Momus: The Podcast

For episode 23, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Sophia al Maria, a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Author of publications including Sad Sack, Virgin With A Memory, and her autobiography The Girl Who Fell To Earth, Al Maria has also written for Triple Canopy, Bidoun, and Harper’s Magazine. Her work as an artist has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Tate Britain, Gwangju Biennale, and the New Museum in New York. She has written Litte Birds, a television series based on Anais Nin’s erotic writings, which will premiere on Sky Atlantic in August 2020.

For episode 22, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Ebony L. Haynes, a gallerist, curator, and writer. Haynes is the Director of Martos Gallery in New York, and Shoot the Lobster in New York and LA. Active for the past ten years, Haynes has insisted on the meaningful inclusion of Black artists and professionals in the contemporary artworld. In this potent conversation, she discusses her experiences as a Black female art dealer in a sexist and racist industry, where her significant contributions continue to do the powerful work of redressing injustice while elevating talent. She says, “I’m here because I’m supposed to be here.”

For episode 21, Sky Goodden spoke with Coco Fusco, the legendary Cuban-American critic, artist, educator, and art historian. Speaking from the center of a pandemic, and on the brink of a significant wave of civil unrest and anti-racist protest, Fusco circled themes relevant to each crisis, looping them through the lens of Cuban history and the seismic shifts it is currently undergoing, in relation to protest, artistic freedom, and criticism against the government.

For this episode, still circling the question “what’s changed, and what should?”, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Brussels-based curator Daniel Blanga Gubbay, the artistic co-director of the historic Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Gubbay has worked as an educator and an independent curator for public programs including Manifesta, Palermo (2018); and was head of the Department of Arts and Choreography (ISAC) of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Palermo and Berlin. Reflecting on the material consequences of halting a massive festival like his, and fighting to keep artists paid and visa applications underway, Gubbay warns that “when you reduce the whole artistic process to the event, if the event disappears, you risk making that process invisible.”

For this episode, Sky Goodden spoke with art writer and musician Johanna Fateman, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, a contributing editor at Artforum, and a frequent critic for 4Columns.org. Fateman co-owns the historic Seagull Salon in New York City, and is, as Lauren notes, “riot grrrl queer royalty” for her involvement in bands like Le Tigre. As Fateman spoke from New York, the epicenter of the pandemic, there were ambulances blazing in the background; her son was home from school, her partner was recovering from the COVID virus, her salon was holding on by a thread, and through it all, Fateman was fittingly working on her first book of dystopic fiction. However, with a measure of surprising calm, she said, “I just think now is not the time to pressure yourself to be original; I really don’t think there’s something original to say right now. I think this is the time to drill down on what’s common to us, and be honestly reflective.”

Momus: The Podcast launched Season 3 with the question “what’s changed – and what should?”, which we continue with Alessandro Bava, an architect and writer based in Naples, Italy. Bava makes exhibitions, installations, interiors, and architecture projects, and writes on the poetics, politics, and technologies that produce contemporary space. In conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Bava reflects, “If your house becomes a place of labor, this radically changes the status of the home and its place in the market as a commodity. […] Three months ago the machine was running and there was nothing stopping it. In a way, now there is a chance to imagine an alternative.”

Momus: The Podcast launches Season 3 with the question “what’s changed – and what should?” with curator and art historian Eleanor Nairne. This prompt was already set, but with the emerging pandemic and its irreversible effects on our economy, cultural metabolism, relationship to art, sense of agency, and connection to one other, there has never been a better time to ask it. This conversation also allows us an opportunity to reflect on past seismic shifts in history, and the equally loud cracks that can occur within an artist’s practice. How do we seize this historical moment, and what do we wish to see change?

As we continue to circle the question “what makes great art?”, Sky Goodden spoke with Margaux Williamson, a slow painter who gives the greatest primacy to the work of her work, and to the thinking-through that the work requires. Based in Toronto, and known for both her intense focus in the studio and her community-building in Toronto’s art scene, Williamson speaks with humor and heart about where her  friends show up in her art, and the soft focus that painting requires. ‘People can be easily impressed by skill, and I know that’s not what art is.’

For this month’s episode circling the question “what makes great art?”, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Berlin-based artist Isabel Lewis. Lewis was trained in classical ballet and carries its impression through a practice that marries philosophy, choreography, storytelling, and sensory aesthetics. She insists, “There is nothing neutral about the body.”

For this month’s episode, towards our season’s question, “what makes great art?”, Sky Goodden spoke with artist, curator, and writer Jarrett Earnest. Earnest is the editor behind the recent compilation of New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl’s writing, titled Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light (Abrams, 2019), which highlights Schjeldahl’s more risk-taking and experimental art writing from venues like The Village Voice, in addition to his most enduring criticism from The New Yorker. In 2018, Earnest published What it Means to Write About Art (David Zwirner Books), a master compendium of fresh, vulnerable, and reflective interviews with the legends of American art criticism. In the spring of 2019, he curated Young and Evil at David Zwirner, which re-centered the gay artists who pivoted away from “the prevailing trend toward abstraction in the early 20th-century.” His conversation with Goodden encircles his approach to reading and writing, the significance of storytelling, and the heightened relevance of the question “what is art?”