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Aria Dean
206 Plays6 months ago
We are delighted to explore our first ICA show in this episode. We discuss artist and writer Aria Dean's Abattoir U.S.A.!, a videogame inspired video installation and a sculptural work exploring exhibitions and otherness / othering. The theme of the slaughterhouse is a powerful one, and it was treated by Dean in a subtle and powerful way.
We also read Dean's book Bad Infinity: Selected Writings (Sternberg Press). It is a philosophical exploration of minimal and contemporary art through the lens of blackness and western thought. There is a theory of representation informed by what we learned to be called Afropessimism.
We go into all of this in this episode, although we may not have understood everything. Such is the magic of exhibitions and books! We go back, and back, and back again.
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Transcript
Introduction & Focus on Aria Deen
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi, Emily here. Thanks for joining us again at the exhibitionist's podcast. This week we're having a look at Aria Deen's abattoir exhibition at the ICA in London. Aria Deen's an artist steeped in philosophy and architecture and how they intersect with blackness. She provides so much food for thought and I was introduced to a lot of work through her.
00:00:33
Speaker
For example, George Bataille, have you heard of him? He's a French philosopher from the early 20th century whose base materials theory perpetuated some pretty transgressive experiments in his own life. A bit shocking, to be honest.
Animal Sounds & Podcast Humor
00:00:48
Speaker
But it was great to see how Dean incorporated it with her examination of blackness. It isn't a bold statement to say that Aria Dean will be an artist that will be considered for years to come.
00:01:00
Speaker
In this episode, you'll hear the menagerie that surrounds Joanna and I while we record cats, dogs, even a sheep bleeding in the background, all part of the fun. Thanks again for joining. We're so glad you're here and I hope you enjoyed the episode.
Artists & Exhibitions Post-Pandemic
00:01:19
Speaker
Hi, welcome back to Exhibitionistas. On this podcast, we explore an artist through the lens of their solo exhibition. My name is Emily Harding. I'm an art lover, an exhibition goer. In this episode, we'll look at the exhibition, Abattoir USA exclamation point by Aria Dean at the ICA in London, which is on until the 5th of May. As this podcast title implies, we love exhibitions, the ideas, the beauty, the provocations.
00:01:47
Speaker
And most of all, the experience. So I was one of those people during the pandemic who thought, hey, secluding at home isn't so bad. What was I thinking going out so much before I can just hang out here alone? Yeah, totally.
00:02:02
Speaker
Exactly. And exhibitions, you know, has been one of those things that have come back to obviously in the past couple of years that remind me how wrong I was. I mean, of course, maybe I was right at the time, but kind of wrong in the long term. And this exhibition is no exception.
Guest Introduction: Joanna
00:02:18
Speaker
It is an experience.
00:02:20
Speaker
Hello, and I am Joanna PR Neves, the other exhibitionista. By the way, I noticed that on Apple Podcasts, they have transcriptions of our episodes now, all episodes. Amazing. And my name is usually Joanna's
00:02:39
Speaker
Pyrenees. So I think that my name is unscrewtable for AI, which I'm very proud. Nice. So here I am, Joanna Pyrenees, and I'm an independent writer and art curator and artistic director of Drawing Now Art Fair. I'm also working on a book actually titled Female Drawing Machines to be published in 2026.
Discussing Alex Garland's 'Civil War'
00:03:03
Speaker
And it is about drawing as technology from a feminist perspective.
00:03:08
Speaker
And so now that you know all about me, Emily, how was your week in culture? Last night on another level, I saw Civil War at the movie theater. So I know this was like I was really not into some American, you know, I saw the preview. No. Yeah, it's true.
00:03:29
Speaker
I know. I know. Shocking. But so I, you know, I saw the adverts and it looked like a Marvel Marvel movie take on a civil war. Same. I was like, is this a joke? What the heck? Yeah, exactly. Very curious to know what it was about and what you thought of it.
00:03:53
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, it all looked a little bit too close to the bone. But then my husband really wanted to go see it. And then I found out it was directed and written by Alex Garland, who wrote the novel The Beach, if anybody remembers that, and lots of other screenplays for movies. So 28 Days Later, and a book or sorry, a movie that was based on one of my favorite books by Kazu Ishiguro, Never Let
Literary Connection: 'Never Let Me Go'
00:04:19
Speaker
Me Go. Did you ever read that?
00:04:20
Speaker
Can I say, I was never able to move past from the first page. I tried reading it so many times. I think it's me. To quote Taylor Swift, which I don't listen to, the problem is me.
00:04:35
Speaker
But I think I chose the wrong time to read it, but each time I have it in my living room, like waiting for me. Sometimes I pick it up and I'm like, I have no idea. It's not a fit. We are not meant to be together. Fair enough. I'm sure the problem is me because everyone says it's amazing. There's pace and timing with things. Sometimes books leap out at you and sometimes they just hang out for a while.
00:05:01
Speaker
But yeah, it's not a read. So, um, so the movie star is Kristen Dunst and a really brilliant cast alongside her. And the, the brilliant part of it is that I made it, it just, there's a lot more nuance than you would be led to believe from the trailer. And it walks a really fine political line ideologically. So, you know, it's, it's not trying to say,
00:05:33
Speaker
explicitly about the politics of the day. It's not trying to say, oh, well, surely this is right and this is right. There's kind of one couple of kernels in there about it. But it's clearly flagging that this is a future we do not want. And I don't know if you know Kirsten Dunst's husband,
00:05:57
Speaker
Yes, me too. Jesse Plemons. Jesse Plemons exacts good on the big screen. It's one of those. Yeah, maybe I'll go get it because I've been trying to see what could I watch on the big screen because I've been watching stuff at home, which is not great. Yeah, because my weekend culture was, I have to say, I'm really taken by this guy.
00:06:22
Speaker
It passed away on the 14th of March of this year. So I learned about him on Instagram, weirdly, you know, obviously, as he, you know, someone was announcing his death. I had no idea this man had existed before. So his name is Franz de Waal. He was a Dutch primatologist.
00:06:44
Speaker
And he wrote these amazing books. He's really interested in the continuity between human behavior and animal behavior, especially primates. But he talks about all animals in his books. And there's one that I really, really love, which is called The Age of Empathy. He talks about empathy, and he deconstructs this idea that actually we blame on Charles Darwin, but actually comes from an economist
00:07:12
Speaker
who's called Herbert Spencer. And he is the one who coined the phrase survival of the fittest. It was not Darwin at all. And so he based on really bad readings of Darwin, this whole notion of
00:07:27
Speaker
competition as the basis of society and in the age of empathy Franz de Waal talks a lot about this in relation to the United States so I think it would interest you it's really interesting but it's all through the perspective of animals and I also learned in his because I've been like listening to talks looking on YouTube you know how obsessive I am so I just started like looking into everything and he talks about the fact that so I learned something this week through him
00:07:57
Speaker
that primates love and kiss. So usually people say that what separates us from the animal kingdom is that we love.
