Audio Arts: Volume 14 No 1

00:00:01 An interview with Susan Hiller recorded at Gimpel Fils, in London, during the artist's exhibition. Interview by Michael Archer, May 1994. This interview was recorded at Gimpel Fils, London, during Susan Hiller's exhibition of recent work in Spring 1994. Concurrently she showed, as part of the Bookworks event, a new piece conceived for the Freud Museum in Hampstead. The discussion begins by focusing on Hiller's approach to art which she sees as rejecting any significant difference between object making and event making. The paintings in the Gimpel show, like some of her earlier work, use wallpaper as a ground fo Hiller's automatic writing. These texts are subsequently brushed out and written over, producing a 'blackness' in the larger works that Hiller relates to Ad Reinhardt. Shown with the paintings were Babylon Suit (a child's garment displayed on the security door to Hiller's studio) and two pieces made from the ashes of drawings executed and burnt over the past twenty years. The alchemical transformation produced by fire in the works is akin to the distance travelled in the paintings from the wallpapers from which they started. Hiller's interest in and use of material culture is explored, as is the importance of the linguistic dimension to her work. Further, and particularly in light of the work at the Freud Museum, the interconnection between these topics and related themes in psychoanalysis and anthropology are examined. 00:18:24 An interview with Janine Antoni recorded in the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. Interview by William Furlong.In describing her work as 'walking a fine line between obiect, performance, relic and process', Janine Antoni elaborates on 'the centrality of her body as a tool for making'. This leads to the consideration of a number of recent works including Slumber installed in the Anthony d'Offay Gallery where this conversation was recorded in March 1994. Slumber comprised the making of a dream blanket into which the artist wove threads of her nightgown using as a starting point the recorded patterns of her 'Rapid Eye Movement' made during a night spent in the Gallery. Other elements in the work included a bed attached to a loom. She goes on to speak about the underlying concerns in her work including the appropriation of image and forms from recent art history. Examples include Gnaw, shown at the Whitney Biennale in 1993, the edges of white Minimalist cubes were bitten and chewed and Loving Care presented at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in 1993, where the artist mopped the floor of the gallery with her hair saturated with coloured hair dye. In Lick Lather, shown in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale in 1993, fourteen neo-classical busts cast in chocolate and soap from a mould of her own body were, through the sculptural processes of licking and washing respectively, re-shaped and modified. Finally Antoni responds to the sense in which work, is concerned with intervention, erosion and denial of the perfect, and challenges the politics and norms of gender and the demystification of the female image.

00:00:01 Marcus Raetz is interview by William Furlong in March 1994. The exhibition of Marcus Raetz at the Serpentine Gallery, London, gained a particular character through its apparent conceptual and formal disunity. Yet the exacting installation and juxtaposition of individual works articulated meanings, tensions and possibilities of the most focused and succinct kind. In this interview the artist elaborates on this 'reading' of his exhibition and goes on to discuss the underlying themes in his work and speaks about the various groupings including the anamorphic heads, drawings of the landscape, the relationships between the space and the work and how each piece both from the past and the present interacts and thus offers new meanings. He talks about a number of individual pieces including the work, Eve, a wall construction of a woman's torso using twigs. He finally elaborates on his appropriations and 'quotations' from the works of other artists such as Matisse and Brancusi, claiming that in using existing words and images we are cognizant of their previous associations, uses and meanings. 00:15:39 Ching Wang Shouqing is interviewed by William Furlong and they discuss their works and opinions and concerns about re-unification of Kong Hong with China in 1997. Also includes a special report from Hong Kong including: Ching Wang Shouquing, Cheng Ka Kay, Janjri Trivedi, Ng Ghing Wa, Lam Tian Xiang, Helen Glover and Ian Findlay-Brown. This report recorded in Hong Kong starts with Chinese streetopera from the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon followed by a commentary by artists Ching Wang Shouqing and Cheng Ka Kay walking through the Central district of Hong Kong en route to Gallery 7, where Janjri Trivedi, the director, speaks about the particular character of the work she exhibits and her expectations as a gallerist as the colony moves towards re-unification with Chinain 1997. Then one of the Gallery artists, Ching Wang Shouqing, provides a commentary, on the Star Ferry to Kowloon, about the Museum of Art's collection. Back in Wanchi, Ng Ching Wa and Lam Tian Xiang join the two previous artists heard on the tape and speak about their experience and preoccupations as artists living and studying both in Hong Kong and mainland China. Helen Glover from the British Council provides an overview of contemporary art in Hong Kong, describes an innovatory scheme to provide scholarships for artists in order to stimulate interest, visibility and support for contemporary art and offers her hopes and fears for the arts after 1997. Finally, lan Findlay-Brown, editor of Asian Art News, discusses the urgent need to establish a professional art school in Hong Kong, and the comparative infrastructure for contemporary art in mainland China and Hong Kong. He then speaks about a re-evaluation of the influence of western forms of art practice coupled with an increasing consideration by artists of their indigenous culture and traditional art forms.