Ken Schles on ‘Invisible City’ and ‘Night Walk’

“For generations the Lower East Side was a churning cauldron of activity. Site of immigrants (my own family passed through there more than a century ago), it already had a long history of renewal and decay.”   Alex Bocchetto of Akina Books Interviews Ken Schles   Alex Bocchetto: With Invisible City you narrated New York’s […]

Raymond Pettibon on Zines, Manifest Destiny and Teaching Math (2011)

  “The tracks divided the good and bad parts of town. I wasn’t exactly on the good side. You weren’t encouraged to play around the demarcation lines.”   Interview with Raymond Pettibon By Eric Nelson When I was 15, I became obsessed with Black Flag, playing everything up until “My War” on full blast at […]

Ed Ruscha on Route 66, Making Books and “Choppy Movement”

“So in a sense they (books) had no–there was no school of thought, and I felt at that time that it was unexplored. That’s one reason it attracted me.” MR. KARLSTROM: What about your books? This is a last thing that I’d like to at least get started on. You have created I don’t know […]

Ed Ruscha on Studio Life, Domestic Life and Its Tax on the Creative Drive

Dirty Baby, 1977, Graphite and acrylic paint on paper   “I couldn’t mix the domestic life and the free form life, I just couldn’t. They’re sort of difficult to mix.”   MR. RUSCHA: There was one period when I moved to Pasadena. I had a studio at 60 West Colorado Boulevard that was about 20,000 […]

Stephen Shore ‘Likes’ Instagram

  “They can be one-liners, essentially.” – Stephen Shore   Excerpt from “LIVING TODAY: Stephen Shore’s Internal Revolutions” What has interested me most in the past half-year has been Instagram. For the past couple weeks I’ve been very busy and haven’t posted a lot, but I went for perhaps five months posting almost every day. […]

Camilo Jose Vergara on Looking at the World Trade Center

View from abandoned pier, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1970.   “All of a sudden you would look around 360 degree angle, and there was the Trade Center.”   Transcript excerpt from New York: The Center of the World, PBS WGBH American Experience Looking at the World Trade Center What was magical for me was that […]

Larry Clark on Cutting through the Bullshit and Hypocrisy of America (2007)

“People like Robert Frank inspired me. But I was really influenced more by people like Lenny Bruce.”   By Raphaël Cuir, Art Press, August 2007 A year ago, seven short films by Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Marco Brambilla, Sam Taylor-Wood and Larry Clark were shown at Cannes under the title Destricted. […]

Robert Adams on Working at Home and Photography as Metaphor (2009)

“By definition art is not propaganda; the goal is not to excite people to action but to help them find a sense of wholeness and thereby a sense of calm.”   Excerpt from a 2014 Hasselblad Award chat transcript Question: Congratulations! You have been taking pictures of the American West for four decades now. Why […]

Lewis Baltz on ‘New Topographics and Exhibition ‘Remakes’ (‘A Very Bad Idea’)

39, WEST WALL, SMICOA, 333 MCCORMICK, COSTA MESA © LEWIS BALTZ, IP 39, FROM THE SERIES “NEW INDUSTRIAL PARKS, NEAR IRVINE, CALIFORNIA”, 1974; STEIDL   Interview (excerpt) with Lewis Baltz Conducted by Matt Witkovsky At Baltz’s home in Paris, France. 2009 November 15-17 MR. BALTZ: You aspire to making something – at least at the time, […]

ASX.TV: Erik Kessels’ Eye (2014)

Photography: Mark Bakker Editor: Bart van den Broek Sound Recording: Erik Leek Soundmix: Hugo Dijkstal Production: Willemijn Cerutti Production VPRO: Karin Vermeulen Commissioning Editor VPRO: Barbara Truyen Producer: Frank van den Engel Written en Directed By: Simone de Vries © 2009 Zeppers Film en TV / VPRO This film was produced with support from Dutch […]

All Women Fall in Love with Nobuyoshi Araki (And Duchamps is a Swindler) (2014)

‘Chiro’ from Sentimental Journey @ Araki In many ways, “Sentimental Journey 1972-1992” is quintessential Araki. It is a documentary of his marriage life with his wife Aoki Yoko till the day she lost her fight to ovarian cancer in 1990. By Zhuang Wubin, epSITE and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, 2004 Nobuyoshi Araki, or Tensai […]