Bilateral

[Ken Bolton at Club Foote, year unknown...]

Earlier this year, I came across a very enjoyable interview between Ken Bolton and Robert Cook. I have long enjoyed the writing of both gentlemen: Bolton a poet, publisher and the man behind the counter at Adelaide’s Dark Horsey Bookshop, who had just put out a collection of his writing on art; and Cook, a curator whose essays are always a great pleasure to read.

One of the things I liked about this interview is that the interviewer does not attempt to hide behind a curtain of anonymity, trying to absent himself in order to ‘get to the facts’. Rather, he puts himself in the picture. Both authors are self deprecating, amusing and intelligent.

I approached Cook and Bolton after I saw the interview, and asked if they wouldn’t mind me cross-publishing it here, in the hope that it will have a bonus life, augmenting its tenancy as a PDF on the Broadsheet website. Many thanks to both (the below is a slightly tweaked version of the one published in Broadsheet). Thanks to Peter and Alan over at Broadsheet for permission to cross-publish.

For the record, the bibliographic details for the original interview are:

Robert Cook, “Under the Counter: Interview with Ken Bolton”, in Contemporary Visual Art + Culture Broadsheet, 39.1, 2010.

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