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Lisa Brandt and the Gates
76 Plays1 month ago
Mark and Joe are joined by writer and broadcaster Lisa Brandt to discuss a massive environmental art installation by Bulgarian artist Christo Yavacheff and French artist Jeanne-Claude, the artists known jointly as Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Lisa started in radio and has since moved into voice-over work and writing for hire as a freelancer, which she loves. She’s also written several books.
The three discuss The Gates, one of the massive environmental art installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The installation was constructed of more than 7,503 steel gates hung with saffron orange cloth, and situated throughout Central Park in New York City. The Gates spanned twenty-three miles in Central Park; it ran from February 12th to the 27th in 2005.
Joe, Mark and Lisa go on to discuss the careers of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the nature of creativity, and explore the question: what does art do for the soul?
For more information, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at [email protected]
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Transcript
Nudist Beach Anecdotes
00:00:08
Speaker
So Mark, I understand you got a good one for us today. I do. Yeah. Now I should preface it by saying you don't have to answer this question if you don't want to. When have I not answered? I know, but this might reach the, you know, the outer limits of what you were talking about. Have you ever been to a nudist beach?
00:00:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not going to answer that question. No, that's a really interesting question. No, I don't think so. No. I don't even know where there's- I knew this would get you. I knew this would get you. The listeners, Joe has gone two shades of red. It's great. I think a better question would be, would I go to- Well, would you?
00:00:53
Speaker
No. Yeah. What about you? I have been to a nudist beach, but it was unintentional. Okay.
Lisa's Summer at a Nudist Camp
00:01:01
Speaker
It was when I was like a story behind that. There's a story. Yeah. I was about 16 or so and we were on a holiday in Greece and I, they're like a little boat came with the rental we had and it wasn't a very good boat. They got out to the middle of this Bay on off of a Greek Island.
00:01:19
Speaker
And the boom vang came off and flew into the water, so I couldn't sail properly. So it took me about two hours to make the best progress I could to this little bay. I remember I'm 16. I'm pretty freaked out because the waves started getting bigger and the wind got higher. I was like, I could die out here. It was actually pretty scary.
00:01:41
Speaker
And so I get onto this little bay and I come in, it's like, oh, thank God I'm alive. And then it's like, oh my God, I need to get out of here because everyone's naked. And they're all looking at me like, are you going to take off your suit? Because you should take off your suit. But now, okay, you're 16. You're in your Adonis Prime, I would imagine. So did you? No, I did not. No. Because I was like, I needed to get out of there because nobody knew where I was. So I knew I needed to get back.
00:02:09
Speaker
to let people know where i was so i just shipped the the the mast and and ran away ran away it got massively sunburned on the way back by the way it was about four hours to walk back yeah no i am very curious why you have chosen this particular question for this particular guest well welcome lisa brandt to the podcast i'm asking this you know why i'm asking this question because i've read your book
Transition from Radio to Freelancing
00:02:38
Speaker
I know exactly why you're asking. I'm loving this. So the question is over to you now, Lisa. Have you ever been to a nudist beach?
00:02:47
Speaker
I have. I lived at a nudist camp for a summer between high school and college, because I worked there. And it was a live-in working position, and I needed a job. I had a semester off. I had to have taken another semester because of a lost course or whatever, and this was the job that was available that would take me. Okay, what exactly was the job?
00:03:15
Speaker
Yeah, this is the question. No, it wasn't anything. I mean, they worked me to death. I was everything from chambermaid. I did laundry. I cleaned the hot tub. I was a server in the fine dining restaurant. I made hamburgers for lunch. What else did I do? I vacuumed. I tended bar under age. You name it. It was a lot of work. At a nudist beach.
00:03:43
Speaker
Well, it wasn't even so much a beach. It was a camp. They had a beach because they made their own lake. So they had a man-made lake there, and that's where the beach was. But people lived there. It was residences and a big clubhouse, and it was a destination for people of that persuasion. My goodness. And Lisa has written a truly amusing book about the experience called The Naked Truth. It's really worth checking out. I'm amused already. OK, yeah.
00:04:13
Speaker
Thank you. Why don't we go right from there then to who you are, your background, what you've done, if you wouldn't mind explaining to our listeners all that. Sure. Yeah. Now I do mainly voice work and freelance writing for hire, but for a long, long time I was a radio host, announcer, small j journalist, all over some other places in Canada and in Toronto and London and
00:04:42
Speaker
all over the place. As we tend to do when you're in radio, you become a bit of a nomad. And yeah, I did that for a long time and corporate radio broke me. That's how I put it. Because I walked away and decided to get into the topsy-turvy, never predictable world of freelancing and I absolutely love
Travel Tales in Newfoundland
00:05:07
Speaker
it.
