After seeing DISBAND perform, I was drawn into looking through some of my video tapes from the '70s. While at Washington University my friend Danny Dries bought one of the earliest portable video recorders, the SONY 3400, I was crazy to have one too. At that same time the magazine Radical Software showed up in my life:
"The historic video magazine Radical Software was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available to artists" http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/
I finally found a way to buy a SONY 3400 in the summer of 1972 (it cost as much as my car!). Video tapes from then were reel-to-reel 1/2 inch, and when I tried to play them back in the '90s they just sat on the machine and squeaked! Nothing would play! But in about 2001 I read it was possible to "bake" old SONY tapes in the oven, driving out the water that was causing the problem, and they would play. So I cranked up my oven, and managed to re-record many of my old tapes.
My old 1/2 video now is jumpy, and has scan lines (it looks like an iMovie effect) but they do play, and I just put the first one on my web site as a flash movie.
They really are historical documents (in the words of Galaxy Quest). In 1972 having a personal video recorder was like having the first Brownie camera! The first video I converted to flash is here, http://www.romdog.com/art/more.html
"New" video
DISBAND
30th Anniversary Reunion of DISBAND featuring Ilona Granet, Donna Hennes, Diane Torr and Martha Wilson.
Ilona Granet, photographed today at P.S.1
"DISBAND consisted of women artists, none of whom knew how to play any instruments so we used Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets, hammer, radio, flag, bedsheet, party hats, flour and fake braids to perform songs like "Every Day Same Old Way," "Sad," and "Iran-y." DISBAND included Daile Kaplan, Barbara Kruger, and April Gornik in the early days. Later, Martha Wilson, Donna Henes, Diane Torr and Ingrid Sischy were joined by Ilona Granet. Then Diane dropped out when we were in Italy, and we disbanded in 1982."
-- Franklin Furnace
I was sitting in the audience with artists Carolee Schneemann, Julie Harrison, and photographer Terry Slotkin, realizing how fortunate I was to be among interesting, brilliant, courageous, and beautiful women!
WACK! ART AND THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION - at P.S. 1 MOMA
BOMB All-Stars
Rick and I just finished putting the Kitchen readings online at BOMB. Created by the BOMB staff in-house, they are incredible readings and performances!
new videos
BOMB All-Stars: Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey,
Jaime Manrique, Robert Polito and Ned Sublette
The Kitchen, NYC, June 14, 2006
BOMB’s 25th Anniversary Reading
"BOMB Magazine celebrated its 25th Anniversary year of publishing legendary interviews with an all-star literary line-up of its esteemed contributing editors on June 14, 2006, at The Kitchen in New York City. The event included readings by Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey, Jaime Manrique, Robert Polito, and performances by writer and musician Ned Sublette."
BOMB Magazine
www.BOMBsite.com
In 2007 I was priviliged to begin work on the redesign of BOMB magazine's web site with my long time programmer partner Rick Frankel. Rick is a genius when it comes to designing web forms to allow the creation of web pages without programming. He designed a database to present all of the past BOMB issues on the web.
We are beginning a new year with BOMB, putting video interviews on the web, and further refining their web site. I have known Betsy Sussler, Co-Founder, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, since my first years in NYC, fresh out of Art School. I left the art world in the mid '90s to work on the web, but BOMB has brought me back. I have found BOMB interviews a real source of inspiration!
For those not familiar with BOMB here is what they say about themselves:
BOMB Magazine was founded in 1981 as an artists’ and writers’ quarterly dedicated to presenting work in its own light, and artists’ and writers’ conversations in their own words.
6 years later, more than 800 visual artists, writers, musicians, directors, architects, and actors have taken that idea and run with it. Their voices comprise an ongoing conversation—published in the pages of BOMB — that has changed the nature of cultural discourse.
BOMB has since grown to become an international magazine with an editorial board of over 80 professional artists, writers, actors, directors, architects, and musicians serving as our Contributing Editors.
Revelations happen in conversations. They make art more accessible, not only to the reader, but to the artists themselves. For 26 years,
BOMB’s mission has remained intact: To reveal the intellectual heart of the matter, and to promote an understanding and appreciation of the arts through carefully developed conversations about the arts, by the people who make the arts.
Focusing on ideas rather than personalities, BOMB interviews delve into discussions of process and aesthetics, allowing for the emergence of complex and varied positions on art making and life throughout editorial revisions. These interviews have become primary documents of American cultural history because artists, the primary source of the creative process, are the authors of their own tales. This simple idea of complex proportions has changed the way in which contemporary culture is understood. The pendulum has swung from the days the critic held sway.
Today, universities, museums, and art institutions across America include the artist’s voice as integral to their programming, a direct result of BOMB ’s effect on the culture. And when the pendulum swings again, BOMB will remain an artists’ and writers’ spokespiece. That is BOMB’s mandate: its commitment to the artists.
In 2005, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired the last quarter-century of BOMB’s archive—including audio files, marginalia, and multiple drafts of hundreds of our interviews—where they will be accessible to students and scholars worldwide—a true testament to BOMB’s legacy.
