Momus: The Podcast

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?”

For this month’s episode, still circling the question “what makes great art?”, Lauren Wetmore enters into a searching conversation with Irish curator and writer Francis McKee. McKee is the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, teaches at the Glasgow School of Art, writes books, and curates in other capacities, as well. He speaks with Wetmore about maintaining a relationship to the real world, and to the peripheries, in art.

Continuing with our pursuit of the question “What makes great art?”,  Lauren Wetmore sits down with Greek art historian, curator, and writer Katerina Gregos, in Brussels. Their conversation builds on a quote from Gregos’s recent exhibition The Anatomy of Political Melancholy, hosted by the Schwartz Foundation at the Athens Conservatory:

“We are increasingly witnesses to the debasement of political language, the infantilization and polarization of political debate; the growth of a simplified discourse that panders to collective fears rather than addressing the real, pressing questions; the lack of accountability from politicians, and of course, ‘fake truth’ and ‘alternative facts’. Clearly there is something profoundly wrong with contemporary politics.”

What follows is a discussion that exchanges this quote’s “politics” for “art,” and interrogates the conditions by which we frame political comment in exhibition-making.

As we continue our season-long exploration of “What makes great art?”, Sky Goodden sat down with Jinn Bronwen Lee, an artist based in Chicago. They discuss old master painting, the effect of our viewing environments on art, and the power of long looking. Lee is a painter currently thinking through the idea of “funk,” after Dr. Cornel West, and Samuel Beckett’s “Mess” as a way of life and practice. She is currently an artist in residence at Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation (2018-19).