00:05:07
Speaker
It used to be if somebody asked me what I did, I'd talk about radio over and over and over. But it's like, I've been doing my own thing now for six years, and radio has become this tiny little part, even though I did it for decades and it was my chosen career. I'm finding this so much more fascinating, autonomous, great for life balance, all those kinds of things. So that's what I do now. And can I ask what kind of voiceover work you're doing? Because you do have a wonderful voice. Oh, thank you.
00:05:37
Speaker
I think it was compliments about my voice that got me to go into radio. That's probably what made me think, maybe I can do that. But so now I do everything from corporate narration to audio books to e-learning, lots and lots of e-learning. Medical narration is a kind of specialty that I
00:05:59
Speaker
Really love to do. There's a lot of words that you don't even believe are words until you start doing that kind of thing. I love the challenge of it. I love when there's teamwork if you're doing a directed session with a producer and maybe a client or two. And yeah, it's very satisfying.
00:06:20
Speaker
I enjoy it a lot. And the writing is more like writing for hire. I've written white papers for companies or just magazine articles, whatever. I will write for food. That's basically my motto. That's a lot of writers. Exactly. Wow. Okay, yeah. So we have some in common, because I did a large part of my career with radio. But less of the private radio, because I think you were more
00:06:50
Speaker
I worked at 680 news. That was my glory days. Um, you want to hear Springsteen on the, um, I did, um, morning co-anchoring on 680 news for better part of a decade. And that was, that was the pinnacle of my career. That was the, you know, the most listened to station in Canada on the yada yada yada award winning, blah, blah, blah. And, um, the most fun, the most pressure.
00:07:14
Speaker
Joe, you started in private radio, right? Yeah, I started when I was 16. My voice has been heard on every radio station in Prince Edward Island except for one. And you'll get them eventually. No. I believe in you. Yeah, well, the way media is going right now, I don't know. Either that or you and I could probably pull what's in our pocket and buy a radio station, so there you go.
00:07:38
Speaker
That actually had been a dream of mine at one time. Growing up in Prince Edward Island and being into radio, and we really didn't have a lot of great radio stations at the time, I had always thought, you know, it'd be a great idea to put like a rock station in Moncton, New Brunswick, which is basically where I'm living now. And of course, now they have it. We were through Moncton last year. My husband and I, we drove to Newfoundland.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, there's, you know, the people who are still in broadcasting and still in private radio are working their tails off. They love it as much as anybody ever did. There's just, you
Exploring Christo and Jean-Claude's Art
00:08:13
Speaker
know, fewer opportunities for them now, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm just taking this down to further and further rabbit holes because you said you drove to Newfoundland. I just drove to Newfoundland and back.
00:08:25
Speaker
Did you take the ferry overnight? Not overnight. We went in the morning. Because we went in June last year, only the one ferry was running. To Portobask. Yeah, so we had to go to Portobask. And it was great. It was fine. And on the way back, they had just opened the pet-friendly rooms.
00:08:46
Speaker
right on the ferry so they hadn't had any pets in them yet and you know it's it's more much more expensive to get a you know what the state room or whatever they call it and so the woman said to me hey i've got an idea for 70 bucks we'll give you a pet room and we had our own bathroom we could have washed a very large dog and uh a couple little beds it was just like it was really cool so i didn't even know that existed a pet room my daughter and i took her cocker spaniel over and it was a
00:09:13
Speaker
Really quite primitive conditions for the car. Do they have to stay in the vehicle? You had the option of you could stay in the vehicle with the pet or you go outside the boat from where all the people are and then there's like another room and it's a heated room.
00:09:30
Speaker
And there's like places where you can put your dog's kennel. And then the dogs that are out there are basically all alone unless someone stays with them. Yeah, when we crossed, they had to stay in the vehicle and you couldn't go down and give them water or anything. So everybody was reminded, make sure you give them whatever because you are not coming back down here. And I was grateful we didn't have an animal with us to tell you the truth. My daughter would have rebelled because we asked someone, we said, so where, because it was our first time in the boat
00:09:59
Speaker
And we're like, where do we take the dogs? And they said, well, you have to take the dogs outside. And of course it was an overnight trip and it was freezing. And my daughter's like, no freaking way am I leaving my dog outside? Like the dog will die. And I was like, how is this going to play out?
00:10:18
Speaker
Yeah, they seem to have not gotten the message that it's not just a dog, it's a family member. Like, you just don't go, oh, okay, there you go, Rover. Good luck. Catch you in the morning, you know. Anyway. Seventies. Beautiful. Well, man, we're running the gamut today. We've gone from the nude beach to dogs in the boat to Port-A-Bask. And what are we supposed to be talking about, Mark? Bring us home here. We're supposed to be talking about Christo, I think.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, Christo and Jean-Claude. Okay. A couple of artists who lived in New York. Yeah, and you were going to talk about a specific piece of art from them. So yeah, okay, explain. Oh, okay. A piece you encountered, right?
