Podcast appearances and mentions of mark staff brandl

This is a crossover episode, it is a short interview Dan Hill made on his EQ Spotlight podcast with me, Mark Staff Brandl, about my book A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art. Dan Hill's EQ Spotlight podcast link: https://www.sensorylogic.com/eq-spotlight-podcast Link to page for my book on Bloomsbury Press: US: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/philosophy-of-visual-metaphor-in-contemporary-art-9781350073838/ Europe: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/philosophy-of-visual-metaphor-in-contemporary-art-9781350073838/

Today I talked to Mark Staff Brandl about his new book A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2023). Brandl is an artist and art historian with a PhD from the University of Zurich. He is an Associate Professor of Art History Emeritus at the Art Academy of Liechtenstein and Higher Professional College for Art in St. Gallen, Switzerland. His work has been shown in galleries and museums in America, Europe, Egypt and elsewhere. Brandl is by his own admission an iconoclast, and somebody who mixes philosophical discourse with more polemical “rants” in advocating for creativity. For instance, as addressed in this episode Brandl does not hesitate to find fault with contemporary artists who take the “cheap out” of relying (too much) on irony, instead of sparking hope; and likewise with collectors of art who often function merely as speculators. Brandl's approach honors Lakoff and Johnson's seminar book, Metaphors We Live By, while applying their approach to the visual arts. A notable example is that for Brandl the artist Van Gogh can be thought of in terms of a passionate flame (the metaphor being, passion is hot), with cypress trees that can appear like candles in the way they've been painted. To understand how form and content intertwine in art, this episode offers a good jumping off point. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/dan-hills-eq-spotlight

Today I talked to Mark Staff Brandl about his new book A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2023). Brandl is an artist and art historian with a PhD from the University of Zurich. He is an Associate Professor of Art History Emeritus at the Art Academy of Liechtenstein and Higher Professional College for Art in St. Gallen, Switzerland. His work has been shown in galleries and museums in America, Europe, Egypt and elsewhere. Brandl is by his own admission an iconoclast, and somebody who mixes philosophical discourse with more polemical “rants” in advocating for creativity. For instance, as addressed in this episode Brandl does not hesitate to find fault with contemporary artists who take the “cheap out” of relying (too much) on irony, instead of sparking hope; and likewise with collectors of art who often function merely as speculators. Brandl's approach honors Lakoff and Johnson's seminar book, Metaphors We Live By, while applying their approach to the visual arts. A notable example is that for Brandl the artist Van Gogh can be thought of in terms of a passionate flame (the metaphor being, passion is hot), with cypress trees that can appear like candles in the way they've been painted. To understand how form and content intertwine in art, this episode offers a good jumping off point. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A very short 4 minute episode concerning how this podcast, the accompanying performance-lectures in painting-installations, and indeed the art historian and artist Mark Staff Brandl himself came to be called 'Dr Great Art.'

This week sees the return of the once thought lost Mark Staff Brandl! Chris Dennis! From his site: Chris Dennis grew up in, England. He studied natural history illustration at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and this classical training is evident in his current therianthropic work.  After completing his BA (Hons) at the University of Wolverhampton he relocated to the United States, and in 2000 earned his MFA from the University of Art in San Francisco. In 2010 after a period in Berlin, Chris made Auckland his home. He has exhibited in New Zealand, Europe and across the United States. He currently resides in Zürich, Switzerland.   My paintings are perhaps best described as ‘Narrative expressionism’ or ‘internalized portraiture’. The stories behind these ‘Therianthropic’ pieces have been carefully obfuscated and invite the viewer to create their own narrative, bringing to mind facets or emotions that maybe more difficult to confront if not disguised behind a mask.  

