Audio Arts: Volume 13 No 4

00:00:01 A conversation with Joseph Kosuth during preparation for the exhibition Symptoms of interference, Conditions of Possibility at the Camden Arts Centre. This conversation with Joseph Kosuth took place during preparation for the exhibition, Symptoms of lnterference, Conditions of Possibility, at the Camden Arts Centre, London in December 1993, a show which included works by Kosuth, Felix Gonzales-Torres and Ad Reinhardt. The interview begins with Kosuth describing the nature of the collaboration between the three artists. What connects them is a shared belief that it is insufficient for artists merely to produce objects: they should strive, rather, to provide a context within which their activities can be understood to have meaning. From this starting point Kosuth proceeds to a broader consideration of the nature of art, of the various models - philosophical and anthropological - which he has proposed for it over the past three decades, and of the legacy of Conceptualism. However, the issue of context and of how meaning arises out of the relationships between things remains paramount throughout.

00:00:01 A conversation with Mrinalini Mukherjee during the artist's visit to England in 1991, in advance of her 1994 exhibition New Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford. In conversation with Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton and William Furlong Mrinalinee Mukherjee visited England in 1991 in advance of her exhibition, New Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford from April to May 1994. On the earlier occasion, Mukherjee, one of lndia's leading contemporary artists spoke about her imposing woven and knotted sculpture using industrial hemp, coloured with vegetable dyes. Themes in the conversation include: the artist's work in relation to the Indian tradition of relief, sculpture, consideration of installation, and the relationship between the preoccupation and concerns of Indian art and the European tradition and her attitudes toward the Eurocentric nature of most Western Art. The artist also discusses the relationships between her sculpture and the human form as well as its evocation of ritual costume. 00:15:39 An interview with T.S. Enkhjin held in Mongolia, with Colin Painter, the Principal of Wimbledon School of Art. Mongolia came under Soviet control in 1921. Until 1990, when it held its first democratic elections, it had little contact with the Western world. In 1992, Colin Painter, the Principal of Wimbledon School of Art, visited Mongolia at the invitation of the New Government's Committee for culture and the Arts. His guide was Enkhjin, a painter and Vice Chairman of the Mongolian Union of Artists. This year Enkhjin made a return visit. In Painter's interview with Enkhjin in the UK, we hear the circumstances facing artists during Mongolia's period of cultural and social change. Enkhjin talks about the Soviet system, the effects of the new economic circumstances on artists and the coexistence of traditional Mongolian painting with 'Western art forms'. 00:30:10 An interview with Mona Hatoum. An underlying concern in Mona Hatoum's work is the role of autobiography, identity and 'the refraction of exile and displacement'. In this interview she makes reference to the importance of her Lebanese background and goes on to discuss several works including Light Sentence shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 1993, and also Measures of Distance and Plus and Minus also shown in that year at the Arnolfini Gallery. In this recording she responds to the view that her recent works have become more concerned with formal issues and the physicality of materials and less with the direct narrative of her earlier video pieces. Her desire however is to combine the physical with the conceptual, where issues such as abuse, violence, the body and Aids can be articulated outside the parameters of language.