"When people ask me how to describe the work or describe myself, I always just start by saying artist," says Glenn Kaino. "Everything stems from the art practice."
The visionary American conceptual artist's work has led him to become an off-Broadway producer, a performer, a magician, a social activist and the technological innovator who helped legalize the music download platform Napster.
A "horrible" trip to an art fair in 2008 caused Kaino to close his studio for a year, unhappy with "how much influence an overall, overriding economic system" was having on art making. He decided instead to "go hang out with a bunch of magicians and see what happens—because they know something about believing".
Magic is "why we do what we do, as artists", says Kaino, who went on to co-produce the off-Broadway magic show "In and Of Itself"—which is smashing box office records. Both magic and art are about belief for Kaino, who says: "Belief has always been at the core of the practice; it's really belief about the power of art."
One of his long-term collaborations is with the Olympian Tommie Smith, who famously accepted the gold medal for the 200m race in 1968 with his fist held aloft, in solidarity with the fight for human rights. "We, as beneficiaries of his sacrifice, can create systems that pay homage to—and also pay—him," Kaino says. "The art I know actually has tangible change, in that it makes people think in different ways or makes people engage in different ideas."
During today’s podcast, which was recorded in Los Angeles with Matthew Thompson (vice president of AAP in Los Angeles) and our host Charlotte Burns, Kaino talks about subjects as diverse as Jurassic Park; diversity in tech; partnering with actor and activist Jesse Williams; his interest in "connecting ecosystems that don’t normally have a chance to meet"; upcoming projects—and much more.
Tune in today.
Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-glenn-kaino/
“In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.
Huge sums of money—more than $2.6bn—have been spent on Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art over the past two weeks in New York. On today’s podcast, Nicholas Maclean (of London and New York dealership Eykyn Maclean) and Allan Schwartzman (co-founder of AAP), discuss with our host Charlotte Burns (editor of In Other Words), what happened: what the surprises were; what trends we can detect; and what's going to happen next.
Here are some choice soundbites:
"It is a sign that the market is starved for broadening what it sees as valuable. This is a big triumph; this is a turning point in perception” — Allan Schwartzman
"I honestly thought that this could be the death knell for the Impressionist market. And then we saw it: that change between 2005 and 2008 was extraordinary” — Nicholas Maclean
"This question of identities seems to me to be a very American one. I think Americans, and perhaps the American market, are more open to approaching their own identities” — Charlotte Burns
"True collectors who will just look across the board and look at artists that tell the whole story are becoming rarer” — Nicholas Maclean
For this and more, tune in today.
Transcript link:
http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-auction-analysis/
“In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.
“There’s no goal to being an artist—you keep doing it and then, in theory, one dies,” says Carroll Dunham, who Allan Schwartzman describes as one of the greatest painters of the past 40 years.
Art is a “kind of lustful driving forwards” for Dunham, who has moved from abstraction to figuration over the course of his varied career. Works from his “Wrestlers” series are currently on show at Gladstone Gallery in New York (until 16 June). “I wanted to try to find a male equivalent to the women that I had been drawing and painting, which I had thought of as being rather primeval in some way,” Dunham says. “They are naked white guys beating the crap out of each other. I’m not claiming any special relevance or meaning for these things. They just allow me to keep making paintings.”
Dunham talks to Schwartzman and host Charlotte Burns about how his life and work—and the broader art community—have changed since moving from the bustle of New York, where he spent his early career, to the solitude of rural Connecticut.
Known for his incisive writing about other artists’ work, Dunham discusses how this exercise has helped his practice. The essays included in the recently published Into Words: The Selected Writings of Carroll Dunham (2017) represented "a diagram of my issues with myself and things I was grappling with in my own work”, he says.
For this, and much more, tune in today.
Transcript link:
http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-carroll-dunham/
“In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.
One of the most talked about exhibitions this year, “Outliers and American Vanguard Art”, closes next week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (13 May), after which it will travel to the High Museum in Atlanta and then to LACMA.
Our guest today is Lynne Cooke, the senior curator of special projects at the NGA who spent five years researching the exhibition. Talking to our host Charlotte Burns, Cooke says much of the art on show was made by people on the peripheries, often in marginalized positions because of their gender, race, class or age. “A great deal was made by African-American artists. Their work is simply not entered into the circuits and orbits of the contemporary art world for lack of opportunity, for lack of education, for lack of money. As I said: class, race.”
The exhibition comprises around 270 works by more than 80 artists and focuses on periods of social, political, economic and cultural upheaval in the United States, during which times the boundaries between the avant-garde and the outliers—self-taught, marginalized, Outsider artists—became more porous.
One of the most thoughtful curators working today, Cooke talks to us about her experience preparing the show, which “called into question a whole set of ideas about creativity and the basis on which innovation and originality and exploration take place”.
Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-lynne-cooke/
“In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.