Momus: The Podcast

Rianna Jade Parker reads “Letter from London: What is the Status of Black Artists in England Today?” published in ARTnews (June 2020), and engages Sky Goodden on issues of artworld access, stature, masculinity, precariousness, deference to sovereignty, and duty to one another, for Black British artists working in the UK. From Steve McQueen’s accepting the Knighthood to a broader conversation around meritocracy and the sudden rush of Black British art (after decades of deletion), Parker discusses her feeling of responsibility to her peers through criticism, and the long unmarked history that she’s beginning to write.

“Most other press speaks about Black British art right now as this […] thing that we need to cling to – this idea of Black culture, Blackness, ‘Black Britain’ – without really assessing ourselves or our social situation. I do love art; but I am all of these things before then. I live in a real material world. I try to explain to people ‘I’m in the art world, but not of the art world’. There is no amount of riches or patron support that I could get that would ever change that. And I don’t need it to.”

Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi discusses “tagatavāsā,” a text centered on Eshrāghi’s grandmother’s art practice that interweaves Indigenous language with the vernacular of contemporary art. Eshrāghi works across visual arts, curatorial practice, and university research, “intervening in display territories to centre Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices.” In this intimate conversation with Lauren Wetmore, Eshrāghi  says, “I wonder how you can bring texts to be haunted by the absence of knowledge, or by the violence of the borders of today.” “tagatavāsā” was published in C Magazine in Winter 2019.

“Like writing, fisting is both a replicable skill and a rarefied art form.” This brachioproctic line begins writer Tausif Noor’s “Hand In Glove” (Artforum, 12 April 2019), a joyfully loaded review of William E. Jones’s novel I’m Open to Anything, released in 2019 by Los Angeles independent publisher We Heard You Like Books. In this searching conversation, Lauren and Tausif discuss Jones’s oeuvre, the importance of independent publishing, and celebrate sexual transgression while lamenting that writing can often feel, like Jones’s description of fisting, “a cork popping in reverse.”

“Let’s stop talking about Philip Guston and start talking about structural racism.” This has been critic Nikki Columbus’s refrain through the past season, issuing what many considered the final word of a furious debate surrounding the postponement of a Guston retrospective. Titled “Guston Can Wait” and published October 27, 2020 in N+1, the text (which Columbus reads for the podcast) deftly summarizes the controversy’s main thrust – the vehemently-shared opinion that postponing the exhibition was a move based in institutional cowardice – before zooming out for the larger context in which museums are actively undermining and purging their own labor forces; that the Guston furor is distracting from these more pressing issues. “I did have fun writing this,” she admits, before stressing, “We have to let go of this myth that we’re more progressive than any other sector or business.”

Season 4 of Momus: The Podcast invites art critics and journalists to talk about an important piece of their writing – texts that carry stories, that ran in prestigious publications to great acclaim, or that were killed under tense circumstances. Every two weeks, co-hosts Sky Goodden and Lauren Wetmore will ask a different writer to read their text to us, and then discuss how it came into being – its inspiration, construction, and impact.

To launch the season, Goodden interviews her co-host Wetmore about a piece that was published in Momus and was shortlisted for a 2016 International Award for Art Criticism, a sharp and farcical review of Manifesta 11: What Artist and Curators Do for Money, which demonstrates a rare example of curatorial criticism. Their conversation ranges from sharpening the perfect retort to writing in bed, with Wetmore reflecting on the driving impulse to write this, her only published review to date: “Like, who’s making this? How much are they getting paid? What process are they using to get this done? How are you, the curator, and your artist, and your intellectual conceit, tied to the making of this work? Because isn’t that the essentially interesting part of the commissioning process? We’re there to be able to touch in some oblique way how this came to be. And if we want to pretend that it came to be out of thin air – as I find a lot of curators want to pretend – then I’m simply not interested. Because it’s not true.”

In the final episode of Season 3, which has been devoted to the question of “what’s changed, and what should?”, Sky Goodden speaks to The White Pube, a UK-based art-criticism collective comprised of Zarina Muhammad and Gabriella de la Puente. Across five years of publishing, The White Pube has been celebrated for its insistence on “embodied criticism” and “sticky subjectivity,” its resistance to the star-review system of popular art criticism, and its practice of DIY art-publishing as institutional critique. “We cannot ever write in a way that denies ourselves,” concludes Muhammed. Their recent feature “FUCK THE POLICE, FUCK THE STATE, FUCK THE TATE: RIOTS AND REFORM” demonstrates an increasingly unrelenting politic, as well.

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.”