Podcast appearances and mentions of Jasper Johns

Die Ausstellung „Fünf Freunde“ im Museum Brandhorst und Museum Ludwig geht den vielfältigen Beziehungen zwischen John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg und Cy Twombly nach. Hier entlang geht’s zu den Links unserer Werbepartner: https://detektor.fm/werbepartner/kunst-und-leben Den kostenlosen Monopol-Newsletter gibt’s auf https://www.monopol-magazin.de/ >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/kultur/monopol-podcast-fuenf-freunde

Die Ausstellung „Fünf Freunde“ im Museum Brandhorst und Museum Ludwig geht den vielfältigen Beziehungen zwischen John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg und Cy Twombly nach. Hier entlang geht’s zu den Links unserer Werbepartner: https://detektor.fm/werbepartner/kunst-und-leben Den kostenlosen Monopol-Newsletter gibt’s auf https://www.monopol-magazin.de/ >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/kultur/monopol-podcast-fuenf-freunde

Die Ausstellung „Fünf Freunde“ im Museum Brandhorst und Museum Ludwig geht den vielfältigen Beziehungen zwischen John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg und Cy Twombly nach. Hier entlang geht’s zu den Links unserer Werbepartner: https://detektor.fm/werbepartner/kunst-und-leben Den kostenlosen Monopol-Newsletter gibt’s auf https://www.monopol-magazin.de/ >> Artikel zum Nachlesen: https://detektor.fm/kultur/monopol-podcast-fuenf-freunde

For the 35th episode of "Reading the Art World," host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with influential art dealer Michael Findlay about his captivating memoir, "Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man," published by Prestel.This vibrant conversation takes listeners back to New York's electric downtown art scene of the 1960s and 70s, where Findlay directed one of SoHo's first galleries and launched exhibitions for artists now considered icons. With charm and wit, Findlay shares candid stories of his rise in the art world, recounting encounters with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other creative forces that defined an era when appreciation for art outweighed its investment potential.Moving beyond nostalgia, Findlay provides sharp insights into how the art world transformed from the experimental downtown scene to today's global market. Through vivid anecdotes about The Chelsea Hotel, Max's Kansas City, and Studio 54, he recreates a New York where creative experimentation flourished without today's commercial pressures.Whether you're fascinated by cultural history, the evolution of the art market, or simply love a good story, Findlay's irreverent, honest perspective offers a fresh look at a pivotal moment when art dealers, artists, and collectors converged to create lasting cultural change.ABOUT THE AUTHOR One of the earliest dealers in SoHo, Michael Findlay showcased artists including John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, and Hannah Wilke. Named Head of Impressionist and Modern Paintings at Christie's in 1984, he later became its International Director of Fine Arts. Since 2000 he has been a director at Acquavella Galleries, New York, which in recent years has held major exhibitions of important Impressionist, modern, and contemporary masters. His other books include “The Value of Art" and “Seeing Slowly – Looking At Modern Art.”PURCHASE THE BOOKhttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/746815/portrait-of-the-art-dealer-as-a-young-man-by-michael-findlay/ SUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW AND HEAR INTERVIEWS:For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com, hear our past interviews, and subscribe at the bottom of our Of Interest page for new posts.Follow us on Instagram: @meganfoxkelly"Reading the Art World" is a live interview and podcast series with leading art world authors hosted by art advisor Megan Fox Kelly. The conversations explore timely subjects in the world of art, design, architecture, artists and the art market, and are an opportunity to engage further with the minds behind these insightful new publications. Music by Bob Golden

A Fundação Louis Vuitton, de Paris, apresenta a mostra “Pop Forever”. A exposição revisita a corrente artística que surgiu nos anos 1950, com raízes no dadaísmo, e destaca a obra do norte-americano Tom Wesselman. Patrícia Moribe, em ParisSem manifesto e sem fronteiras, o pop foi uma das correntes artísticas mais importantes do século 20 e sua influência continua forte nas artes plásticas e na música até hoje. As cores, o psicodelismo, o objeto cotidiano como fonte de inspiração, a sensualidade e o absurdo são elementos recorrentes.Quem pensa em pop, pensa em Andy Warhol. Ele era o rei em uma Nova York efervescente, onde tudo era possível. Em seu espaço antológico, The Factory, flanavam intelectuais, dramaturgos, drag queens, artistas sem-teto, celebridades de Hollywood e milionários. Ele teria cunhado a frase de que no futuro todos seriam famosos por 15 minutos – e depois cairiam no esquecimento. Um dos quadros mais famosos de Warhol, um silkscreen da série retratando Marilyn Monroe está na exposição.Mas o fio condutor da exposição é a obra de Tom Wesselman (1931-2004), que morreu em 2004 aos 73 anos.“É uma exposição dupla, pois é, ao mesmo tempo, uma retrospectiva dedicada a este artista, Tom Wesselmann, que é considerado um dos pais fundadores do movimento pop”, explica Oliver Michelon, um dos curadores. “Mas também é uma exposição dedicada à arte pop, já que é, no fim das contas, uma leitura do pop a partir da obra de Tom Wesselmann e uma interpretação um pouco mais ampla do pop, já que vamos abordar as origens do movimento, por volta de 1960, até os dias de hoje”, acrescenta.“Tom Wesselmann, junto com Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol e James Rosenquist, é uma das primeiras grandes figuras do pop”, relata o curador. “Ou seja, ele aparece na cena artística de Nova York no começo dos anos 60 com obras que mostram objetos de consumo cotidiano, formas vibrantes, enfim, que fazem a arte passar para uma nova dimensão ao se apropriar da cultura popular. É uma espécie de detonador do pop. Desde o começo dos anos 1960 até o meio da década, e depois, obviamente, sua obra também evolui.”A mostra reúne 150 pinturas e trabalhos com técnicas mistas do artista. Há também 70 obras de outros nomes do pop, além de Andy Warhol, como os recordes de quadrinhos de Roy Lichtenstein, a releitura da bandeira norte-americana de Jasper Johns e as bolinhas de Yayoi Kusama.O projeto levou cerca de dois anos para ser concretizado e teve dois curadores convidados, Dieter Buchhart e Anna Karina Hofbauer. “Nunca é fácil conseguir os empréstimos, ainda mais de artistas excepcionais como é o caso”, diz Michelon. “Também pudemos contar com o apoio generoso da família Wesselman, que nos emprestou muitas peças.”O diálogo do pop acontece com artistas contemporâneos, como Jeff Koons e Ai Weiwei, além da nova geração representada por Derrick Adams, Tomokasu Matsuyama e Mickalene Thomas, que criaram peças especialmente para a exibição.“Pop Forever” fica em cartaz na Fundação Louis Vuitton até 24 de fevereiro de 2025.  

Bald schliesst Jelmoli seine Pforten. Denn an vielen Orten sterben heute diese Paläste des Konsums. Dabei war das Warenhaus doch einmal ein Sehnsuchtsort. War mit seinen glitzernden Auslagen Projektionsfläche für Träumereien vom glänzenden Leben. Haben die Warenhäuser ihre beste Zeit hinter sich? Epa, Manor oder Jelmoli – immer mehr Warenhäuser schliessen oder müssen zumindest ihre Konzepte überdenken. Hohe Mieten und der prosperierende Online-Handel sind schuld daran, dass viele Warenhäuser inzwischen schliessen müssen. Für viele ist das ein schmerzlicher Verlust, denn die Warenhäuser sind Orte der Erinnerungen, aber auch Orte, an denen wir besondere Momente erlebten. Als Kinder haben wir uns zu Weihnachten die Nase an der Schaufensterscheibe plattgedrückt oder die prachtvollen Dekorationen bewundert. Warenhäuser sind auch Projektionsflächen für ein Leben, das vielleicht ein wenig schillernder hätte sein können, für die «etwas glücklichere Familie» oder für Möglichkeiten, die uns das Leben noch zu bieten scheint. Fast jeder kann sich an Momente mit der Mutter, der Grossmutter oder der Gotte im Warenhaus erinnern. Mit dem Verschwinden dieser Orte verlieren wir ein Stück unserer Geschichte, unserer Kultur, aber auch unseres Stadtbilds. Aufstieg und Fall eines Warenhauses Als vor knapp zwei Jahren das Ende des Zürcher Kaufhauses Jelmoli bekannt gegeben wurde, hat sich Historikerin und Filmemacherin Sabine Gisiger sofort an die Recherche gemacht, die Geschichte dieses Konsumpalasts aufzuarbeiten. Es ist ein gesellschaftliches Sittenbild geworden, denn Warenhäuser demokratisierten das Einkaufen schöner Waren im 19. Jahrhundert. Sie boten Frauen eine der wenigen Möglichkeiten, zu arbeiten und ihr eigenes Geld zu verdienen und sich in einer streng patriarchalen Gesellschaft, die wenig anderes für sie bot, dem Hobby des Shoppens zu widmen. Der Film «Jelmoli – Biografie eines Warenhauses» erzählt davon. Schaufenster als Kunstraum Ein wichtiger Teil der grossen Luxuskonsumtempel waren immer wieder die prächtigen, verrückten oder auffallenden Schaufenster. Viele, die später Künstler wurden, konnten sich hier austoben und noch dazu Geld verdienen. Einer von ihnen war der Schweizer Künstler Jean Tinguely. Angeregt dadurch eröffnet das Museum Tinguely Anfang Dezember die Ausstellung «Fresh Window», die sich nicht nur ehemaligen Schaufenster-Gestaltern wie Warhol, Rauschenberg oder Jasper Johns widmet, sondern auch junge Künstlerinnen und Künstler dazu einlädt, das Schaufenster als Kunstraum zu nutzen. Und anlässlich der Schliessung des Jelmoli führt Eva Wannenmacher ein Gespräch mit der Jelmoli-Unternehmenstransformerin Monica Monsch über die Schliessung des Traditionshauses.