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah, I need to lead you up to this a little bit. I'll try and not make it the, you know, the on a bridge version. But my previous husband and I lived in a house in Toronto and it had this massive wall and it was just this big empty slab. It was about, I don't know, 32 feet high or some ridiculous thing.
00:11:18
Speaker
And I wanted a piece of art for it. So I went online and I was just looking for big art, I guess. And I found this student in Toronto who had done a painting, an abstract version of The Gates.
00:11:34
Speaker
And at that point, I didn't know what the gates was. I just thought, this looks really cool. It's got all these slashes of saffron, which of course I called orange, being a, you know, not knowing what I was talking about. And it was really big and it was beautiful. And I thought, okay, I don't want that exactly, but I want something kind of abstract. So we invited this student over thinking, okay, here's a guy, a starving artist. This is going to be cool. I want to commission something from him.
00:12:03
Speaker
right? Wouldn't you think you're in school? Somebody with actual money wants to pay you to do something. So he came over. Yeah, he was a nice kid. But as long as the evening went on, the longer it went on, the higher his price got.
00:12:21
Speaker
So, you know, and that's partly due to an experience, I'm sure, partly due to all sorts of things. But next thing you know, it's way out of my price range. It's like, I can't, you're not the actual Christo, right? So we had to kind of let that go. And I thought, you know what?
00:12:39
Speaker
I am always thinking of myself as not being creative. In radio, they say there are reactors and there are generators. And I was always told I was a reactor. You're a great reactor. You build on things, but you don't generate them. And so I thought, I bet I can do some, I don't know why, just this painting. And then the more I learned about the art installation, I thought I could do this. So I actually ended up
00:13:06
Speaker
painting a giant abstract that had nothing to do with the gates, but that hung on that wall that people thought we bought somewhere. Wow. So it was pretty good then? Yeah, I figured it out. I mean, what's underneath, if you could go in there with an X-ray and see what's under what I did, you would probably tell me to never touch a paintbrush again. But that's the beauty of paint. You can cover it over and do it over and over again. I ended up
00:13:35
Speaker
Inventing a technique that I know was invented hundreds of years ago, or thousands, but I always jokingly say I invented it, using a scraper and thick wads of paint and just sort of making marks with it.
00:13:52
Speaker
I ended up selling a few. I had one in a gallery. It opened up all this creativity that blossomed into a whole bunch of other things. But I should probably tell you about Crystal and John Claude.
Valuing Art and Artists
00:14:03
Speaker
No, but first I just want to say, so you became a generator.
00:14:06
Speaker
I did and that's kind of the upshot is that I became a generator and I looked at myself in a whole new way. So suddenly in this ridiculously too big house that we had, I had an extra bedroom that became my painting room and I was painting in there. I would make, I don't know, I'd just paint for fun, but I felt like I was flying when I was doing it. It was the most incredible feeling and I hadn't had that doing anything else in my life.
00:14:33
Speaker
And the more I learned about creative people when they're making art, when they're making whatever, that's kind of how it feels. When it's coming from that, whatever you believe that force is within you that generates something that you don't even really think about, you're just sort of going,
00:14:50
Speaker
That state of flow, as they call it. Is that what it is? I think it's the psychological term for it, flow. Well, it's incredible and I had never felt it before, but it not only opened me up for painting, it opened me up to think, well,
00:15:07
Speaker
Maybe I can write fiction. Maybe I can create other things with my brain that I didn't believe I was capable of before. And oh, I did all sorts of stuff like I even, you know, kind of semi mundane things like I thought, well, I can.
00:15:23
Speaker
Reupholster those chairs and I did. Well, I can, you know, make this mirror and make it look like leaded glass. Okay. So did you ever like hit that hit the limit where it's like, okay, I can't. Okay. No, actually I can't do that. Did you ever?
00:15:41
Speaker
Oh, I'm sure I have, because I definitely have one. Doesn't sound like it. I haven't tried everything yet, but yeah, there are certain things.
00:15:54
Speaker
I believe in paying artists too, and I believe in supporting art. Just not when they keep increasing the price over there. That's right. But here's another thing though, I learned from that. There was a young woman, she calls herself Fleur Soda, she's in London, and she had some of her original pieces of art
00:16:18
Speaker
She's becoming a tattooist, so it was kind of like small, interesting little pieces. She was displaying them at this trade show I was at. There was nothing to do with art. It was a business meeting, like a small business meeting. And I went over to her and asked her if I could buy one she did that was three lemons with faces on them.
00:16:40
Speaker
one lemon smiling, one lemon is, you know, grimacing. And I just thought they were the most delightful things. And I went over, but I had learned from that student all that many years ago. And I went over to her and I said, I would absolutely love to buy this. Are you willing to sell it? She said, sure. And I said, do you know what you want for it? And she stopped and I said, don't say anything now.
