American painter and graphic artist
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4 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
4 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
3 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
3 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
3 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
3 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
3 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
2 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
2 episodes with Robert Rauschenberg
Oggi a Cult: Lorenzo Ceva Valla firma con Mario Garofalo Geymonat il film "L'ultimo viaggio"; alle Gallerie d'Italia di Milano la mostra "Una collezione inattesa. La Nuova Arte degli Anni Sessanta e una Omaggio a Robert Rauschenberg"; lo scrittore britannico William Atkins ospite in studio per il libro "Tre isole" (Iperborea"; la rubrica di fumetti a cura di Antonio Serra...
For the 36th episode of "Reading the Art World," host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Sarah Roberts, curator of the landmark exhibition "Amy Sherald: American Sublime," and editor of the accompanying catalog published by Yale University Press in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Roberts discusses Sherald's revolutionary portraiture approach — from her distinctive gray-scale skin tones that shift focus to her subjects' interior lives, to her deliberate use of clothing and settings as narrative devices. She shares insights on the "American sublime" concept in Sherald's work and her curatorial decisions integrating the iconic Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor portraits within the larger context of the artist's practice.This episode is essential listening for anyone interested in contemporary portraiture, the evolution of American figurative painting, and how art can challenge conventional narratives about representation and identity. Roberts' insights reveal why Sherald's quiet yet radical artistic vision offers a powerful reimagining of who deserves to be seen and celebrated in American art history.ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sarah Roberts is Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation where she oversees the Foundation's Artwork and Archival Collections and the Joan Mitchell Catalogue Raisonné project. Since 2004, she has served in progressive leadership roles in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the SFMOMA, and since 2020 as Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture. A specialist in post-war American art, Roberts has organized significant exhibitions including major presentations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, and co-curated the Joan Mitchell retrospective that traveled internationally. Roberts holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and Brown University, and has contributed to numerous publications on contemporary art.ABOUT THE EXHIBITION"Amy Sherald: American Sublime" is now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through August 3, 2025, following its run at SFMOMA. The exhibition will travel to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. (September 19, 2025 – February 22, 2026).PURCHASE THE BOOK https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300279382/amy-sherald/ 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. 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
Today's episode is a special conversation and recap of Elisabeth Condon and my experiences collaborating as visual artists in the ballet project CounterPointe (now in its 12th year) produced by Norte Maar and staged at the Mark O'Donnell Theater (Brooklyn) in March 2025. Jennifer Coates kindly came on to ask us questions about making props and what it was like for 2 newbies to enter the world of dance. Thanks, Jennifer!Special thanks also to Norte Maar and its co-directors, Julia K. Gleich and Jason Andrew for their support of artists and creative collaboration.More information about Elisabeth and Amy's work:Elisabeth: https://www.elisabethcondon.com/ | @elisabethcondonAmy: https://www.amytalluto.com/ | @tallutsMore information about Julia Gleich and Jason Andrew's NorteMaar & CounterPointe12: https://www.nortemaar.org/projects/counterpointe12Julia K. Gleich's website: https://www.gleichdances.org/Julia Gleich interview on this podcast: Episode 49The dances we discussed:"Vermillion | 10" by Ava Desiderio and Elisabeth CondonDancers: Minami Ando, Lucia BeteluSupport structures: Elise WunderlichMusic by Zero Eklipse and William Pilarte Lighting: Evan SpigelmanMark O'Donnell Theater, Brooklyn, March 2025"And So It Begins" by Margaret Wiss and Amy TallutoDancers: Maya Tsuruki Holden and Jaclyn KriewallMusic by Margaret WissLighting: Evan SpigelmanMark O'Donnell Theater, Brooklyn, March 2025"46 Gordon" by Julia K. Gleich and Nicole CherubiniDancers: Michelle Buckley, Kara Chan, Annie Freeman, Amber Neff, Ethan Schweitzer-GaslinLighting: Evan SpigelmanMark O'Donnell Theater, Brooklyn, March 2025Special thanks to Jennifer Coates for interviewing us! Jennifer's website: https://www.jenniferlcoates.com/Jennifer on IG: @jennifercoates666Artists mentioned: Henri Matisse, William Kentridge, Florine Stettheimer, Keisha Prioleau Martin, Meg Lipke, Elana Herzog, Nicole Cherubini, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison (Dancer), Julia K. Gleich (Choreographer), Jason AndrewDances mentioned: "Afternoon of a Faun" by the Ballet Russes, “Minutiae” (1954) Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham, "Cry" Alvin AileyVideo mentioned: "How to Make Theater Props" by Eric Bucklein (not actually old but young) https://youtu.be/JSl5Vc8mej0?si=KWGdOxnijBiEEGZcBook mentioned: Inigo Philbrick "All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art"Exhibition mentioned: "Edges of Ailey" at the WhitneyAll music by Soundstripe----------------------------Pep Talks on IG: @peptalksforartistsPep Talks website: https://www.peptalksforartists.com/Amy, your beloved host, on IG: @tallutsPep Talks on Art Spiel as written essays: https://tinyurl.com/7k82vd8sBuyMeACoffee Donations always appreciated!
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
Oggi a Cult: Paolo Bignamini è direttore artistico del ciclo "I libri sulla scena" in varie località della Svizzera per proporre spettacoli italiani; inizia il MIART 2025 con un omaggio a Robert Rauschenberg; Mario Sala torna in scena con "Il sogno di un uomo ridicolo" da Dostojevskij al Teatro Out Off; Antonio Serra intervista i fondatori della casa editrice di fumetti indipendente MalEdizioni...