00:08:07
Speaker
But Simeon's love. They love the lot, actually. And he talks about being in his office and listening and hearing them laugh. And they also kiss. So Bonamos apparently is more sexual, the kissing. It's like he talks about this person who was minding the Bonamos community and who let one of them kiss him. And apparently there was immediate tongue.
00:08:36
Speaker
They're like famously horny, right? Bonobos are like famously horny? Yes. So the female bonamos, apparently, when opposing groups start fighting, they go to the other side and they start having sex with the bonamo females, the opponents, females and males, and they stop the wars like that.
00:08:59
Speaker
So many interesting stories that I'm just fascinated. I'm still reading it. You know, I bought two books. There's another one, which is, are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? I mean, it's just another world. It's so nice. So he just died last month. But when was he writing, like, the Age of Empathy? When is that from?
00:09:24
Speaker
Well, he came into his profession in the 70s, 80s. So he said that that's really interesting because he actually said that basically primatology and animal behavior studies were mostly male, so mostly male scholars, and they were completely interested in conflict.
00:09:50
Speaker
That's what they were studying because they, you know, had this idea that animals were basically machines. They didn't have emotions or effects. And they just, you know, was studying the way they fought and they were territorial, etc.
00:10:06
Speaker
And then some female scholars started coming in and they were interested in care. They were interested in the way they structured their societies. And suddenly a few scholars started saying, well, you know what? This conflict thing is not the nature of these animals. We're only seeing these animals through a very narrow scope. And so he decided to study conflict resolution. And he has a lot of interesting things
00:10:34
Speaker
to say about that. It's really, really interesting because some things are very animal based and others, and that's what he says, we are very close to primates. Like we have the same psychology. He doesn't believe that our psychology and our social structures are that different, even our sexuality. And in that sense, it's really interesting, especially when you think about all these new tendencies of
00:10:59
Speaker
trying to incorporate Native American thinking and relationship to the planet into our own behavior. Say, for example, I think it was in New Zealand where they finally accepted a river to be seen as a person. So, you know, the state of American thinking of personalizing minerals, organic life, animals,
00:11:24
Speaker
And that's really interesting, I think. And at the same time, he's a scientist. So he's not going to say things to please you. We've come to a point where we're finally understanding and opening up the scope on these issues. And it's fascinating to read him. It's fascinating. So he talks about gender as well. And he says, like, one in 10 primates are sexually gender fluid.
00:11:53
Speaker
there's something that doesn't correspond neither to the female or the male gender but mostly it's binary but there's exceptions to that and very different kinds of exceptions like intersex but also other behaviors so it's really interesting and he's very objective at the same time he's not going to say you know
00:12:12
Speaker
the politically correct thing because that's not who he was. But I think he broke a lot of barriers, not alone equals a lot of people in his books. So you think of science as just presenting the information, but of course it is infused with politics, you know, towards ever thus. It's fascinating. I'm going to check him out. Well, now that we've spoken about our week in culture, I'm really, really excited to hear you on this, Emily, and to
00:12:39
Speaker
exchange with you about abattoir. Well, to be honest, I have the leaflet from the exhibition, and it says Ariadine Abattoir. And on the website, the IC8 says Ariadine Abattoir. And then in other places, it says Ariadine Abattoir, USA exclamation point. So I don't know, it's kind of a fluid title, let's say. But first, I'm really curious about Ariadine herself. I mean,
00:13:05
Speaker
Basically, she's a baby still. She's so, so young. Tell us a bit more about her. Yeah, so she's pretty new to the art world. So she, Ariadne, was born in LA in 1993. Her parents worked in the entertainment industry, which is super common. I mean, for those of you who haven't been to LA, it is a company town by and large. It's hard to find someone there who isn't connected to the entertainment industry in some way.
00:13:30
Speaker
but is now based in New York and LA. She's a critic. She's a curator. She attended Oberlin College in Ohio, which set out to me because I'm also from the Midwest and they have a really formidable reputation for its progressive liberal values. So it was the first liberal arts college to go co-educational, the first to admit African Americans.
00:13:55
Speaker
It has the oldest continually run music conservatory. Lena Dunham, did you ever watch Girls? She's the creator. Yeah, she went there. I mean, it's like super, super. Oh, so it's a very, well, is it, does it connote like, is it basically, let's put this in UK terms, is it a posh school?
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's a posh school. It is just as progressive as you can get. And it has a huge arts culture as well. But anyway, I mean, I think, you know, I'm mentioning that because it seems like a lot of her ideas were incubated there. I mean, one of her first, well, one of her pieces that's ironic, ionic, which is, you know, a column was based off of a bit of architecture that was on the campus. My Venturi, yeah.
00:14:46
Speaker
Yeah, after obtaining a bachelor's degree in studio art at Oberlin College, she returned to Los Angeles taking a position as a social media strategist for the Museum of Contemporary Art. So in many respects, Dean's early engagement in the digital sphere of an institution prefigured the question she posed around blackness
00:15:08
Speaker
within the emergent internet culture. So she examined generative and gratuitous workings of online cultural production of how the circulation of memes maps onto blackness and the visibility politics of selfies.
00:15:27
Speaker
So she really dug into the complexity of what social media is and what that means through the lens of blackness particularly. But I think, you know, yeah, as we'll talk about just, you know, her production of images and, you know, what that means and ownership, you know, certainly comes into her work.
00:15:55
Speaker
Well, she's an accomplished writer. I mean, I was so impressed by her because she decided to publish the writings or she was asked to publish the writings she did in her 20s. Yeah. Which is so incredible. So Ariadne is a young African-American artist who studied not only arts, but also philosophy and architecture.
00:16:18
Speaker
So she's incredibly accomplished. She has a transdisciplinary education. So do you wanna just, you know, maybe the thing to do now is just to dig into the exhibition itself.
00:16:32
Speaker
Do you want to introduce that? Well, first of all, about the exhibition, I'm vegan. So of course, when I read abattoir, which means slaughterhouse in French, I immediately thought, you know, my imagination started overworking and thinking, what is this about? Because, you know, vegetarianism and veganism. Is this for me? I'm not sure. Yeah, or maybe because I kind of my mind went immediately to the images of slaughterhouses.
