Most of my interview experience is clinical or forensic, so this will be different. Nevertheless, there are some well-established skills and practices that are transferrable. My practice is usually to take a semi-structured approach based on an understanding of the context and background information. Then, beginning with an open question that starts, ‘Tell me about …’ I probe this initial opener, which is often quite short because interviewees tend not to talk at length at this stage, and begin working through the topics I want to explore.

I always write down responses because this makes it easier to nip back to something that resonates with more current material, ‘You mentioned that earlier; how do you see the two styles/ideas/actions operating where you find yourself now?’

I use open, non-leading questions because this has been shown repeatedly to generate more information per question than closed questions, to reduce yes/no answers, and also to reduce the number of questions asked. But to home in on specifics, it’s possible to ask more direct questions. For example, ‘You said A/B/C happened and that it caused you to lose confidence but that you eventually got back on your feet; what was it that helped you do that?’ The structure moves away from giving the interviewee no direction at all to providing a circumscribed topic to which they can respond, but still without leading and without bringing in material that they haven’t already introduced. In other words, without making assumptions.

Adapting this technique to an artist interview will be interesting because, while clinical and witness interviews tend to come with a backstory of, for instance, seeing or being a victim of something, or being competent to consent to a medical procedure, I would have to find and absorb relevant information about the artist. It should be relatively clear what kinds of events or milestones they would like to talk about but what about the tough times, do we skate over those or tackle them head on? Perhaps that depends on how public they have been about such matters. I would still need to be alert to any sign of questioning unearthing a trauma for the interviewee because some emotional issues can lie dormant under the veneer of success and it only takes the lifting of one tiny corner of that rug for it all to spill out. I’ve been a clinician too long to be blind to such signs and, as the focus of an interview emphasises the interviewee and not the interviewer, readiness would be an imperative.

Young Artists in Conversation. The list of artist interviews begins with an entry that itself contains a long list of young artists and the text of each interview. Unfortunately, the layout onscreen makes reading difficult and so I have skipped these.

Sarah Amy Fishlock.This is another from the same website.

Timeout – Susan Hillier Interview. The interviewer here is wonderfully concise in their questioning and although there are quite a few closed and directive questions, “Would you say you are creating the materiality of the immaterial?” for instance, there’s also evidence of a structure which, in some instances, moves the interview along and in others, takes it back to an earlier remark. The interviewee produces quite extensive answers and seems comfortable with the interview experience.

Timeout – Sarah Lucas, Why Would Anyone be Shocked by a Cigarette in Somebody’s Bum? The interviewer is a self-described fan and plainly excited about this encounter. Of the ten questions, only one is not leading. The rest are closed and imply a particular kind of response. The answers are short.

Richard Deacon – It’s Orpheus When There’s Singing #7 This looks more like a series of letters than an interview, albeit interpolated with remarks by someone else whose identity I’m having difficulty locating. The writing is turgid and belies the title.

SFMOMA Artist Interviews. There are so many of these I decided to cue them up for watching over lunch but picked out Sitting on Chrome, which is about shiny big cars, for my taster! It’s the colours, honestly, the colours! There doesn’t seem to be an interviewer but, although there must be someone in the production team who is doing this job, the effect is one of authentic, relaxed accounts of work and what’s important to this collaborative group. There is nothing stilted about it and that most likely arises from the filming process itself – following artists as they go about their work and their social environment in an unintrusive manner. It’s a documentary where no one is sitting face-to-face in a studio, instead they’re in their cars, in their studios, in their cafes and it works. One artist is reimagined as a car for a show about “low-rider cars and queer cruising” and it’s spectacular! Chanell Stone – Natura Negra. Again, not an interview as such but Stone is probably responding to questions edited out of the video. The effect is a semi-naturalistic account of her work and motivations, gently paced and articulated. Kerry James Marshall. Like Stone, Marshall places Black people front and centre in his work and every one he shows has the eyes of a Black person looking directly out at us. Despite what must have been the awfulness of life as a Black person in America where he grew up prior to the civil rights movement, Marshall has the crinkled eyes of a man full of life and humour. Richard Deacon again. This time on video although he’s still talking to someone who is present but unheard and unseen. He is a collector (of shells, stones, his kids’ toys, and probably anything on a beach) and if he has fun, I would bet his humour is quite dry and I might miss it. Jay DeFeo. Because there are so many of these, I scrolled to the end and picked up this, the first on the list. Bruce Connor talks about The Rose, painted by his friend DeFeo, and what seems to have been a traumatic episode during which the painting had to be removed from her flat because she and her partner were being evicted. She sounds scattered and barely in the real world while also being very much in her own real world. There is mention of lead in the white paint she used, and from searches, I see that she only survived to 60 years. This is not an interview, it’s an account drawn from memory by someone who was there, although he may have been the subject of an interview in making this. These videos are little jewels.