00:17:03
Speaker
I will come over to you after we have our next session. You take some time and think about it and you decide what you want for it and we'll talk about it then. Just don't rush, don't put pressure on yourself because I think that other guy
00:17:21
Speaker
thought as he was talking, you know, he started out too low and I didn't want her to feel bad that I had ripped her off. I bought her first ever piece, like I was her first sale. Right.
00:17:37
Speaker
And I wanted her to be able. Yeah. And her dad was there with her. And I said, when I came back, I said, I want you to know, both of you, that the father and daughter, that I want you to look back on this moment and go, when I sold that first piece, I felt great about it. I felt like the person loved it and that it was fair to me. And so she gave me a price and I'm like, yeah. And I bought the thing. I got the perfect frame for it. It sits in my dining room now. But when I grabbed it,
00:18:06
Speaker
and was ready to leave, a woman came up to me. She goes, I was going to buy that, but I didn't think she was selling anything. And I'm like, well, that's why we ask questions. That's why we ask questions.
00:18:20
Speaker
So I was really proud that I got this piece. And like I say, it's a one-off. It's even got little pinholes in it from where she had it in her workroom, pinned up on the wall. Wow. So you still have it. Yeah. And so I don't need to try everything. I know I'm not going to be good at anything literal when it comes to painting. I don't want to take classes.
00:18:42
Speaker
I took a pottery course, a one weekend pottery course, and my bowl looked more like a squish hat. You know, and not everything is going to come easily, and not everything is worth pursuing. I didn't like doing pottery, actually. It's too dirty for me. I'm such a princess.
00:18:59
Speaker
But yeah, so I think a lot of times, there are some times when I look at something and think, gee, maybe I could recreate that myself. But other times I think, you know, that person came up with that and they deserve to be honored for their creativity.
Art and Self-Discovery
00:19:17
Speaker
Now, why are you opposed to taking classes?
00:19:21
Speaker
Well, it's not that I'm opposed to it. It's that I don't really want it that badly. I don't want to do that. I've taken several courses online and elsewhere to do with writing because I love it and I know it's part of who I am to write. I mean, my high school ring was a
00:19:42
Speaker
was a little writer's insignia on it, but it's just not something I feel strongly enough about, I guess. Right, okay. And I always say to people, you know, when I paint, which I do on and off, I have long off periods, but I say I do abstract, so nobody can tell me I did it wrong. Because there's nothing literal about it. It's just whatever the muse sends me to, whatever colors and that kind of thing.
00:20:10
Speaker
Yeah. OK, so you were leading up to Christo. Yeah, Christo and Jean-Claude. They were a married couple. They're both deceased now. But he was from Belgium. She was from France. How they found each other is pretty incredible because like it's incredible that it happened because they were just so philosophically aligned. They both believed that art should be about freedom and that you should not have to pay to enjoy it.
00:20:40
Speaker
So he was very prolific and commanded a lot of money for everything from portraits to other things he made throughout the year. He did a little bit of everything. So they had lots of money. So when, for example, the Gates is what I know best about them. So when they decided to do the Gates, they got the approval from the city of New York and the Gates was roughly 7,500
00:21:07
Speaker
giant fabric installations that were put in place by people over 23 miles in Central Park. It only lasted, I think, about something like 14 days. Four million people went and saw it. And it was just to demonstrate freedom, which is
00:21:33
Speaker
kind of the theme of that all their work was and I mean it was absolutely incredible if you ever can see overhead shots of it or you know they were they were smart about where they had all of the the installations put the gates because they they didn't disturb the ecology they deliberately put it where there was little wildlife
00:21:55
Speaker
I mean, I wish the world was filled with more Christos and John Cloddes. They were just the sweetest, not without confidence in a smattering of arrogance, but they wrapped buildings in this gauzy fabric and it would just last for sometimes hours, sometimes days. And if you got to see it, you kind of felt like
00:22:21
Speaker
You saw Hummingbird, you know, it was just here and then it's gone. But the Gates is this one that maybe because it's New York and maybe because it was so big and because it lasted longer, it just seems to be the thing that's most aligned with them. And when you say their names, people go, oh, yeah, yeah, that Gates thing, that giant. But I mean, I don't even know how many yards of fabric were used or it's just incredible. It's got to be a lot.
00:22:49
Speaker
It's incredible. We'll post some of the pictures because they're really spectacular and some of the overhead shots. Could you describe what they look like?
00:22:59
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so they were like giant, you know if you have those metal sort of posts that you slide a poster into, they hold the poster at the two edges vertically, they were like massive, massive pieces like that with huge wrappings of this sort of almost chiffon fabric
00:23:25
Speaker
in Saffron, which again, I called orange. And so they were really super tall. I don't know exactly how tall, but they were really, really tall. And so you figure, you know, 7,500 of these things. And then some of the pictures above are amazing because it was February when they did this in Central Park. So there's no leaves in the trees. 16 days.
00:23:48
Speaker
If you look at some of the overhead pictures, we'll post some of the pictures on the show notes because I think people will want to see it. You can see like this orange trail sort of curling around all the various walkways in Central Park and there's, I mean, it's a huge park and there's a lot of.