00:16:56
Speaker
that propel people into veganism or vegetarianism. So I didn't really know what to expect and I really didn't wonder if she was vegan. And then I went onto her Instagram and I saw that her handle is lol underscore prosciutto.
00:17:13
Speaker
And I thought, maybe she's not. And then who cares? Only me, honestly. Then who cares? Yeah, exactly. Maybe she likes vegan prosciutto, but vegan prosciutto is already taken. You never know. You never know.
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah, it could be plant-based prosciutto. Who knows? Anyway, there's USA in the title, so I thought, oh, this is perhaps a criticism of North America. We'll see. We'll see. So the exhibition is very clever because it starts with a text that I have to say I read really quickly because I don't like reading decks before.
00:17:50
Speaker
experimenting the artwork. And then you open two strange looking doors between hospital doors and industrial food storage doors. And then you're faced with an empty room with a huge film projection. So the floor and walls replicate the atmosphere of the doors.
00:18:15
Speaker
And the floor is a black linoleum with little circular protuberances. And then the walls have a sort of human height strip of a sort of a nondescript color, like grayish greenish color.
00:18:33
Speaker
and then the lighter color up to the ceiling after that strip. So it is not a projection room. You are not in a projection room. So you have this uncanny feeling of being both in a projection space and in a recreation space. And for some reason, what I'm saying is triggering Siri. So triggering in the psychological sense. So I'm going to put my
00:19:01
Speaker
my phone away from me on airplane mode. And I apologize for that if you had it. So... Series vegan too, she's really triggered by this. Exactly. So, you know, you're not really in a projection space, you're not in a sort of... You're in a sort of recreation of a space that is nondescript at the same time, could be many things.
00:19:28
Speaker
So psychologically, it kind of creates a void, so nowhere for your soul to be. But suddenly, personally, my consciousness was heightened because I was asking myself, you know, where am I? What is this space that I'm in? And, you know,
00:19:47
Speaker
Am I the one looking? Is someone looking at me? There is this uncanny feeling of a presence of some kind. It's really, really clever. Yeah, that room is really key. You wouldn't get the power of this film if you watched it on your laptop or your phone screen. Because I mean, like you say, the industrial floor, the doors, they bring you into
00:20:11
Speaker
the film itself because you're looking at a similar structure on the screen. And then for me, so there's at the end of this room, so you walk in this room through these big double doors, you sit down on a bench at the back of the room, you're looking at the screen, and then off down to the right of the screen, there's this open doorway.
00:20:35
Speaker
It's lit from within and it just feels mysterious. As I was watching the film, it's like other people who'd been in the film before me kind of wandered back in there and then they came back out quite quickly.
00:20:52
Speaker
And it's like your mind starts going like, what's in there? Is it a broom closet or something that they just forgot to shut the door to? That was also added to the level of what's going on in here feeling for me too. True. When I was there, these people went in and never came back.
00:21:13
Speaker
I thought, okay, because I don't think the exhibition continues that far. There's only two pieces to watch. Maybe they kind of came back in, but I just didn't notice because I was so taken by the atmosphere. I don't know. But are you right? You're like, it's a portal. They've gone to the next dimension in
00:21:38
Speaker
Yeah, there is that. Yeah, absolutely. Indeed. There's a portal-like feeling. And you'll see, because going back to the video, actually, and it is weird that we get to the video after really focusing on the atmosphere of the room, it's unusual. So the video is an empty slaughterhouse.
00:22:02
Speaker
rendered through a 3D gaming software called Unreal Engine. So this also contributes to this uncanny feeling of being somehow part of the whole scenario because it's completely empty. There are no bodies whatsoever. So it confronts real space and virtual space because there's elements of the room that are repeated in the film.
00:22:25
Speaker
And you somehow become the interface of it all, of this real space and this virtual space. And Aria Dean says something really interesting, which is that she thinks that only virtual spaces can talk about our real, or can talk about reality, or can do or produce reality in some ways. And she really makes you feel that.
00:22:48
Speaker
So the video takes you almost literally because it is this gaming software. So your mind clicks onto that atmosphere and you know you're supposed to play a role in it somehow in this kind of aesthetic created by Unreal Engine.
00:23:04
Speaker
So you go through a space with corridors until you see a bright light that kind of almost explodes in your eyes. It's really beautifully made as well. As if you went through a different dimension, like a portal. Of course, it makes you think of death, but nothing is specific in this experience. So you don't know. You're the one making decisions and interpreting and producing the meaning somehow, along with the imagery, of course.
00:23:34
Speaker
So you get to another space with clearly, well, with blood on the floor, that's the only person-like or body-like thing that you see. It looks like sticky. Is there blood on the floor? Yeah, it looks like a sticky substance. I mean, it's definitely like wet. I interpreted it as wet. Oh. But I didn't interpret it as blood because it's like it covers the whole floor, right? I mean, which I guess I've never been to a slaughterhouse. Maybe blood does cover the entire floor. Well, this is fiction, obviously.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, you're right. You know, who knows? I saw it as blood, but it's not said to be blood in any way. It makes no sense because there's nothing there. It does have the apparatus of post-death for the slaughtered animal because it has the hooks that you hang the bodies on. And the strange thing is that you realize at this point that you're the only living thing in this space.
00:24:28
Speaker
and you're the spectator. So you're powerless in some ways. You only have the power of imagination and of being taken into this quite manipulative thing, like a video game can be. But there's this weird sensation of also being in an architecture, especially the corridor that leads you to that portal-like impression of an explosion of light that made me think of
00:24:55
Speaker
an artist who just passed away, Richard Serra's sculptures, you know, the big iron sculptures that are. The only difference is that it's not as tilted as the sculptures usually are, but not all of them. And you go, I mean, I've experienced a few of them. And when you're in them, you have this feeling of as if the walls were coming in and kind of pressing onto your personal space. They're very strange sculpture, very effective when you think it's just an iron
00:25:24
Speaker
basically an iron spiral, for example. Really tall, they're very big. So some moments of the video made me think specifically of certain artists, but the whole, but that was, I didn't have a lot of thoughts about that. You know, it just made me think of the slaughterhouse, especially the corridor, because there's this autistic woman who
00:25:51
Speaker
thought of a way to build those corridors so that the animal wouldn't know what they were getting into. And I thought, so much effort. Why just not convince people not to kill animals like this? At least not like this. Anyway, because it is obvious that the animals get really distressed because they understand what's going on and they see
00:26:13
Speaker
the previous ones, the ones walking in front of them being killed. So obviously it's a horrendous thing. Totally. Yeah, I know they can sense it for sure. How could you not? I mean, they aren't born to be put through channels like this. I mean, they were born to go and graze on a bunch of grass. And they're not machines, like people in this time thought they were, like going back to France,
00:26:41
Speaker
They're not machines and they understand that if an animal in front of them is screaming or making a certain kind of noise, that means danger. Yeah, absolutely. It is a very clean aesthetic for a gruesome place and the way that the camera angle works
00:27:01
Speaker
is kind of in the beginning, you're sort of looking around, you know, up at the ceiling and there's sort of this beautiful Victorian glass ceiling and you think, you know, maybe the slaughterhouse was converted from like a huge
00:27:16
Speaker
Greenhouse like they have it at Kew Gardens or something like that. For example, it's a Victorian and there's lots of Victorian flourishes around so like it's there's some beauty to the building but you're sort of looking up at the ceiling and then you know the camera kind of pans down to this channel that the animal would have gone through, you know and meets this violent end but you
00:27:38
Speaker
You're seeing things primarily from the perspective of the animal, which I think, obviously, any point of view of the camera, the viewer is going to have more sympathy with that point of view. So I think that's part of what makes it
00:27:55
Speaker
so powerful. But yeah, then you're kind of drifting through the slaughterhouse and seeing it. But that notion of her emphasis on architecture, her emphasis on space and how that makes one feel is definitely very profoundly felt in her works.