I am going to skip the interview with an OCA peer, partly because there’s an assumption that the person available will be at the same stage as me and have done the same reading, but also because I have an alternative idea. This may take some time to set up and so the recording may not appear for a little while.

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My Dissertation was already completed in early 2023 in accordance with the guidelines available to me at that time. It was positioned as a piece straddling 3.1/3.2. But whereas people choosing to write two critical reviews would have an essay to submit for 3.1, there was nothing obvious, beyond the draft of the dissertation, for me to submit for formal Assessment. This, I argued, could lead to complications involving self-plagiarism, particularly as I write and redraft quickly so that there may be little difference between a late draft submitted for 3.1 and the final piece submitted at the end of 3.2. The solution was that I write an essay for 3.1 (see Doors to Inception, Conboy-Hill, 2023) and submit the completed Dissertation during 3.2.

In the meantime, the guidelines about writing and researching have become more expansive and include a proposal, which I don’t recall being present in my original materials, hence there isn’t one here. The new materials are a big improvement but clearly could have no influence on my completed work. Luckily this is not my first rodeo so I don’t feel disadvantaged but I do need to make clear that the work complied with guidelines as set out at the time and that this was agreed with Emma Drye.

I was very pleased to see the section titled, The Voice of the Critic because it reflects themes in my Dissertation that address communication where I suggest that, as long as ownership of the ‘art space’ remains largely in the hands of White men whose subjective views and language inevitably take precedence, the kind of obfuscating floridity most associated with ‘experts’ has been the slammed-shut gateway to inclusivity. Brian Sewell with his strangled vowels and acerbic resistance to anything new comes to mind.

Adrian Searle encounters: Roni Horn’s mysterious drawings that just won’t leave you alone. Searle uses ‘you’ when he means ‘me’ and in doing this he includes his readers in his own experience. This is problematic, for me at least, because it presupposes I will share his experience or, presumably, inadvertently seeks to impose it on me. I found the writing a little flamboyant and sails a little too close to opinion presented as fact.

Mark Godfrey, Diagrams of Thought Roni Horn. Again there is an over-inclusive use of ‘you’ to describe his own experience. When something is subjective, as in perceived experience, it seems to me that first person language is critical to releasing description and impression from the straightjacket of critique and allowing it to perform that function with the authenticity of personal confidence. These drawings can not do the same thing to everyone or construct themselves the same way for each person who looks at them because each of us uses a unique set of neuropsychological structures and processes to do that. Attempts to constrain this individuality by elevating one perception to the rank of expert opinion risk alienating viewers for whom the experience is different.

The voice of the practitioner: I read the quote attributed to Bullen (2019) but found I was unable to relate to it in any way. I suspect predisposing factors and the experiences that naturally followed predisposition set up cognitive structures in me that were, and are, strategic and anticipatory. And while self-reflection is an imperative when providing therapy, the ability to subjugate emotional disconnection or turbulence comes with training and experience because the client’s disconnection and turbulence is the primary concern. I think most of us have always known that there are two different kinds of empathy although this is only recently being articulated. One is emotional and places the therapist in a situation comparable with the client’s, both equally compounded in the client’s emotional state. The other is intellectual which maintains a slight distance, understanding the nature of the turmoil and possibly having experienced it personally but without losing the pragmatism that comes with having head and feet outside of it. Whether I learned this or had the seeds of it early in my life, I couldn’t tell, but I do know the kinds of experience I often hear described, latterly by artists, are not ones I am personally familiar with. Empathic detachment is a term I just made up and seems to describe it well.

SCH 2024

Conboy-Hill, S. (2001). The Cognitive Interview: a multi purpose approach to interviewing people with learning disabilities. Clinical Psychology 2 (June) 17-20