This episode is a replay from Dec 28th 2023. Just Make Art will be back with a brand new episode on March 20th.What happens when an artist truly understands their medium? For Robert Rauschenberg, that's precisely when it was time to stop and move on. His philosophy—"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it. Then I stop. At the time I am bored, or understand, and I use those words interchangeably"—serves as the launching point for a deep dive into artistic evolution and the creative mindset.Ty Nathan Clark and Nathan Terborg unpack Rauschenberg's approach to creativity, exploring how his constant medium-shifting—from painting to sculpture, printmaking to performance—wasn't merely restlessness but a deliberate artistic strategy. They examine his famous "combines" that incorporated everyday objects and trash, born initially from economic necessity but evolving into a revolutionary artistic approach that bridged the gap between art and life.The conversation takes fascinating turns through the concept of the "beginner's mind," the documentation of creative processes, and the tension between commercial success and artistic growth. Particularly compelling is their discussion about creating opportunities in today's art landscape—from organizing house shows to leveraging digital platforms—that echoes Rauschenberg's resourceful spirit.Whether you're a working artist feeling stagnant in your current practice, or someone curious about the artistic mindset, this episode offers both philosophical insights and practical takeaways about embracing boredom as a creative signal, following your curiosity, and maintaining that crucial sense of wonder throughout your creative journey. Ready to transform your approach to making art? Listen now and discover why sometimes understanding something completely is your cue to move on to the next exciting possibility.Send us a message - we would love to hear from you!Make sure to follow us on Instagram here:@justmakeartpodcast @tynathanclark @nathanterborg
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
The Art Bystander No27: Marcus Jansen. In this episode our host Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar, sit down with internationally acclaimed artist Marcus Jansen whose work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and Documenta among others. From his early years between the Bronx and Germany to serving in the U.S. Army and later becoming one of the most important painters of his generation, Jansen's journey is as compelling as his art.His new exhibition Faceless at CFHILL, Stockholm, in collaboration with Almine Rech and the Marcus Jansen Foundation, dissects power structures, anonymity, and the systems that shape our lives. Jansen's raw, gestural abstraction meets a deeply political and emotional narrative, making his work a powerful lens through which to view contemporary society.We talk about: His transition from soldier to artist; the unseen forces of control in today's world; how his art challenges historical narratives; the intersection of street art in his practice and the socialist structure of the military.Jansen's work has been described as a 21st-century response to Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, but his voice is distinctly his own—urgent, fearless, and unfiltered. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Join Tamara for an interview with photographer Bailey Davidson, a Milledgeville native who lived in NYC as an aspiring actor for a few years, before returning to Georgia in the late 90s to pursue his MFA in Photography at SCAD. Since graduating, Bailey has built his freelance career in all aspects of professional commercial and editorial photography, working with a wide range of clients, including Savannah Music Festival, Wine Enthusiast Magazine, and The London Observer. This past spring he opened a studio in City Market - go visit him and his 20 years' worth of Savannah photos there! Check out Bailey's work and follow him here: https://www.facebook.com/BaileyDavidsonPhotography https://baileydavidson.com/ Topics in their chat include: Bailey's indie movie he acted in, called "Bringing Down Dejonga" (this was the ending title after all! I found out online. --Tamara); how while in NYC he started taking headshots for his fellow actors and gradually took more and more photos, getting into art shows, and drifting from acting to photography; how he first heard of SCAD because his parents happened to meet the Poetters on a cruise; his Flannery O'Connor tie-ins of having grown up in Milledgeville and then living in the garden apartment of her childhood home as his first Savannah apartment; his practice immediately post-grad of shooting weddings and family portraits, to support himself as he built up his clients for commercial and editorial shoots; his show at the JEA last year that was a continuation of his MFP thesis show, "Bailey's Acres," all Holga pinhole camera work; the nostalgia of taking photos with an analog/film camera and then being surprised by the images once you pick up your developed photos; his Storyboards website where he displays his series of photos that combine to tell a story, influenced by David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg; his photography books "Seasons of Savannah," "Savannah Past and Present," and "Milledgeville Then and Now;" recently getting published in the fine art mag "Black & White Magazine;" and his advice to students and young photographers to just shoot shoot shoot as there's no substitute for practicing your craft. Tune in and get all the details!
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
Taking Venice (2023, EE.UU.), dirigido por Amei Wallach y producido por Vanessa Bergonzoli, Tal Mandil y Andrea Miller. V.O. en inglés con subtítulos en inglés En plena Guerra Fría, Estados Unidos puso en marcha su diplomacia cultural para conseguir que el artista norteamericano Robert Rauschenberg recibiera el Gran Premio de la Bienal de Venecia de 1964. Este documental desvela la historia detrás de este hito que se considera la consagración del cambio de escenario entre los artistas de la Escuela de Nueva York y el éxito del pop. Alice Denney, mujer del mundo del arte vinculada a Washington y amiga de los Kennedy, recomendó que fuera Alan Solomon, comisario que apoyaba el arte más contemporáneo, quien organizara la participación de Estados Unidos en la Bienal. Solomon tramó un plan audaz junto a Leo Castelli, galerista neoyorquino y marchante de Rauschenberg. Las maniobras realizadas para conseguir el premio dejaron a la prensa internacional boquiabierta y al artista cuestionando la política nacionalista que lo había llevado hasta allí. La Fundación Juan March inauguró en 1985 la primera exposición de Rauschenberg en España. En octubre de 2025, con el apoyo de la Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, presentará una segunda muestra centrada en la utilización de las imágenes que el artista hizo a lo largo de su trayectoria, práctica clave en su producción. La presentación de este documental, sesenta años después de la Bienal, y la mencionada exposición, Robert Rauschenberg: el uso de las imágenes, contribuirán a remarcar la relevancia de un artista cuyo centenario tendrá lugar en 2025.Más información de este acto
Check out the newest season of Recording Artists, hosted by actor, artist, and futurist Ahmed Best. Explore the Getty archives and learn about the innovative art-science group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in season three, out now. This first episode of the season features Robert Rauschenberg, weaving archival recordings of the artist with new interviews by MoMA chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo and cognitive-studies scientist Xiaodong Lin-Siegler. Learn more about the episode and subscribe to the series. The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast. Additional music from “Variations VII” written by John Cage courtesy of Henmar Press, Inc.
Check out the newest season of Recording Artists, hosted by actor, artist, and futurist Ahmed Best. Explore the Getty archives and learn about the innovative art-science group Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in season three, out now. This first episode of the season features Robert Rauschenberg, weaving archival recordings of the artist with new interviews by MoMA chief curator at large and publisher Michelle Kuo and cognitive-studies scientist Xiaodong Lin-Siegler. Learn more about the episode and subscribe to the series. The Getty Patron Program is a proud sponsor of this podcast. Additional music from “Variations VII” written by John Cage courtesy of Henmar Press, Inc.
In this thought-provoking episode of Exploring Art Podcast, host Emily and panelists Bianca and Anthony delve into the complexities of collaboration and the nature of art through Robert Rauschenberg's iconic work, Erased de Kooning Drawing. They explore the cultural context of the late 1950s New York art scene, highlighting the tension between Abstract Expressionism and Rauschenberg's Neo-Dada approach. The discussion covers Rauschenberg's bold decision to erase a drawing by established artist Willem de Kooning, raising philosophical questions about authorship, value, and creation.
In episode 904 of the “Exploring Art Podcast” we will delve into Robert Rauschenberg's groundbreaking work, Erased de Kooning Drawing, and its profound implications for the art world. Join us as we explore the intricate materials and techniques that define both de Kooning's original piece and Rauschenberg's act of erasure.
In this Le Random discussion we are so pleased to speak to a scholar of art history in Dr. Nancy Perloff from the Getty Research Institute. She joins Le Random's editor-in-chief Peter Bauman. Perloff recently curated Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), showing at the Getty Center as part of PST Art. The pair explores E.A.T.'s influential role in merging art, technology and engineering, a movement founded in 1966 by Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver and artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Dr. Perloff shares insights on E.A.T.'s success, including as an early digital art network, as well as its collaborations between artists and engineers (mostly from Bell Labs). This included performances like Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and immersive experiences at the 1970 Osaka World Expo's Pepsi Pavilion. They touch on curatorial challenges, EAT's experimental nature, its role in building interdisciplinary networks, and its lasting, yet underappreciated, impact on art and technology.
