Julie Mehretu in conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson

[Music] hi good afternoon I'm Julia Brian Wilson I am the Doris and Clarence mallow professor of modern and contemporary art at UC Berkeley and also the director of the arts Research Center which is hosting this event tonight I want to thank our co-sponsors which include the department of art practice the Center for the study of sexual cultures and the Center for the Study of race and gender I also want to acknowledge that this event and every event that happened takes place on the UC Berkeley campus happens on the unceded territory of the Aloni peoples and to pay respectful tribute to this land as their ancestral home I have a few announcements to make before I introduce our esteemed guests tonight one of which is that on November 8th which is a Friday from 4 to 6 the curator Mark Godfrey will be in conversation with Kenyatta Hinkle who's an art practice professor here at Berkeley talking about the show soul of a nation which opens I think that next day at the Legion of Honor so that will be at the David Brower Center close to Bart from 4:00 to 6:00 I also want to say that the Arts Research Center is starting an initiative called poetry in the census there's cards that look like this that tell you a little bit about it there's a fellowship program that will begin in January 4 to Berkeley professors to Berkeley grad students to Berkeley undergrads and to local poets to convene over the course of the year and think the through together the theme of the year which is emergency so if you're someone who has a poetic frame of mind you know or wants to think about poetry and conversation with a really interestingly horizontal group of people that is to say kind of you know people from not just from campus but also from the community and think about especially poetry in times of crisis it might be a good opportunity for you I think that was all my oh yes and I also want to give a very heartfelt thanks to my staff at the arts Research Center Lauren Pierson and Laurie McPhee and also to the people at ETS tonight for their technical assistance thank you so we're here of course to hear from the world renowned painter Julie Moretz ooh Julie who lives and works New York City was born in Ethiopia in 1970 her bachelor's degree is from Kalamazoo College and her Masters of Fine Arts which she received with honors is from the Rhode Island School of Design she's the recipient of many awards including the American art award granted by the Whitney Museum and a MacArthur Genius award both from 2005 she's also received the Berlin prize and the u.s. Department of State Medal of Arts award in 2015 her work is currently on view at the Venice Biennial and her curatorial selections are on display at the Guggenheim as part of their artistic license show now on view and I want to also say that Paul Chan another one of the artists whose work is who has gone deep into the Guggenheim collection and curated a salt a selection will be the UNA lecture next week on Tuesday and Wednesday so just look out for that it's especially nice to have Julie back in the Bay Area because as most of you know in 2017 SFMOMA unveiled her major Commission of site-specific works which are in my opinion a clear highlight of their new building she is visiting us from LA where she's in the midst of installing her mid-career retrospective which opens in about a week I think the press preview is next Wednesday at LACMA and we'll travel to the Whitney and she came up specifically to have this conversation so we're truly very grateful in the midst of this really busy time so please join me in welcoming Julie [Applause] thank you thank you for all coming out on such a beautiful night can everyone hear us here I want to quickly say first because things have started I forgot to push play that what we're looking at is a selection of images that Julie has pulled together that range from her own work to reference images historical paintings things that inspire her news images that she works from and it's a really eclectic mix and they're not captioned so in a way we're just gonna let those sort of flow over on top of this conversation and we might refer to some of them but we might not and the first image that you saw was a david hammons peace pray for america from 1969 and Julie thought that would be an interesting place to kick off the conversation as a as an artist that she's long been kind of in conceptual dialogue with ya but I wanted to start by asking you because here you are in the midst of installing how does it how are you approaching the idea of the mid career retrospective both maybe artistically but also emotionally psychologically you know this kind of stock taking it's the most I think Helen Molesworth would and I were in the studio the other day talking she used to be a curator of MOCA in Los Angeles and she brought can you hear me can everyone hear me she brought the the Kerry James Marshall show she was one of the big curators of the retrospective that started at the Met Metropolitan and traveled through and she'd been working with him for a long time but when we talked about like installing this she said I don't think there's another moment when you know in other careers that you're asked to kind of take stock of what you've done and I think maybe that happens when you put together the anthology of poetry but a lot of times even a publisher does that when you're now no longer alive or so this this comes from that tradition and I actually think it's not the right form for a lot of artists I think it works for painters because that's in a sense of traditional media media and it works in this way that we have an understanding of trying to make sense of things but it also really in a very intense way limits what that what the possibilities are and how painting evolves how things involved how creative thought moved and so it's super complicated and I mean it's a really I feel like it's a incredible moment if it happens once in a lifetime it's an incredible moment if it happens more than once it's like really rare thing but I think that it's it's a very in a very complicated and uncanny thing to try to take stock of your work that you've done over a life and make a story out of it and it works in many ways contradictory to the way the creative practice and creative process works well do you are you enjoying that yes and tell me how is it going I wanted to hear about the emotional part so it's difficult okay no it is but you're in the middle of is no luminary narrate the complications I mean emotionally it's like this amazing thing because you put I've worked on this work since I was and I don't know very young and I have work in the show that starts from graduate school when I was in school just just just coming into the language that I started to invent and I think what wouldn't you do like I've done shows we have done participated in big group shows like the Venice being on that were documented in 2012 or the Whitney Biennial in 2004 and you make you know that's a heat there's a lot of pressure around an exhibition like that and you put you put a lot of work and thought into what you're into a project and then it's in this context and dialogue sometimes in a conversation that really makes sense and other times in a really complicated relationship but a lot of times for painting it puts painting because it's a flat image almost as a background like a video or performance piece or sculpture takes space in a different way than painting does and this is one of the challenges with painting of it and so a lot of times in those contexts it almost feels like the work it really fights to have a space and in this context there was this beautiful moment where I realized that these paintings like they support each other in this kind of context so when you're putting the show to install in the show and you they as they start getting putting getting you got are going up on the wall and it's a very slow process with me because we've research a lot of the very big paintings there's this you start seeing them hold each other like support each other and there's this very intense they that some came work came into the world with before others and others be existed when the others didn't and you know so there's this really weird relationship between them also but is it and it's a relationship that you feel like it's just now emerging one that wasn't necessarily evident to you until this hang yeah yeah and they just they kind of could they kind of conceptually or like they they could support each other in a very like or like erratic way like not in a it's not in a sense that we understand like it's not