00:24:03
Speaker
Walkways. Twenty-one million dollars this thing cost and they use their own money. That was my first question was when I started looking into it, where did they get this money? But it was from selling art. I think growing up, my mom loved art and she would buy things and I remember her in particular buying this one.
00:24:32
Speaker
set of paintings for our kitchen that everybody she knew made fun of because it was the center of the flowers in the piece. The flowers were made of burlap and the center was, it looked like sand and glue and they were sort of three dimensional. She loved it. She absolutely loved it. And everybody made fun of it. My dad did. Everybody thought it was just ridiculous. And she was like, I don't care. It's art and I like it, you know? And we were not an artsy family by any means or anything.
00:25:01
Speaker
And that stuck with me, that it doesn't matter really what somebody thinks. Art is in the eye of the beholder. And it's just to me so incredible that these people with so much money would spend it on making sure other people got to see their idea of what freedom was about.
00:25:23
Speaker
It was the ultimate in giving back to society. Yeah, they didn't feed people, they didn't, you know, whatever, that somebody might say, oh, what good is art? But here we are all these years later talking about it and the importance it had on my life that I never ever could have imagined when I happened to look for
00:25:45
Speaker
Painting to put on a giant ugly empty wall. They moved me and that continues to move me I look at the pictures even now and think What would have been like to stand there and look up at even one of those? massive gates An incredible cuz they're all just to kind of elaborate on what it is because I'm looking at pictures. It's basically the same orange gate reproduced over and over again and
00:26:13
Speaker
over many kilometers. Right, 23 kilometers. Throughout the park. Yep. Huh. Exactly. And, you know, 23 miles or whatever it was of the park. So you could not go into Central Park, I don't think, and not know what was there. You would get the glimpse of it, right? Even though the park is so big. So they figure it did draw 4 million people to New York during that time.
00:26:41
Speaker
Even just as a short 16-day spectacle, it's the kind of thing that people, I mean, they had to go to the city and get permits. They had to get, you know, they had to get buy-in from everybody. And when it comes to doing something artistic, that cannot be easy. It's not
00:27:03
Speaker
tangible. It's not going to last forever. They're not putting a bust of a mayor or something in the gateway to the park or something. They had to be very persuasive. And I know they were very clever. Somebody said in one of the news conferences they had before putting the gates up, why would you do this? Something about let them eat cake. And she said, no, no, no, let them eat gates.
00:27:33
Speaker
Jean-Claude. Yeah, and she passed away before he did, I think 2009, and he's been gone, I don't know, maybe about 10 years, but they were really special people. And just to be clear, Jean-Claude was the woman, and Christo was the man. Was the man. That's right. That's true. Yeah. It seems a little unusual. It does. Yeah. Was that a real name? Do you know? Yeah. Yeah. And even though it's spelled J-E-A-N-N-E, I double-checked
00:28:03
Speaker
everywhere I could think of, and that's how they pronounce it. John Claude. It sounds male, but it's not. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And are you aware of any other detractors to this? I'd never heard of it before. I'm not familiar with it. Looking at pictures of it, seeing this gate, and you said it's supposed to represent freedom. Yeah.
00:28:23
Speaker
I'm not sure that I entirely get it. I'm not sure I entirely get it either. And I've looked at it a gazillion times. It's their idea of what freedom is. And let's be honest, at any time somebody looks at a piece of art, they get what they get.
Philosophical Musings on Art
00:28:41
Speaker
I mean, we were in Italy last fall.
00:28:43
Speaker
And we didn't even go in and see Michelangelo's David because there's one that's a replica outside. So, you know, I mean, I'm not sure I'm the best one to talk about. It's like, oh, we've basically seen it, haven't we? Well, yeah, then let's avoid the crowds. You know, I'm not sure I have the greatest mind for analyzing art is what I'm saying, but
00:29:04
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know either. It's just that they, that's their idea. But it did impress you. It left an impression. I think it did. Well, it definitely did. And it opened up this whole door for me because of, you know, I think it was a combination of the students
00:29:26
Speaker
interpretation of it in his painting. And the fact that they could call this an artistic installation, this massively expensive thing that took over New York and how they ever got everybody to agree to let them do it. And it just, it sort of opened something in my brain that made me think, okay, maybe if I just set judgment aside and see what happens,
00:29:53
Speaker
Who was the mayor of New York at the time? Bloomberg. It was Bloomberg, yeah. It was Michael Bloomberg, yeah, which I find surprising that he would go, yeah, hurt. What do you think, Mark? Oh, I think it's cool. I mean, you talked about they didn't feed anybody. He's like, yeah, but they fed people souls.
00:30:11
Speaker
I mean, and that's what the purpose of art is, is to feed your soul, whether you're just doing it for yourself or if you're consuming something someone else has done. I remember the first time I encountered Christo was, I didn't see this myself, but I knew what it was. So I was, when I saw the pictures of it, it was blown away by it. They wrapped Pont Neuf in Paris.