00:28:19
Speaker
So there's also, like you say, I mean, you see things from the perspective of the animal. And I was being really literal. And because the film is in the loop, I'm not sure we arrived at the beginning of the film. So there's a moment, like you say, where you kind of up, there's this beautiful light, sunlight through this Victorian building, a little bit like the Crystal Palace, you know, the sun rays go through the windows.
00:28:45
Speaker
And you kind of have an aerial view of things. And I thought, oh, it's the animal soul. But it's not. It's not. You are in a space where anything's possible. She's really interested in cinema and cinema theory. So you are in a space where you can float. Why not? There's no rules. It's a game without rules. So you don't know what game you're playing because you don't have a remote in your hand.
00:29:09
Speaker
and or a controller and you you can't have an impact on the the motion of the camera so you're taken in a place where usually you you would be able to do something in this kind of aesthetic so it's really interesting because you have moments where
00:29:26
Speaker
it kind of disconnects you from the point of view of the animal. It creates other meanings in some ways, and it brings you back to your own identity as someone who is looking at a structure, and Ariadne is interested in structures. But maybe we'll talk about this a bit later on. This time for a break, isn't it, Emily? Yeah, definitely. Let's take a quick one back in a moment.
00:30:04
Speaker
you
00:30:16
Speaker
Well, welcome back, everyone. We've brought you in. You're in this kind of 3D gaming software slaughterhouse. I mean, I have to say when I was watching it, so I worked in the West Bank in Gaza for five years and a few years ago and going through that.
00:30:36
Speaker
did have some remembrances and similarities to going through Erez, which is the crossing between Gaza and Israel, kind of the north of Gaza. And I mean, obviously, Erez is not a slaughterhouse. I'm not saying that it is a slaughterhouse by any stretch, but
00:30:57
Speaker
When you're going through, it's absolutely full of channels like this, whether it's, you know, fencing on both sides and on top of you to direct you to a certain place.
00:31:11
Speaker
And sometimes, I mean, there is a lot of concrete slabs used everywhere. I mean, it's an enormous complex that manages movement to the extreme. I mean, you feel confined, you feel directed, you feel monitored.
00:31:30
Speaker
And that was coming back to me, certainly, as I was watching this piece by Aria Dean. I mean, look, people, when they get to the other side of Erez, are not being executed. So I'm not trying to make a similarity there. But the similarity is certainly through the amount of control of, yeah, exactly, the structure, the amount of control and surveillance of people's bodies
00:32:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's really and I mean, you know, obviously, there's there's a lot that, you know, both Gazans and Israelis would have to say about that. But for me, you know, as a person, I mean, I remember going in, you know, and, you know, you kind of go through this long, long corridor of, you know, kind of the fencing on both sides and above. Yeah.
00:32:23
Speaker
And then you come in and you have to go through the metal detectors. This is coming out of Gaza rather than going in, although it's, you know, there's some similarities going in as well. But you get your metal detector and then you kind of go through this little bit of a labyrinth where they have tiger traps. So it's like you go. No, you go in.
00:32:48
Speaker
You go in one door and then you're kind of held in a very small area that maybe three people side by side could fit in. And then the next door is locked and it won't open until they sort of make whatever decisions they're making up in the control booth.
00:33:08
Speaker
And, you know, at certain times, you know, I mean, it has been where you get redirected to a different door that is locked and then opened when you get to it. And I'm assuming you don't want to go into that door. That's not exactly. That's where you get strip searched. That's the strip search. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, but
00:33:32
Speaker
You know, I mean, making light of it. Look, Israelis will say that's absolutely necessary for security. And, you know, October 7th, you know, underscores that more than anything. And there's an argument to be made that that is, you know, an intense amount of control to have over human bodies. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, there is a there is, you know, not an exact simile, but certainly some similarities there.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think this idea of the structure is really what interests Aria Dean. I mean, from what I've read from her. And the parallel you're making is really interesting because it really is what she is
00:34:12
Speaker
focusing on because there are no bodies. So the hint you have is that you're looking at a very specific kind of structure with a very specific orientation and ability to lead you somewhere. And which is something that the image is also making, you know, the comparison with gaming is really interesting. So to bring matters to a bit of a bit of a lighter, you know, perspective. Yeah.
00:34:42
Speaker
So one of my sons wants to study game art. And so I went to a lecture, to a game art lecture. So the first question we were asked is, what is a game? And we had a hard time defining. Well, first of all, as parents, we're trying not to speak, but then obviously we started raising our hand. And so we got to a point where he was defining gaming as opposed to puzzles, as opposed to toys.