Today I'm taking us on a space, art and space-art journey. Because, I've been thinking about how when William Shatner recently went up to space in Bezos' rocket, he saw in real life what he had always pretended to see on TV: space and the final frontier. But to his shock and horror, he...sort of hated it: At least he hated the outer space view. He quaked in the face of all that vast emptiness and ended up with a new appreciation for our warm "Mother" Earth. I.e. "Beam me down, Scotty." And in this way, I think an artist could adopt a William Shatner in Space ideology: and try to appreciate the gifts we each have right now (time, space, adequate health, and freedom to create), versus caving into the dark matter horrors of compare & despair, and worry over not achieving the right career benchmarks. Artists/Works mentioned: "The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise" by Giovanni di Paolo (1445), "Galaxy (Hydra)" Vija Celmins (1974), "The Moon Museum" Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Forrest Myers and Andy Warhol (Possibly sent on the Apollo 12 Moon Mission-1969), "The Wave" by Astronaut, Nicole Stott (2009) William Shatner's book: "Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder" Frank White's book: "The Overview Effect" More about Astronaut, Nicole Stott's first-ever painting in space: http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-070816b-astronaut-artist-nicole-stott.html More about The Moon Museum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Museum Thank you for listening! All music by Soundstripe ---------------------------- Pep Talks on IG: @peptalksforartists Amy, your beloved host, on IG: @talluts Pep Talks on Art Spiel as written essays: https://tinyurl.com/7k82vd8s BuyMeACoffee Donations always appreciated! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/peptalksforartistspod/support
When embarking on your mokuhanga journey, whether through making or collecting, one name stands out above the rest: (pause) Yoshida. The Yoshida family of artists have helped create some of the most important and exciting mokuhanga prints of the last 100 years. Their designs, techniques, and marketing transformed the perception of prints in Japan and around the world. I speak with Dr. Monika Hinkel, Lecturer in the Arts of East Asia at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) at the University of London and an Academic Member of the Japan Research Centre. Dr. Hinkel is also the curator of the current exhibtion (at the time of recording) about the Yoshida family of artists, titled Yoshida: Three Generations of Printmaking, being held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, England. Dr. Hinkel joins me to discuss the Yoshida family, from Hiroshi to Ayomi, the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery—the first of its kind in the United Kingdom—the Yoshida family's history, and their impact on the global art community. Please follow The Unfinished Print and my own mokuhanga work on Instagram @andrezadoroznyprints or email me at theunfinishedprint@gmail.com Notes: may contain a hyperlink. Simply click on the highlighted word or phrase. Artists works follow after the note if available. Pieces are mokuhanga unless otherwise noted. Dimensions are given if known. Print publishers are given if known. Dulwich Picture Gallery - located in London, England the Dulwich Picture Gallery is the worlds first public "purpose-built" public art gallery founded in 1811. Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) - was an American artist known for his innovative and boundary-defying work that blurred the lines between painting, sculpture, and everyday life. Emerging in the 1950s, Rauschenberg challenged the conventions of traditional art with his "Combines," a series of works that incorporated found objects, photographs, and non-traditional materials into paintings, creating dynamic, multi-dimensional pieces. Characterized by a spirit of experimentation and a desire to break down the distinctions between art and the real world, Rauschenberg played a crucial role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Charlene (1954) mixed media Pop Art - was an art movement from the 1950s and 1960s that incorporated imagery from popular culture, such as advertising, comic books, and consumer goods. It challenged traditional art by blurring the lines between high art and everyday life. Key figures like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein used bold colors and familiar icons to both celebrate and critique consumer culture, making Pop Art one of the most influential movements in modern art. Yoshida: Three Generations of Japanese Printmakers - is the current exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery from June 19, 2024 - November 3, 2024. Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950) - a watercolorist, oil painter, and woodblock printmaker. Is associated with the resurgence of the woodblock print in Japan, and in the West. It was his early relationship with Watanabe Shōzaburō, having his first seven prints printed by the Shōzaburō atelier. This experience made Hiroshi believe that he could hire his own carvers and printers and produce woodblock prints, which he did in 1925. Kumoi Cherry Tree 23" x 29 1/8 " (1926) Yoshida Fujio (1887-1997) - the wife of Hiroshi Yoshida and the mother of Tōshi Yoshida (1911-1995) and Hodaka Yoshida. Fujio was so much more than a mother and wife. She had a long and storied career as a painter and printmaker. Fujio's work used her travels and personal experiences to make her work. Subjects such as Japan during The Pacific War, abstraction, portraits, landscapes, still life, and nature were some of her themes. Her painting mediums were watercolour and oil. Her print work was designed by her and carved by Fujio. Flower - B (1954) 15 3/4" x 10 5/8" Yoshida Tōshi (1911-1995) - was the second child of Hiroshi Yoshida and Fujio Yoshida, although the first to survive childhood. Beginning with oil paintings and then apprenticing under his father with woodblock cutting. By 1940 Tōshi started to make his mokuhanga. After his father's death in 1950, Tōshi began to experiment with abstract works and travel to the United States. Later travels to Africa evolved his prints, inspiring Tōshi with the world he experienced as his work focused on animals and nature. American Girl A (1954) 15 7/8" x 11 1/8" Yoshida Chizuko (1924-2017) - was the wife of painter and printmaker Hodaka Yoshida. Beginning as an abstract painter, Chizuko, after a meeting with sōsaku hanga printmaker Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955), Chizuko became interested in printmaking. Chizuko enjoyed the abstraction of art, and this was her central theme of expression. Like all Yoshida artists, travel greatly inspired Chizuko's work. She incorporated the colours and flavours of the world into her prints. Jazz (1953) 15 3/4" x 11" Yoshida Hodaka (1926-1995) - was the second son of woodblock printmaker and designer Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950). Hodaka Yoshida's work was abstract, beginning with painting and evolving into printmaking. His inspirations varied as his career continued throughout his life, but Hodaka Yoshida's work generally focused on nature, "primitive" art, Buddhism, the elements, and landscapes. Hodaka Yoshida's print work used woodcut, photo etching, collage, and lithography, collaborating with many of these mediums and making original and fantastic works. Outside of prints Hodaka Yoshida also painted and created sculptures. Abstract (1958) 11" x 15 7/8" Yoshida Ayomi - is the daughter of Chizuko and Hodaka Yoshida. She is a visual artist who works in mokuhanga, installations and commercial design. Ayomi's subject matter is colour, lines, water, and shape. Ayomi's lecture referred to by Jeannie at PAM can be found here. She teaches printmaking and art. You can find more info here. Spring Rain (2018) woodblock installation Kawase Hasui (1883-1957), a designer of more than six hundred woodblock prints, is one of the most famous artists of the shin-hanga movement of the early twentieth century. Hasui began his career under the guidance of Kaburaki Kiyokata (1878-1971), joining several artistic societies early on. However, it wasn't until he joined the Watanabe atelier in 1918 that he began to gain significant recognition. Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885-1962) commissioned Hasui to design landscapes of the Japanese countryside, small towns, and scenes of everyday life. Hasui also worked closely with the carvers and printers to achieve the precise quality he envisioned for his prints. Spring Rain at Sakurada Gate (1952) 10 3/8" x 15 3/8" Shōzaburō Watanabe (1885-1962) - was one of the most important print publishers in Japan in the early 20th Century. His business acumen and desire to preserve the ukiyo-e tradition were incredibly influential for the artists and collectors in Japan and those around the world. Watanabe influenced other publishers, but his work in the genre is unparalleled. The shin-hanga (new print) movement is Watanabe's, collecting some of the best printers, carvers and designers to work for him. A great article by The Japan Times in 2022 discusses a touring exhibition of Watanabe's work called Shin Hanga: New Prints of Japan, which can be found here. Impressionism - was an art movement that emerged in France in the late 19th century, characterized by a focus on capturing the fleeting effects of light and color in everyday scenes. Instead of detailed realism, Impressionist artists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas used loose brushwork and vibrant colors to convey the atmosphere and momentary impressions of their subjects. This movement broke from traditional art by often painting en plein air (outdoors) and prioritizing personal perception over exact representation, leading to a revolutionary shift in modern art. Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) - was a key figure in the development of abstract art, known for using color and form to express emotions and ideas without representational content. His influential writings and innovative approach helped shape modern art, making him a central figure in movements like Expressionism and the Bauhaus. Stars (1938) 13 7/8" x 10 1/4" colour lithograph Charles Freer (1854–1919) - was an American industrialist and art collector, best known for his significant contributions to the field of art through the establishment of the Freer Gallery of Art. Freer was a wealthy entrepreneur who made his fortune in the railroad industry. In his later years, he became an avid collector of art, particularly Asian art, including Chinese and Japanese ceramics, paintings, and sculptures. Nakagawa Hachiro (1877-1922) - was a close friend of Yoshida Hiroshi and traveled to the United States together for the first time in 1899. He was a yōga painter and showed primarily in Japan. Landcape in The Inland Sea 13.94" x 20.87" colour on watercolour The Great Kanto Earthquake - struck Japan on September 1, 1923, with a magnitude of approximately 7.9. It devastated the Kanto region, including Tokyo and Yokohama, causing widespread destruction and fires that led to the deaths of over 100,000 people. The earthquake also resulted in significant infrastructure damage, homelessness, and economic disruption. In the aftermath, the disaster prompted major rebuilding efforts and urban planning changes. Additionally, the earthquake led to social and political unrest, including widespread anti-Korean sentiment, as rumors falsely blamed Korean immigrants for the disaster. Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) - born in Edo, Hiroshige is famous for his landscape series of that burgeoning city. The most famous series being, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856-1859), and the landcape series, Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (1833-1834). His work highlights bokashi, and bright colours. More info about his work can be found, here. Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji No. 21 Lake at Hakone 14" x 9 1/4" Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) - a designer of more than six hundred woodblock prints, Kawase Hasui is one of the most famous designers of the shin-hanga movement of the early twentieth century. Hasui began his career with the artist and woodblock designer Kaburaki Kiyokata (1878-1971), joining several artistic societies along the way early in his career. It wasn't until he joined the Watanabe atelier in 1918 that he really began to gain recognition. Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885-1962) had Hasui design landscapes of the Japanese country-side, small towns, and everyday life. Hasui also worked closely with the carvers and printers of his prints to reach the level Hasui wanted his prints to be. Selection of Views of the Tokaido (1934) Bishu Seto Kilns 15 3/4" x 10 3/8" Itō Shinsui (1898-1972) - Nihon-ga, and woodblock print artist and designer who worked for print publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō (1885-1962). Shinsui designed some of our most famous shin hanga, or “new” prints of the early 20th century. One of my favorites is “Fragrance of a Bath” 1930. Kasumi Teshigawara Arranging Chrysanthemums (1966) 21 7/8" x 16 1/2" Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) - is one of the most famous Japanese artists to have ever lived. Hokusai was an illustrator, painter and woodblock print designer. His work can be found on paper, wood, silk, and screen. His woodblock print design for Under The Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1830-32) is beyond famous. His work, his manga, his woodblocks, his paintings, influence artists from all over the world. Tama River in Musashi Province from 36 Views of Mount Fuji (1830-32) 9 7/8" x 14 7/8" Boston Museum of Fine Arts - a museum with a rich history with Japanese artwork, especially woodblock prints. It holds the largest collection of Japanese art outside of Japan. Many of their woodblock prints are held online, here. A video on YouTube found, here, describing the MFA's history, and its collections. Onchi Kōshirō (1891-1955) - originally designing poetry and books Onchi became on of the most important sōsaku hanga artists and promotor of the medium. His works are highly sought after today. More info, here. Nijubashi Bridge to the Imperial Palace from Scenes of Lost Tokyo (1945) 7.8" x 11.1" published by Uemura Masuro Tarō Okamoto (1911–1996) was a prominent Japanese artist known for his avant-garde works and dynamic use of color and form. His art, which includes painting, sculpture, and public installations like the "Tower of the Sun," often explores themes of chaos and modernity. Okamoto was influential in Japanese contemporary art and also made significant contributions as a writer and cultural commentator. More info, here. Seashore (1976) lithograph 5.55" × 22.05" Oliver Statler (1915-2002) - was an American author and scholar and collector of mokuhanga. He had been a soldier in World War 2, having been stationed in Japan. After his time in the war Statler moved back to Japan where he wrote about Japanese prints. His interests were of many facets of Japanese culture such as accommodation, and the 88 Temple Pilgrimage of Shikoku. Oliver Statler, in my opinion, wrote one of the most important books on the sōsaku-hanga movement, “Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn.” St. Olaf College - is a private liberal arts college located in Northfield, Minnesota. Founded in 1874 by Norwegian-American settlers, it has a strong emphasis on a comprehensive liberal arts education, integrating rigorous academics with a commitment to fostering critical thinking, leadership, and global citizenship. The college is known for its vibrant community, strong programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and its affiliation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). St. Olaf is also recognized for its strong music program, including its acclaimed choir and music ensembles. More info, here. The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) - is an art museum in Detroit, Michigan, founded in 1885. It is known for its extensive collection of artworks from various cultures and periods, including significant American, European, and African art. The DIA is particularly famous for Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals and serves as a major cultural center with diverse exhibitions and educational programs. More info, here. baren - is a Japanese word to describe a flat, round-shaped disc, predominantly used in creating Japanese woodblock prints. It is traditionally made of a cord of various types and a bamboo sheath, although baren have many variations. Jeannie Kenmotsu, PhD - is the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art at the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon. She specializes in early modern Japanese art, with a focus on painting, illustrated books, and prints. Her interview with The Unfinished Print about her work about the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai can be found, here. © Popular Wheat Productions opening and closing credit - by Gordon Lightfoot - Affair on 8th Avenue from the album Back Here On Earth (1968) on United Artists. logo designed and produced by Douglas Batchelor and André Zadorozny Disclaimer: Please do not reproduce or use anything from this podcast without shooting me an email and getting my express written or verbal consent. I'm friendly :) Слава Українi If you find any issue with something in the show notes please let me know. ***The opinions expressed by guests in The Unfinished Print podcast are not necessarily those of André Zadorozny and of Popular Wheat Productions.***