This week: Happy 2012! We kick off the new year with Mark Staff Brandl reporting from Venice 2011! A Venice Biennale 2011 extravaganza. Mark Staff Brandl is in the City of St. Mark. Brandl, the Central European Bureau and VaporettoShark, traverses and discusses his way through this huge international festival with sporadic assistance from Peter Stobbe, Claudia Tolusso, Manuela Gritsch, Elisabeth Payer, Tamara Remus, Lucas Malsch, Adam Vogt, Sarah Rohner, Johanna Gschwend, Marc Bless, Manuel Ackermann, Chandra Marquart and others from the Art Academy of Liechtenstein. He covers many of the national pavilions at the Giardini park, discusses much of the Centrale and even works his way through all of the massive Arsenale. Furthermore, at the end Dr. Mark and Dr. Peter visit and discuss some thrilling old paintings at the Accademia, the wonderful Venetian Museum and go to a retrospective of Julian Schnabel in the Museo Correr, located in the Piazza San Marco. Whew. Viva la Serenissima! This is the 54th incarnation of this show, probably the most important contemporary art exhibition. It takes place once every two years, the first Biennale being held in 1895. The Exhibition this year, titled ILLUMInations was curated by Bice Curiger; it is the largest yet, spreading over 108,000 square feet between the Giardini and the Arsenale, and features 83 artists from all over the world. The Accademia art museum is situated on the south bank of the Grand Canal, within the sestiere of Dorsoduro. It was founded in 1750 and contains among a huge number of others, works by Bellini, Guardi, Giorgione, Pietro Longhi, Lorenzo Lotto, Mantegna, Tiepolo, Titian, Veronese, Vasari, and Mark's great favorite: Tintoretto. The Museo Correr is the civic museum of Venice and extends along the south side of the Piazza. It holds art, documents, artifacts, and maps that chart the history of Venice across the centuries. It has also has shown one person exhibitions of contemporary artist such as Anselm Kieffer, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Enzo Cucci.

This week: Mark Staff Brandl reports from Art Basel 2011!

This week: Mark Staff Brandl talks to Ieva Maurite. Ieva Maurite is a young Latvian artist living in Riga. For the show this week, Mark Staff Brandl, (the Bad at Sports Continental European Office and EuroShark) interviewed her during her visiting artist gig in the Principality of Liechtenstein. Maurite is a painter, book artist and art academy instructor who has also had residencies in Paris, Iceland and many other parts of Europe. Maurite and Brandl discuss the itinerant European artist life, art study and the artworld in Latvia, Maurite's difficult-to-photograph linear imagistic paintings and generally have fun meandering around art topics while Brandl fails to pronounce anything in Latvian correctly including her name (which begins with an "i", by the way, in case Richard and Duncan screw up this paragraph.)

This week: This is the second of two interviews with German artists conducted by Mark Staff Brandl on the island of Elba, Italy. Alexander Johannes Kraut is an artist who concentrates on drawing and printmaking, sometimes reaching installative proportions. He has also created an amazing thirteen chapter wordless graphic novel. Kraut comes from a farming village in the Allgäu, and is now based in Kreuzberg in Berlin. He has lived in many places and exhibited widely in important museums and other venues including in Mexico City, Paris and New York as well as several places in Germany. The artist was in an invitational retreat in July as a working guest of a foundation on the island of Elba along with Viennese jazz pianist and composer Martin Reiter, New York playwright Sony Sobieski, Ruessellsheim artist Martina AltSchaefer (the interviewee in part one) and Mark Staff Brandl, the Bad at Sports Continental and now also islandal European Bureau. As a note to English speakers: Kraut's name is not only amusing as the English-language slang for 'German,' but also means 'herb' in German, and 'Johannes Kraut,' called 'St. John's wort' in English, is a plant traditionally used to combat depression and, in ancient times, to ward off evil. http://www.ajkraut.de/

This week: Mark Staff Brandl talks to Martina AltSchaefer.This is the first of two interviews with German artists conducted by Mark Staf Brandl on the island of Elba, Italy. Martina AltSchaefer is an artist living in Ruessellsheim, Germany. She studied with the famed Konrad Kapheck and her creative work centers on very large, labor-intensive drawing in colored pencil on translucent paper. AltSchaefer has exhibited in many prestigious galleries and museums. She also does printmaking and is an expert on mezzotint, about which she has curated shows and written essays. She was in an invitational retreat in July as a working guest of a foundation on the island of Elba along with Viennese jazz pianist and composer Martin Reiter, New York playwright Sony Sobieski, Berlin artist Alexander Johannes Kraut (the interviewee in part two) and Mark Staff Brandl, the Bad at Sports Continental and now also islandal European Bureau. And for all the Napoleon fans, especially those commenting on facebook, they were not in exile and even Mark was allowed back on the mainland without having to invade it.

