Introduction to Sylvère Lotringer’s Interviews
Sylvère Lotringer did his first interviews when he was in his late teens, traveling around northern England and Scotland on a Vespa with an enormous open-reel tape recorder strapped to the back. He’d been reading deeply political mid-century British writers like John Osborne and Brendan Behan, and he convinced L’Humanité editor Louis Aragon to let him travel that summer and interview them. A few years later, he returned to the UK with another unwieldy recorder to interview Vita Sackville-West, Leonard Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and others for his dissertation on Virginia Woolf. To Sylvère at that time, interviewing was a serious business that entailed weeks of preparation through correspondence and reading, procuring and transporting equipment, the encounter itself, and subsequent weeks of manual transcription and editing.
Three or four decades later, when he conducted interviews with Eileen Myles, David Wojnarowicz, and Kathy Acker, the only thing that really changed for Sylvère was that the recording device had become lighter. He still saw the interview as an encounter. If anything, he’d become vastly more skilled at conducting interviews as incredibly multivalenced encounters. His conversations with Myles, Wojnarowicz, and Acker fluidly shift from mortal combat to sweet duets. Sylvère would never interview a writer or artist he did not deeply admire, but once the date for the encounter was set, he began to prepare for battle; on a certain level, he saw his subjects as prey. His job was to lead them to an accurate, truthful description of their artistic process. He did this at times by exposing the contradictions in things they said, and often by circling back to a word or phrase that they used over and over again. In his interview with Myles, conducted around the 1991 Semiotext(e) publication of their book Not Me, Sylvère constantly returns to Myles’s self-identification as “a Kennedy” and their poetic idea of the frame.His conversation with Myles was perhaps the most serious discussion and consideration of their work as a poet that had occurred to that date. It takes place in Myles’s apartment at a fascinating time in their career, when they are known as an interesting, provocative writer but are not yet renowned.
Sylvère adored the work of David Wojnarowicz. He was heartbroken by David’s HIV diagnosis, and he was determined to conduct the definitive interview with the artist. They met in Peter Hujar’s Second Avenue loft, where David was living, one year before David’s death, winter of 1990, to talk for several hours. The conversation was videotaped by their mutual friend and collaborator, the filmmaker Marion Scemama. David, Scemama told us much later, was extremely nervous about being interviewed by Sylvère, whom he saw as an avatar of an intellectual world that eluded him. Sylvère was equally nervous about talking with David, in awe of his work as an artist and his very public activism despite his advanced illness. Outside the loft, the traffic roared, and the two men at times had difficulty hearing each other. Sylvère edited the interview for publication years later in the 2006 Semiotext(e) book David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side. He was never completely satisfied with their conversation; he felt that he’d missed a vital connection. But Marion has since shown the videotaped interview many times, and it remains one of the most intimate, telling portraits of Wojnarowicz as a person and artist.
Sylvère’s interview with Kathy Acker was conducted in 1990 for the 1991 Semiotext(e) publication of her book Hannibal Lecter, My Father. They went back and forth on the edit multiple times. She felt entrapped by his aggressive edits and probing questions, while he felt unappreciated for the weeks of preparation and editing the work entailed. Their conflict over the interview was certainly colored by their personal history as a former couple, but it also arose from pitting her very contemporary notion of the artist-as-icon against his more traditional values of authenticity and leisurely, nuanced critical discourse. Economics as well as aesthetics played into this conflict: Sylvère was a tenured professor, while Kathy supported herself largely by writing and touring. Nevertheless, their conversation remains one of the most definitive expositions of Kathy Acker’s intelligence, style, personality, and formal strategies as a writer.
Sylvère liked to think of himself as a foreign agent—the title he’d coined for his Semiotext(e) imprint of European critical theory. As an interviewer, he expresses himself indirectly as a great literary critic and a perpetual agent provocateur.