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
At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government is determined to fight Communism with culture. The Venice Biennale, the world's most influential art exhibition, becomes a proving ground in 1964. Alice Denney, Washington insider and friend of the Kennedys, recommends Alan Solomon, an ambitious curator making waves with trailblazing art, to organize the U.S. entry. Together with Leo Castelli, a powerful New York art dealer, they embark on a daring plan to make Robert Rauschenberg the winner of the Grand Prize. The artist is yet to be taken seriously with his combinations of junk off the street and images from pop culture, but he has the potential to dazzle. Deftly pulling off maneuvers that could have come from a Hollywood thriller, the American team leaves the international press crying foul and Rauschenberg questioning the politics of nationalism that sent him there. Director Amei Wallach (Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here) stops by for an in-depth conversation on a time and place where the long reach of the Cold War, the internal machination's of the Olympic's of the art world and the ascendency of modern art's bête noire and how they all crossed paths in this John le Carré-ish tale. For more go to: zeitgeistfilms.com/taking-venice
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/
In this unique episode of The Art Bystander, the host Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar meets with the world famous sculptors Joel Shapiro and Ugo Rondinone. They are part of a group show at Carling Dalenson Gallery together with Michael Craig-Martin, who unfortunately couldn't participate in the conversation. In the relaxed and intimate dialogue with Joel and Ugo, they touch on their role as artists, influences, background and the process of making art.Joel Shapiro is an American sculptor celebrated for his dynamic, abstract sculptures, often resembling human figures and constructed from geometric shapes. His work is characterized by a sense of movement and balance, using materials such as wood, bronze, and cast iron. Shapiro's sculptures range in scale from small, intimate pieces to large public installations. He gained prominence in the 1970s and has since exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous awards and honors, solidifying his reputation as a leading figure in contemporary sculpture.Ugo Rondinone is a Swiss-born, New York-based artist known for his diverse and multimedia approach to contemporary art, incorporating sculpture, painting, video, sound, and photography. His work explores themes of nature, time, and the human condition with a poetic and meditative quality. Notable pieces include "Seven Magic Mountains" and immersive installations using light and color. Gaining recognition in the 1990s, he has exhibited internationally in major venues like the New Museum in New York and the Venice Biennale. Rondinone's blend of personal emotion with universal experiences has made him a prominent figure in contemporary art.Established in 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden, Carling Dalenson is a private family run gallery that specializes in well-established contemporary artists from around the world.The gallery is privileged to among the founders, Caroline D. Anchér and Isabella Dalenson, have Theodor Dalenson with more than 30 years experience from the institutional art world and a former board member of Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, Aspen Art Museum, Americans for the Arts, and who together with Isabella Dalenson was co-chairman of the National Art Awards for a number of years. More recently Theodor is the head of Moderna Museets advisory board. Exhibitions include artists that the Carling Dalenson family has collected and supported such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, as well as living artists such as Frank Stella, Vera Lutter, Robert Mangold, Joel Shapiro, Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport and Ross Bleckner.A limited number of curated exhibitions within contemporary art, are shown in Carling Dalensons Stockholm Gallery at Sibyllegatan 49. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
So excited to welcome Artist, Frederick Hayes, to the podcast this week. Fred makes graphite drawings and paintings of faces, and he also creates found-material assemblage sculptures that portray the psychological interior of his subjects. Half made up and half based on the street photos that he takes, his portraits conjure up a community of people. These heads function as general archetypes but also as familiar faces that Fred might see in his community, remember from his past, or have seen in the media as victims of racial injustice. Fred Hayes is also an artist who studiously avoids being pigeonholed, and I loved hearing about how he prioritizes freedom in his varied studio practice. Find Frederick Hayes online: IG: https://www.instagram.com/fhay_00/ WEB: https://www.fredhayesstudio.com/ 2023 Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant-Winners Exhibition at PAAM (thru 6/16/24, Provincetown): https://paam.org/the-2023-artist-grant-recipients/ This episode is kindly sponsored by the New York Studio School. Check out their June-July 2024 Summer Marathon courses here: nyss.org Artists mentioned: Henri Matisse, Emil Nolde, Cartier Bresson, Robert Rauschenberg, Margaret Kilgallen, Terry Hoff & Chris Johanson of the Mission School / Luggage Store Gallery, Max Beckmann Frederick Hayes has exhibited work at Triple Candie, the Studio Museum, Hallwalls Contemporary, New Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Addison Gallery of American Art, DeSaisset Museum, Boston University, Number 35, and the Luggage Store and Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, CA. Hayes has held residencies at MacDowell, VCCA, LMCC and The Headlands Center for the Art. He is the recipient of a 2020 NYFA-NYSCA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, a 2012 & 2001 Pollack-Krasner Grant, a 2010 Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Program Fellowship, a 2000 San Francisco Art Commission Individual Artist Grantand his work is in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and UC Berkeley Art Museum Thank you, Fred! Thank you Patrons and Listeners! Appreciate everyone! Check the pod out on IG! And why not review Peps on Apple Podcasts? Yay! Find me, your beloved host, online at: amytalluto.com and @talluts All music by Soundstripe ---------------------------- Pep Talks Website: peptalksforartists.com Pep Talks on IG: @peptalksforartists Amy, your beloved host's website: amytalluto.com Amy, your beloved host, on IG: @talluts Pep Talks on Art Spiel as written essays: https://tinyurl.com/7k82vd8s BuyMeACoffee Donations always 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
I am so thrilled to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most esteemed curators in the world, Naomi Beckwith. Currently the Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, where she plays an instrumental role in shaping the museum's vision, Beckwith's career has seen her curate some of the groundbreaking shows in recent years. At the MCA Chicago, she curated Howardena Pindell: What Remains to Be Seen – the first survey of the 20th and 21st century pioneer, as well as The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music that looked at the legacy of 1960s African American avant-garde and its impact on art and culture today. Among many others, she also staged the first ever US solo exhibition by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Beckwith was part of the team that realised Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, conceived by Okwui Enwezor for the New Museum, as well as shows featuring Arthur Jafa and Laurie Simmons. She has dedicated her career to the impact of identity and multidisciplinary practices within contemporary art, and has just been granted the David Driskell Prize 2024. But the reason why we are speaking with Beckwith today is because she has just unveiled a new group exhibition at the Guggenheim – By Way of Working – that brings together artists across mediums, and generations – from Mona Hatoum, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, and Senga Nengudi: the artist we are very excitingly discussing today. Chicago-born Nengudi is hailed for her works across sculpture to performance, that explore the human form in all its many iterations through her early training in dance, and I can't wait to find out more. -- LINKS: Naomi's exhibition: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/by-way-of-material-and-motion-in-the-guggenheim-collection https://www.guggenheim.org/about-us/staff/naomi-beckwith https://www.sengasenga.com/ https://www.artnews.com/feature/senga-nengudi-who-is-she-why-is-she-important-1234591161/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DutixbTscWM https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5078 -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield
Despite its short lifespan, Black Mountain College (BMC) left a lasting legacy as an influential pioneering arts institution that challenged traditional academic structures and fostered a unique community of creative thinkers. Founded in 1933 just 20 minutes outside of Asheville, NC, the college emphasized holistic learning and the study of art as central tenets of its educational philosophy. While BMC closed in 1957 due to funding issues, many of its faculty and students were or would become influential in the arts, including Josef and Anni Albers, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. In today's special crossover episode from our friends at ArtsvilleUSA, we welcome Kate Averett Anderson, a writer, curator, staff historian, project coordinator, and board member at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC). The museum works to preserve the legacy of educational and artistic innovation of BMC through exhibitions, conservation, educational events, and public programs. “It's not about having a gallery space where you walk in and you go, ‘Here is the history of Black Mountain College from beginning to end,” says Kate. “You can come in and have hands-on experiences with different exhibitions that tell a lot of different stories.”In this episode, you'll discover the fascinating connections between BMC and the iconic Bauhaus movement, relive the vibrant atmosphere of the college's legendary parties, and uncover the pivotal role of the BMCM+AC in keeping BMC's spirit alive. From exploring historical parallels to celebrating the creative freedom that BMC championed, this episode offers valuable insight into the birthplace of the American avant-garde. “[Black Mountain College] was a haven for a lot of people,” says Kate. “It was a place where a lot of people had the freedom and ability to explore different elements of their identity.” Key Points From This Episode:An introduction to Kate, her career journey, and her role at BMCM+AC.The origin story of BMC (which starts with a scandal, like all good stories do).Insight into founder John A. Rice's educational philosophy on hands-on learning.Nazis, the final days of the Bauhaus, and how Josef and Anni Albers found BMC.Influential figures that attended BMC and the relationships that developed between them.The legendary parties that were thrown at BMC; such as Jean Verda's Greek party.An overview of the communal, democratic, non-hierarchical structure at BMC.How a young Robert Rauschenberg was profoundly influenced by his time at BMC.Some of the many famous student revolts at BMC; including one known as The Split.Cultural and political shifts that impacted the college in the late 1950s.The important role that BMCM+AC plays in keeping the BMC legacy alive.How the BMCM+AC differentiates itself from the typical stagnant museum institution.Different stories that BMCM+AC hopes to tell about BMC, not just its history.Looking to the future in the ReVIEWING Black Mountain College conference.Reflecting on the history of identity intersection and racial integration at BMC.A closing anecdote about Harriet Sohmers Zwerling and sexual liberation at BMC.For more information, please visit http://notrealart.com/black-mountain-college
https://notesonfilm1.com/2024/04/04/in-conversation-with-richard-layne-on-yoko-ono-music-of-the-mind-tate-modern/ I talk to Richard Layne on ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind', currently on at Tate Modern. You might recognise Richard from our podcast, THINKING ALOUD ABOUT FILM. What you might not know is that he is a long-time fan of Yoko Ono and one of the most knowledgeable people on her work as an artist and performer. In this podcast, Richard, compares this exhibition, billed as the largest ever undertaken on the work of Yoko One, and compares it to the many others he's attended. We talk of how he became a fan, her various types of work, the performance art, the conceptual art, her books of instructions, the connection to Fluxus. We also touch on her collaborations with some of the key figures of mid-twentieth century art (John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, John Lennon) and how her work prefigures that of contemporary artists such as Marina Ibrahimovic. Our conversation broadly follows the flow of the exhibition itself, so I've included photographs from the exhibition in the blog so the listener might more clearly follow the points of conversation. Richard is very illuminating on why Yoko Ono is one of those figures that keep getting re-discovered periodically, on her extensive influence in various domains of art, from the gallery to punk, and on how she is a wonderful conduit to chance meetings with The Pet Shop Boys.
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
Episode: 3112 Donald Barthelme: Creative Editor. Today, a sheriff of an editor.
durée : 01:25:02 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Albane Penaranda - Par Jean Daive - Avec Robert Rauschenberg (artiste plasticien), le directeur de la Kunsthalle de Berlin (commissaire de l'exposition consacrée à Robert Rauschenberg), Jens Jensen (peintre), Brigitta Restorff (éditrice et journaliste), Dieter Ruckhaberle (peintre, directeur de musée), Michael Stone (photographe), Kristin Gerber (artiste) et "Bärble Goldbeck" - Réalisation Pamela Doussaud
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
Today, it's a brand new installment of the "Interview the Interviewer" series and I'm excited to reveal that this episode's Interviewee is ... me! Thank you so much to artist, Catherine Haggarty, for generously suggesting this collaboration and for asking such wonderful questions about my work. More info about Amy (your beloved host's) work online: amytalluto.com and @talluts Works mentioned (AT unless noted): "The Princesse de Broglie" (Ingres), "Bending Figure & Ingres Eye" 2023, "Rain Cloud" 2022, "Cloud (After Ingres) 1-3" 2023 Catherine Haggarty online: catherinehaggarty.com and @catherine_haggarty Artists mentioned: Jennifer Coates, Phyllis Plattner, Louise Mouton Johnson, Frank Gross & Jean Pichotta Gross of NOCCA, Rita MacDonald, Ever Baldwin, Geoffrey Young, Dee Shapiro, Elisabeth Condon, Dona Nelson, Philip Guston, Judy Glantzman, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins, Julia Gleich, Shari Mendelson, Courtney Puckett, Matisse, Betty Woodman, Charles Burchfield, Edvard Munch, Robert Rauschenberg, Kathe Bradford Amy's fave podcast: Las Culturistas Amy's fiery crucible of self help: Pep Talks for Writers, Wired to Create, Steal Like an Artist, On Art and Mindfulness, The War of Art, Art & Fear, The Artist's Journey: Bold Strokes to Spark Creativity, Make Art Not Content (Podcast), Big Magic Thank you, Catherine! Thank you, Listeners! And thank you so much, Patreon supporters! ---------------------------- Pep Talks on IG: @peptalksforartists Peps has a Patreon! If you are a Peps fan and would love more pep talks in your life, please consider supporting the podcast financially on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/PepTalksforArtists! For $5 a month, patrons receive exclusive mini Pep-isodes monthly or bimonthly, delivered directly to their email inbox with a clickable link. No tech savviness required! Also, patrons receive early access to not-yet-released full episodes, fresh out the oven. Join the Peps fam on Patreon and become a part of the Pep Talks Peerage today. Find out more here: https://www.patreon.com/PepTalksforArtists Pep Talks on Art Spiel as written essays: https://tinyurl.com/7k82vd8s BuyMeACoffee Donations appreciated! All music and effects are by Soundstripe --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/peptalksforartistspod/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/peptalksforartistspod/support