00:35:09
Speaker
And so the interactive element is really important. But then what makes, because if you're playing chess, it's interactive. So what's the difference between chess playing and gaming? It was really interesting. And then he got to the fine
00:35:26
Speaker
um the fact that in a game you win so you have to win so you're interacting with some form of platform it can be other people it can be the computer can be ai can be bots can be whatever but there's a set of rules and you have to um kind of overcome the hurdles that they're thrown at you it can be a shooter it can be you know jumping and getting something it doesn't matter
00:35:51
Speaker
And it made me understand how controlled the narrative is and how you are controlled as a gamer. But it also brought me back to a class, a literature class, where the teacher had the bad idea of saying what makes a novel. So the structure that every novel has to have. And I remember that my soul fell to my feet
00:36:17
Speaker
And it completely broke my experience of fiction. And I thought, no, no, no, no, no. You know, no, no, no. And it's within the restraint that fiction happens. And that's really interesting because so Ariadine is really focused on a theory called Afro pessimism. So Afro pessimism
00:36:39
Speaker
bases their theory on the fact that black bodies through the invention of slavery and not only in America but way earlier before in the African continent were completely othered in as much as they couldn't belong to the ontological structures
00:36:57
Speaker
And so to be human meant to be not black. So humanism is defined by the creation of these black bodies that could never attain the role of subjects and could never attain subjectivity. And therefore, society is built on those black bodies that render you human. And the slaughterhouse, the way she describes it, goes back to biopolitics, to Foucault's biopolitics in this idea that
00:37:26
Speaker
So these structures, these big industrial structures, actually are saying not who gets to live, but who has to die for you to exist. And that's why the slaughterhouse comes in. As a vegan, that interests me.
00:37:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. And I mean, I think that that relationship to what is human is that came out to me in watching her film, because as you say, there aren't any people in the film and there aren't any cattle or there aren't any animals going to slaughter either. There's nothing. But the structure is built as a liminal space to transfer cattle from being alive to dead.
00:38:10
Speaker
But it's not a liminal space for people who work there, you know, and the whole space is set up for this function of killing animals for slaughtering them. And you can't imagine.
00:38:24
Speaker
people actually going there and working eight to 10 hours a day. So I did some research in Minnesota a few years ago. I took a very late in life master's in comparative politics and I did some work looking at- Did you do a geriatric master's?
00:38:44
Speaker
I did, yeah. I was so old. You're the oldest in the group. Everybody else was so young, you know? And it was just looking at their faces, like, unlined and fresh and optimistic. Yeah, I mean, really, it was shocking. I mean, like, goodbye, a long chuck. Everybody else, they were plowbacks. It was like, they got done with their undergrad and they were plowing right back into doing a master's.
00:39:14
Speaker
No, there was none older than me, you know, I mean even through the professors it's like yeah, I mean I I had the need age wise so went and did this Masters focusing on how to govern divided societies. But anyway, I digress the research I did was looking at comparing Somali integration into rural towns in Minnesota. So Minnesota has a huge
00:39:39
Speaker
population of uh, the diaspora the somali diaspora are are in minnesota And you know, so it was looking at kind of you know how they were treated in these two places but I mean so many of them came to work in slaughterhouses and meat packing plants and I mean You know and not just somali immigrants obviously, but I mean immigrants full stop. I mean this was work
00:40:05
Speaker
that was intolerable for the white population who had lived there for a long time. I talked to one of the small town mayors, and he was really pro. So this was kind of the main difference between the two towns, was there was a very pro attitude towards
00:40:24
Speaker
Immigration and integration in one and not the other and it didn't go on political lines, which is really interesting But but he was you know, he said that a lot too. He's like you think some of the you know folks here who are You know say that they can't get a job. They could get a job
00:40:41
Speaker
but it's going to be at the plants and that's going to be, you know, they're saying that that's unacceptable. You know, obviously that's, you know, there's exceptions to what he's saying, but I mean, that otherness, you know, we're not going to do that. We're going to get you to do that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what she talks about. I also read somewhere that the suicide rates of slaughterhouses, slaughterhouse workers is pretty high.
00:41:09
Speaker
It's a really gruesome work they do for sure. Well, you would say that you're a vegan. That's vegan propaganda right there. That's propaganda. There's a book called Vegan Propaganda, which is absolutely incredible. So actually, thinking about structures, we have to talk about the architecture as well. So the text at the entrance that I didn't pay much attention to, but is in the leaflet as well,
00:41:32
Speaker
is about the construction of this world and it clearly states that Dean looked into the history of the buildings, of slaughterhouse buildings specifically. So back in the day, like two or three centuries ago, they used to be adorned with features and weren't very different
00:41:48
Speaker
from other buildings. They were supposed to be beautiful and they were clearly marked as being slaughterhouses until Napoleon. So Napoleon decided that architecture and ornament should be removed from these buildings, which by the same token should be industrialized, regulated
00:42:09
Speaker
but also taken away from sight. So the idea is that this is removed from our visual relationship to society, from existence really. This, interestingly, this idea of not having any ornaments, resonates very strongly with modernist tropes in terms of form and shape for buildings. So she mentions Adolf Luz, who was a famous Austrian Czech architect,
00:42:38
Speaker
who wrote a book called Ornament and Crime, published in 1913, which was a lecture before and then became a book, stating that anything superfluous should not be undertaken. So this was very specifically against Art Deco or Arnouvou. So beauty for him was in the function of things, which also resonates with Bauhaus and all of the modernism that then comes into play, first in Europe and then in America.
00:43:04
Speaker
So this was rather exciting, you know, for many people when I was younger and artists, including myself. The issue is that these notions came, and that's what she flags up in her texts. So this came at the same time as standardized production, Fordism. And I just learned that adult flus was into prepubescent or pubescent girls because their bodies were pre-ornament.
00:43:33
Speaker
as was Gustav Klimt and Egan Schiele. So this was brought to my attention. Well, Egan Schiele, that's no surprise. That's no surprise. But there's a whole group. It was an organized group. I learned about this from
00:43:48
Speaker
an MFA thesis that I supervised, and it really rocked me to my bones. The name of the student is Laura Fisher. She's also an artist, and she did an amazing work. It was beautiful to work with her. So Dean here is amalgamating these references.
00:44:04
Speaker
in a really interesting way, echoing Afro-pessimism. So this idea that obviously these regulations were brought about for hygiene reasons, but this also means that there's a dismissal of a ritualistic part of life that suddenly is taken away
00:44:24
Speaker
from society in terms of structure and so the video echoes these different architectures across time. Another mark of the film for me was this incredible score like it has great sound I mean you're sort of surrounded by sound which adds to that feeling you talked about at the beginning of true you know yeah
00:44:48
Speaker
what this room is and what's going to happen. And there's a really incredible score that goes along with it. And at a certain point, so when you're at the end of the channel and the light is flashing, and then you transcend to the other side of the flashing light, there is a rendition of I Think We're Alone Now by Tiffany, which I mean...
00:45:19
Speaker
I mean, it is so good. I mean, my teenage self was a huge shift event. Did she kind of penetrate Portugal? Oh, yes. Did she? Yeah. Did she penetrate? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was a big deal.
00:45:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. But unusual choice, right? I mean, I guess it's like, if that's when the animal dies, the animal is then alone in there, wherever animal spirits, any spirit goes.