Our third of four Bill Lane Center for the American West podcasts featured Stanford's Alex Nemerov in conversation with Michael Krasny. The discussion began with what makes Western art distinctive and what captured Alex's imagination. Michael then explored Alex's approach to curating art exhibitions and discussed the influences of Alex's father, celebrated poet Howard Nemerov, and his aunt, iconic pioneer photographer Diane Arbus. This led to a discussion of Susan Sontag's book on photography and photography's status as fine art. The conversation then broadened to explore various themes: women artists, Jasper Johns, the universal and spiritual elements in art, solipsism, art for the marketplace versus art for art's sake, and socially purposeful versus aesthetic art. Alex shared both personal and professional perspectives on art's power—from its inward transformative and transfiguring effects to its broader meaning and potential as a world-changing agent. The interview concluded with a discussion of kindness, and Alex revealed what he considers the greatest work in American art.

Marcado en un principio por John Cage, de quien incorpora la aleatoriedad y los sistemas alternativos de notación musical, el compositor norteamericano evoluciona hacia obras cada vez más extensas y minimalistas que requieren—o proponen—la suspensión del tiempo._____Has escuchadoNeither (1977) / textos de Samuel Beckett. Petra Hoffmann, soprano; Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks; Kwamé Ryan, director. Col Legno (2000)Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981). Arne Deforce, violonchelo; Yutaka Oya, piano. Aeon (2008)Piece for Four Pianos (1957). David Tudor, Edwin Hymovitz, Morton Feldman, Russell Sherman, pianos. Edition RZ (2007)String Quartet II (1983). Ives Ensemble. hat[now]ART (2007)The King of Denmark (1964). Max Neuhaus, percusión. Sony (2013)_____ Selección bibliográficaBEAL, Amy C., “Time Canvasses: Morton Feldman and the Painters of the New York School”. En: Music and Modern Art. Editado por James Leggio. Routledge, 2002*BLASIUS, Leslie, “Late Feldman and the Remnants of Virtuosity”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 42, n.º 1 (2004), pp. 32-83*BOUTWELL, Brett, “Morton Feldman's Graphic Notation: Projections and Trajectories”. Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 6, n.º 4 (2011-2012), pp. 457-482CERVERÓ, Joan Josep, Hibridaciones entre música y pintura: la relación de Morton Feldman y Mark Rothko en Rothko Chapel. Tesis doctoral, Universitat Politècnica de València, 2017CLINE, David, The Graph Music of Morton Feldman. Cambridge University Press, 2016COSTELO, Catherine, “The Sounds of the Sounds Themselves: Analyzing the Early Music of Morton Feldman”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 34, n.º 1 (1996), pp. 6-27*DELIO, Thomas, The Music of Morton Feldman. Greenwood Press, 1995DOHONEY, Ryan, Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022FELDMAN, Morton, Écrits et paroles. Editado por Jean-Yves Bosseur. L'Harmattan, 1998—, Give my Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. Exact Change, 2000*—, Morton Feldman Says. Selected Interviews and Lectures, 1964-1987. Editado por Chris Villars. Hyphen Press, 2006—, Pensamientos verticales. Caja Negra, 2012GAREAU, Philip, La musique de Morton Feldman ou le temps en liberté. L'Harmattan, 2006JIMÉNEZ CARMONA, Susana, “Suspensiones temporales: sonido y temporalidad en Luigi Nono y Morton Feldman”. En: Musicología en el siglo XXI: nuevos retos, nuevos enfoques. Coordinado por Begoña Lola y Adela Presas. Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2018*JOHNSON, Steven, “Rothko Chapel and Rothko's Chapel”. Perspectives of New Music, vol. 32, n.º 2, (1994) pp. 6-53*JOHNSON, Steven (ed.), The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Edgard Varèse, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg. Routledge, 2002KISSANE, Séna (ed.), Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts. Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010LAWS, Catherine, Headaches among the Overtones: Music in Beckett. Rodopi, 2013NOBLE, Alistair, Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman. Ashgate Pub, 2013SAFATLE, Vladimir, “Morton Feldman comme critique de l'idéologie: expression et politique dans Rothko Chapel”. En: Expression et geste musical: actes du colloque des 8 et 9 avril 2010 à l'Institut national d'histoire de l'art de Paris. Editado por Susanne Kogler y Jean-Paul Olive. L'Harmattan, 2013*SNIJDERS, John, “That is Not Freedom, that is Taking License: The Pitfalls in Performing Morton Feldman's Graph Scores”. En: The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts: Spontaneity, Flaws, and the Unfinished. Editado por Andy Hamilton y Lara Pearson. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021*VOLANS, Kevin, “What is Feldman?”. Tempo, vol. 68, n.º 270 (2014), pp. 7-14ZIMMERMANN, Walter, “Entretien avec Morton Feldman”. En: Musiques en création. Editado por Philippe Albèra. Contrechamps, 1997* *Documento disponible para su consulta en la Sala de Nuevas Músicas de la Biblioteca y Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación de la Fundación Juan March

A mysterious poster about a famous artist with no connections to Texas — or Jason’s Deli — leads us on a hunt for who made the thing — and why on Earth they put it there. The post Why is there a display about Jasper Johns on the side of a Jason’s Deli in San Marcos? appeared first on KUT & KUTX Studios -- Podcasts.

For the 29th episode of "Reading the Art World," host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Richard Shiff, art historian and author of “Writing after Art,” published by David Zwirner Books. Richard shares how he comes to understand an artist's work in a way that will inspire us to observe and understand artists and their processes more fully.“Writing after Art” is an expansive anthology of Richard Shiff's most influential writings, many of which have shaped the art world's understanding of 20th and 21st century artists. These writings first appeared in exhibition catalogs for institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, and they spotlight modern masters such as Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley and Peter Saul.Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin. His interests range broadly across the field of modern and contemporary art. His publications include Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (coauthored, 2004), Doubt (2008), Between Sense and de Kooning (2011), Ellsworth Kelly: New York Drawings 1954–1962 (2014), Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969–2019 (2020), and Sensuous Thoughts: Essays on the Work of Donald Judd (2020). He is currently completing a comprehensive study of the art of Jack Whitten.PURCHASE THE BOOK:  David Zwirner BooksSUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW AND HEAR INTERVIEWS:For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com, hear our past interviews, and subscribe at the bottom of our Of Interest page for new posts.Follow us on Instagram: @meganfoxkelly"Reading the Art World" is a live interview and podcast series with leading art world authors hosted by art advisor Megan Fox Kelly. The conversations explore timely subjects in the world of art, design, architecture, artists and the art market, and are an opportunity to engage further with the minds behind these insightful new publications. Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and past President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations.Music composed by Bob Golden

Dave is revisiting some of his favorite episodes and interviews for his ‘Best of Dave Chang Show' series. In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, beloved 'Dave Chang Show' guest, and 'Art is Life' author Jerry Saltz returns to survey the state of art and food in 2022, and deliver a bracing dose of motivation to Dave, Chris, and anyone else out there embarking on a potentially terrifying creative endeavor. Also: ancient DNA, private psyches, Chris Ofili, Laurie Anderson, zombie formalism, the end of linear time, dirty shamans, Jasper Johns, caveman cooking, F. Murray Abraham, Ai Weiwei, 'The Raft of the Medusa,' Dolly Parton, fighting your demons, Neal Brennan, Thomas Kinkade, art vs. craftsmanship, Cy Twombly, Jason Polan, and a Coen Brothers debate. Hosts: Dave Chang and Chris Ying Guest: Jerry Saltz Producers: Sasha Ashall, Jordan Bass, and Victoria Valencia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The grandfather of British Pop Art, Sir Peter Blake is one of most influential and popular artists of his generation. A Royal Academician with work in the national collection, including Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, he is renowned for paintings and collages that borrow imagery from advertising, cinema and music. Having created The Beatles' Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve in 1967 he became the go-to album designer for other musical artists including The Who, Paul Weller, Madness and Oasis. He was knighted for services to art in 2002.Sir Peter tells John Wilson how, after a working class upbringing in Dartford, Kent, he won a place at the Royal College of Art alongside fellow students Bridget Riley and Frank Auerbach. He recalls being influenced by early American pop artists including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and how he began making art inspired by everyday popular imagery. He chooses Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood as a work which captivated his imagination and later inspired a series of his artworks based on the characters, and also cites Max Miller, the music hall artist known as 'the Cheeky Chappie'; as a creative influence. Sir Peter remembers how he made the iconic Sgt Pepper sleeve using waxwork dummies and life size cut-out figures depicting well-known people chosen by Peter and The Beatles themselves. Producer: Edwina PitmanArchive used: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, performed by Richard Burton, BBC Third Programme, 25 Jan 1954 Max Miller, introduced by Wilfred Pickles at the Festival of Variety, BBC Light Programme, 6 May 1951 Max Miller archive from Celebration, The Cheeky Chappie, BBC Radio 4, 3 July 1974 Monitor: 89: Pop Goes The Easel, BBC1, 25 March 1962 Peter Blake: Work in Progress, BBC2, 21 February 1983 Newsnight, BBC2, 7 February 1983 Ian Dury, Peter the Painter

Matías Rivas, Arturo Fontaine y Sofía García-Huidobro comentaron la obra de la poetiza y Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda 2024. Además recomendaron "Ideas sobre pintura" acera de Jasper Johns, "Amy Foster" de Joseph Conrad, "Monster" de Hirokazu Koreeda y "Pinic extraterrestre" de Fabián Casas .

