Marvin J. Taylor, Director of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University sat down with Conversations at the Edge’s program assistant George William Price to talk about his thoughts on the emotional archive, the ethics of custodianship, and the cultural scene of 1980’s Downtown New York City. This interview will be released as part of Video Data Bank’s On Art and Artists collection late Spring 2015.
Taylor introduced the November, 2014 program The X-Ray of Civilization: Films by Tom Rubnitz, David Wojnarowicz, and Tommy Turner. Surveying the cultural scene of 1980s New York, this program explored how the Culture Wars and the devastation of AIDS contributed to a city that crackled with tension and ached with sadness. Against this background, artists Tom Rubnitz, David Wojnarowicz, and Tommy Turner transformed mass media’s detritus into transgressive responses to the socio-political order.
Video Data Bank’s On Art and Artists is a unique collection of interviews and portraits of artists, musicians, performers, architects, theorists, and critics, spanning 1974 to the present. The OAA collection represents four decades of producing and acquiring interviews by the Video Data Bank, and features more than 300 available titles, of which at least half are interviews produced by the Video Data Bank and its co-founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield. In addition, the collection offers artist interviews produced by external producers and producing organizations—including Artists Television Network,Long Beach Museum of Art, and the University of Colorado—and experimental documentaries and portraits, many of them produced by other artists.