00:45:51
Speaker
the like that was the ultimate make out song right it's like you know your parents have left the house you're there with your boyfriend you can kind of make out on the couch i mean that's sort of like the the alone that i think tiffany
00:46:07
Speaker
pointing to. But when you take, when you take the, you know, because I think we're alone now. Yeah. So we, so it's like the viewer and the, the cow spirit or what have you, I mean,
00:46:23
Speaker
I guess we're alone now. And if you read the interview, she has this really, really interesting interview with the Afro pessimist theorists, Frank B. Wilderson III in the book. It's right in the middle of the book. And this idea that I think we're alone now really speaks to any community. But I think Afro pessimism has something that really, you know, made me feel, made me
00:46:53
Speaker
position myself very clearly because the black community is placing themselves so specifically as being completely alone and you not being part of their condition. You will never be part of this condition as a white person. And that was incredibly powerful to read because they bring it home
00:47:16
Speaker
in a way that really explains this context of having been the slave even before the slave ships that the Portuguese started to as a trend, my people, they started to organize, to bring to other colonies, particularly what is now the USA.
00:47:40
Speaker
But the slavery thing was already happening before that. So this otherness of the slave and that body that is so object that it will always reinforce your privilege or your existence as an existence that creates the structure.
00:48:01
Speaker
is so powerful that when I was reading these texts that she wrote and was reading the interview, I didn't understand everything. It's very dense theory. And it's a theory that also criticizes representation, which is something that is very controversial, I think, within
00:48:20
Speaker
communities that are excluded, not only the Black community, but in art nowadays. We're talking a lot about representation. It was a big deal when the portraits of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were made by
00:48:32
Speaker
I forget the name of the artist, but this black artist who painted the first black presidents and the first black first lady. And that was all about having black bodies represented in the museum doors, not as slaves, but as powerful people. And Afro pessimism kind of interrogates this. And there's even the passage where he talks about what 12 years a slave and how the whipping of that character
00:48:59
Speaker
he thinks does not do what Steve McQueen thinks it's doing. It's actually reinforcing the trope of black suffering bodies. I think we're alone now, you know, is not specifically there. And I think that's why it's so clever, because you are asking yourself, who is this we, you know, and according to the spectators, background, identity, color of their skin, you're going to feel differently because they even Afro pessimism, and that's
00:49:29
Speaker
what really...
00:49:31
Speaker
astounded me is that they separate their thinking from LGBTQIA plus issues, for example, from white female issues, for example. They really construct a territory that is impenetrable. One of the authors they mention is, of course, James Baldwin. And they reject the humanism in James Baldwin because he says, I love James Baldwin until the end of the books. And the end of the books, he reconnects with humanism and humanism is built on our backs.
00:49:59
Speaker
and it we don't belong there. And I mean you know I guess sort of in that room we have the we're in the slaughterhouse in that room and then there's that doorway at the end. We haven't visited the whole exhibition yet. So the second room has these vitrines that look archaeological or kind of typical of like old
00:50:22
Speaker
um historical exhibition spaces the surface of the table is covered with red velvet with the word vitrine on them with an asterisk if i'm not uh and then they're covered by these huge glass boxes so it's they're vitrines but they're empty and they're they're they're rectangular as well yes so they look
00:50:41
Speaker
a bit coffin-like. Yes, they do. They do. And there's a poem on the wall that says vitrine as a sort of asterisk, as a sort of title. And so Ariadine says that this was her speaking, you know, about her own experience. And so it says,
00:51:04
Speaker
captured air that details an undermining, trickeries against oneself. It is revealed that the melancholic sap, or lover of history, or singer of lament, felled by wars not fought and hollered by spectre of lives she did not live, forgets herself and the muck at her ankles, favouring instead the scent of the theft of the wind from over the inverted horizon.
00:51:34
Speaker
So I love this poem. I love the idea that it's a horizon. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. I thought it was nice too that it was like, you know, the text could have easily been, here's what I was thinking. And it's obviously kind of a continuation of her examination of structures and all that. But she didn't, you know, she put this
00:51:56
Speaker
You know, kind of strange branding, vitrine, alongside a poem for you to make of what you'd like to.
00:52:04
Speaker
yeah, were kind of, in the beginning, I was like, oh, well, I get it, you know, empty vitrines. I get it, you know, fine. But then I was reminded of a story that a friend told me, this Portuguese artist, Joanna Scruval, she went to the United States for some reason, and she ended up going to one of the museums there,
00:52:30
Speaker
Maybe the Met? I don't know. And she interviewed a person responsible for some sort of collection. The story is very vague, it was years ago. But the important bit of the story is that this museum curator told her that they had these hairdressers from Native Americans still existing, still alive and practicing the rituals in the United States.
00:53:00
Speaker
as exhibition items. And because there's now a culture of giving back, these artifacts, they contacted the chief of this particular community, Native American people. And so the person came and they took out the headdress
00:53:22
Speaker
from this vault at a certain temperature. They opened the boxes really carefully with gloved hands. They put them on the table and then the dude just took the headdress, put it in the sports bag, put it in his bag and just left. What? Because it's an everyday thing for these people, whereas for the white people,
00:53:47
Speaker
It was something very precious of the past. But for them, it's a living thing. It's a thing they use. I mean, I love that because it's like there's always that pushback around the Benin bronzes and stuff. It's like, oh, well, or any of it. It's like, oh, well, if we gave it back, they'd sell it on or duh, duh, duh. It's like,
00:54:06
Speaker
Yeah, go for it. They can. It's theirs. They can do what they would like. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's in this idea of representation, you know, what what do you bring to the exhibition space? And she said something really, and she says that she's not interested in what art expresses. She's interested in what art is doing.
00:54:29
Speaker
That's where I was in seeing this because immediately my mind is trying to make sense of the film and my mind is trying to make sense of these empty, clear, coffin-like boxes with the red velvet branding on it. I watched the film twice and when I watched it the second time, I sort of let my
00:54:58
Speaker
mind relax and just be taken through. And then it, then it kind of got quite emotional. And that's when kind of some of the similes with errors crossing and other ways that people and movement is confined and monitored and controlled to such a high degree.
00:55:21
Speaker
And the ways that we build structures to do that, you know, I felt like the second viewing was sort of when that started to sink in. And then when I went to the second room, you know, yeah, my media, it was like, okay, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of this.
00:55:41
Speaker
But then it's like after you leave and you're sort of absorbing and amalgamating both things, it's the idea presented in another way. I mean, just that trappedness, that invisibility too, the invisibility of the trappedness, it's the air that's trapped. We don't even see it. We don't even see the air being trapped.
