Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation
"In London in the early 1970s, a conceptual artist named William Furlong began harnessing the cassette for his unlikely purposes in the visual arts.  The motivation wasn't dauntingly conceptual: he and his friends talked a lot and listened to the conversations of other artists and realized something. It became apparent to us," Mr. Furlong said "that none of that talk and none of our interests were being met by any traditional arts publications."Phaidon Press has now publishedSpeaking of Art, a small sampling of the immense undertaking that resulted from that dissatisfaction. Beginning in 1973, with the help of a few collaborators, Mr. Furlong created Audio Arts, a no-budget ?magazine? composed solely of cassette recordings of interviews with artists Mr. Furlong found interesting. He mailed them to friends and subscribers, at first hundreds and then thousands.[...]Speaking of Artis made to resemble a cassette, with an "A" side and a flip-over "B" side and shiny dark-brown endpapers to evoke magnetic tape. It presents edited transcripts of 43 artists from the archive [...] The excerpts from their conversations skew more toward the academic (Mr. Furlong has been an art professor most of his life) than toward the breezy tone of Paris Review interviews. But they never veer far from Mr. Furlong's guiding principle that he is talking with artists, not interviewing them."—Randy Kennedy (New York Times)