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, Nathan and Breck discuss: Art as an investment and the value it holds from a monetary and aesthetic standpoint The rise of fine art as an alternative asset class The role of an art consultant in the buying and selling process of fine art The impact Breck's grandfather had on his life and the community they lived in thanks to his influence as the founder of Xerox How family values and community involvement shape who you are Key Takeaways: There is a hunger for people to understand art as an asset while also appreciating the aesthetic of the works itself Follow your passion and find a way to incorporate it into your work each and every day. Determining the impact you want to make with generational wealth starts and ends with your family dynamic. Finding common ground, a shared vision and how you orient together is key to a successful family experience. Embrace your strengths, have sure footing, and maintain a bit of a practical planning view to see the bigger picture in life. “Art is about context, and the reason why art is in our museums is because it resonates with a moment in time.” — Breck Kling About Breck Kling: Breck is an Acquisitions and Collection Management Specialist and Fine Art Consultant that has been with Heather James Fine Art since 2017. He spends his time between Palm Beach Florida and Jackson Hole Wyoming. First introduced to HJFA as a collector, Breck's collection includes works by Robert Rauschenberg, Chuck Close, Takashi Murakami, Yoshimoto Nara, and Dana Schutz. He was a longtime board member of the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, and was an advisor to the first VOLTA art fair in Basel, CH, in 2005. Breck has sat on the board of his family's foundation (www.wilsonfdn.org) for over 25 years and he is also a co-founder and a trustee of Silicon Couloir, a network for entrepreneurs based in Jackson Hole. Breck's passions are art and meeting new people. He spends the majority of his time meeting new collectors and helping clients navigate collecting decisions . Breck's perspective as a collector and decades of experience in the artworld offers his clients unique insights at any stage in their collecting process. Breck has also assisted collectors in selling works by Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pat Steir, Andy Warhol, Willam de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Motherwell, Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, James Rosenquist, Alexander Calder, and Zao Wou-Ki among others. Breck spends winters in Palm Beach and enjoys time with his two kids, golf and recently discovered pickle ball. Connect with Breck Kling: LinkedIn: Breck Kling | LinkedIn Website: Art Consultant | Heather James Fine Art Connect with Nathan Mersereau: Phone: 248-645-1520 Website: www.dayinacanoe.com Email: nathan.mersereau@planningalt.com Twitter: @NathanMersereau
For the 20th episode of "Reading the Art World," host Megan Fox Kelly speaks with Susan Davidson, author of “Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting,” published in August by Hatje Cantz.Susan's work is an in-depth study of the renowned Abstract Expressionist known as a deeply intellectual painter, brilliant theorist and articulate spokesman for the movement alongside Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. The book accompanies the exhibition Susan curated of Motherwell's painting at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth this summer. From October 12th through January 14th, 2024, you can see the show in Vienna at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien. Contributing writers to “Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting” are Jennifer Cohen, Simon Kelly, Monica McTighe and Sarah Rich.As an art historian and curator, Susan Davidson is an authority in the fields of surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop art. In her previous role as senior curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Susan oversaw the stewardship of the institution's collection, in addition to organizing notable exhibitions that include Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, John Chamberlain, Jackson Pollock's Paintings on Paper and Peggy and Kiesler: The Collector and the Visionary.Previously, Susan was collections curator at The Menil Collection in Houston. She served as the curatorial advisor to Robert Rauschenberg and a board member to the Rauschenberg Foundation, and her numerous exhibitions and publications on Rauschenberg include exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the 2016 retrospective at the Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York, and with Walter Hopps, the definitive Robert Rauschenberg retrospective for the Guggenheim.Susan holds advanced degrees in art history from the Courtauld Institute London and George Washington University in Washington, DC."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. For more information, visit meganfoxkelly.com and subscribe to our new posts. Follow us on Instagram: @meganfoxkellyPurchase "Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and at Hatje CantzMusic composed by Bob Golden.
for full 4.5 hour episode support the show on Patreon 4.5 hour sequel of A History of Leisure and Free Time focusing on lesser known movements, innovations, and countercultural operations of the 20th century - a consummate historical excursion into how we can redeem the Realm of Freedom in the 21st Century. Robert Rauschenberg's Captiva Island getaway in post 68', Bell Laboratories, Experiments in Art and Technology, and Expo 70' in Osaka, Robert Maynard Hutchin's Civilizations of the Dialogue, Book Clubs, Feminism and the 6 hour work day, The UK Free Festival Circuit: Ritual Madness at Stonehenge ft. Ozric Tentacles, Utopian Communities during the Great Depression, how labor unions turned into "a carbon copy of capitalism", Taft-Hartley act, Frank Lloyd Wright pt. 2, FDR and the spiritualization of work...
Through his abstract paintings, the Miami-born, Brooklyn-based artist José Parlá explores themes ranging from memory, gesture, and layering, to movement, dance, and hip-hop culture, to codes, mapping, and mark-making. Coming up in Miami in the late 1980s and early '90s, Parlá spent his adolescence and young adult years steeped in hip-hop culture and an underground scene that involved break dancing, writing rhymes, and making aerosol art. The art form still manifests, in wholly original ways, in his abstract works, which, while decidedly of the 21st century, extend in meaning and method back to ancient wall writings and cave drawings.On the episode, Parlá talks about his recent near-death experience with Covid-19; his activism with the collective Wide Awakes; and how his large-scale murals at locations including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barclays Center, and One World Trade Center trace back to his early days of painting elaborate wall works with aerosol.Special thanks to our Season 7 sponsor, Van Cleef & Arpels.Show notes: [07:37] Rey Parlá[11:45] Ciclos: Blooms of Mold[12:19] Augustin Parlá[13:13] Curtiss School of Aviation[14:05] José Martí[16:20] “Phosphene” series[18:27] “Polarities” series[18:32] “Breathing” series[23:25] Wide Awakes[23:26] For Freedoms[23:29] Hank Willis Thomas[23:31] J.R.[23:35] Wildcat Ebony Brown[24:28] “The Awakening”[32:04] “It's Yours”[34:17] Snøhetta[34:45] Ghetto Gastro[36:50] Craig Dykers[36:55] José Parlá's Studio[38:20] James B. Hunt Jr. Library[38:22] “Nature of Language”[38:47] Far Rockaway Writer's Library[56:56] “Brothers Back to Back”[59:51] “Parlá Frères”[01:00:03] Hurricane Andrew[01:00:12] Savannah College of Art and Design[01:01:32] New World School of the Arts[01:01:51] Mel Alexenberg[01:02:29] “Combine” by Robert Rauschenberg[01:06:29] “Gesture Performing Dance, Dance Performing Gesture” at BAM[01:06:30] Barclays Center mural[01:06:32] “One: Union of the Senses” at One World Trade Center[01:06:33] “Amistad América” at the University of Texas at Austin[01:12:08] Gordon Parks fellowship
Back in 1958, Robert Rauschenberg erased a De Kooning. Sometime since 1964, an Angry Girlfriend vandalized an Amazing Spider-Man #14. In 2023, we're assaulting your ears... On this episode, we discuss the First Artwork to Increase in Value After Being Vandalized. Was it "Erased de Kooning Drawing"? Was it the Angry Girlfriend Variant? What is vandalism? What is art? Oh... we get into it! Plus, we play I See What You Did There!Learn about some vandalized art: https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/news/art-vandalism-mona-lisa-van-gogh-famous-artworks-1234647552/Have a First for us? Or maybe a cloaca? Just wanna try to convince Kelly to play a video game? Email us at debutbuddies@gmail.comListen to Kelly and Chelsea's awesome horror movie podcast, Never Show the Monster.Get some sci-fi from Spaceboy Books.Get down with Michael J. O'Connor's music!Next time: First Book of the Bible... Genesis.
