“It is not about fixing or mending, but about celebrating the vulnerability of the object and ultimately myself.” - Yee Sookyung

Shattered porcelain is impossible to repair. As impossible as fully, and accurately, reconstructing the past. But who needs that pressure? What if, instead of tossing those shards in the dustbin of history, we acknowledged that the thing will never be what it once was? Maybe then we appreciate the beauty, and the human resilience, of what new things it could be, in the now.

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Music used:

Billy Joel, “You May Be Right”

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Littl Jon,” “The Dustbin,” “BlueGarden,” “Nesting,” “A Rush of Clear Water,” “A Common Pause”

Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

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"It's the close focus that draws me into a sound. And then it sort of spreads out and spreads through my body. And I let that happen, and I'm listening in a different way." - Annea Lockwood

The artist and composer Annea Lockwood is not just any musician. She is an artist of sound. She is a composer of art. Her music is performance art, and her art is always, always audio-rich and musical. She sends her microphones into the elements – fire, here, and rivers, in a recent series called Sound Maps, where she captures, among other things, the tonality of the different depths of the water. She loves chanting, tones, drones. She loves what sound does to our body, how we respond to it, how we visualize it. How sound breathes. How we breathe differently around different sounds.

And for me, as an art historian who fell in love with sound, I get it. I think I get it. And this is what today’s conversation is about. Annea joined me to talk about what it means to listen with your body, to experience the silence in all the noise, and the noise in the silence. We talk about the value of musical training versus musical instinct. We talk about how rivers sound different from one another (they really do!). And we explore what an artist from New Zealand who gained prominence in the 1960s burning pianos can teach us about the art of sound, and what she can learn from her 85-year-old self, today.

Episode webpage

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, "Brer Rhetta," “A Common Pause,” "Tanguedo"

Episode sponsors:

Art of Crime

The Seattle Prize

Visual Arts Passage

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"The only thing permanent is change." - Felix Gonzalez-Torres

There is no way around it. The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a gay, Cuban-American artist who responded to - and died during - the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, is sad. His work is a memorial, both to a lost generation and to his own partner, Ross. Yet it is through these seemingly banal, industrial, or every day materials, and the powerful metaphor that they represent, that we can best get to the root of what loss can mean. And, maybe, healing as well.

See the images.

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, “A Little Powder,” “Lerennis,” “Taoudella,” “The Melt,” “Rafter”

Open Book, “Second Chance”

Episode sponsors:

Art of Crime

The Seattle Prize

Visual Arts Passage

Smartist App

With extra special thanks to Martin Young.

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