CALL FOR PAPERS

The Artist Interview: contents and contentions in oral history/art history

Session at 32nd AAH Annual Conference

5-7 April 2006
Leeds University

Conference organiser : Fred Orton

Chairs: Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute), Rob Perks (National Sound
Archive,) and Bill Furlong (Audio Arts)

Deadline for papers: 11th November 2005

With more and more work being carried out on contemporary art and on artists
who were active after 1950, the artist interview has increasingly become an
important source of information for scholars. The artist interview can be
accessed both as text and as recording. There is a growing literature of
material in transcribed and published form: from Katharine Kuh's The
Artist's Voice (1960), to Patricia Norvell's Recording Conceptual Art
(2001), Kersten Mey's Sculpsit: Contemporary Artists on Sculpture and Beyond
(2001), Sandy Nairne's Art Now: Interviews with Modern Artists (2002) and
Judith Olch Richards' Inside the Studio (2004). There is also a growing
number of archives of original recordings, accumulated through the important
work done in the last few decades by organisations such as 'Audio Arts'
(est. 1973) and the 'Artists' Lives' project (est. 1990) at the National
Sound Archive.

Since the introduction of the Phillips audio cassette in the early 1960s,
the widespread availability of recording equipment (and then other digital
communications technologies later on) has meant that scholars - and anyone
with an interest in art, for that matter - can not only listen to recordings
(and read transcripts), but also easily conduct such interviews themselves.
This has also meant that artists too have been more easily able to speak for
themselves - in conversation and on record - and bypass critical and
historical assessment by a third party. Such developments are facilitating
the rise of oral testimony from the margins into the academic mainstream.
Oral history is an important component of inter-textual thinking, forcing
the reconsideration of other documentary sources and drawing attention to
the mediated nature of interpretation. This strand aims to examine the
ramifications of these issues and consider the artist interview as an
interesting place of intersection for art criticism, art history and
histories of contemporary practice.

Papers are invited that look critically at the complicated status and
function of the artist interview, recorded on tape, film, video, DVD etc.
and that address one or other of the following areas of enquiry:

The artist interview as an emerging critical genre and the
historiography of this format (from the questionnaire to digital recording).
The problems of 'missing' content - and how we deal with the
differences between the edited and unedited, the spoken/heard and the
transcribed/read.
The 'authenticity' of the artist's voice and the character and
directness of the spoken word
The role, position and expertise of the interviewer, and the dialogic
relationship between interviewer and interviewee.
The artist interview not only as primary source, but also as a work of
art in its own right, inseparable from artistic practice
The application of oral history, as a research tool, in the museum and
gallery, conservation department, archive and library.

For further information please call Ellen Tait on 0113 246 7467. Please
submit abstracts (c.500 words) to ellenhenry-moore.ac.uk or by post to
Ellen Tait, The Henry Moore Institute, 74 The Headrow, Leeds, LS1 3AH by 11
November 2005.

Ellen Tait
Administrative Assistant
Exhibitions & Research
Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AH
T + 44 (0)113 246 7467
F +44 (0)113 246 1481