Auto-Interview: Richard Foreman talks to himself [and whoever else is listening] about Strong Medicine [un film]

sion/insight, and the audience still functions as passive witness to this "personal" vision. The element that links the extremes of the spectrum of responsibility is the "I" who takes this responsibility. So, responsibility, far from being a radical break, is the most recent articulation of an ideology of individualism. Despite the possibility of an increase in funds flowing into the art world as a result of the IRS ruling, these increased funds will still only be available to a small minority of successful artists-those with a sound track record. In terms of resources available, then, there will only be a marginal difference between this and the self-employed artisanal mode of the gallery system or the lottery of government grants. So the important effect of venture capital entering the art market is to re-emphasize individualistic competition as the basis for art practice -proyiding a new carrot of the big art break [investors' capital] for which scores of artists can struggle. This competition is clarified by the emphasis on "responsibility," the primacy of the artist as "l." Anecdote, Analysis, Discourse It is impossible to place an art-work in its social and political context when it is isolated as a spectacle within a market, and its production is seen in terms of individualistic excellence. This combination emphasizes the passive function of the audience and demands an explicatory role for the critic. Conventional criticism, therefore, has gone hand-in-hand with the marketplace. The role of the critic has been to "explain" artwork , but at the same time, to preserve it as a spectacle. Critics have mystified this contradiction by telling stories. They are journalists who account for a work by constructing an anecdote out of the accidents of its production, set in the isolated and mythical world of an art historical continuum. So, in terms of the market, critics become the arbiters of taste; in terms of art practice, critics obscure the fact that work is a cultural manifestation by writing discrete aetiological fables. Work is thus deprived of context by becoming the last word, the inevitable resolution of a narrative. This critical stance is one element in a structure which prohibits the artist and audience from taking shared responsibility for confronting the problem of how meaning is created. This structure: 1. refuses to allow an art-work to function as an intervention within a specific set of shared social problems; 2. mystifies the fact that a work is both made and seen within one dialectical process; 3. reinforces the cultural definition of art-work as commodity, and denies the imperative that art should demand active engagement; 4. justifies the "ghettoization" of art by both admiring and promoting its esotericism; at the same time it obscures the fact of the embeddedness of art within the social and political world, where no work can possibly be ideologically neutral. In other words, the conventional critic's function is to deny art a context; to place it above analysis. A constructive theoretical practice, on the other hand, would emphasize the embeddedness of art within culture. This practice would place art as one element within a political discourse. New York City June 1978 CORRECTION Babette Mangolte was incorrectly listed as the photographer for the stills illustrating Richard Foreman's "Auto-Interview" in PAM 1. The pictures were taken by Joseph Bartsherer and Denise Simon. The cover photo was taken by Morton Beebe . . . The statements in "Paris Letter" were taken from a conversation between John Howell and Ralston Farina. SUBSCRIPTION/ORDER FORM See Last Page 25 AUTO-INTERVIEW Richard Foreman talks to himself [and whoever else is listening] about Strong Medicine (un film] Photos by Babette Mangolte Richard Foreman, i am struck bythe intensity of feeling, the sense of anguish that the characters in Strong Medicine seem to express, an anguish greater than a mere recitation of the story might lead one to expect. Can you tell me what the hidden source is in your film of this anguish? The reason for your choice of this atmosphere, this subject matter? Iwant my work to be always placed at moments of anguish, because only at those moments is there a certain level of intensity...