PressPlay : Contemporary Artists in Conversation

A personal encounter with 50 of the world's most significant contemporary artists, pressPLAY draws together the full texts of the complete Phaidon interviews with artists since 1995.

From highly established artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Alex Katz to midcareer masters such as Fischli and Weiss and Jenny Holzer to the most exciting artists of the current generation such as Maurizio Cattelan and Pipilotti Rist, the artists in pressPLAY work in every variety of media - from painting to video, sculpture to installation. In discussion with key art critics as well as fellow artists, novelists, musicians and theorists, together the players in pressPLAY explain in full what it means to be an artist today.

Highlights include veteran painter Vija Celmins and noted sculptor Robert Gober in an intimate discussion on their differing art practices; longtime friends and fellow travellers for decades, Benjamin Buchloh and Lawrence Weiner recall 35 years of work in the definitive, career-long interview for this key conceptual artist; the late Sir Ernst Gombrich in a discussion with the UK's pre-eminent sculptor Antony Gormley, who confesses that it was Gombrich's Story of Art that first inspired him to become an artist; the taciturn, legendary Raymond Pettibon muses on the evolution of his work with noted novelist Dennis Cooper; musician-artist Christian Marclay discusses performance, music and art with Kim Gordon from the legendary rock band Sonic Youth .

Juan Vicente Aliaga is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Valencia, where he lives and works. He is co-editor of the books Arte Conceptual Revisado (Conceptual Art Revisited, 1990) and De amor y rabia. Acerca del arte y el Sida (On Love and Rage. Art and AIDS, 1993). A curator and art critic, Aliaga writes regularly for Artforum and Frieze.

Michael Archer, an art critic and lecturer. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly, Untitled and Artforum, is the author of Art Since 1960 (1997) and the co-author of Installation Art (1994). He is a Tutor in art history at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Carlos Basualdo is a poet and curator based in New York who regularly contributes to Artforum and Art Nexus, among other publications. Formerly the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Basualdo was also Co-Curator of Documenta 11 (2002) and the 50th Venice Biennial (2003).

Daniel Birnbaum is a contributing editor to Artforum and the author of several books on art and philosophy, including The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl's Phenomenology (1998) and Production (2000, with the artist Carsten Hšller). From 1998 to 2000 he was the Director of IASPIS, an artists' residency programme based in Stockholm. Since January 2001 he has been the Director of Portikus and the StŠdelschule Art Academy, both in Frankfurt.

Barbara Bloom is a New York-based artist whose international exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (1988), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998), the International Center of Photography, New York (2006) and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2006). Her artist's books include Ghost Writer (1988), The Reign of Narcissism (1990) and The Collections of Barbara Bloom (2006).

Nicholas Bourriaud is a French critic, curator and theorist. Formerly Co-Director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, he is the author of Relational Aesthetics (1997) and the Director of Documents sur l'art, a bilingual magazine devoted to contemporary culture.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is an art historian and critic and a Professor of twentieth-century and post-war art history at Harvard University. An editor of October magazine and co-author of Art Since 1900 (2005), Buchloh has also published his collected essays in Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry (2000) and Formalism and Historicity (2004).

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Italy. In 1998 she curated the first major retrospective exhibition of William Kentridge's work, and in 1999 she edited Arte Povera, also published by Phaidon.

Lynne Cooke has been Curator at the Dia Art Foundation since 1991. She co-curated the 1991 Carnegie International and was Artistic Director of the 1996 Sydney Biennale. She is a lecturer at Yale University and is on the faculty for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Dennis Cooper, a novelist and critic, is a Contributing Editor to Artforum. He has published a number of novels, among them Frisk (1991), as well as The Dream Police: Selected Poems 1969-93.

Douglas Crimp is Professor of Art History the University of Rochester and the author of On the Museum's Ruins (1993). He has also lectured and published widely on the subject of AIDS.

Bice Curiger is Curator at Kunsthaus Zurich and the co-founder and Editor in Chief of Parkett. She wrote the definitive monograph Meret Oppenheim, A Retrospective (1989).

Diedrich Diederichsen is the critic most closely associated with Isa Genzken, and the world expert on her work. Noted for his writings on pop music, theatre, cinema and political issues as well as art, Diederichsen’s texts have appeared in Artforum and Artscribe, among other journals.

Donna De Salvo is Associate Director for Programs and Curator, Permanent Collection, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Formerly Senior Curator at Tate Modern, she has curated exhibitions on Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol and Anish Kapoor, among others.

Mark Francis is a curator and critic based in London. He was previously Founding Director and Chief Curator of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and has curated exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

Tamar Garb is a critic and historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture and Professor of Art History at University College London. Her books include Sisters of the Brush: Women's Artistic Culture in Late 19th Century France (1994), The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity (co-edited with Linda Nochlin, 1995) and Bodies of Modernity (1998).

Alison M. Gingeras is Adjunct Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Exhibitions she organized while Curator of Contemorary Art at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1999-2004) include 'Dear Painter...' (2002) and Thomas Hirschhorn's project Musee Precaire Albinet (2004). Her writings appear regularly in Parkett, Tate Etc. and Artforum.

Robert Gober is among the most important American artists to have emerged in the 1980s. Primarily a sculptor and installation artist, Gober's handcrafted works - often based on familiar domestic objects - have been the object of major exhibitions, at, among others, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1997); the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Reina Sofia, Madrid (both 1991); and the Art Institute of Chicago (1988). In 2001 Gober represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.

Thelma Golden is Head Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, where she curated Lorna Simpson's 2002 exhibition. As Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, she curated the controversial exhibition 'Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art' in 1994.

Ernst Gombrich was one of the greatest and least conventional art historians of his age, achieving fame and distinction in three separate spheres: as a scholar, as a popularizer of art, and as a pioneer of the application of the psychology of perception to the study of art. His best-known book, The Story of Art - first published 50 years ago and now in its sixteenth edition - is one of the most influential books ever written about art. His books further include The Sense of Order (1979) and The Preference for the Primitive (2002), as well as a total of 11 volumes of collected essays and reviews. Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in London in November 2001. He came to London in 1936 to work at the Warburg Institute, where he eventually became Director from 1959 until his retirement in 1976. He won numerous international honours, including a knighthood, the Order of Merit and the Goethe, Hegel and Erasmus prizes.