Matías Rivas, Arturo Fontaine y Sofía García-Huidobro comentaron la obra de la poetiza y Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda 2024. Además recomendaron "Ideas sobre pintura" acera de Jasper Johns, "Amy Foster" de Joseph Conrad, "Monster" de Hirokazu Koreeda y "Pinic extraterrestre" de Fabián Casas .

A conversation with Jordan Schnitzer, the world's foremost collector of prints and multiples. In the conversation, we discuss Jordan's undeniable passion for art, his thoughts on collecting, and his unwavering support for arts programming. In particular, we delve into his support of a current exhibition at The Getty titled "First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L."For over five decades, Gemini G.E.L Co-Founder Sidney B. Felsen has documented the vibrant life and creative processes at Gemini through his love of photography. This has resulted in an unmatched historical record of some of the most influential artists of the last sixty years, including Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Gehry and Julie Mehretu. Felsen's intimate photographs which capture the collaborations and friendships that have shaped Gemini's legacy, are on view at The Getty through July 7.https://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/exhibitions/sidney_b_felsen/index.htmlhttps://www.jordanschnitzer.org/https://schnitzercare.org/https://www.geminigel.com/

Episode No. 653 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast features critic and author Deborah Solomon and host Tyler Green's 2016 conversation with Frank Stella.  Frank Stella died on May 4 at the age of 87. For two decades, from the late 1950s until the late 1970s or early 1980s, Stella was one of the United States' most important painters. The Museum of Modern Art, New York famously devoted two mid-career retrospectives to Stella's work, in 1970 and again in 1987. Solomon is a critic whose work can often be found in the New York Times, and the author of biographies of Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Norman Rockwell. Her biography of Jasper Johns is forthcoming. She wrote this critical obit of Stella for the NYT. The next segment is Stella's 2016 visit to the Modern Art Notes Podcast on the occasion of a Stella retrospective at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. The exhibition traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the de Young Museum, San Francisco. 

Magazzino exhibit shares 1960s work by talented, but troubled, artist One takeaway from the exhibit Germinal at Magazzino Italian Art in Philipstown is how often the artist, Mario Schifano, shifted visual and technical gears over just 10 years, from 1960 to 1970. In Italy, the groovy 1960s collided with lingering post-World War II malaise and radical politics. Schifano visited New York City three times during the period, hobnobbing with jazz masters and hanging out with Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. A cheeky account states that "the Rolling Stones stole his girlfriend," Anita Pallenberg (who dated Brian Jones and had three children with Keith Richards). Later in the decade, Marianne Faithfull left Mick Jagger for Schifano. One photo in the exhibit shows Jasper Johns preparing a libation as Schifano relaxes. The Italian's extensive photos and films of old New York are priceless, but he also picked up a heroin habit and did not return to the city after interest in his work waned. He continued to create, but ill-gotten fame grew with successive arrests. After spending time in a mental institution and with a band, he died in 1998 at age 63. He had exhibited all over Europe and around the world, from Tokyo to Los Angeles and South America. This show, curated by Filippo Fossati, reimagines and streamlines the museum's Schifano exhibition from last fall, focusing on the period when his dalliances in New York City and Italian politics informed his work. At first, the artist's textured monochrome paintings attracted the interest of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, among the world's most renowned art dealers at the time. In his expansive studio at 791 Broadway, he created many large works, some of which conveyed motion as stencil-like people beat feet, hands extended as if marching down an urban street. One is clearly derivative of Da Vinci. "Elemento per grande paesaggio" (1962) "Compagni compagni" (1968) "La testa della madre 1913" (1965) "Futurismo rivisitato a colori" (1965) "Ultimo autunno" (1964) "Particolare di propaganda" (1962) The works on display at Magazzino are smaller, including an installment of his recurring series Propaganda, which incorporated interpretations of the Coca-Cola and Esso (precursor to Exxon) logos beginning in 1962 and earned inevitable comparisons to Warhol. His handlers wanted Schifano to keep knocking out single-color works, but he rebelled and they dropped him. The show features abstracts, what he called "anemic" landscapes, more realistic landscapes and two loud, strident images of workers holding hammers and sickles. There is also one painting from a series of collaborations with poet and neighbor Frank O'Hara, who wrote on the canvas: "There was a lot of static - Lately deciding to be relatively evil or not I bought a wrist radio." He added: "Images were shy and oblique and I love Federico Fellini more than grass." Schifano overlaid several works with plastic or plexiglass, including an untitled collage with yellow strips of jagged Perspex hanging from the top and "52 Delle Grotte Alley from the Inside in the Early Morning," which depicts a window with an interior perspective but is covered by what resembles the material used to cover fluorescent lights. Recurring motifs include words and slogans splashed across canvasses along with outlines of wood rulers and drafting tools, as if left on the table of a quasi-abstract artist. Many works are embellished with random, geometrically rigid shapes disconnected from the rest of the image, like the red strips punctuating "Anemic Landscape I" and a bright-green rectangle that clashes with the unfinished red, white and brown canvas in "Propaganda Detail." Schifano painted flourishes around a photo of his artistic heroes, the Futurists from the early 1900s, although their faces are blanked out. Pieces from another series were influenced by his infatuation with television. The exhibition's title is drawn from the artist, who claimed t...

In this episode, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar, is entering an inspiring and insightful conversation with Scandinavian art world legend Björn Wetterling.1984, in the heart of Stockholm, at the iconic Kungsträdgården 3, something remarkable happened; Wetterling Gallery opened its doors. This moment marked the beginning of what would become a cornerstone in Sweden's contemporary art scene.Under the visionary leadership of Björn Wetterling, the gallery became the gateway for seminal American artists of the time, artists whose names are now synonymous with modern art greatness— Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ed Ruscha, just to name a few.But the Wetterling Gallery's journey didn't stop with the icons of the 80s. Over the decades, it has evolved, embracing a wide spectrum of artistic expressions and stages of career development. Today, while still honoring its roots and the artists who laid its foundation, the gallery is a vibrant platform for both emerging and established talents, particularly those from Scandinavia or based in the region.At the core of the Wetterling Gallery's mission, guided by Björn Wetterling and his dedicated team, is a profound respect for the unique vision and instinct of each artist they represent. It's a place where art is not just seen; it's experienced, where every exhibition is a testament to the gallery's commitment to diversity, innovation, and the unwavering belief in the power of art to inspire and transform.So, join us as we explore the legacy of the Wetterling Gallery, its impact on the art world, and the stories of the artists who have called it home. It's a journey through four decades of artistic excellence, and we're just getting started. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In s3e51, Platemark host Ann Shafer talks with Chris Santa Maria, artist and gallery director at Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl. As director of the New York gallery, Chris is responsible for showcasing and selling the print output of the storied LA workshop to enable it to keep working with amazing artists and producing incredible editions. Chris and Ann touch on Gemini's history, the structure of the workshop, how artists get to work there, and Julie Mehretu, Julie Mehretu, and Julie Mehretu. They also talk about Chris' side hustle as an artist and his intricate paper collages. Josef Albers. White Line Square IV, 1966. 53.3 x 53.3 cm (21 x 21 in.). 2011. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; ©Gemini G.E.L. and the Artist. Chris Santa Maria wrangling prints at Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, New York. Sidney Felsen, co-founder of Gemini G.E.L. Photo by Alex Berliner. Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, 535 West 24th Street, third floor, New York. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Chris Santa Maria hanging Julie Mehretu's print at Art Basel Miami, 2019. Julie Mehretu's etching installed at the New York gallery, June 8–August 24, 2023. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Julie Mehretu at work at Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Julie Mehretu at work at Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Analia Saban working at Gemini workshop. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Robert Rauschenberg working on the limestone for Waves from the Stoned Moon series with Stanley Grinstein in the background. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen, 1969. From the collection of Getty Research Institute. Jasper Johns deleting imagery from a lithography plate for Cicada, November 1981. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California, 2001. Richard Serra at work on his etchings and Paintstik compositions, November 1990. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California, 2001. Ellsworth Kelly (left) and NGA curator Mark Rosenthal at Gemini; Ellsworth canceling a print from the Portrait Series, February 1990. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California, 2001. Works by Richard Serra and Julie Mehretu at the IFPDA Print Fair, October 2023. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Joni Weyl and Sidney Felsen at the 2019 IFPDA Print Fair, New York. Tacita Dean at work at Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Roy Lichtenstein at work at Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Julie Mehretu at Gemini G.E.L.'s booth at the IFPDA Print Fair, October 2023.         Tacita Dean. LA Magic Hour 1, 2021. Hand-drawn, multi-color blend lithograph. 29 7/8 x 29 7/8 in. (75.88 x 75.88 cm). ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Chris Santa Maria. Field 31, 2023. Paper college on 4-ply ragboard. 10 x 10 in. Chris Santa Maria's studio. Chris Santa Maria's studio. Chris Santa Maria. President Trump, 2020. Paper collage. 72 x 72 in. Chris Santa Maria. No. 5, 2014. Paper collage on MDF. 58 x 60 in. in the window of Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York. Ellsworth Kelly. The River (state), 2003 and River II, 2005. Lithographs. Installed during the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: The Rivers, October 25–December 8, 2007 at Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, New York. Julie Mehretu's etchings installed at the New York gallery, June 8–August 24, 2023. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Bruce Nauman in the curating room canceling a copperplate by drawing a sharp tool across it to destroy the image with assistance from William Padien, 1983. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California, 2001. Julie Mehretu at work at Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Works by Ann Hamilton and Tacita Dean in the exhibition at the New York gallery, Selected Works by Gemini Artists. January 2–February 24, 2024. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California. Daniel Buren at Gemini workshop, August 1988. Photograph by Sidney B. Felsen. ©Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California, 2001.   USEFUL LINKS Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl. | (joniweyl.com) Gemini G.E.L. Graphic Editions Limited (geminigel.com) Chris Santa Maria Instagram accounts @chrisantamaria @geminigel @joniweyl    