00:56:05
Speaker
you know, and how profound, you know, that is. So, Aria Dean is not shy about naming George Bataille as a huge influence for her. I mean, she has one of her essays in her book, Bad Infinity, that is in fact called,
00:56:28
Speaker
Black Batai. Black Batai. Yeah, it's written in 2021. And it looks and if you look at any of her stuff online, some of her lectures, etc, she is bound to reference him. And Joanna, I know that you know more about Batai than I did, because you studied philosophy and he and he was brand new to me. I literally had never heard of him. Wow.
00:56:53
Speaker
Wow, does he make an impression? Oh my gosh. I mean, essentially, I mean, really, really strange guy, like made some very strange life choices. But the essentially he developed this theory of base materialism. And he posited that base matter is in everything and disrupts the division between high and low matter. This counters the idea
00:57:23
Speaker
that matter is a thing in its own right. So I read this article by Evan Jack in Medium that was published in September last year. And it gives an example about what he means that's based on capitalism. So there's the bourgeois and the middle class that is high material, high matter rather.
00:57:47
Speaker
And they want to keep the working class separate. So they want to keep low matter separate. So there might be a theory that says that high matter is a thing in and of itself that is its own thing. But what Bataille would say is that it's impossible to separate high and low.
00:58:08
Speaker
so that in the high there is the lows. So the working class is inseparable from the bourgeois and the middle class, which of course we all know in economy it is and certainly in capitalism it is.
00:58:23
Speaker
So the thing with Bataille is that this is all transgressive. This is a transgressive thought. So Jack in this article also writes that it's only when one goes towards the limit, then transgresses it, does one, quote unquote, follow Bataille. And this explains the human sacrifice stuff. What do you mean by human sacrifice? This is Ignai.
00:58:52
Speaker
This is a guy, Bataille, who was interested in transgressing that line. And he had a club of people that were like, hey, we'd be up to be the subjects of human sacrifice. And they tried to get someone who would be up for being the executioner
00:59:13
Speaker
It was a group called Asifal. Yeah, the group was called Asifal, so acephalus, which means without a head. So someone would have fucked the head somehow. And it is really a ethos of transgression, if one may use this oxymoron.
00:59:32
Speaker
It is, yeah, it's a literature of transgression and he was indeed a strange dude who was practicing strange stuff at the time. This is alleged, so I don't know to what extent this is real or not, but no wonder, you know, there was some rumors about, you know, Bataille, because he also wrote Istoire de l'oeil, so I don't know how it is translated, The History of the Eye maybe, which is all about transgressive
01:00:01
Speaker
sexualities and sexual imaginaries and actions and gestures. And I have this thing where, you know, when you tell me something, I believe you. You know, is it made worse that when people tell you who they are, believe them? I believe him. I think he was this transgressive dude and there were many places and still are in society where, you know, you practice transgression.
01:00:28
Speaker
And you can practice transgression by... And it's interesting because what is transgression? I think that's what the question... And that's where Aria Dean enters because if you're a Mormon, is it Mormons who can be married to lots of women?
01:00:47
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah, right? That's okay. It's part of a religious structure, so it's part of the structure, so it's okay. But then if someone's in a throuple and they decide to, and they hold hands, the three of them, and kiss each other in public, then ooh, dude.
01:01:04
Speaker
That's not good. That will not happen in society. So what is transgression and what is the structure of society? He went very, very far. He goes into mutilation and to all sorts of things that are quite, you know, for lack of a better word, very, very creepy to me. But he does come from and he did influence Foucault and Lacan and all of these people.
01:01:30
Speaker
I think also materialism is something that interests Ariadne and as opposed to symbolism. So again, this idea of the fact that everything is active in society, is an active agent. So it's real and it acts upon society and it acts upon structures or is structural.
01:01:53
Speaker
rather than, you know, expression and symbolism, you know, art as being something that kind of stays away from the real, from reality, which Nabokov always said, when you write reality, you have to put it into between quotes.
01:02:13
Speaker
Because why? Everything is. He was probably a materialist as well. There's no such thing as reality. We're in it. This is it. And she wrote this famous text called
01:02:28
Speaker
a poor meme, rich meme. Is that it? Let me check. I have the book right here. Yeah, that's one of the very early ones. Yeah, 2016. And she was talking about these black youths who were using social media. So memes, of course, are now a forgotten thing, almost prehistoric. Back in 2016, it was a thing that was happening and everyone was using them. And black people were creating it, black
01:02:54
Speaker
young people. And she talks about how instantly those creative processes from these black people were incorporated in something that is corporate, that is an entity that immediately owns whatever they produce. So they're caught in this loop, in this bad infinity, let's say, where they're immediately dispossessed.
01:03:18
Speaker
And this possession is something that's really interesting for her. And she mentions this in a situation that happened at the Whitney Biennale, I think it was the 2017 Whitney Biennale, where Dana Shoots, who's an incredibly successful painter, and a white woman, decided to paint the image of the poor 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, who was brutally viciously murdered
01:03:46
Speaker
Because a white woman said that accused him of harassing her like winking at her or something really really, you know Oh, it was like how it was very it was like a small gesture from from memory and it wasn't even true anyone she the the woman who accused him finally admitted in the end that he didn't even do it but
01:04:09
Speaker
Anyway, so he was brutalized, brutally murdered, and there's an image of him in his casket, I think, and completely disfigured. And she painted this image. And Hannah Black, particularly this British Black artist, said that the painting should not be there, it should be removed.
01:04:31
Speaker
because that was not her story to take. And Dana Schutz replied that the painting was not for sale, it would never be for sale. But there was a big uproar and Ariadine participated in this uproar. And in a conference, she said, well, I was on the side of Hannah Black. I was one of those people, full disclosure, who was
01:04:56
Speaker
not happy with this painting being at the Whitney Biennial. But then it kind of got away. This became a huge discussion about can a white woman paint a black child, which is not the thing that interested me. So what interested her was the notion of dispossession and the notion that as a black person,
01:05:21
Speaker
who inherited this history and who is a victim of this history, maybe not a victim, but subjected to in their own bodies, in your own body, you are dispossessed somehow of that story.
01:05:37
Speaker
And it is difficult to understand this. And I kept thinking about this. You know, I have to be honest, you know, it's not these things are not easy to understand. It's important to talk about them. And I think we may get some things right here wrong here and while we talk. But, you know, it is important to understand this experience. And I the only parallel I could come to was that a friend of mine, a very close friend, very dear friend, is responsible for this football team.
