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Sol Lewitt: An Interview

Blumenthal/Horsfield

1977 00:46:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3Video

Description

American, minimalist painter Sol Lewitt (1928-2007) used the grid as a foundation for his many artworks. Seeing himself in the role of architect or composer, Lewitt was most concerned with the concept behind the piece rather than the final product. His geometrical compositions stripped away extraneous information and presented the bare essentials. His prolific two and three-dimensional work ranged from Wall Drawings, over 1100 of which have been executed, to photographs and hundreds of works on paper and extends to structures in the form of towers, pyramids, geometric forms, and progressions. LeWitt helped revolutionize the definition of art in the 1960s with his famous notion that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

In this 1977 interview, describes breakthrough encounters with the work of Edward Muybridge and Jasper Johns that facilitated his transition from a painterly practice to serial sculptures and wall drawings. In the conversation Lewitt emphasizes a flexibility of methods, possibilities, and concepts. He also addresses his relationship with art’s commercial markets. “The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators…I believe that the artist’s involvement in the capitalist structure is disadvantageous to the artist and forces him to produce objects in order to live,” Lewitt says in this interview with Kate Horsfield.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1977 and re-edited in 2003 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.

 

About Blumenthal/Horsfield

Lyn Blumenthal has been recognized as a leading and innovative experimental feminist media artist and teacher. Her multi-disciplinary body of work included videos, sculpture, drawings and critical essays.  She forged new directions and objectives for the field of independent video—not only creating important video pieces, but also envisioning alternative video as a critical voice within the culture, capable of exposing the numerous foibles and blind spots of mainstream media. Committed to the application of feminist theory to video practice, Blumenthal’s early ’80s art tapes investigate issues of women’s identity and sexuality as a crisis of representation. Her tapes weave together stunning visuals and theoretical analysis, most with an incisive humor that tears away the veil from cultural institutions such as television and the family.  Blumenthal was co-director of the Video Data Bank with Kate Horsfield from its founding in 1976 until her death in 1988.

Kate Horsfield received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 and in the same year co-founded the Video Data Bank with the late Lyn Blumenthal. Horsfield was Executive Director of the Video Data Bank from 1988 to 2006.  Horsfield and Blumenthal began their research in contemporary art in video by producing over 200 video interviews with contemporary artists, photographers and critics, including artists such as Lee Krasner, Romare Bearden, Alice Neel, Joseph Beuys, Buckminster Fuller, and Vito Acconci. This group of interviews has become one of the largest and most valuable primary collections of resource material on contemporary artists in the country.  Horsfield has also produced serveral thematic anthologies of video and collaborated with Nereyda Garcia-Ferraz on Ana Medieta: Fuego de Tierra.  From 1980 to 1999, she taught courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Texas, Austin.  After her retirement from Video Data Bank in 2006, Horsfield has split her time between New York, NY and Austin, TX.