how a sibling props another sibling it's more it works differently than that it's this other it's this other sensibility in that sense well let me read you something from the press release but I want to talk to you about so this is a little blurb about the LACMA show it covers over two decades of her examination of history colonialism capitalism geopolitics war Global uprising diaspora and displacement those are big words through the artistic strategies of abstraction architecture landscape movement and most recently figuration so I mean I guess it's really interesting to hear you talk about your work your paintings in the context of like a Venice or a Documenta as sometimes we see because of its medium receding to the background but all of those words are so I mean they're always ever-present I guess but they feel very present in fall of 2019 and so to see your work kind of take center stage once again I mean it just feels like you're painting is really at the is it's I think they're it's been for drownded the urgencies that you have long been grappling with you know feel kind of sharper than ever so it's a I think you mentioned the kind of uncanny feeling of the retrospective for you but I think there's also it feels a little uncanny and it's timing happening right now well it's like it's it's these are like these are all these these have always been very intense I mean you could that you could add many more words to that list that inform and and impact and effect how any of us negotiate the worlds around us and how we build and make and think about whatever we're involved in and yet at this moment I think especially with the way that we are dealing with media and social media and as a component of that but just in general how we're dealing with the way information is spreading and how we listen to information read information and process information we have this we image --is and words and concepts and phrases are weaponized in a different way so we're at this moment where you have this very different kind of kind of battle between these things but I think like all of them like go back to this this place where you're kind of extracting these concepts from there from from whatever historical past or place and you're trying to then process them and get them into a possible new future so they can be like like if you composite them as something else there's a way to think and find a break inside of this you're talking about some of your source images or yeah just the any of our words its concept like this idea of like being able to use these sources that inform and impact how like so basically as an artist you're I'm negotiating how who I am in this world and then how what I try to invent and make is about relate is it in a way negotiation of that but it's a way of then trying to invent some other things some other Futurity in that maybe we can just to clarify or to explain expand you know explicate a little bit more of your process for these very recent works kind of sense 2017 which are drawing images from social media news images of really difficult migration detention centers the election of higher bolson ro forest fires riots uprisings clashes inauguration of Trump etc etc and that those become this kind of under painting you know that ghosts the final image but is by no means legible but in what you do on top of it and I guess I have it I guess so that's just to explain a little bit of what we're looking at here you know images that are familiar probably to most of us so I guess one question I have for you is you know how much are you thinking about the hope of the possible future or the invention of the new language when you're grappling with some of these really difficult images and you are abstracting them you know far away from their initial legibility I really rarely think about hope outside of like Barack Obama who I adore but I really don't think like in terms of exactly that word doesn't come up but I do think about I'm not pessimistic at the same time and I think that I think that actually anyone who's had to negotiate race culture in like ID your place in and actually this work this goes for anybody having to negotiate their identity within a context that has prescriptive ideas of who you are and that comes for anybody in this country especially but anywhere in the world we we are dealing with these ideations around who you are and I think that we're constantly negotiating that space and and how can how there's many preconceptions or many kind of preconditions of what of what that reads as or what the possibilities are and meanwhile there's like a million dividual experience the individual experience is really something that can't be individuated in that way it's a really abstract complicated contradictory negotiation constantly of who you are and how you are and so I think like well you know I use many many at the beginning it was a mark it was a mark on a piece of paper to try and negotiate what what individual agency could be and how it could meet how it could operate and try to think about that metaphorically and then it became negotiating that within architectural and social space and thinking about the history of the built environment as of thinking around space and time and and then it really like that became something where I became really knowledgeable of that and that wasn't so interesting in the same way or felt so and I became much more interested in the kind of abstract possibilities that are embedded inside of a lot of these images that inform me and inform their social context I'm living in but I became interested in the blur in the in the kind of compressed this language inside of those and for me like I think part of that is like how do you use me how like how am I thinking differently in a possible different future with this media and a lot of them meet like I used to cut the paper the images out of the newspaper when when the newspaper was black and white and then when the newspaper became these color images that changed and then it all became something that you could get on your phone around there and so media has changed so rapidly from when I started working that the way that I've processed it and think about it and then getting negotiate that has really shifted and in many ways like I feel like I go the reason that I blur a lot of the photographs now like I take a photograph of say an event like these California the wildfires from here in 2018 just north of here and I took one image and I that image I blurred it and that became a point of departure for this painting but my interest in the blur is only to absolute is to kind of capture the light the time the color this there's one kind of DNA of that moment in that image as one an element of this double helix that makes up the complex kind of image that becomes the painting which is not an image that's readable or something that you can decipher in a way but is this image that is visceral and that it shifts how you then kind of what you see in that and it's so it's really it has all these other layers in that and that layer is this experiencial layer that hopefully offers something else right yeah and that's something I don't mean to be speaking so abstractly but I think it's abstract what in its nest I mean so your answer which was dense and rich makes me think of a lot of different things including glee songs idea of the right to opacity you know and the strategic use of the blur it makes me think of your indebtedness often and that often comes out in your titles to the black radical aesthetic traditions of jazz and improvisation but I also I am curious oh we can talk about both of those things maybe but I also am really curious about like when you're in the space of the studio like you're literally engaged in the act of mark making you have to make decisions about where go what goes where color to choose etc etc are you thinking about like a word like geopolitics no you know no I'm in the studio and I'm listening to something I listen to all kinds of things whether it's news podcast music audiobook what a film like it really depends and I and that and a big part of that process is is working intuitively so and I think of intuition it's a it's a really important sense in creative practice and for any creative practice and it's so in the way it's about speaking before you think it's about trying to process and you make something without the thought process that informs that and then there's a process of kind of Jen then trying to dig through that and understand that further so I think that you know so for me the process of the studio brought my first step in the studio is really to get as lost as I can from myself this kind