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Eleven interviews in Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation

Speaking of Art contains eleven of my interviews with artists (comprising just over a quarter of the book). It is the first time these extensive research-based interviews been made public in written form, and they have all been re-edited and re-contextualised for the medium of print.

The research nature of the output is two-fold. In each case I have conducted specific research, both primary and secondary, into the individual artist and his or her work, so as to inform the conversation – as evidenced by the interview content. However, my work also testifies to a developing research methodology that employs the conversational interview to produce new primary material, foregrounding the artist’s voice. This dimension of my process has made a significant contribution to the expanding focus on ‘the voice’ in art practice and discourse.

The interviews published in Speaking of Art represent a small sample of my ongoing projects: I have conducted over 900 interviews in total, for a variety of contexts. From 1996–2009 I was principal interviewer for Audio Arts, one of the world’s largest and most wide-ranging sound archives devoted to art and artists. The entire, unedited archive of my recordings was acquired by Tate between 2004–2009. Tate’s 2012 conference Off the Record, at which I gave the keynote address, marked the digitisation of the whole Audio Arts archive – soon to be available online in the form of a stand-alone website to include 150 of my interviews.

In 2009 I won an IVCA (International Visual Communications Association) award for my series of online TV interviews with artists for The Art Newspaper in collaboration with Spike TV. My interviews have also been published in a wide range of journals and books including the recently republished Talking of Art 1 (Ridinghouse/Art Monthly, 2009; 2nd edition 2013).