Embark with us on a journey through the innovative mind of Robert Rauschenberg, a beacon of artistic evolution. Our conversation weaves through the narrative of an artist who always moved towards new creative territories. We share personal reflections on how Rauschenberg's philosophy resonates with our artistic endeavors, embracing the beginner's mind and the allure of fresh experiences over the pursuit of mastery. Through his story and our own, we uncover the joy of constant change and the impact of collaborations, such as those Rauschenberg had with Jasper Johns, in shaping an artist's path.As artists, the canvas is merely a starting point; the true art lies in expanding beyond it. This episode delves into the shifting landscapes of art mediums, from sculpture to painting and beyond. We discuss the discipline required to flourish in artistic practice, the openness to new ideas, and the enriching power of diverse interests. Tapping into insights from David Epstein's "Range," we celebrate the generalist's advantage in today's art scene—a world where a wide-ranging palette of experiences can lead to groundbreaking work.Wrapping up, we reflect on how the pressures of the art market intersect with the creative process, comparing the strengths that Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) can bring to an artist's work. We share the importance of continual growth and the exploration of new artistic territories to maintain the spark of joy in our creations. By documenting our artistic processes, we underscore the profound impact of revisiting past works, allowing for a narrative of growth and the embrace of irresistible possibilities that guide us to meaningful evolution in our work. Join us for this homage to the indomitable spirit of artists who, like Rauschenberg, never cease to evolve.Send us a message - we would love to hear from you!Make sure to follow us on Instagram here:@justmakeartpodcast @tynathanclark @nathanterborg

In s3e43, Platemark host Ann Shafer talks with Craig Zammiello, an artist and collaborative printer with over 40 years of experience in all areas of printmaking. He worked for 25 years at Universal Limited Art Editions, where he collaborated with numerous artists, including Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, James Rosenquist, Kiki Smith, and Robert Rauschenberg. Currently, he is a collaborative printer at Two Palms working with Mel Bochner, Ellen Gallagher, Chris Offili, Elizabeth Peyton, and Dana Schutz.  He is author of a studio manual on photogravure, as well as Conversations from the Print Studio published by Yale University Press. Ann and Craig talk about Woodburytypes, working with Robert Rauschenberg at ULAE, and helping Matthew Barney grow copper nodules on a Woodburytype and then gold plating them. They talk about Craig's transition to Two Palms and how that studio works outside of the traditional print studio model. Find out about a lifelong interest of Craig's that has resulted in his collection being acquired by the American Museum of Natural History (no, it's not prints), and what band would he most like to join on tour. Zammiello received an MFA from The State University of New York, Stony Brook in 1995. He is currently Adjunct Faculty at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Zammiello has taught workshops and classes at New York University, Yale University, The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Flemish Center for the Graphic Arts in Belgium. Episode image: Elizabeth Zammiello Matthew Barney (American, born 1967). In Vain Produced, All Rays Return, Evil Will Bless, and Ice Will Burn, 2015. Set of 4 Woodburytype prints on copper with electro-formed copper, nickel and 24 carat gold, in red oak frames. Framed dimensions: 11 1/2 x 15 ½ in. Printed by F-Zero Project and published by Two Palms, New York. Lead printing plate for Brad by Chuck Close (American, 1940–2021). 9x12 in. The finished Woodburytype print for Brad, Chuck Close (American, 1940–2021), with the ink overflow around the edges. 11x14 inches. Published by Two Palms, New York. R. Crumb (American, born 1943). Keep on Flushin', 2022. Etching. Sheet: 13 ½ x 11 ½ in. Printed by Craig Zammiello and published by Two Palms, New York. Mel Bochner (American, born, 1940). Is This It?, 2023. Cast and pigmented paper. 69 ¾ x 67 ¼ x 5 5/8 in. Published by Two Palms, New York. Lee Bontecou (American, 1931–2022). Ninth Stone, 1965–68. Lithograph in 1 color on Chatham British paper. 20 x 25 in. (50.8 x 63.5 cm.). Published by Universal Limited Art Editions, Bayshore, New York. Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925–2008). Wall-Eyed Carp/ROCI JAPAN, 1987. Acrylic and fabric collage on canvas. 203.2 x 617.2 cm (80 x 243 in.). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Lisa Hodermarsky and Craig Zammiello. Conversations from the Print Studio: A Master Printer in Collaboration with Ten Artists. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2012.   USEFUL LINKS Craig Zammiello's video on photogravure techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3HAoyIsrDY  Craig's website: https://www.zammiello.com/ IG: @craigzammiello

In this episode, Eric sits down with author, media personality and art collector; Alvin Hall. They discuss his early beginnings — growing up in Florida during the Jim Crow era, his educational journey and early exposures to art. The artists who inspired him and helped cultivate his knowledge and appreciation for the artistic process. How he began collecting black and white photography and prints, his passion for writing, his career as a financial writer and becoming a patron of the arts. The works in his collection; what motivates his decision making when buying art and how his collection has evolved through the years. They discuss abstract art, art as an investment... the books he has written, his recent podcast series and research on the Green Book, his new book and upcoming projects. For more visit: www.ericsperspective.comGuest Bio: Alvin Hall is an internationally renowned financial educator, television and radio broadcaster, bestselling author and regular contributor to magazines, newspapers and websites. For five years on the BBC, he hosted the highly rated and award-winning series, Your Money or Your Life, on which he offered both practical financial and psychological advice to people about how to take control of and fix their financial problems. His radio program, Jay-Z: From Brooklyn to the Boardroom, won the Wincott Foundation Press and Broadcasting Award for the best radio program for 2006. In the US, he is a regular contributor on personal finance and the economy on NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin.Among Hall's bestselling books are: You and Your Money: It's More than Just the Numbers, Your Money or Your Life (winner of the WHSmith 2003 People's Choice Award), What Not to Spend, Getting Started in Mutual Funds 2nd Edition, and Getting Started in Stocks 3rd Edition. His children's book, Show Me the Money, has been published in over 20 foreign-language editions. Hall lives in New York City where he designs and teaches classes about the investment markets for financial services companies, banks, regulatory authorities, as well as information and technology vendors.  He is also on the Acquisitions Committee of the Studio Museum in Harlem.About Eric's Perspective: A podcast series on African American art with Eric Hanks — African American art specialist, owner of the renowned M. Hanks Gallery and commissioner on the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; offers his perspective on African American art through in-depth conversations with fellow art enthusiasts where they discuss the past, present & future of African American art.For more on Eric's Perspective, visit www.ericsperspective.com#ERICSPERSPECTIVE #AFRICANAMERICAN #ART SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/2vVJkDn LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2B6wB3USpotify: https://spoti.fi/3j6QRmWGoogle Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3fNNgrYiHeartRadio: https://ihr.fm/2KtYGXv Pandora: https://pdora.co/38pFWAmConnect with us ONLINE: Visit Eric's Perspective website: https://bit.ly/2ZQ41x1Facebook: https://bit.ly/3jq5fXPInstagram: https://bit.ly/39jFZxGTwitter: https://bit.ly/2OMRx33 www.mhanksgallery.comAbout Eric Hanks: African American art specialist and owner of the renowned M. Hanks Gallery, Eric Hanks is one of the leading representatives of Black artists, promoting and selling their works nationally to individual and museum collections, publishing exhibition catalogues, teaching art appreciation classes, and writing articles and essays appearing in prestigious art books and various other publications. 