of disembodied way of making but it's not as if the hand is working like two a day on one thing and then and you know then it's in a very informed intuitive way of making and so the idea is that that process kind of shocks and alerts me like it teaches me in otherwise it's like and there are days that that happens in days that it doesn't and every day actually leads usually I work and and you know you're spinning wheels a lot like so where the invention happens is where there's a step mm-hmm Agnes Martin talked about that really beautifully and you'd think that you you don't see those kind of evidence steps so clearly in her in her pieces because it's a grid and then the grid maybe breaks but yeah it's tiny wobble yeah a little and but it was always I mean she would make work and if she wouldn't show it or put it out there if she didn't feel like it had that step right this other kind of invention to herself yeah to this kind of self-realization in an understanding of something and that's I think that that's like the driving force of maybe in the process I mean it wasn't I mean obviously your work is about geopolitics I just was wondering about and you know in the moment you know in the moment of kind of aesthetic decision-making how and but I you don't even think when you think of geopolitics I don't think I think that's such an enormous concept that it's more like to me like something will happen and I won't even be so conscious how intensely that story I listen to or whatever just happened how you know and something else that you know something I ate or whatever I listen to a song or and these things start to happen but you like it's it's as if there's this kind of you know like with a Ouija board how you like things start there's this way of like putting information together and there's really this space where there's all these symbols and history and these words in this past and this kind of knowledge then that's about mining that like really mining that only to like like something else comes together that you're kind of you kind of teach yourself in this through this process of really letting go and to me that that becomes this image or invention that I'm really interested in like what is possible in abstraction what is possible in making a painting right now why be involved in that why do I go to the studio every day to to be engaged in this kind of practice it's not only to put a painting on the wall but it's I mean why do I travel to whatever place to see one painting and you and I spend two hours in front of it like weird is that weird where is that dialog coming from and how complicated and contradictory up is that dialog because it is it's a it's a it's a it's it's a privilege and it's an intense but it's an intense necessity to socially well one of the things you said one of the things you have said to me in the past the past of about 20 minutes ago was we should talk about the fact that there's a lot of painting right now it's like a moment where there's a lot of painting and so maybe and they were stuck on this this is pause oh but it's a good moment actually to maybe talk about your the Guggenheim selection that you cold from going deep into their collection and how you did make a statement you know you had the kind of your curatorial statement was actually about the possibilities of abstraction in a time of great upheaval and your period izing not around World War two and then we have a but there's a lot of kind of really canonical images some of them painting some of them not you know where artists are really grappling with world histories in paint and then other materials so I'd love to hear you talk about how that Guggenheim process yeah I mean just so you know how you think the Guggenheim is a very complicated place because it has this beautiful building its in its iconic and it's important and it's one perfect in so many ways and yet it's filled with massive problem problematic history it's it's embedded in that and it's an its this in its collection really highlights that it hardly has from before 1980 any artists of color like from from the world and the few artists that it does have but I mean I think they're the artists of African descent are even more my neighbor they but it but there are so few and so at the beginning my intention was like I love going to that museum I've loved it from when I first moved to New York I've always loved it from when I was when I would visit New York when I was young and it informed me immensely like a lot of the type of abstraction that they were showing really like what they were built a collection around originally informed me and but I didn't want it I wanted to look at everything else that they had and I went through the entire archive like four times to actually try and find work and then I went to see all the work it at in the various storage holdings and a lot of that work that I thought could be interesting and images where you look at them at poster size and they're really not there they were a lot of bad work and there's tons of work in storage that's the other thing this is shocking as someone who's making because you just realize like it's just gonna get put away and and that's a kind of another challenge for the future of museums I think in in the big picture but sharing that somehow but I think that what what what I was interested in then is what images when I was going through the stacks because these images weren't working and trying to like retell the story from a different perspective that would have been a blank ramp and I didn't want to do that but so what I ended up trying to do then is what works in this are like what do i what am i mostly responding to and why and so one of the first ones was the big bacon triptych I was stunned by your selection of bacon francis bacon man yeah and was that really pulled me and my youngest son when i took them to the museum music you chose that yeah and he gave me the most disgusting faces horrified by that selection that and the Gustin he's like why we think those two things he hated we need to let's linger on those i want to hear about that well it's the only gust in heaven it's not it mean it's you know but he was disgusted by so what was the does where with the disgust couldn't understand why you would choose a this thing of these trees and a target like that was for him but for the for the bacon he was disgusted in the image i mean he couldn't look at it he walked away so difficult it's really difficult but to me like my interest and I'm huge I'm really interested in bacon was the kind of the the what what is happening to the disembodied kind of fractured being and this and you know there's an image here of Picasso Picasso Picasso s Guernica but you don't have like that that that became this kind of very they were working not that far apart from each other in time and there's this engagement with like whether subliminally or not there was this engagement with the colonial kind of just like internal colonial kind of problematics of being that and being Francis Bacon and to me what happens in the in the subconscious and what happens in what he's trying to negotiate in terms of not just the subconscious but in terms of the kind of the aspects of the figure and yeah I mean super bodily bodily and broken yeah and and and you know Harvard apart and dismantled and in a way was that clear we're and this very social activist kind of project in that and it was it he's a painter that kind that really looked at his myself as a colonial colonial subject himself as well and I was really interested in that and I'm bacon moves me all the time like I'm super interested in the paintings of Velazquez and he painted and repainted and looked at those paintings in great detail and the structure of those paintings and there's a certain kind of visceral kind of experience that happens where you understand time differently that happens in front of a bacon so for me I've I've looked at those paintings all coming and so but then I was like how do I build a narrative around these what I'm interested in right here and you had David Hammett what a very recent acquisition yeah Hammond's yeah a recent acquisition thank God they got yes right we pushed for some others and the singer new goodies they got I think so those were important but I think that these like social action like I think we like go back to like really like rethink this history how what does this history mean in terms of way that I'm thinking about that history and if I think of one of the most important modern moments being the decolonization of two-thirds of the world or to more than two-thirds of the world then that moment and how artists were thinking