This week Mark Staff Brandl interviews ex-pat artist Leonard Bullock. Here is some text crassly cut and pasted from somewhere else: Leonard Bullock originally from North Carolina and New York City, has lived in Europe for the last 15 years, frequently exhibiting in Switzerland and Germany. ... Bullock is a painters' painter, his direct facture influencing many better-known contemporaries such as the young Swiss artist Lori Hersberger. While Bullock often paints on surprising surfaces such as fiberglass or silk, the most arresting aspect of his work has been his mark-making, which is somewhat reminiscent of de Kooning in that it aspires to an indexical demonstration of sensation. Bullock does not copy his inspirational sources but rather updates them. He aligns a wide variety of strokes into tilted vectors, forming abstract totem poles that appear to swerve through space. His sense of touch reveals a painter more concerned with Titian and with questions of disparateness than with expressionism. In the "outro" to this weeks show, Duncan defends the good name of Joseph Mohan, against Richard's inappropriate commentary.

First, Duncan and Richard present a horribly off-track intro which consists largely of talk of herpes and sleeping around. Eventually they get around to discussing what is really important, this week’s show!   Steve Litsios, an artist from La Chaux-de-Fonds in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, is interviewed this week by Mark Staff Brandl. Litsios is known for his vast paper installations, wall objects, smaller sculpture, and web-work, all of which are elegant, restrained, and yet puckish in their surprising flirtation with elements of garishness. His work has recently begun to incorporate political content into his formerly abstract approach. The artist also plays in several roots blues and skiffle bands.   Then, in the closing, Duncan calls out Joseph Mohan. Other wackiness ensues.  

Mark Staff Brandl, the Central European Bureau and EuroShark, is in Central Illinois this time, interviewing Prof. John Jennings and Damian Duffy, curators of the traveling exhibition "Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics," which originated at Krannert Art Museum in Champaign. Jennings and Duffy discuss their curation of several shows, their own art and writing such as the graphic novel The Hole, their teaching, the extension of sequential art beyond the "Masters of American Comics" notion, theory, the socio-political, African-American culture, impurity, art history and more. Hey Kids, Comics, Fine Art and Filosofizing! Big fun for one and all

Duncan "the fieldmouse" MacKenzie interviews Mark "The EuroShark" Staff Brandl, theorist, writer, professor, artist, and contributor to Art in America, Sharkforum and Bad at Sports.Richard expresses concern that Duncan is off his meds. 

This week, guest host James Yood and Duncan interview Derek Guthrie, co-founder of the New Art Examiner for an illuminating history lesson.New Art Examiner was a Chicago-based art magazine. Founded in October 1973 by Derek Guthrie and Jane Addams Allen, its final issue was dated May-June 2002.At the time of the New Art Examiner 's launch, in October 1973, Chicago was "an art backwater." Artists who wished to be taken seriously left Chicago for New York City, and apart from a few local phenomena, such as the Hairy Who, little attention was given to Chicago art and artists.Called in Art in America "a stalwart of the Chicago scene," the New Art Examiner was conceived to counter this bias and was almost the only art magazine to give any attention to Chicago and midwestern artists (Dialogue magazine, which covered midwestern art exclusively, was founded in Detroit in 1978, but it has also ceased publication). Editor Jane Allen, an art historian who studied under Harold Rosenberg at the University of Chicago, was influential in developing new writers who later became significant on the New York scene and encouraged a writing style that was lively, personal, and honestly critical.Over the next three decades Chicago's art scene flourished, with new museums, more art dealers, and increased art festivals, galleries, and alternative spaces. Critics asserted that the New Art Examiner "ignored, opposed or belittled" Chicago's artistic developments, that it was overly politicized, overloaded with jargon, and did not serve the Chicago or midwest arts communities.The critics and artists who wrote for the New Art Examiner, included Fred Camper, Jan Estep, Ann Wiens, Adam Green (cartoonist), Robert Storr, Carol Diehl, Jerry Saltz, Eleanor Heartney, Carol Squiers, Janet Koplos and Mark Staff Brandl.