“Home of the Brave” performed by Laurie Anderson & Dickie Landry on The Late Show. Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city's most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Keith Sonnier, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson. Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass' ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11. Listen to his music on Unseen Worlds.http://www.dickielandry.comhttps://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landrywww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
“Home of the Brave” performed by Laurie Anderson & Dickie Landry on The Late Show. Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician, and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects.For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city's most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Keith Sonnier, Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson. Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass' ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11. Listen to his music on Unseen Worlds.http://www.dickielandry.comhttps://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landrywww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
For nearly half a century, Richard “Dickie” Landry was at the center of the New York avant-garde. Born in the small Louisiana town of Cecilia in 1938, he began making pilgrimages to the city while still in his teens in search of the city's most cutting edge gestures in jazz, and relaxed there not long after, falling in with a close knit community of artists and composers like Philip Glass, Keith Sonnier, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matt Clarke, Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Graves, Lawrence Weiner, Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, and Robert Wilson. Landry remains one of the few artists of his generation who made important waves within numerous creative idioms. Having been trained from a young age on saxophone, not only is he a remarkably respected solo performer and bandleader, but he was an early and long-standing member of Philip Glass' ensemble, playing on seminal records like Music With Changing Parts, Music in Similar Motion / Music in Fifths, Music in Twelve Parts, North Star, and Einstein on the Beach, and played with Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, and jazz giants like Johnny Hammond, Gene Ammons, and Les McCann. He was also one of the most important photographic documenters of the New York Scene, until he left the city for his native Louisiana, following 9/11.http://www.dickielandry.comhttps://unseenworlds.com/collections/dickie-landrywww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast
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
I was sitting in my studio the other day, looking at some of the 100+ paintings I've done over the past few years and out of the blue I thought to myself, “I hate all of these.” Adrianne walked in a few minutes later and asked what was going on and I said, “I think I hate everything I've done.” Adrianne being Adrianne then asked, “Do you really hate it or is it something else?” I didn't answer immediately, but of course it's something else, right? It has to be. But that's how it came out in the moment. To be clear, I don't love every piece I've ever done—I don't think any artist really does—but I certainly don't hate every piece either. So what is it that's really going on?LINKSPicasso: https://www.pablopicasso.org/The New Propaganda: https://projects.jefferysaddoris.com/Grid Variations: https://projects.jefferysaddoris.com/Sean Tucker: https://www.seantucker.photography/Josef Müller-Brockmann: https://www.grapheine.com/en/graphic-design-en/graphic-designer-muller-brockmann-swiss-styleReid Miles: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-blue-note-album-covers/Robert Rauschenberg: https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/Robert Motherwell: https://www.wikiart.org/en/robert-motherwellMy Substack: https://jefferysaddoris.substack.comCONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com Twitter: @jefferysaddoris Instagram: @jefferysaddorisSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Jeffery Saddoris: Almost Everything in your favorite podcast app to get more conversations like this. You can find the full written version of this Iteration on Substack.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris
Truth, beauty, transcendence. For millennia, people think they know the rules of great art. Then, in the 1950s, a guy named Bob breaks every one of them, declaring car tires and Coke bottles and entirely blank canvases part of his art--and, in turn, being declared the greatest artist of his time. As war gives way to optimism, is Robert Rauschenberg offering a weary world a new way of seeing, or is he simply, entertainingly, lucratively bamboozling it?
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
Talk Art EXCLUSIVE! We meet Hollywood icon SHARON STONE!!! In this feature length special episode, we discover Sharon's obsession with painting, her current debut solo exhibition 'Shedding' at Allouche Gallery in Los Angeles and her lifelong passion for art. We learn about her journey collecting art, her close friendships with artists including Robert Rauschenberg and her love of museums. But most of all, we reveal Sharon's LOVE for MARGATE, Turner and @turnercontemporary!!!!!Stone has a diverse range of creative projects - writing, producing, acting, activism and painting. Sharon Stone's paintings are predominately abstract, meditative landscapes. Yet occasionally figurative elements appear within her colourful abstractions. Dream worlds, nostalgia, imagined landscapes, views of idyllic nature. Motifs recur including an ominous moon. Sharon Stone is best known for her acting roles in Basic Instinct, Casino, Total Recall, The Specialist, Catwoman and more recently Ryan Murphy's Ratched. She is the recipient of various accolades including an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award nomination. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1995 and was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2005 (Commander in 2021). She has been honoured with a Nobel Peace Summit Award, a Harvard Humanitarian Award, a Human Rights Campaign Humanitarian Award and an Einstein Spirit Award. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her family.Follow @SharonStoneVisit @AlloucheGallery and https://allouchegallery.com/exhibitions-laSharon Stone 'Shedding' runs until 31st March at Allouche Gallery, Los Angeles.Read Sharon's extraordinary memoir 'The Beauty of Living Twice', published by Allen & Unwin. Order from Waterstone's in UK. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This episode is Part 2 of the Re-Creation of Meaning Roundtable (The Fire Dragon Edition) featuring John Mark McMillan, Stephen Roach, Vesper Stamper and Brandon Willett. In this part of the discussion, we talk through: - self absorption vs. self awareness- the role of the audience in the artist's creative process.- meekness and confidence- Fire Dragons and Jackalopes- How the intimate reflects the infiniteThis Roundtable is the world's first podcast ever to discuss Taylor Swift, Radiohead, Beck, Nick Cave, Miley Cyrus, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Justin Vernon, Jay Z, Kanye, Rick Rubin, Adele, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Johnny Cash, Slayer, James Taylor, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Fire Dragons, Comic Books, David Brooks... All in one episode. Enjoy..Join The Makers & Mystics Creative Collective. Your support enables us to continue leading the way in these conversations on art, faith and culture. Buy Vesper's New Book! It's Incredible. See Brandon's amazing visual artHear John Mark McMillan's musicJohn Mark McMillan
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