00:30:32
Speaker
So, and they did the same sort of saffron cloth and if you look at pictures of it, it's so cool because it's like the bridge is glowing. It's like it's like electric or something with this cloth all over it. And I just, I wonder how the heck they got that done. Like, I mean, that's a major, you know, road.
00:30:54
Speaker
even in Paris. So how do they, somehow they, they cast a spell on people and they do. Yeah. I guess in Paris you can sort of see them going, yeah, well of course we try that. You know, that's, you know, cause they, they like art, they like, you know, so yeah. But yeah, so I've always sort of been impressed by what Christo and Jean-Claude do because it's big, it's dramatic.
00:31:19
Speaker
Yeah, and I love the phrase, I don't know art, but I know what I like. It's like, yeah, I like it. It's cool. Well, OK, let's stop down for just a second and do something we've never done in this podcast, which is about art and creativity. And you kind of touched on it a few sentences ago when you said that art is about feeding the soul. What is art for? Is it just for feeding the soul or is there more to it?
00:31:46
Speaker
Well, it can be other things. I mean, it can be instructive as well, but I actually think some of the best art isn't necessarily instructive. Like sometimes the best artist is something that you have a visceral reaction to and makes an impact on you and you think about it every once in a while.
00:32:07
Speaker
when the circumstances are right and something resonates with what you saw or you're experienced and then you feel it again in a different way, that doesn't necessarily have to be about moral instruction. Now art can be that, but I don't think it has to be that. What do you think, Lisa? Well, I think, I agree with Mark and I think that
00:32:33
Speaker
It doesn't have to have a practical application in any way, shape, or form. I think appreciating the way other people think is part of it too. When I see something that is so far removed from anything I believe I could have ever thought of, it just delights the heck out of me. Because I appreciate effort.
00:33:02
Speaker
You know, it's funny, I was talking about a some festival with somebody and I said, you know, I just appreciate all the effort. And she said, I never think about that. I just go, oh, here's a festival. Let's go. And I I'm constantly thinking about that, I guess, because my husband used to be an event promoter for a while, too. But but I appreciate that when it comes to art. Just the fact that somebody took the time and thought this is worth creating and I think the world should see it.
00:33:29
Speaker
To me, that's important enough for me to at least take a look at it. Yeah, and I would say it depends on the kind of art too. Like we're using art. I want to make sure people know we're not saying just visual art here. We're not just talking about sculptures and paintings. We're talking about everything, music, writing. Because I think sometimes people hear the word art and that's what they think. They think, oh, drawings, that's what art is. And I think it's much bigger than that. And it's a really important part of the human
00:33:58
Speaker
condition, we've been doing it for, what is it, at least 50,000 years. If you look at some of those cave paintings, those are at least 50,000 years old. And they're pretty good, if you've seen them. Back to the whole idea of the effort required. So the effort required to make those cave paintings was huge.
00:34:21
Speaker
And a time when, you know, you'd have to spend probably most of your day just getting enough calories to survive to take the time to figure out how to make paints and then how to, you know, find cave walls that weren't going to get wet and ruin your painting right away. And then actually then go, okay, I'm going to do a
00:34:40
Speaker
an oxen or whatever it is I want to paint and figure out how to do it. That to me is amazing and that's very deep in our history as a species that we want to do that kind of stuff.
00:34:52
Speaker
If it is, we have such a long history with it, if it's so important to us, why then do we seem as a society to, on the one hand, value it so little, you know, that so many creators and artists don't get paid. But then on the other hand, you've got Christo and Jean-Claude, who can get several million dollars out of New York to put up all these orange veils.
00:35:20
Speaker
I go back to, let me put it this way. Our family, my family growing up was not huge on art. My mother was, she wanted to be, but that was about it. And one of the most important pieces of art or stories about art that I remember from growing up-ish, I'm sure I was an adult then, is voice of fire. Do you remember voice of fire?
00:35:46
Speaker
Voice of Fire was purchased by the Canadian government for, I forget how many millions of dollars, and it's three stripes. And you cannot convince people that art is important when you spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money on three stripes.
00:36:05
Speaker
That's not what art is about. And if somebody, in my opinion, and if somebody is trying to find a reason to appreciate art and that's what they see, that's not going to help. Yeah.
00:36:19
Speaker
And yet, by the same token, I know a creator here who is ripping off everybody's copyright and trying to pass that off as art. Art has such a big umbrella over it. I think until you find the thing that speaks to you,
00:36:41
Speaker
If you haven't already, it's just always going to be sort of an airy-fairy abstract thing. That's in my experience growing up without a lot of appreciation for art in my life. So the right thing has to hit you at the right time before you can kind of appreciate it.