responding mimicking copying participating within that and how little that's been talked about it was like essential to the way that I started to think about what I was interested in I know it's fascinating to me to put bacon at the center of that you know it's just counterintuitive I guess why was you're an art historian yeah I mean there hasn't been a really great yet not that Ouija board thing going on well yeah I actually did want to ask you about if you know your relationship to maybe art criticism art theory or history like are do you read are you someone who read well do you read your own reviews do you read No why do I do I agree teen fiction a lot more but but no I mean yes yes uh-huh but I but for me the way that I approached this was really about how I approached more like how I make in terms of this election but certainly yeah I mean it was I thought I wasn't I wasn't I was I couldn't approach it wearing a different hat because that's not who I am and there are artists who write and who are involved with criticism in a really different way and while I do read that and usually what I read is what I'm most interested in what's informing how I'm thinking around making so I'll read Fred Moton or correlation in a way when you know in a moment then were you but they're you know this but there's this is this is a very different kind of informative like I'm looking for language usually for an experience that I'm engaged in and and and that's different for when I was approached this putting together this work right right I mean I think bacon what wouldn't of the things that is really striking about bacon is precisely the attention to you know this flayed body and to this masculinity in crisis I think that and and the Hammonds piece which is the another version of the another image like to me it's about how do you design this flayed body it usually always becomes a different type of symbol but then he also has his hands over his eyes but if you look at that image closely a third eye appears so there are these two senses of knowing that also happens with other Hammond's that's in the piece that has the puzzle pieces and it's his mouth and he's kind of itches mouth in his chest and that becomes almost like this mask image but when you look at it closely again the mouth becomes a third eye and so there's this they're really amazingly powerful works every day like I live with that other hand like I know we know that's mine and you might go to it's in your house like yeah and I go to I look at that and I go to the studio every day thinking if I can do like that's not like this marker for me about how much reverberation an actual piece of paper or mark on a piece of paper or like an actual object can have and that's like I think what this endeavor is about like yeah well let me since you don't read reviews very often I don't tell you well no I will say though because it brings us to this question of abstraction versus abstracting yeah which i think is important for your work and also for bacon and ham it I mean for all these people that are touchstones for you which is that it was not a and you didn't have anything to do with those so I can tell you that the installation in Venice of your work of course people love your work but there were a lot of questions about the choice of putting your work alongside someone like Henry Taylor who is a representational painter also African American painter working with kind of questions of black portraiture and they were hung side by side in a bit a room that had other things going George Kondo yeah exactly yeah so there other things going on but people were sort of like what is this room all about supposed to be about just like painting here it is and I wanted to hear your thoughts about that about that constellation because to me it raised really interesting questions about you know all the many directions that kind of like black painting has taken right taking in this moment yeah I think people found that really difficult like the whole Ralph's installation of the yeah higher bada yeah because it was mostly when you usually have like in Venice and I've only been to I don't know five being all the installations they they're usually each artist has his own of room space so in this installation Ralph or Gulf basically took all the artists and mixed it up it was an enormous group show so you had different rooms where some artists like you'd have a group a painter like Nicole Eisenman on one wall and you'd have a sculpture by whoever else I can't recall right this now and then you had somebody else on the other wall and so you had these kind of dialogues between artists and these zones and in our room he wanted to do the same thing we want to put me on one wall Jorge condo on another wall and Henry Taylor and then Arabic Rami in and then who is the sculpture Jimmy Durham in the same room and my I proposed to all the artists if you're gonna put us in the same space like let's hang this like an intentionally group shot like let's put this work in conversation with one another which it problematizes it even further so for me it was it that was really difficult for a lot of people like the they felt like it was undermining of each other's work to have this but if you're gonna put us in the same space it's not an Art Fair where you're going to put one thing on one wall in one thing on and it's in and I think that there's this moment of the we're living in the this really uncertain moment where there's so much that people can't have they don't have the language for to understand socially politically aesthetically that that to me that's really interesting that it became this space where that same kind of blurring and complication and contradictions took place in the installation I was like excited by that if you're going to do this and I didn't feel that Henry Taylor's paintings were a challenge to how one could interact or see my paintings in fact I thought they were interesting kind of thing dynamics it would have cried I thought they really I thought it was a really successful room yeah I did too and I felt like Mary Barra me and sculptures in the middle look like they participated in the making of the like it was a very animated room and there is a slide in here I think of the installation yeah so but they're just supposed to enter you're like cut subconscious and then affect how you leave the room we don't go so I mean I guess one question people had about that or you know because some people were confused by the by the arrangement was it was to me based on a kind of misunderstanding of your work which is to say the the feeling that your work is somewhat evacuated of physicality that it really you know me my body yeah that there is kind of note you know and I think that people like because I know and your early work was so much about mapping you know it did have all of these references to kind of mapping to kind of bird's-eye view to but even then the park was a buddy I always I always go for us yeah but so I want to hear you say more about you know respond to that I mean suggestion so the body was hidden individual marks it was a they were about individual account is mark could affect change on this piece of paper like if all the marks working went this way and one mark behave differently you saw that mark effect how all these other marks would then behave especially if they had to follow one another or little rules I would set up when I was working and thinking and drawing and then the more that this language evolved and the more that I started to work within the architectural you can't think about the architectural and not the body I mean it's not like this stuff happens but like its bodies moving through space I mean that's what how we interact and work within our built environment and and it's very intentionally built in a particular way and there's all kinds of complex narratives and histories as to why this the spaces are built the way they are when the way we interact with them and how we then impact them and shift them and that's kind of always been a foreground of what I've been interested in and negotiating understanding or speculating about and my work and I think eventually as I left the architectural language behind then the body or the disembodied parts and the way that I started to work how they started to appear more and more in the work I mean they started to appear kind of just in the way that they were always suggested yeah bike because abstraction does that and then I started to push that even further within the blurred photograph you would blur a photograph and it would look like some part of this crucifixion to you know some other some other type of form