This season, I'm rounding up stories about modern artists in love, in lust, in relationships— digging into these individuals, see how their liaisons, marriages, affairs, and connections played in or on their respective works of art, and how, if anything, they affected art history as we know it. I, for one, believe that it's time for Modern Love. Today: we're homing in on the love affairs of Robert Rauschenberg, moving from Cy Twombly and on to Jasper Johns—a series of relationships that lasted only briefly, but whose effects on modern art are still felt to this day. Please SUBSCRIBE and REVIEW our show on Apple Podcasts and FOLLOW on Spotify Sponsor ArtCurious for as little as $4 on Patreon Instagram / Facebook / YouTube SPONSORS: Lume Deodorant: Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @lumedeodorant and get over 40% off your starter pack with promo code ARTCURIOUS at lumedeodorant.com/ARTCURIOUS! #lumepod To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to sales@advertisecast.com or visit https://www.advertisecast.com/ArtCuriousPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, I welcomed back, painter, Catherine Haggarty to the Peps pod. We spoke about her background as a high school basketball player and how the focus and commitment required to be an athlete have so many parallels to the life of an artist. Catherine makes luminous paintings and drawings using spray paint, acrylic, watercolor and oil stick of imagined domestic interiors, all put through her uniquely surrealist and prismatic lens. Also, find out what her term "Instagram Brain" means! Catch Catherine's work in person in "Support Structures" at TSA (NY) until June 18, 2023 Catherine's website: www.catherinehaggarty.com and IG: @catherine_haggarty The Canopy Program is online at www.nyccritclub.com or on IG: @the_canopy_program_ Catherine's uber-helpful How to Host A Studio Visit episode Catherine earned her MFA from Rutgers University and has recently shown her work with Geary Contemporary and Hashimoto Contemporary in NYC and at Badr el Jundi Gallery in Madrid. She recently showed her work at Future Fairs in NYC with Lorin Gallery (Los Angeles) Works mentioned: LA Light, Too Many Ideas, Monument to work, Droste Effect for Max Artists mentioned: Jennifer Coates, David Humphrey, Japanese Ukiyo-e artists, Matisse, Sylvia Mangold, Rita MacDonald, Chardin, Mary Cassatt, Catherine Murphy, Jasper Johns, Edward Hopper, Méret Oppenheim, Andrew Prayzner Book mentioned: Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting by Norman Bryson *Shout out to all the Hall of Fame Dads past and present and especially to James Bernard Haggarty, who was the Bee's Knees.* ---------------------------- Pep Talks on IG: ⁠@peptalksforartists⁠ Pep Talks on Art Spiel as written essays: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/7k82vd8s⁠ Amy's Interview on Two Coats of Paint: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/2v2ywnb3⁠ Amy's website: ⁠https://www.amytalluto.com/⁠ Amy on IG: ⁠@talluts⁠ ⁠BuyMeACoffee⁠ Donations appreciated! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/peptalksforartistspod/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/peptalksforartistspod/support

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

In this KEEN ON episode, Andrew talks to the author of THE FOREST, Alexander Nemerov, about his truthfully subjective image of America in the 1830s Alexander Nemerov is Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. His new book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, is just out from Princeton University Press. His most recent book is Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, published by Penguin in 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography.in 2021.He has recently published essays on Adaline Kent, John Quidor, Deana Lawson, Clifford Ross, Wilson Bentley, Jasper Johns, Perugino, Tintoretto, and the social history of art. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“J” is for Johns, Jasper (b. 1930). Artist. Jasper Johns is a pivotal figure of twentieth-century American art, occupying a critical position that mediates Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism.

'Painter's Painting', 'You've Got Mail' and 'Sleepless in Seattle', religious Gen Z, studio talk, and Jasper Johns.

Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic, beloved 'Dave Chang Show' guest, and 'Art Is Life' author Jerry Saltz returns to the show to survey the state of art and food in 2022, and to deliver a bracing dose of motivation to Dave, Chris, and anyone else out there embarking on a potentially terrifying creative endeavor. Also: ancient DNA, private psyches, Chris Ofili, Laurie Anderson, zombie formalism, the end of linear time, dirty shamans, Jasper Johns, caveman cooking, F. Murray Abraham, Ai Weiwei, "The Raft of the Medusa," Dolly Parton, fighting your demons, Neal Brennan, Thomas Kinkade, art vs. craftsmanship, Cy Twombly, Jason Polan, and a Coen Brothers debate. Hosts: Dave Chang and Chris Ying Guest: Jerry Saltz Producers: Sasha Ashall and Jordan Bass Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

According to former lorry driver turned Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, Jerry Saltz, art represents "the greatest operating system our species has ever devised to explore consciousness." That is, of course, until they invented the podcast. On this episode, Ryan and Lydia Porter had the distinct pleasure of talking all things visual with America's most famous, and in some corners of the internet, infamous, art critic. In his new book, "Art Is Life", Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points - from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today - Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture.Art Is Life offers Saltz's eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, Hilma af Klint and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Marina Abramovic; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. With his signature blend of candour and conviction, Jerry Saltz argues in Art Is Life for the importance of the fearless artist. The result is an openhearted and irresistibly readable appraisal by one of our most important cultural observers.Jerry spoke to us about everything from Tracey Emin to Dolly Parton, to the bankrupt FTX billionaire currently making headlines. We debated the merits of the art market, to whether or not we British are capable of transcending our literary roots to paint what he calls, "the bullsh*t American sublime." While rarely succinct, he is never boring, and full of tremendous curiosity, intelligence, and an enthusiasm for art and artists that cannot be ignored.