00:37:02
Speaker
Like somebody sees a sculpture or hears a piece of music and thinks, oh, that's what I want to do with my life, or whatever. You know, that thing, that piece of art that somehow speaks to you, maybe it happens when you're too
00:37:18
Speaker
Or for me, maybe it happens when you're in your 40s. But that thing, it's kind of indefinable. And I don't even know if you go looking for it. I certainly didn't know that I was looking for something to break me open like a coconut. But it happened. I think I like that point a lot because I think there are some forms of art that
00:37:40
Speaker
can have an impact on you without you understanding it at all. And there's some where you really do need to understand something about it. Like, for example, when I was a younger man in my teens, I really didn't appreciate Shakespeare. But once I'd taken an acting class and had to learn how to say the lines, and then the year after took a Shakespeare class where I learned about the history of the times. And so once I had taken all of that education,
00:38:09
Speaker
then I actually love Shakespeare. And, you know, we're very lucky. But you needed the context. But I needed the context. No, some people don't. Some people just the language is beautiful and that's enough. I'm not one of those guys. I'm probably more of a I need to I do need a story. And I I like a little moral instruction. I'm not against that. So, you know, but I don't think art has to have that. And for me, visual art is the place where it's I need at least.
00:38:37
Speaker
For me, visual art can just stimulate that part of my brain in a way that, you know, touches my emotions. And I don't really need to understand it. I like to understand it. I'm a big nerd.
Impact of Christo and Jean-Claude's Work
00:38:48
Speaker
So I like to understand what I'm looking at, but sometimes, you know, Mark Rothko is one of my favorite famous sort of, you know, blob of color guys. I love his paintings. They speak to me, but yeah, there's not, if you look at them, there's like, you know, there's blobs of color.
00:39:04
Speaker
There's not a lot to them and I can see why I understand why people say, is that really art? It's like, yeah, it is. Especially if you get to see one of the originals because there's a luminosity to them that you don't get on prints. I kind of think that's a question that I don't find valid. Somebody asking, is that really art? You know what I mean? Yeah. I remember one of my sisters-in-law saying, looking at one of my paintings and going, is that what they're calling art now?
00:39:33
Speaker
20 years ago, I might've been offended, but I laugh so hard and it's like, yes, some people do call that art. Just like some people call other things that I don't understand or whatever art. It's still art, even if you don't personally like it. So anyway. Yeah. Okay. So funny, quick little story about Shakespeare in, uh, for CBC radio, we had a bunch of a Stratford actors in one time.
00:39:58
Speaker
and they were doing some Shakespeare. And we recorded a scene and it just so happened that one of the former artistic directors of the Stratford Festival, Richard Manette was there at the time. And after recording this one scene of this really complicated Shakespearean prose, everybody was dead silent for a few seconds until Richard Manette said, wow, absolutely brilliant, completely impenetrable, but brilliant.
00:40:28
Speaker
Yeah, see, that's, in my view, that's not good Shakespeare. I think even the good actors can take that in Petter's Ball, like, Fartles-Bartkin stuff and make you understand something and feel something. But that is the challenge, yeah, is working your, but you're right. That is, and I've seen, you know, several productions, you know, some of it just went completely over my head and others where you're like, wow, I don't really understand the words or the language, but somehow they're conveying the meaning.
00:40:58
Speaker
Yeah, it still comes across. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, back to you, Lisa. So you, and you've already talked a little bit about this, how the gates kind of opened up a whole aspect of creativity for you. You became a generator instead of a, uh, a reactor. Are you familiar with the rest of their, their oeuvre? What, uh, you know, and Marcus touched a little bit on what they've done. What else have they done? And it hasn't had any impact on you.
00:41:25
Speaker
Well, I guess they started, I'm really not an expert on them, but I guess they started with wrapping things and literally some of these things they wrapped look like bodies someone's about to throw into the Hudson River. Yeah, so the idea was, you know, kind of like to guess what this is or
00:41:50
Speaker
a table like there's one from 1961 it's called package on a table and it's rope and some sort of fabric covering the top of a table and you can't tell what it is the bottom is visible there's another one that's a painting of a nude woman so you can see through the
00:42:11
Speaker
sheets of plastic that there is a nude painting there, but it's not very, you know, crisp and clear. They love to wrap things. It seems to be their thing. They just love to put stuff around stuff. Just a very, very
00:42:30
Speaker
odd, interesting, fascinating couple that the fact, like I say, the fact that they found each other and were aligned, they weren't John and Yoko when it came to music. They were, you know, it was the total thing. How did they find one another? Do you know? If memory serves, and I could be wrong, but I believe Christo traveled to France
00:42:50
Speaker
And they met somehow there. You know, when you're young, you just gravitate to people. Somehow you meet everybody. And it went from there. But they were an enduring love story. They had a son in 1960. He's a filmmaker now. And I'm sure he does some other things as well. And they just, just a fascinating couple. I am
00:43:11
Speaker
happy that people like that exist in the world. I couldn't be one. I couldn't live with one, probably. Nor could they live with me. But it's just, again, it's effort and it's mission. Because they like to rap big things too, right? Like the pontiff, they rap the Reichstag.
