CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/17/2023

Shaggy and spontaneous, 'The New York Tapes' collects Alan Solomon’s mid-60s interviews for television

Featured spreads are from The New York Tapes: Alan Solomon’s Interviews for Television, 1965–66. Years in the making, this whopping new collaboration between Circle Books and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art weighs in at 672 pages and measures almost two inches thick at the spine. Collecting previously unpublished interviews conducted by the renowned Jewish Museum curator Alan Solomon for the 1966 documentary tv series USA: Artists, it features conversations with many of the key players of the day, including Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, among others. Fresh off his turn curating the legendary American pavilion for the 1964 Venice Biennale, Solomon spoke with each of his subjects for more than an hour, though the program lasted only thirty minutes. What was lost on the cutting room floor has never been published until now. Editor Matthew Simms writes: “In contrast with the compressed, carefully crafted television presentations, the interviews are shaggy and spontaneous, and do not cohere to a narrative thread, no matter how much the interviewer sought to guide the discussion. Chronologically, the interviews precede the editorial wizardry of shifting camera angles, conventions that shape the visual impact of the episodes. The transcripts follow the discursive cadences of spoken language that emerge in the back-and-forth rhythm of unfurling dialogue. As a group, the television programs sought to pull the artists together into a coherent, if bifurcated, advanced guard of contemporary art in the United States.… Instead of an art scene, the transcripts present an aggregate of now diverging, now coinciding points of view—a group portrait of individual artists at grips with unique aesthetic concerns.”