What you'll learn in this episode: How synesthesia—the ability to hear colors and see music—has impacted William's work Inside William's creative process, and why he never uses sketches or finishes a piece in one sitting Why jewelry artists should never scrap a piece, even if they don't like it in the moment The benefits of being a self-taught artist, and why art teachers should never aim to impart their style onto their students How a wearer's body becomes like a gallery wall for jewelry About William Harper Born in Ohio and currently working in New York City, William Harper is considered one of the most significant jewelers of the 20th century. After studying advanced enameling techniques at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Harper began his career as an abstract painter but transitioned to enameling and studio craft jewelry in the 1960s. He is known for creating esoteric works rooted in mythology and art history, often using unexpected objects such as bone, nails, and plastic beads in addition to traditional enamel, pearls, and precious metals and stones. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Crafts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A retrospective of his work, William Harper: The Beautiful & the Grotesque, was exhibited at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2019. Additional Resources: William's Instagram Photos available on TheJewelryJourney.com Transcript: Rather than stifle his creativity, the constraints of quarantine lockdown and physical health issues helped artist-jeweler William Harper create a series of intricate jewels and paintings imbued with meaning. After 50+ years as an enamellist, educator and artist in a variety of media, he continues to find new ways to capture and share his ideas. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about his creative process; why he didn't want his art students to copy his style; and why he never throws a piece in progress away, even if he doesn't like it. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week. I'd like to welcome back one of today's foremost jewelers, William Harper. To say he is a jeweler leaves out many parts of him. He's a sculptor, an educator, an artist, an enamellist, and I'm sure I've leaving out a lot more. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Crafts, the Museum of Fine Arts, and most recently he had a one-person show, “The Beautiful & the Grotesque,” at the Cleveland Institute of Art. I can't do justice to all of his work, so I'll let him try to do some. Bill, welcome to the program. William: Thank you. It's great to see you again. Sharon: It's so great to see you after everything we've gone through. Give us an overview of how you got into jewelry and enameling, your art, everything. How did you get into it? William: One of the questions you gave me to ponder ahead of time was if I was interested in jewelry when I was a child. I was not even interested in jewelry when I was in college, except for taking one course to make the wedding rings for my now ex-wife, but that was it. A few years later, I got a phone call from Florida State University asking me if I would like to interview for a job teaching jewelry and metals and enameling. I wrote back and said, “I don't think I'm the person you want, because I don't know very much about jewelry.” So, I said no. Two days later, they called me again, and I told them the same thing. Then two days later, they called me again and I said, “Let me think about this. You're on the quarter system. Are you willing to pay me for one quarter, when I'm not there and I'm cramming on how to teach jewelry?” The head of the department said, “That sounds like a great idea. As long as you can come three weeks ahead of the students, we'll be happy.” I'm basically self-taught except for watching people at a few workshops. I think being self-taught is a very valuable tool because I was not chained to the style or techniques of any major professor, which happens so much, especially to students coming out with MFAs. For years, their work will look pretty much like what their instructor was doing. I didn't have that. I was my own instructor, and I was able to play out, in my 55-year career, how to do what I saw vaguely in my mind. I should say at this point, I had synesthesia—I could never say it correctly—which is the ability to hear music and see colors or see a painting and hear music. I'm blessed with that. I used to think it was a chain around my neck, but I appreciate the fact that I can do something that very few people can do. Sharon: You mean you see a painting or you hear music and you think about how that translates into art or jewelry? I'll call what you do jewelry. William: Yeah. The strangest one is I can smell an odor, whether it's bad or something overly sweet, like old lady rose perfume or cigars, and I have an instant reaction where I see—I don't see things; I sense things in my mind. That's the way it works. Sharon: You've talked about the dichotomy in your work. Does that play into it? William: Oh, absolutely. I've always been in opposites. Long before I was doing jewelry, I had a very successful enamel career. I would usually make two different objects in the same physical format, but one would deal with sensations that are opposite of the other, such as light and dark, good and evil, colorful and noncolorful. That informed that work. Now, after all the years doing jewelry exclusively, I try to build diametrically opposed ideas into the forms. You mentioned the exhibition the Cleveland Institute of Art gave me a few years ago, “The Beautiful & the Grotesque.” The title of that show epitomized what I'm usually doing in my work. Sometimes it's not always obvious to the viewer, but it serves as a jumping point for me. If I can plug the catalogue— Sharon: Please do. William: Cleveland did a beautiful catalogue. Everything that was in the show was there. If you're interested in it, it's $25 plus $9.95 shipping. It adds up to $34.95. To get it, you can contact me at my email address, which is ArtWilliamHarper@mac.com. Sharon: ArtWilliamHarper@mac.com. William: Yes. Sharon: We'll have a thumbnail of that on the website so you can click on it and order it. William: Good, you've seen the catalogue. Can you vouch for how beautiful it is? Sharon: It's a beautiful catalogue. It has everything, the jewelry, the boxes, all of the art. When I say boxes, I'm thinking of the ones that are really art pieces. You said you think a lot of art is about thinking. What do you think about when you're doing your art? William: It often starts way before I actually begin making anything. That's a hard question to answer. For instance, I've done several series based on other artists, all of whom were painters. I prefer painting to jewelry right now, I have to say. But in terms of these influences, I would look at the work, for instance the work of Jean Dubuffet. He has incredibly beautiful, messy patterns that run— Sharon: Who? William: Jean Dubuffet. Sharon: Oh, Dubuffet, yes. William: I have loved his work for many, many years, and I have known that he was the instigator of what is called the art brut movement, which is art that is made by people that not only are not highly educated in universities or art departments, but they might have some kind of physical disability or mental disability, where they express themselves in these absolutely gorgeous, out of this world ways, not like any professional artist would do. Dubuffet collected those and was instrumental in having a museum set up—I think it was in Switzerland; I should know that—of this work. Talking about dichotomy, I wanted to catch that quality of not knowing what I was doing along with my sophisticated technique and taste. So, I did this series. I think there are 10 pieces. In order to do it, as I got into the third or fourth piece, I decided I wanted to write an essay about what the series meant to me being put into this catalogue. So, I gave it the name Dubu. Sharon: How? William: D-U-B-U. I came up with idea that a Dubu is a fantastical creature that can infect your mind and cause you to do absolutely glorious things. It was just something I made up in my mind. I should also say that I don't start a piece and finish it immediately. I don't even know where I'm going when I start a piece. I simply go into the studio and start playing around with the gold. I know that sounds silly, that somebody can play around with something as precious as gold. But in doing so, there's another dichotomy. I'm able to come up with forms that I would never be able to otherwise. At this point, I should mention I do absolutely no sketches, diagrams, or beginning things on paper to guide me. I simply allow the materials to guide me. I trust in them and my manipulation of them that they will start leading me to see what I want to be after. Sometimes these are small enamel pieces. Sometimes they're more complex with gold pieces. Sometimes they're a consideration of how to use a stone or a pearl. As I'm making these things, I know I can't use them necessarily in piece number one. So, my idea is, “O.K., go to my idea for piece number two and follow the same format of making things, simply because they amuse me.” I don't take myself seriously while I'm doing these things. I think that's part of why they're successful. I should say one of the qualities that my work has been lauded for is being humorous without being funny, without being a caricature. I have found that is a rather rough road to travel, but I'm able to facilitate it somehow. Anyway, I have these pieces I made, piece number one and piece number two. I still want to play around with making, let's say, a different kind of cloisonné enamel that had been used in pieces one and two. At that point, after I have made things that could become three different pieces, I take what I like and finish piece number one. As often as not, I think of the title first, which I know is a rather strange way to go about it. But in thinking of a title, it helps me guide the quality of the personage I'm dealing with. So, I finished piece number one. I don't take anything away from it at that point. When I get to piece number two, I'd better start making things for piece number four. There's this manipulation where all the pieces start moving around on my desk. When I start seeing there is a conclusion in making each one successfully, I know I can stop. Often in that process, I paint myself into a corner. I don't know where I'm going, but actually that's the best part in terms of the quality of the piece, because it gives me the opportunity to really think about what I'm after. After I've contemplated that, I'm able to get out of the corner, and I do piece number two and piece number three. This is a process I've used my entire career. I've done a series dedicated to Jasper Johns which is very intellectual, because he's a very intellectual artist. I did a series on Fabergé. I don't really like Fabergé. I admire him, but I don't like him particularly. In my series, each brooch had an egg-shaped enamel part as a part of the physicality of the piece. One of the things I don't like about Fabergé is that his work was very dry. It's beautiful, but it's dry. It doesn't have any kind of emotion attached to it at all. It was perfect for the Russian nobility because they were decadent. They were inbred. They proceeded far too long in this sociological process. So, I changed it by having in each piece a little zip that went from the outside peripheral into the center, which was like a sperm getting to the egg and fertilizing it. That's how I dealt with that matter. I've also done a series on Cy Twombly, who is my favorite painter. I know people wonder how I can be influenced by his work, which I admire for its messiness. I wish I could do it. People either get Twombly or they don't. When I look at a group of Twombly pieces, I'll have an idea of how to start meshing these into the same process I mentioned before, with the Dubus. I think I did the Twomblys 25 years ago and they still look fresh. That's how my process works. Sharon: How do you know if you've hit a wall? If you say, “This isn't going to work. I'm going to put it in the junk pile”? William: I don't put things in junk piles. It's too expensive and the enamel is too precious. I just put the elements aside. I know if I'm doing a series of 10 pieces, or if I decide I want it to be 12 pieces—it's never more than 12 in a series—by the time I get to 10 or 12, I had better have come to a conclusion with all those pieces and not have left off too many elements. I just put those aside. I might use them again in four years, five years. My work is rather slow because I think a lot about it, and I don't have drawings to follow. I don't think of myself as a designer; I think of myself as an artist who makes jewelry. There's a difference. Sharon: Do you know before you start how many pieces will be in a collection? Do you say, “I'm going to make 10 pieces. They're going to be in the collection, and I have no idea what it is”? William: Yeah, I generally set a goal for myself. There are other pieces I do that I call knee play pieces. Knee plays come from music. Robert Wilson collaborated on a piece that is now an iconic gem called Einstein on the Beach. It was in five acts, which, if you think my work is unintelligible, this work was almost totally unintelligible. But it appealed to a certain kind of mind as being exquisite. Between each act, without scenery or costumes or anything like that, there were groups of instrumentalists and vocalists who would improvise. With the knee play pieces, it's not determined what the music and the vocalization is going to be. The vocalization is not consisting of words; it's consisting of almost primal sounds that are put together with a cadence of Phillip Glass music. The reason they call it knee play is that they connect the acts. As soon as this group of pieces, the knee play music, is over from act one, they will usually suggest some kind of music or situation you're going to see in act two. That's sort of a meandering, intellectual approach, but I really like the idea. In my career, I haven't just made series. I've often done isolated pieces, and I would do those in order to open up thought processes I could use to get to the next series. Does that make sense? Sharon: Yes. Is that how you got to the collection you did during lockdown quarantine?

We meet Alex Rotter, Chairman of Christie's 20/21 Art Departments, to discuss Christie's New York forthcoming auction 'Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection' which runs from 9–10 November 2022 at Rockefeller Center. The collection of philanthropist Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, includes more than 150 masterpieces spanning 500 years of art history. Reflecting the depth and breadth of Paul G. Allen's collection, the auctions connect this visionary innovator to a range of ground-breaking artists, joining Paul Cezanne with David Hockney, Alberto Giacometti with Louise Bourgeois, Georges Seurat with Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin with Yayoi Kusama. Valued in excess of $1 billion, The Paul G. Allen Collection is poised to be the largest and most exceptional art auction in history. Pursuant to his wishes, the estate will dedicate all the proceeds to philanthropy.From 29 October – 8 November 2022, view The Paul G. Allen Collection in-person at Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries in New York. Follow @ChristiesInc and visit their official website: https://www.christies.com/en/events/visionary-the-paul-g-allen-collection/overviewFrom Canaletto's famed vistas of Venice and Paul Cezanne's magisterial vision of the Mont Sainte-Victoire to Gustav Klimt's Birch Forest, Georgia O'Keeffe's 'Red Hills with Pedernal, White Clouds', and latterly, David Hockney's joyful depictions of his native Yorkshire, the collection highlights landmark moments in the development of landscape painting through centuries. Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat, Georges Seurat's pointillist masterwork Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) and Lucian Freud's Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) demonstrate the enduring power of the human figure in art, while the polyvalent practice of artists such as Max Ernst and Jasper Johns show how artists can subvert tradition to move art forward. We explore some of our own personal favourite works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Louise Bourgeois, Bridget Riley and Barbara Hepworth.Alex Rotter grew up in a family of art dealers in his native Austria, and studied at the University of Vienna. He currently lives in New York and is responsible for overseeing a global team of specialists spanning the full scope of 20th and 21st Century art. Rotter's progressive approach to presenting extraordinary works of art to the market has yielded many of the most groundbreaking moments in auction history. Career highlights include the 2017 sale of Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi , which sold for $450 million, becoming the most expensive object ever sold at auction, and Jeff Koons' Rabbit from the Collection of SI Newhouse, which sold for $91.1 million and set a world auction record for a living artist. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Christie's Chairman Marc Porter talks about Paul Allen as a collector and the role philanthropy now plays in the sale of the major art collections of our time. Max Carter discusses the challenge of estimating a wide array of artists in a collection that ranges over hundreds of years. Led by works from Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Klimt, van Gogh, Boticelli, Manet, Jasper Johns, Lucian Freud, David Hockney and many more artists.

Dave calls up Will Guidara, the front-of-house half of the partnership that took Eleven Madison Park to the top of the hospitality stratosphere, to talk about Will's new book (‘Unreasonable Hospitality'), how he reshaped EMP, and what the next generation of cutting-edge restaurants might look like. Also: coffee that tastes like soup, instant-ramen ratios, oomori servings, the fruit-medley gambit, macaroni ephemerality, waiting for grunge in the disco age, Jasper Johns, Danny Meyer, Bill Belichick, going hard in the paint, the Dreamweaver, rolling out the Budweiser cart, exceeding your mentors, Sean Brock, a croissant parable, and changing before you have to change. Hosts: Dave Chang and Chris Ying Guest: Will Guidara Producer: Sasha Ashall Additional Production: Jordan Bass and Lala Rasor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We continue our week-long look at the Montclair Art Museum's offerings this fall. Today we speak talk about the exhibition, Transformed: Objects Reimagined by American Artists, which has been up for a while, but the pieces are always evolving. It's inspired by a 1964 Jasper Johns quote: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” The show features sixty works, Gail Stavitsky, chief curator of The Montclair Art Museum, joins to discuss.