01:06:05
Speaker
And he sent me a logo. He was designing a logo for the football team. And it was a dog, a female dog, a bitch, you call them, being breastfeeding. It's her little
01:06:21
Speaker
Cubs. And I looked at that image and I was so enraged. And we had this huge WhatsApp fight. I mean, exchange of views. And I said, like, I'm so sick of men appropriating breastfeeding as a sort of wholesome image is dispossessing me of my experience and the politics of breastfeeding, which are so incredibly vicious, you know, at the moment.
01:06:47
Speaker
So we had this huge discussion and it was, I mean, it's the only thing that I can, again, you know, thinking of Afro-pessimism as a white feminist. This is not the same, you know, it's not the same experience, but in trying to understand what dispossession means. And that's what I found interesting about that lecture where she talks about this was
01:07:12
Speaker
exactly what you're saying, the notion of not trying to say who has the rightful property to represent what. But she made the point that, look, we're at the Whitney, we're at the biennial, not just anyone.
01:07:30
Speaker
can show here, but white people more so. And, you know, and that's, that's part of the issue here is the fact of, you know, that black artists are not represented in these spaces as much. So therefore a white woman takes this, you know, Emmett Till image and... And when they are represented, they are tokenized. And I think that's the issue.
01:08:00
Speaker
Is that even now as a curator, you have to think, do I have trans bodies? Do I have trans experiences? Do I have female experiences? Do I have Black experiences? Do I have Latina experiences? Do I have Asian experiences? But it takes a long time as a curator myself to represent, not to represent, but to present
01:08:21
Speaker
different experiences as artists, you have to take time and listen and see what that experience is. And the thing now with the art world is that no, yeah, you do have Black artists in exhibitions, but they're immediately tokenized. There's maybe some self tokenization, which I think is what the theories she interviews alluded to when he was talking about 12 years a slave. That's how I understood it.
01:08:46
Speaker
I don't know. I don't think that's my place to say he doesn't say it like that, but that's kind of how I interpreted it. I may be wrong. Anyway, sorry, go on.
01:08:55
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, that's I mean, I just think that that juxtaposition between who has the right to represent something and what is the space to represent was kind of that's the that's where the rubber meets the road. And I think that's a really helpful nuance.
01:09:16
Speaker
Because, of course, a painter can paint whatever they want, right? We don't want to start policing what someone can put down on canvas. And from what I understood of Aria Dean's commentary, that's exactly where she is, too, as you've mentioned. But it's more about who has the opportunity to. And if it were a level playing field and there was just as many
01:09:40
Speaker
black artists at the Whitney Biennial and most biennials and in the establishment, different story perhaps. But yeah, I thought that was a really, I am in the polarized politics of the day. It was really nice to hear her work that through in a way that
01:10:04
Speaker
that just felt more engaged in nuance than it very easily could have been. I don't know if that she's nuanced. When you read her, you see that she is so extreme. That's what I enjoyed in her work. I think she's just precise. She's precise in what she's saying. But in the interview,
01:10:31
Speaker
Frank B. Wildesen III does say, why are people happy when we complain, but then they're not happy when we're violent? And that's a question. We're not happy when we claim a space for ourselves. There's this discomfort when you claim a space for yourself because you cannot exist otherwise.
01:11:00
Speaker
again i know they would hate the parallel i'm making but you know i'm trying to understand you know there's in hamstead heath there's the swimming pools for
01:11:11
Speaker
uh men swimming pools for women and then the mixed one and i remember going to the women one kind of grumpy and thinking oh where am i what is the segregation you know but it was the closest one to the male one so part of the family went to the male one and my daughter and i went to the female one and it was the most delightful experience ever the behavior was different the way you presented your body was different it was such
01:11:40
Speaker
And now I'm completely for it. And I wasn't. I was like, the cool girl, we can all be together. But actually, it is sometimes really important to just behave in a different way. And of course, there's a lot of desire. There's a lot of lesbians there. It's not about desire. It's more complex than that. And I love that she goes into that complexity. I think she's going to change a lot. Her mind's so young. I'm really curious to see where she's going.
01:12:07
Speaker
Looking at the essays and looking how much she's developed her thinking in these, you know, in the span of the essays, which I think is like five, six years or something like that, and imagining where she's going to go from there. And I really liked, you know, I mean, obviously we're talking about the piece as an Aria Dean piece, the video, which of course it is, but all of the artists that were involved in it as well. I mean, the
01:12:34
Speaker
the game software developers, the composer. I mean, it was just such a collaborative effort as well. All right. So this is a wrap, isn't it? We've come to the end of it. I think much more could have been said. But because she has so much written work, you know, I mean, it's it's she has visual stuff, but obviously a lot of written work and then
01:13:03
Speaker
I mean, a lot of she references a lot of other folks like George Bataille, you know, and Robert Morris, who is another huge influence of hers. So I felt like, you know, you're kind of getting to know her, but you're also spinning off into all these different directions, which was great. I mean, it was sort of feed that into the fertile mind. You know, it was
01:13:26
Speaker
It was good. I have a question to you. All this theory, did it affect your experience of the exhibition? That's a good question. I don't think it did. I had, I think, a profound experience at watching the film because of my own experiences and
01:13:45
Speaker
you know, just kind of turning off the, turning off my brain as it were, trying to figure it out and what it is and what she means, what she's trying to do with it. But I don't know if it, maybe if I went back, maybe if I went back and saw the video again, it would be, it would inform a different experience. But I think because I saw it before all of that and I had quite a, you know, I had an experience in and of itself
01:14:16
Speaker
without all of the theory. I'm not sure it changes that experience. I think people are a bit weary of artists who are theorists as well. You write, theorize. And I think that's the strong point of her work is that the theory is the theory, the writing is the writing, and the experience of the artwork is the experience of the artwork. And she produces
01:14:43
Speaker
these experiences that are separate from her writing. If you haven't read her thoughts on materialism versus symbolism, all of those things, you still have an incredible experience that is not too far away from where she places and positions herself. So it's an effective artistic creative work
01:15:08
Speaker
that will not be explained by whatever you read from her and therefore resolved. So we've come to the end of our episode and our next episode is going to be focusing on the solo show of Zaynab Saleh at the Tate Britain. The exhibition is open until the 23rd of June, so you have a lot of time to visit it still.
01:15:32
Speaker
Leave us a review. We have a couple, but maybe more would be of use. You know, that helps. You know, believe it or not, it really helps to support the podcast. And, you know, this season will be over at the end of July, but we will come back in September with season two. So that also depends on you. Leave us a review or at least rate us, of course, five stars minimum. You know, you can go up to six if you want.
01:16:01
Speaker
But yeah, just support us. That really means a lot to us. Alright. Thank you. Thanks Joanna. Have a great week and see you next time. See you next time Emily. Always a pleasure. Take care. Bye bye.