and then from within that these other narratives kind of emerge from that landscape or from that scape and so for me that the the disembodied parts and these the different the way that there was different marks engage with one another I think of them almost like visual neologisms like the neologism comes about when the language unit is at hand what is it you know it's an utterance it's an invention of a word it's like the new creation of something and when there when language is not enough that's when you invent something else and usually it's like communities and people and culture and ways of living that we exist outside of what is the traditional normalized idea on that or what is parked you know what as part of the systems of power or parts of hegemony all that gets challenged by and language is one of the first ways that that's articulated and kind of concrete and you know made concrete and so I think that for me like you're none of us are painting or inventing this language from without thinking of two thousand to forty thousand years of history of painting and making marks sixty thousand goes back and so there's all of that history that we're working within but all of those parts so a particular arc thing can look like a Hammonds handprint but it can look like a 5,000 year old cave print and again can then can in addition to that can move into another you know fill Gustin nose to a really specific kind of bacon torn body parts I was interested in that and how do you take those parts of a of a mark that we associate and understand visually as being that and then be able to like redo it with my mark and that becomes this very other like how does that Pierce an invent then this other space of thinking through mm-hm you know yeah I know I mean I'm thinking of the title one of your titles for one of the more recent paintings which is flow Mila after n s which is the reference to a Nina Simone song and flow Mila is the entire those are the lyrics it is this kind of you know invention of a new system of utterance and understanding because and what it's the story is really carried along in the song my tone you know by boys boys by all that you know the grain of the voice but it's fully abstract fully abstract but yet full of meaning I mean but also of course full of abstraction only is which is which is really you know we need to any in that room you know you talk about abstraction and representational thing and there are so many elements like if you look at Poussin we say is one of the most like rigorously representational painters but one of the most abstract painters at the same time and the way that color and shape work and prints and can't be ignored as the most flat kind of rendition of space in a particular way as well as being one of the most and the same you could say about david hammons or when Henry Taylor's pain if you're thinking about that and I think at the same time when you're looking at my abstract paintings in that room there are ways there are no way that you cannot avoid pulling out the different body parts and the kind of violence that is that occurs in those as well as these kind of the jokes and the possibility of something else that were just from we own them I mean sometimes to me they're they're kind of like lacerations on the picture play and sometimes it's suturing together you know sometimes it's like mascara brush work I mean there's so many I think you're mark making it so you have such a varied vocabulary for it you know that the reference is kind of a crew you know they accrue and they accrue but I want to talk to you a little bit about texture or whether or just to Adam I don't think and I think this is really important that you have to know that history to really respond viscerally to the painting so I don't think that you have to understand the narrative and the compassion of st. Matthew or and they're like martyrdom of Saint Matthew the Caravaggio painting to really be moved by that painting and I think that's something that's really important to understand also in terms of how the because the intention of these paintings is not what's essential it's how the paintings live and participate in effect the human being that engages them and encounters them and participates with them or the tree or whatever you know like that there is this engagement that happens that is informed by your your experience like we are all beings within a very visual you know symbolic world we exist in this and within these semiotic slike it's part of what how we engage and understand who we are and what we are and so these aren't something that exists outside of that but they're very much informed by very particular things but they also have this have invent something else there's this other kind of leveling place and I don't like to think of the world you Universal because that's not what I'm talking about because it's very these are made specifically from a very particular cultural place but at the same time I think that would you would you use the word beauty I think sometimes I think they're not I think there's some ones that are not very beautiful at all I think I'm more interested in in the kind of visceral kind of it happens when you experience a work and it changes how I think and the and I think part of it is also the dis is the disorientation then I think that's a big part of the effect of these is feeling like you strut the struggle to understand in a way you know and then the abandon when you realize that that understanding will never quite come you know yeah and I think yourself over to the field you know to the field of the painting yeah and I think that you have like there's there will be moments where you find moments of yourself and you will every human being I've spoken to who looks at these paintings has will see different things and sometimes they see things that I see and sometimes they see things that I've never seen but there's usually this this aspect of something it's in the changes and but they're time-based like if you look at a painting for one minute you don't see the painting if you look at a film for one minute you know you haven't seen the film because you know you have to go from the beginning to the end of the film and then to painting you don't have that time limit so we're not like you have to look at this painting for ten minutes but you can't really see a painting in one minute or two minutes or three minutes there are time based experiences and through the experience of looking at them they change and you change like in that experience can I say something took about two tech cuz I want to talk to pressure you or not press you but yeah go ahead elaborate I want you to be I want you to elaborate more about texture especially of the in these recent works because I think part of what is so interesting about them and also in a way challenging is their smoothness you know the kind of super the play with flatness because it's very hard that you can't this is such a distortion obviously to see these slides they're very very very smooth and the space that they seem to suggest is very shallow you know I mean there is there is there is a sense of kind of like depth obviously but in terms of the actual like feeling of tactility there they've been buffed you know they've been sanded I mean you work really hard actually to get that a marks --less surface yeah and I think in some of the earlier works texture was a way you know the variegation of texture was a way in kind like your eye would catch on something and that would help you linger and that would help you distinguish between different kind of pressures of the you know of how you were of the kind of the labor that goes into these and now that labor is somewhat mysterious it's yeah because of the last because I think of it all as a simulacra right like it is this thing that is this you know you're the kind of experience with the painting is that it's this image that's on this rectangle if it's an enormous rectangle like the paintings here at the museum or if they're small or you know you're this you're this individual looking at this thing whether it's as big as you were you know it's small and in that there's this projection of something but there's also this searching and mining for something visually and that it's not directing you in terms of what it is they're mean it used to more when these you could say here's a window and I know that's a door and I know that's a walk past passage way but when the paintings don't have that they become these kind and they and in the internal space of the painting spatially is blurred they become this haze and there's a haze you can't really negotiate space you negotiate depth you