The way I see it
Readers of this blog will know that my mother is an avid listener to BBC Radio and that I, thanks to her frequent thoughtful recommendations, often find unexpected programmes that excite me, variously on art, history, science and material culture.
A recent suggestion from Radio 3 has proved particularly inspiring. ‘The Way I See it’ written and presented by Alastair Sooke is a 30-part series celebrating the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In each episode he talks to a well-known creative mind about their favourite work from the collection, ranging from MOMA’s director to architects, chefs, musicians, astronomers and more.
The format of a short 15-minute episode discussing an object or work of art has become popular on the radio since Radio 4’s landmark series with the BBC ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ (and not forgetting our own recent Science Museum series). I really enjoy the requirement that it puts on the presenters to think carefully about how to describe and evoke an object for listeners who can’t see it. 'The Way I See it' has varied in its success on that front but has surprised me in the range of ways that it has engaged with questions around art and science that I often think about.
The very first episode featured scientist Janna Levin discussing Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, painted in 1889. As well as suggesting how the height and brightness of the various stars in Van Gogh’s sky shows that one is Venus, Levin talked about the painting as the artist’s particular construction of our sky. That might seem obvious as it’s such a visually-compelling painting by an artist who we know to have been suffering from poor mental health at the time. Yet, Levin compared it, tellingly, to the recent widely-reported ‘first image’ of a black hole taken by astronomers. These are also carefully constructed from the data of many telescopes, analysed and coloured. Artists and scientists are employing the same subjectivity and creativity in picturing the sky.
Another episode that really struck me showcased the jazz musician Jason Moran talking about Piet Morandi’s Broadway Boogie Woogie from 1942-3. Moran enthused beautifully about how the painting is not just evoking a period of revolutionary music, but is itself a piece of musical score, which he went on to ‘read’, improvising off of the lines and blocks of colour. He gave a compelling sense that this abstract art is responding to the careful, diagrammatic conventions of other creative forms.
In other examples Es Devlin spoke passionately about Felix Gonzales-Torres’s 1991 piece Untitled (Perfect) Lovers, a conceptual piece in which two ordinary clocks from a hardware store are set running at the same time and then slowly become out of sync. Devlin conjured how such contemporary art can make emotional messages with ordinary things, in this case responding to the death of Gonzales-Torres’s partner at a time when the death of gay men from AIDS complications was still a taboo subject. I also enjoyed architect Liz Diller on Marcel Duchamp’s Network of Stoppages and the artist’s response to scientific standardisation.
There are many more episodes to which I’ve yet to listen, which will no doubt draw on many more aspects of art dialogues that I think about often, and which are of course the mark of a great collection like MOMA, as well as a great listen for the holidays ...