Last week, I took the train into DC to visit the National Gallery of Art, which is by far one of my favorite places in the city. Regardless of the show or exhibition, I always come home energized and inspired. Sometimes, I'll even go down just to sit in the “Rothko Room” for an hour — and I know the official name is Tower 1 of the East Building, but I think Rothko Room sounds much more poetic. On this particular trip, I was there to see The Double, a show that a friend who works at the gallery called “life changing” — which is saying something considering she's one of the top paper conservators in the world and has seen some pretty incredible work over the course of her career. The show really is fantastic and features work by some of my favorite artists, including Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg; and it begins with a pair of American flags by Jasper Johns displayed opposite Double America by Glenn Ligon.LINKSNational Gallery of ArtRothko RoomThe DoubleDouble AmericaRothko: The Color Field PaintingsEpisode 59 of Deep NatterCONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com  Twitter: @jefferysaddoris  Instagram: @jefferysaddorisSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Everything in your favorite podcast app to get every show I release in one feed.SUPPORTLeave a review or a rating wherever you listen, or you can DONATE to support the shows more directly.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery SaddorisSupport the show

Last week, I took the train into DC to visit the National Gallery of Art, which is by far one of my favorite places in the city. Regardless of the show or exhibition, I always come home energized and inspired. Sometimes, I'll even go down just to sit in the “Rothko Room” for an hour — and I know the official name is Tower 1 of the East Building, but I think Rothko Room sounds much more poetic. On this particular trip, I was there to see The Double, a show that a friend who works at the gallery called “life changing” — which is saying something considering she's one of the top paper conservators in the world and has seen some pretty incredible work over the course of her career. The show really is fantastic and features work by some of my favorite artists, including Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg; and it begins with a pair of American flags by Jasper Johns displayed opposite Double America by Glenn Ligon.LINKSNational Gallery of ArtRothko RoomThe DoubleDouble AmericaRothko: The Color Field PaintingsEpisode 59 of Deep NatterCONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com  Twitter: @jefferysaddoris  Instagram: @jefferysaddorisSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Everything in your favorite podcast app to get every show I release in one feed.SUPPORTLeave a review or a rating wherever you listen, or you can DONATE to support the shows more directly.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery SaddorisSupport the show

Last week, I took the train into DC to visit the National Gallery of Art, which is by far one of my favorite places in the city. Regardless of the show or exhibition, I always come home energized and inspired. Sometimes, I'll even go down just to sit in the “Rothko Room” for an hour — and I know the official name is Tower 1 of the East Building, but I think Rothko Room sounds much more poetic. On this particular trip, I was there to see The Double, a show that a friend who works at the gallery called “life changing” — which is saying something considering she's one of the top paper conservators in the world and has seen some pretty incredible work over the course of her career. The show really is fantastic and features work by some of my favorite artists, including Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg; and it begins with a pair of American flags by Jasper Johns displayed opposite Double America by Glenn Ligon.LINKSNational Gallery of ArtRothko RoomThe DoubleDouble AmericaRothko: The Color Field PaintingsEpisode 59 of Deep NatterCONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com  Twitter: @jefferysaddoris  Instagram: @jefferysaddorisSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Everything in your favorite podcast app to get every show I release in one feed.SUPPORTLeave a review or a rating wherever you listen, or you can DONATE to support the shows more directly.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery SaddorisSupport the show

Mark Rozzo's astute and engaging new book Everyone Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Heyward, and 1906s Los Angeles, published by Ecco Press, documents the lives of Hopper and Hayward in the heyday as New Hollywood's It couple but also paints a panoramic landscape of the Los Angeles scene in the Sixties.Rozzo poignantly captures the vivacity of the heady days in the early 1960s, just as the underground culture of the Beat Generation was about to explode into the mainstream counterculture of the latter part of the decade—the sex, drugs and rock ‘n' roll mantra was born in the late 1960s.Sixties Los Angeles was a new center of gravity in culture; there was a new consciousness, a West Coast symmetry between art, underground cinema, music and civil rights that had never happened before, and has never happened since. Hopper and Hayward were not only up-and-coming actors in the early 1960s, they were also cross-cultural connectors who brought together the best of underground Los Angeles art, music and politics, under one roof—literally—1712 N. Crescent Heights in the Hollywood Hills. This modest Spanish Colonial was the meeting ground, as Rozzo illustrates, for a who's who of that time: Jane Fonda, Andy Warhol, Joan Didion, Jasper Johns, Tina Turner, Ed Ruscha, The Byrds and the Black Panthers.Their art collection, showcased at this house on Crescent Heights, as well as the house itself, is the backdrop of Everyone Thought We Were Crazy. Rozzo tells the story in a straight-forward, dual narrative, that helps fill in large parts of Brooke's story, which compared to Hopper's, hasn't been as well documented or explored in other books. Rozzo finds the right balance.As a decade-ending benchmark, Hopper's directorial debut Easy Rider became the emblematic proto-New Hollywood independent film, alongside Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. These films help illustrate the promise and loss of that generation and that era. There isn't a happy ending in those films or in Hopper's marriage to Heyward, unfortunately—the couple divorced in 1969 just at Easy Rider was about to make cinematic history.After the divorce, Brooke eventually sold the house, broke up the art collection and moved back to New York, where she still resides. Hopper died in 2010.Rozzo's wide view of Los Angeles in the 1960s is essential reading for anyone interested in the unvarnished history of that period.Here's my conversation with Mark Rozzo discussing the life and times of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward.Reading by Mark Rozzo.Music by Love.

For the tenth episode of "Reading the Art World," host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Marguerite Steed Hoffman and Gavin Delahunty about the new book, “Amor Mundi: The Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman” (Ridinghouse, 2022). The book tells a unique story of carefully considered and inspired collecting, and the motivations behind the collection's creation and its ongoing evolution. “Amor Mundi” presents a selection of over 400 works of modern and contemporary art from the Marguerite Steed Hoffman Collection in Dallas, Texas. The two-volume set features the pieces brought together by Marguerite and her late husband, Robert Hoffman, including works by Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, along with more contemporary artists like Rita Ackermann and Maria Lassnig. Around 30 authors contributed essays for the book, not only art historians but artists writing about other artists and creating unique works for this book."Reading the Art World" is a live interview and podcast series with leading art world authors hosted by art advisor Megan Fox Kelly. The conversations explore timely subjects in the world of art, design, architecture, artists and the art market, and are an opportunity to engage further with the minds behind these insightful new publications.Megan Fox Kelly is an art advisor and President of the Association of Professional Art Advisors who works with collectors, estates and foundations. For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com.“Amor Mundi: The Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman” can be purchased at artbook.com.  Read more about the book through its publisher, Ridinghouse.Music composed by Bob Golden.

This episode of the pod kicks off with Lindsay, David, and Elisabeth reflecting on how artworks have changed (or reinforced) their perspectives on what art is, and whether or not Elisabeth is really “auditioning” for the role of co-host. Starting at about 9:00, guest Mary Louise Schumacher kicks off the conversation with a reflection about witnessing Milwaukee artist Roy Staab joyfully re-discovering his own artwork while watching it get destroyed in a storm.  Throughout the conversation, Mary Louise shares about her trajectory from political and technology reporter to art critic, to director of the forthcoming documentary film, Out of the Picture. She reflects on how art critics draw on a much more “embodied” kind of writing than other more objective forms of journalism.   Out of the Picture arose out of asking the question “what does it mean to write about art today?” Turning her camera on the interesting people in the art world who are writing about art, in the process Mary Louise and her team of collaborators ended up documenting extraordinary changes in visual culture and media. Since the beginning of the film, over the last ten years, 'Art” has evolved to include NFTs, social movements, memes and monuments, (oh my!) and visual culture shapes how we see the world more than ever. Out of the Picture raises questions including: how are power and privilege conferred on voices within the art world? And the question of how precious the work of art criticism actually is.  Mary Louise also reflects on how the simultaneous openness, intimacy, and obscurity of the Milwaukee art scene promotes a special kind of artistic thriving, and periods of richness within our arts ecosystem.  She closes with a fantasy edict to instate an Arts & Culture Administrator for the City of Milwaukee to help Art to be more valued in our community.    Instagram: @Marylouises  Due to the unprecedented number of shout-outs contained in this episode, we decided to do our best to represent all of the individuals and entities. Please enjoy the following absurdly long list of links: :  https://www.outofthepicturemovie.com/ (Out of the Picture)   https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=Ue4q0Twd_So&feature=emb_logo (Sunset Theatre by Sarah Gail Luther)   https://okmke.org/ (Open Kitchen)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Belle_(Staab) (Nature Bell by Roy Staab)  https://mam.org/info/quadracci.php (The Quadracci Pavillion)    https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaslujero/ (Nicholas Lujero)   https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindy-eggert-johnson/?trk=org-employees&originalSubdomain=be (Cindy Eggert Johnson)  https://www.markescribano.com/ (Mark Escribano)  https://www.thisismilwaukee.us/johnathonolsen (Jonathan Olson)  https://www.corridorfilm.com/ (Corridor the film)  http://katieavilastudio.com/ (Katie Avila Loughmiller)  http://www.naomiwaxman.com/resume (Naomi Waxman)  https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/residency/pegi-christiansen-distance (Pegi Taylor Christiansen)  https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-heil-a75b821a/ (Katie Heil)   https://www.jasper-johns.org/ (Jasper Johns)  https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/ (Robert Rauschenberg)  https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/ (LaToya Ruby Frazier)  https://whitecube.com/artists/artist/doris_salcedo (Doris Salcedo)  https://www.hankwillisthomas.com/ (Hank Willis Thomas)  http://postcommodity.com/About.html (The Post Commodity Collective)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Saltz (Jerry Saltz)  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-graves-96bb123/ (Jen Graves)  https://www.bostonglobe.com/about/staff-list/staff/jenee-osterheldt/ (Jenee Osterheldt)  https://hragvartanian.com/ (Hrag Vartanian)  https://genreurbanarts.com/ (Genre Urban Arts)  ...