can see that things fall into one another come out from it one another it feels sometimes like something's emerging like a spectral kind of emergence is taking place or you're witness something you've just lost something but it is this this this kind of very simulacra makind of like space of like the submits like i think of it as the way you can almost like fred mote and one time talked about mayonnaise you know like mayonnaise is this kind of it said i only it's like between a liquid and a anti solid it's this kind of in-between weird like stage that is sublimely like you can't it's intangible there's an under its undone j'en see yeah thank you you know you yeah it's something like something exists yeah so in a way I feel like when I'm looking at them because you've worked because just to emphasize that you have worked you have labored hard to make them to erase the traces of the labor you know in some ways and also the use of so it looks like so it's like you're seeing in you're seeing it and you're seeing into it and it's just very there's a sense of location or uncertainty about how deep it really goes yeah meaning the pain but that uncertainty and dislocation is what I'm like those that like I'm interested in the aesthetics of that sure like yeah that's this that's that and the and the more I think the earlier paintings when I was really interested in trying to negotiate a very different picture so 1999-2000 we were living in a really really different world before 9/11 before like the end of all like American what is it possibility of like it's just kind of positive Global global global eyes kind of Futurity like that shifted post 9/11 and that cut a different American projection of how think having world dynamics evolved from that point as this country in this in this in its role as a superpower and I think that like what I was interested in then about this connectivity and what was happening in this kind of euphoric kind of pop you know a different perspective of what was being projected or speculated that shifted after after 2001 and I think and I think you know like what then what has happened now post the last you know a couple years we've seen a very very different shift of something else and and I think you know globalization and many other things have led into this situation but I think that what I'm interested in negotiating is that it is that visceral space of that uncertainty and like how do we negotiate what are the aesthetics of uncertainty but what are also the ethics inside of the aesthetics of uncertainty well I think it's also really crucial that you your use of the airbrush yeah you know and which is a really like it's a pretty that's a really classed material its raced and gendered as all materials are but I mean it's super you know I'd love to see well for me is technically the best way to copy the photograph in paint to make it look like the blurred photograph we were I was outputting the photographs first with digital with inkjet really high high-end inkjet printers and the blur didn't I have the same like when it really works then the blur the the camera can't focus properly on the painting you have to put a piece of tape there focus on the tape to be able to take the photograph because digital cameras can't figure out what to focus on with the marks and with the blur dad that's a queer interesting yes it's like and and the eye does that in a very different way but we we're negotiating that space and these other type of ghosts come through so like in early photography when you when you've had you know and you you know even the what's-her-name the woman who contributed to the invention of the double helix or like the nun invention but the kind of what was her name what was her name yeah was that yeah yeah DNA with with the double helix she was the one who did the photographs the x-rays right so when she did that that was this that at that moment - you had this really kind of interesting even earlier than that interesting negotiation with photography and what what else could be what else could be realized about what we didn't understand sense wise and it wasn't just in the microscopic level with the x-rays but also in terms of these ideas of the photography of the occult and this in the spirit and that kind of the could you catch what was happening at with somebody's or or with the spirit coming out of them and what was left over what were the ghosts that were participating there's all these efforts at trying to actually capture that I mean usually it was it was what was interesting plays with light and time and space and there was no real science behind when she went so well it's and but this this form of photography didn't but I was really interested in what those photographs are beautiful and they there's something about socially what's going on and then what that brings up in terms of it's a mining of our collective history and the violence of that collective history and what's embedded and that's colonial sublime that I'm super interested in that comes up in the blurs well maybe and maybe it's not just mayonnaise you know but maybe it's like ectoplasm yeah you know like there is some and it is maybe like the veil between the known and the unknown or something but there's this piercing of like so in the projection of inventing something there's appear there's these holes within these layers and these gaps through every form of language whether writers have a lot of space because you can invent languages you invent characters then you push the form of writing into and there's in terms of the art history there have been these ideas around abstraction that particular forms of abstraction have been invented and then the conversation has been closed on what that has done which is the opposite of what is what really exists in the world I mean many of those forms of abstraction in that history moment just put out a great book right now that I highly recommend to anyone who has it doesn't have it called among others and it's darby english wrote an enormous text at the beginning of this book which talks about moments history and with blackness since 1929 until now and mabel wilson has another really great text in that book about architecture about shorter texts and much more manageable immediate but his text is super exacting and goes into the minutiae of this history from 1929 until now and and I think the rehang of oh my haven't seen it really is trying to deal with this history but I think as as as someone who's painting and working within that language and that history and has I've always been momenta inspired and moved by that language but I've also also felt a certain there's been these spaces and huge gaps in what that could be and so for me its its opacity was what drew me to it but it's also its capability and and possibility also is what drew me to it and so there's something super important and finding those gaps and fissures in within our cultural language and history and possibilities and then use those as possible vectors to project for something else for a different type of Futurity and different type of possibility is something like where you might be in a reinstalled MoMA important to you like is that I mean because I texted you once from inside of the gallery at the darkness the hood Museum in Dartmouth where they have really beautiful installation in their African galleries and you are in the African galleries you're not in the American galleries and it looks great looks amazing yeah and I thought it was really I thought it was a great so you know a really interesting career toriel choice that really worked yeah made it made a lot of sense with the other things that were hung there it's sweet it sounds right yeah is this something but I'm just curious I'm a nice ink MoMA's really who you're next to and I haven't seen it yeah I've seen some photos well just open like two days ago they have several paintings but the painting that they have the one that they choose to include right now is the painting that I made in 2003 and it was a very different picture and it was looking at that moment it was it's it's it's in the galleries looking at that moment from the early 90s into the mid 2000 and it was this moment of interconnectivity I mean when I was in grad school email was just beginning that's how like it mean I was 1996 who is it like it's everybody knows this but when you really maybe like go to a special lab yes okay it's just even when I took those photographs that become part of that painting I went to the top of this tower and in Istanbul and took pictures all the way around of this city and I painted all the rooftops that I couldn't locate in the photographs that