on the one hand, I do want to learn a lot of new skills (as wide a variety of skills as possible) I do think that the expansion of the definition of art promotes that kind of broadness wihtout depth. But really, developing a broad range of skills are what art school (esp. liberal arts school) is about. I guess if we want to expand the definition of art to include advertising, sociology, and the natural sciences, then we have to develop a new strategy for obtaining knowledge and information.. we can't just expect ourselves to know everything about a certain topic.. hence: Blithe's collaboration with another artist on the Belief Objects project.