WTF? this weeks show is as long as your arm and brimming with what you need to know about the art world around you...It's a three shows for the price of one deal!!! First Duncan takes on the Chicago Artist Coalition to find out, what they do and what business they have publishing a magazine. Next,Terri and Serena talk to David Adjaye and Cydney Payton at The Museum of Contemporary Art: Denver and figure out how you go about building a museum.  As if that was not enough, Mark Staff Brandl our European Chief checks in to remind ushow important it is to be a member of a community.The show closes with a tribute to the Birthday of Joseph Mohan.    

Are you tired of all the self obsessed, cynical, angry art that’s out there today? Well Alex  Jovanovich is out there to fix what ails you and point you in the right direction! Terri talks to Alex about his Loveliness Workshops. Next, Kathryn talks to Paul Klein about the screwed up stuff going on with public art funding in Chicago. Paul is working of some interesting activist stuff and we will post a letter/manifesto on the recent events, on our blog.  Then, Mark Staff Brandl checks in from the Central Europe Bureau! Last, Mike Benedetto, with another Art Superstar Cinema Spotlight. The Supertsar is Monique Meloche. The movie is Volver directed by Pedro Almodovar. Might made his own bed music for this bit. Wow.  Wow, what a whole lot of show.  

Holy guacamole fun times! This week Kathryn Born interviews Natalie van Straaten. Mark Staff Brandl talks about Jeff Hoke's kickass book-website-museum Museum of Lost Wonder. Mike Benedetto gives a DOUBLE FEATURE REVIEW. Lastly there is a special bonus treat at the end of this weekâ��s show, it is a surprise. Natalie van Straaten has been a professional writer on arts subjects for more than 30 years and founded Chicago Gallery News in 1983. A curator, educator, administrator and organizer, she serves on various arts advisory boards and is a frequent juror in art competitions. She served as Executive Director of the Chicago Coalition for Arts in Education (1983-1986), and co-directed an art gallery for fourteen years. Shamelessly and apologetically lifted from Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Every now and then, a book comes along that's almost impossible to categorize, like Hoke's beautifully illustrated gem, a strange marriage of alchemical lore and psychology, science and "wonder." Hoke, an artist and a senior exhibition designer at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium, writes that the eclectic museums and curiosity cabinets of the 1600s inspired him, and that he wants to return us to a time before "science became a belief system unto itself," a time when artist-alchemist-scientists were able to search for inner truth via mystical experiences and experiments without being ridiculed. Guided by the Greek muses and lured by his lovely color illustrations, readers are beckoned into seven "exhibition halls," named for the stages of alchemical transformation from base matter to divinely inspired knowledge. Each exhibit also includes a pull-out interactive paper model, such as a "Do-It-Yourself Model of the Universe" in chapter one, where Hoke playfully addresses various creation myths. The chapter on dream states, visions and hypnosis is particularly fascinating. This is a book to linger over; it gradually reveals itself as a sly philosophical meditation on human consciousness, bringing in concepts from Tibetan Buddhism and quantum physics. Coming soon! Rodney Graham!!!  

Reports galore! Duncan talks to the crew from Bridge about the impending Miami madness. Newly knighted European bureau chief Mark Staff Brandl talks lots of shows across the pond. Mike Benedetto talks Kurosawa's Rahomom. Brian Andrews on Portland. Wow! That's a whole lotta show. Thanks to Mr. Moon for helping out with the intro. We need an audio intern. E-mail us if you have a clue, and don't mind somewhat dull technical work. Lots of gory, oh, my friend there is lots of glory. No money. ALSO: BAS has an APB out for Phil Berkman. If anyone out there knows Phil Berkman we are trying to get ahold of him...