Book Launch
April 11, 2024, 7pm
Artists Space and no place press celebrate the release of Exit Interview with a conversation between three eminent critics and art historians. Pamela M. Lee discusses the book with its authors Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster.
In Exit Interview, a conversation in three parts, Buchloh and Foster discuss the former's intellectual foundations and motivations, tracing an arc from family history to activist politics of the 1960s and ’70s to encounters with significant artists, including Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Louise Lawler, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, and Lawrence Weiner. Foster engages Buchloh on his education and ambitions; his time in communes in Berlin; and his experiences in London as an aspiring fiction writer; and his return to Germany in 1971 to work at art galleries, publish the short-lived but influential magazine Interfunktionen, and teach at the Dusseldorf Academy. Together they chart Buchloh’s path from Europe to North America, first to Nova Scotia, then Los Angeles, and finally New York, as a publisher, professor, curator, and critic. Building on years of collaboration and friendship, Foster and Buchloh’s compelling conversations move from biography and anecdote to important reflection on one’s critical life as a whole. Their discussion is a study in dialectical thought as they explore what Foster calls the “fascinating contradictions” that have structured Buchloh’s approach to culture. The interview retains the intimacy of a frank and generative dialogue, with close examinations of the connections between politics and art. Exit Interview closes with a postscript by Buchloh that reflects on his rigorous commitment to the potential of critical art, despite the relentless commodification of everyday life.