00:43:33
Speaker
They've wrapped the L'Arcte Trion from Paris, so they wrap these big projects. The other one I remember, and I can't remember when it was, but of course I didn't see it as it was in Japan, but one called the Umbrellas, or it had umbrellas.
00:43:49
Speaker
And they had different colored umbrellas for different landscapes. So like these hills, they had the saffron umbrellas and they had blue umbrellas. And I can't remember exactly the others, but again, these huge umbrellas, these huge things, like they're huge, like they're, you know, 30 feet. But what do they do? They're like, so they're sitting at a cafe in New York or Paris or something like that. And they're like, you know, so what, what do we do next?
00:44:15
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's wrap something. Well, what would you like to wrap? How about the Arc de Triomphe? I mean, how do they develop these? I like to think they had really knocked down drag out arguments about it. Like, no, we will wrap these. No, we're going to wrap these. You know, and then they finally come to a compromise. I love the accent, but I have to think that they're probably having those arguments in their native tongues.
00:44:45
Speaker
Anyway this is sort of divine madness to it you know. I think but here's the other thing so they and they're really successful at this this wrapping in these grandiose crazy artistic projects.
00:45:00
Speaker
and get lots of money for it and are able to do stuff with their own money for the benefit of everyone. Whereas somebody else toils forever on, let's say, a novel, which could be really good and is not similarly rewarded. It seems like there's no justice in art. There's no justice in the world.
00:45:25
Speaker
There's no justice anywhere. It's all chaos and we just have to be nice to each other. That's my philosophy. I just think there's no... It's unfortunate that there are a lot of really creative, great people doing wonderful things that no one's ever going to see, either because they don't look like an Instagram filter or, you know, who knows what the
Art World Challenges
00:45:48
Speaker
reason is. There's a lot of unfairness, but I think it's just part of the chaos in this.
00:45:54
Speaker
this world we're living in. I think the only justice we get is the one we work hard to make. And that's a very fragile thing. Yeah, ultimately, Joe, I think, you know, your question is a valid one and it's a hard one for many of us who are artists and who would love to make a living at their art. But that's just not the way it works and hasn't really ever. I don't think, you know, you mentioned Michelangelo. I'm sure there is tons of
00:46:22
Speaker
people who are almost as good as Michelangelo, but we don't know who they are because they never, you know, got past the apprentice stage or whatever. So, you know, and they couldn't find a patron and they're toast. They gotta, you know, do whatever they have to do to make a living and survive.
00:46:37
Speaker
And now I'm thinking of Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder when he looks at Baldrick and Baldrick says something along the lines of, that's not fair. And Blackadder says, of course it's not fair. Life isn't fair. If life is fair, things like this wouldn't happen. And then he hits him. It's sad but rude.
00:47:00
Speaker
So on that note, Lisa, anything further you would like to say about your art or about Christo and Jean-Claude?
00:47:09
Speaker
Uh, just that I'm grateful for effort. I'm grateful for people who go put themselves out there and whatever it is, whether it's Mark, uh, writing his novels or whatever that's, uh, that I draw a little bit of inspiration from. I have to tell you, Mark, I have a novel that I've written a novel and I've written a half a second novel. And every time I have imposter syndrome, I stop and I think, you know what?
00:47:37
Speaker
Mark Rayner can do this. Other people can do this. Why can't I do this? I can fucking do this. If Mark can do it, I could do it. You know, I mean, you're here in Canada and you're getting there done. So yeah. I know exactly what you mean, actually, because I do take Mark as an inspiration. The number of books, you know, and the number of quality books that he's written have definitely inspired me. So.
Commitment to Creativity
00:48:00
Speaker
Yeah, me too. Well, now I'm ready. I have nothing else to add, no. Well, I mean, I would love to talk about this more, but I think we will. I think this is sort of like one of the conversations we're going to continue to have during this podcast because that's really what we're asking is what is creativity? What is art to you? What does art do for you as a creative person? What does it mean? How does it help you generate your own work? I think that's sort of the heart what we're trying to talk about.
00:48:30
Speaker
Lisa Brandt, thank you for helping us perpetuate that conversation on our podcast, Recreative. I had a blast. Thank you so much for having me here. I enjoyed talking to you both. Thank you.
00:49:04
Speaker
You've been listening to Recreative, a podcast about creativity and the works that inspire it. Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney for Donovan Street Press, Inc., in association with Monkey Joy Press. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web design by Mark Rainer.
00:49:22
Speaker
You can support this podcast by checking out our guests' work, listening to their music, purchasing their books, watching their shows, and so on. You can find out more about each guest in all of our past episodes by visiting recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. You can contact us by emailing joe mohoney at donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.