became the background of that painting but those I mean you could get a zillion more rooftops now with cameras it's like very very different technology and time and space and and what happens in those paintings and in that time I'm curious to see how that but no I don't I actually to tell you the truth I don't spend that much time thinking about how the work is placed or you know or under I get that that becomes somewhat limiting and I'm sorry you guys keep getting stuck on it's not a bad thing to keep contemplating for sure so but the long and the short of it is you're pleasantly surprised when it makes when it's you know usually I look at old paintings and I have like a lot of it's it's it's more of a mining of myself like when I'm but I'm curious to see it I mean I mean here's a question I guess which is I mean a mid-career retrospective that's a major moment not only for you to take stock of your own work and career but sort of for the world also to kind of put you in proper histories you know to kind of reckon with the legacy you know a legacy that has is now somewhat well-established do you feel that the that have been generated around your work you know how do you I mean first of all do you track them do you feel like or do you feel like the story reeled the real story has yet to be told I know that Fred Moton for example contributed to this catalog I'm really excited to read that I don't think that I think that there's look the way that writers or critics or the art world wants to compartmentalize and understand there's a lot of problems in how that happens and and a lot of it like the art world is going through seismic shifts and changes and part of it is because it's so monetized but part of it's because it's so globalized and so you have many more participants and much more money in that and what that I mean art and money have always been like that's nothing new I mean this is from pre-colonial times like it took resources to invent I mean from early early you know that's what happened and so I don't like that's that's a different whole conversation that's a super rich and interesting conversation but what I think what you see happening in the war in in their world is although you have many many worlds and you have many many different types of practitioners and makers and participants in that and there's this there's a way of consuming and understanding and kind of encapsulating and packaging somebody that is a way for the amount of information that people are literally digesting daily it's a way to do that and I think you can't do that with with with works of art I mean you can't do that with one Caravaggio painting let alone like a whole artist and all their careers like they're it's impossible to try and like tight tie it up so neatly and so it so that's kind of the interesting long game like how wrong do you do people get that well I feel like there have been your central everyone acknowledges that your central to these very important interesting and complicated conversations around black abstraction you know I think it's been a little less which overlap with feminist abstraction and do overlap also with queer abstraction but those latter two categories have been somewhat drawn out yeah like - totally but I think that's also because there have been people writing about that in the same way and that it took certain people who made those who to say that whereas I actually think that in terms of the black radical tradition abstractions always been core has that been something that's been talked about in terms of our history and in terms of the course it's not until recently many of those artists were living in poverty or without without even though they had recognition or major contributors to movements in time I mean 9th Street women is a great example of heroic women important who invented and participated in the construction of a huge part of our history and visual history like Abstract Expressionism they invented this as if a word as a language as a form and have been erased from that and in terms of the canons like and so I think you're seeing a redressing of that history and a mining of that history and uh but it's not as if we haven't been participating in making and inventing and working through that so I think in the big big big picture a different narrative will emerge but I hope that I don't even understand that yes you know what I mean as well about my own work because even looking to be kind of boring if you felt like yeah everything you were doing you know everything you were doing totally and looking back at what I've made in the early 90s or the mid 90s it's so it's so instructed like it's been so instructive to put this together because it made me it shows you how much like how it's kind of another example of how it how into the intuitive sense no so much and like understands and it's about like actually not limiting that creative potential in in the individual rather than kind of trying to limit that further and and in essence that's like liberation that's like you know what I mean and that's like something else about where art can go but like to me that's something that's crucial and I think that's what you know Nina Simone was looking for in that cell totally well I think this is a good moment because we've been talking for about an hour so maybe open it up I know there's a lot of people in this room who are really excited that you're here and probably have questions oh boy yes please test test test test good clothes okay yeah um I was totally like noticing the image is in the back and they're so like they're totally like vivid and like awesome but I don't know when you take like something really charged you know and also kind of boil it down to like shape space and time and then it's put in a place like a museum or something do you ever fear of how they're digested or that there's something about it that becomes palatable or are you hoping that the violence is also digested when people are looking at it but I think you live in violence we live in violence daily and I don't think I mean these images that I'm showing are examples of media showing that violence but it's not it's not separate from the daily experience of that so I don't like as a creative like fit maker I'm working in a negotiation of that constantly and I think that that's like what informs how I'm the this is a way to like illustrate part of this archive that is as part of our social time in a way but that's not and that's part of this that this building like this room the history of this room is part of that and part of that history and that part of what informs how I think through and make from that so I don't ever think of making us something about boiling anything down like I think that that's like that's like when you're cooking food you know when you're boiling down like the ingredients to make and morph those into something else but I actually think like this is about like a negotiation through visual language and visual experience and and then fell physical feelings and experiences and ideas of who one is and trying to make sense of that into inventing a different kind of image and for me I'm interested in the history of the museum and that space for negotiating and presenting a different narrative and a different kind of image in that space do you know what I mean that's okay it's good that it's like [Music] this is a really amazing to hear your your your words and yours your forms and as an artist I was really lucky growing up to visit some of your early work and realizing that it was like sound and I was standing in front of your pieces there were two in a room and it felt like sound was collecting as opposed to even though I was seeing something so visual it actually was pointing to something beyond the visual and I'm wondering as an artist who works with phenomena in that way what was it like to work in that church in Harlem where you kind of had more space maybe than usual and what inspires you in terms of sound and the relationship to your work great I love that you had that experience I think of the paintings there I think they're very sonic experiences as well and some way more than others and part of the sonic experience of the blurred paintings I think is about this kind of like the way sound almost operates underwater where you can't really figure out what that is that you're listening to her what what register it is as opposed to like a really staccato beat but for me the church was an incredible incredible experience but also it's the strangest type of building to work in because everything in that building is like directed to convert to like a dress to make you address yourself and kind of