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NOTES ON INTERVIEW AS CRUCIBLE: ART AND ARTIST, OBJECT, AND SUBJECT By Matthew La Croix There was once a powerful traveller in the summer of 1665 in France. He was an artist, summoned by King Louis XIV to plan the building of a new home for France’s treasures – the Louvre, and to depict the King in a bust. The King ordered collector and art connoisseur Paul Fréart de Chantelou to accompany him. Alongside his travelling companion he recorded the words and personality of the famous Bernini, and laid out the first blueprints for modern arts journalism. ‘His fluency is very beautiful and he has a special talent for explaining things with words and gestures, and for making them vivid as well as the greatest painters have been able to do with their brushes.’
Chantelou was the first to record his enchantment with the shamanism of the artist and the language and articulations of art. From Cennini to Vasari in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the infamous journal of De La Croix and Bacon’s love letters, the spoken word of artists has been passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth and storytelling beyond the enticing texture and intensity of art.
The complexity of the path from ideas to making is unravelled through this story-telling and made fluid, and a ‘primary voice, behind the text, the image, the work of art,’ frustrates and excites new reactions from their public, and opens up a new fresh narrative, where art criticism is re-united within the process of art creation through exchange and meeting, in the artist’s interview. For a time the interviewer can bask in the reflected glamour of the artist and some lucky enough can buy a ticket into art history, and a new reversible site of subject and object is created – the nuances of the artist can somehow be ‘textualised’ – or ‘lyricised’. ‘The creator and critic are revealed as subjects, with all the subtle complexities of gender, generation and social interaction that that implies.’1
However, the art and the maker have since become infused –the bravura of the expressionists guttural painterly expression lacked bravado, it was the artist that sought new heights of gesture and manifestation of text and subject and the artist body became site for object. Actionists took action! Artists are actors on stages, evolving out of an avid fascination with process, methodology, and the heroes and victims of The Studio. These tragic/comedic/heroic archetypes dragged wet women on canvases, commit socially-invested shamanic rituals, signed living body sculptures, and created a fermentation of body-masochistic art. The open-ended sensibility invites interpretation and an understanding within the ‘textural rhythm’ (ibid) of the interview. It also offers the chance to state claim on intention, or to challenge such accusations of artists as ‘bumpkins, dionysians, and dumbbells.’2
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