Come along on a ~~Dream Quest~~ with me to discover works of art that show real dreams...not just images of sleepers or "dream-like" paintings. I set out to discover the bonafides. I began in 1525 with Albrecht Durer, then moved to France with Odilon Rédon in the 1800's, the Surrealists and André Masson in the 1920's, and then shot over and up to the US in the 50's to Jasper Johns, and finally landed back at modern day with the exquisitely-observed representational paintings of Catherine Murphy. This episode was inspired by 2 main sources: 1) The book "Painting the Dream" by Daniel Bergez and also 2) An online artists' talk between 3 painters: Chie Fueki, Alexi Worth and Catherine Murphy called "Painting Table: Catherine Murphy talks with Chie Fueki and Alexi Worth" 1/21/22 hosted by DC Moore Gallery: Watch here: https://vimeo.com/668978992. In the talk, Catherine Murphy reveals that 2 of the paintings in her most recent show ("Flight" & "Begin Again") were made from real dreams that she had had (her discussion of this occurs about 1hr into the talk). Artists and artworks mentioned: "Dream Vision" by Albrecht Durer, "Dream Vision" c 1880 (x 2) by Odilon Rédon, "Gradiva" by André Masson, Jasper Johns "Flag," "Flight" & "Begin Again" by Catherine Murphy Authors/Poets and pieces mentioned: "Painting the Dream" book by Daniel Bergez, "The Gradiva: The Woman Who Walks" novella by Wilhelm Hermann Jensen, "Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva" essay by Sigmund Freud, "La Révolution Surréaliste" literary journal pub by Paul Eluard, Antonin Artaud, Andre Breton, Michel Leiris & Louis Aragon, "Une Vague de Rêves" poem by Louis Aragon Louis Aragon's Poem "Une Vague de Rêves" (A Wave of Dreams) 1924 Translated from French by Susan de Muth (2003) Excerpt used in the episode: "Dreams, dreams, dreams, with each step the domain of dreams expands. Dreams, dreams, dreams, at last the blue sun of dreams forces the steel-eyed beasts back to their lairs. Dreams, dreams, dreams on the lips of love, on the numbers of happiness, on the teardrops of carefulness, on the signals of hope, on building sites where a whole nation submits to the authority of pickaxes. Dreams, dreams, dreams, nothing but dreams where the wind wanders and barking dogs are out on the roads. Oh magnificent Dream, in the pale morning of buildings, leaning on your elbows on chalk cornices, merging your pure, mobile features with the miraculous immobility of statues, don't ever leave again enticed by dawn's deliberate lies. Who is there? Ah good: let in the infinite." Follow Pep Talks on IG: @peptalksforartists & Donate to the Peps: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/support. Amy's website: https://www.amytalluto.com/ Thank you for listening, rating, reviewing & donating! All music is licensed from Soundstripe. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/peptalksforartistspod/support

On March 27, 1926, Frank (Francis Russell) O'Hara was born in Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O'Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.Following the war, O'Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. While at Harvard, O'Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O'Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English. He then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received his MA in 1951. That autumn, O'Hara moved into an apartment in New York. He was soon employed at the front desk of the Museum of Modern Art and continued to write seriously.O'Hara's early work was considered both provocative and provoking. In 1952, his first volume of poetry, A City Winter, and Other Poems, attracted favorable attention; his essays on painting and sculpture and his reviews for ArtNews were considered brilliant. O'Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. O'Hara's association with painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas. In certain instances, he collaborated with the painters to make “poem-paintings,” paintings with word texts.O'Hara's most original volumes of verse, Meditations in an Emergency (1956) and Lunch Poems (1964), are impromptu lyrics, a jumble of witty talk, journalistic parodies, and surrealist imagery. O'Hara continued working at the Museum of Modern Art throughout his life, curating exhibitions and writing introductions and catalogs for exhibits and tours. On July 25, 1966, while vacationing on Fire Island, Frank O'Hara was killed in a sand buggy accident. He was forty years old.From https://poets.org/poet/frank-ohara. For more information about Frank O'Hara:“Frank O'Hara”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/frank-ohara“To the Film Industry in Crisis”: https://poets.org/poem/film-industry-crisis“The Ongoing Influence of Frank O'Hara, the Art World's Favorite Poet”: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ongoing-influence-frank-ohara-art-worlds-favorite-poetMeditations in An Emergency: https://groveatlantic.com/book/meditations-in-an-emergency/

This week, the panel begins by discussing A24's newest horror/thriller film from Alex Garland Men. Then, the panel jumps back in time with the reboot of Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall. Finally, the panel is joined by contributing writer for the New York Times, Jody Rosen, to discuss his newest book Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.  In Slate Plus, the panel spoils Men to get to the bottom of the horror mystery. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: This 10 year-old article from Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian Magazine titled “The Long History of the Espresso Machine.” Julia: From Jody's early recommendation via Twitter: the Boston food-chain Tatte, which is expanding into DC. Jody: New York Times Critic Jason Farago's series Close Read, in which he does close analyses of works of art. In particular: his pieces on Berthe Morisot, Jasper Johns, and Chitarman's “Shah Jahan on a Terrace.” Steve: A deep-cut YouTube video of The Replacements' “Friday Night is Killing Me” (Live). Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is "Did I Make You Wait" by Staffan Carlen. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the panel begins by discussing A24's newest horror/thriller film from Alex Garland Men. Then, the panel jumps back in time with the reboot of Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall. Finally, the panel is joined by contributing writer for the New York Times, Jody Rosen, to discuss his newest book Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.  In Slate Plus, the panel spoils Men to get to the bottom of the horror mystery. Email us at culturefest@slate.com. Endorsements Dana: This 10 year-old article from Jimmy Stamp for Smithsonian Magazine titled “The Long History of the Espresso Machine.” Julia: From Jody's early recommendation via Twitter: the Boston food-chain Tatte, which is expanding into DC. Jody: New York Times Critic Jason Farago's series Close Read, in which he does close analyses of works of art. In particular: his pieces on Berthe Morisot, Jasper Johns, and Chitarman's “Shah Jahan on a Terrace.” Steve: A deep-cut YouTube video of The Replacements' “Friday Night is Killing Me” (Live). Podcast production by Cameron Drews. Production assistance by Nadira Goffe. Outro music is "Did I Make You Wait" by Staffan Carlen. Slate Plus members get ad-free podcasts, a bonus segment in each episode of the Culture Gabfest, full access to Slate's journalism on Slate.com, and more. Sign up now at slate.com/cultureplus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The American Modern Opera Company is a multi-disciplinary collective of some of America's keenest talents in the fields of music, dance, theater, writing, producing and composing. They are also the first interdisciplinary group to lead the Ojai Music Festival as Music Director. They are led by artistic directors Matthew Aucoin and Zack Winokur. Winokur and Davone Tines, baritone-bass singer, join the podcast to talk about their ambitious plans for this year's festival. Some members of the collective are already familiar with Ojai, such as violinist Miranda Cuckson, soprano Julia Bullock, who, with Tines, will stage a full production of Olivier Messaien's song cycle "Harawi." AMOC will also introduce new artists to the Festival, including Julius Eastman, whose gifts for composing, vocals, piano and dance had often been neglected. Eastman was proudly gay at a time in the conservative classical world culture, and his gifts we talk about at length. The festival is also producing works by another neglected artist, Connie Converse, who is credited for pioneering the singer-songwriter tradition. We talk about how and why truly outstanding artists are often neglected and forgotten in their own time, and the festival's role in bringing them back into the spotlight. Another line of conversation is AMOC's similarities in spirit to Black Mountain College, which included Ojai-favorite composer John Cage, modern dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. AMOC has just won a $750,000 grant from the Andrew K. Mellon Foundation, and we talk about what they plan to do with the money, as well as what an affirming moment is was for the collective, founded in 2017.

“J” is for Johns, Jasper (b. 1930). Artist. Jasper Johns is a pivotal figure of twentieth-century American art, occupying a critical position that mediates Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism.

Phil Sanders is a master printer, educator, author and artist, and is the founder and director of PS Marlow—a fine art publisher and creative services consultancy based in Asheville, North Carolina. Phil has worked with celebrated artists like Elizabeth Murray, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler and Chakaia Booker among many others. Phil talks about his new book Prints and Their Makers, learning about the emotional impact of color while collaborating with painter Wayne Thiebaud, the difference between reproductions and prints, prioritizing other artist's work over his own artwork, the enduring legacy of artist and master printer Robert Blackburn, art history and antiracism, fatherhood and the work/life balance, and how art, artists and our imaginations are vital components of a healthy democracy. Purchase Prints and Their MakersJoin the PATM Book ClubSupport Deep Color