Books and primary research have helped me organize my thinking around the critical publication. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I want Belén’s interview to be the foundation of the text. But I wasn’t sure how that would actually work—how an artist interview could function within a critical framework. I needed to find a clear example of how that’s been done effectively.
My latest library find, The New York Tapes: Alan Solomon’s Interviews for Television, 1965–66 helped clarify that. The book collects transcripts from a short-lived TV series where Solomon interviewed post-war contemporary artists like Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. The interviews were meant for television, but these transcripts are messier, less edited, and more useful. They show the artists thinking in real time—sometimes clearly, sometimes not.
That messiness is what I’ve been thinking about. When we interviewed Belén, I expected to pull a few clear statements to include in the book. But what we got instead was much more layered. She jumped between thoughts, circled back, corrected herself. It didn’t always land cleanly, but it felt real.
The New York Tapes preserves that kind of thinking. The editor, Matthew Simms, didn’t try to make the artists sound more polished than they were. Using resources of the Alan Solomon Papers, he left in the pauses, the contradictions, the parts where someone changes their mind. It reminded me that interviews don’t need to be boiled down to a perfect quote. Sometimes they’re more useful as a way to show process.
So instead of trimming Belén’s voice down to fit a neat argument, I’ve been letting it sit in the text as it is. Sometimes that means keeping a half-finished thought. Sometimes it means opening a section with something unresolved. The goal isn’t to use her words as evidence—it’s to let them speak for themselves.
This has changed how I see the interview. It’s not there to explain the work. It’s part of the work. And if we’re trying to document how an artist thinks or creates, then it makes sense to leave room for uncertainty.
The New York Tapes is a useful model because it doesn’t treat the interview as background—it treats it as a primary source. I’ve been trying to do the same with Belén. Not by cleaning up the conversation, but by listening to it more closely.