go into yourself so while it feels like this super expansive space it absolutely isn't in a weird way and as much light as I had coming in the stained glass was gone and they had it was it felt very much like when I was done after a while working in there I was happy to be in a different space that had a view that I could see something else because it is architectural II really invented and intended to direct yourself into yourself and it's a it's even though it's enormous so it has this like metaphoric idea of like and I think really interestingly like when I was in the church I also went to some caves in Spain and it and I knew this before from having experience but it was so uncanny to feel that experience again in these caves in satsang dare Spain that you feel in the church when you really spend a you know I don't go to I didn't go to church as often as I spent that year working in that space but also I should say you know I had Jason Moran coming there regularly serenading me from the balcony while I worked I mean I wanted to know about the performance aspect of your work I saw in the images it looked as if there was a performance but also how you relate to performance in your work it's a good question so I think of the paintings as these markers of performances and a performative kind of space they're in there in that that that's how like it's you can't stand in front of them and experience them without thinking of how they were made and how fast some marks were made or how slow or how big those marks are or so they're trace of the body and the jet and the movement of that is apparent in the same way when you have Richard Serra tearing lead you there's no way to not feel that when you're experiencing those pieces so there is that the remnant of that and they're performative in terms of in the way performance kind of invents anew as it occurs and and that is very different when you experience that or when you experience a performance of sound then when you actually have a recording of it and you replay it and then it's but it's ephemeral that goes away it's like you hear it and then all you can do is kind of remember it but it's never the same as the experience of so there's this kind of the residual of that that keeps happening in cycles when I think in front of the paintings for me and but I've also been super interested in in working with performance artists and we I've had different type of performance events in front of the paintings whether it was the big painting that I made for mural for downtown and the Goldman Sachs building at 200 West Street when I had that in the Berlin of Berlin studio we had an opera that was performed in front of that painting with a composer who worked with me that he wrote the score based off of the painting Jason Moran worked with me for the Howell paintings that are here and hopefully one day that piece will come and he will perform that here in San Francisco he performed that in the church with the paintings with this right with the show now down at the Los Angeles kind of Museum we have like many different artists who are coming to then do something within the paintings and I'm always interested in how the painting into engages within that that form of making because performance art offers a very I mean I'm curious actually if you can actually speak about your show that you're curating in Sao Paulo and dancing and that because that's also has this interesting relation to I think what's afforded and aesthetics and politics and in terms of yeah I mean when were I mean it's something that we're deeply concerned about is not treating paintings like backdrops for moving bodies you know how to activate paintings in their own on their own terms as maybe crystallizing something about a dancer-ly language so I'm creating this show that will open in June that involves a lot of Latin American kinetic art especially by women where you know the sculpture is dancing or that's the proposition that we're engaging with or that the painting itself is the dancerly form right at stake so that it doesn't just become so kind of theatrical the theatrical and so when I saw this performance with Ralph lemon and oak we and who else it was at the Whitney there's I'm forgetting two other artists but it was this amazing performance that took place inside one of his exhibitions and when while they were doing this then what was occurring in their performance I thought of it was the space and the paintings and that's when I wanted that to be part of this conversation not necessarily in the paintings but has this context to articulate and it was it was it was kind of amazingly moving to have that experience where you actually see this thing happening in space that feels like in this what you called it very thin membrane of the mm-hmm I see other hands I find your work very musical and dynamic and I'm just wondering if you could speak at all of musicians or artists who have informed your work or your aesthetic when you were studying in school well I look I've looked at work my whole life and I look really seriously at at work I travel to look at paintings and certain artworks I have so I've been formed by a enormous number of artists I mean there are certain artists whose work was important to me when I was studying I can think of Matt Mulliken because of his kind of negotiation of trying to deal with world building and the individual and negotiating like meaning from that I think of Allan McCollum as another artist who was making at that time and then there were these are such surprising stones for yeah it's wonderful to hear you know how expansive your influences have been you know Matt Mulligan someone who deals with a kind of channeling almost you know but also this concept of like the individual in this kind of society of the spectacle like and and Alan we call him really an op turret almost a refusal to picture you know like like a negation but to me they were but because it's this kind of liberation of the negation that turns into a positive yeah and then musically have listened to me I'm a child of hip-hop I grew up with rap as like I mean I was very young when that music started that was the music that informed me from early that having grown up in Michigan being like informed early of that like new wave and early pop they punk and I was so all of this informed me you know drum and bass and electronic music and so I became very jazz I became like all of this became part of what informs how I think I'm working I mean it's a that's why there's so many images I think that's like what I chose tried to give you like a little bit of it a way in when you do these large paintings you know you have like Ferguson and keroro you sort of have the subject and things like that but we go to doing something small how do you sort of get away from all this multi sort of dimensional thing to a smaller work and what do you how do you can switch your mind and what makes you make the smaller works so the the smaller works are never small versions of the big works and they're never parts of the big works there are almost their own investigations if it's a drawing or a chain the way that I approach that is really different I mean all the work started in that gene when I was in school and then and then I start there's always this investigation and really like I what I said when I speak before I think like that's really a big part of trying to make like it's like you make the mark before you try to process what it is and there's many that you don't you edit and you you know don't work or but there's usually these really interesting lessons that take place in that and so for me this weather I mean I make the work based like based on what I'm trying to think about and engage with and and so if I don't make a painting the scale of Cairo anymore but when I did that it was for a particular investigation and when I'm working on small drawings it's usually to like push something in mark-making or what I'm working on monotypes that's to push something else and try to do something in this other slippery space I think it's like the way writers work with short stories small pieces and then essays and novels they're very different projects that take different amounts of time and that you think through things very differently your journals yeah hello you mentioned earlier when you were talking about putting together the retrospective the erratic connections between the different works and we've talked a lot about kind of like the things that have influenced you or we've been watching a quiet erratic ly connected slide show and I was wondering what for you is like the content of the connections between the works themselves or are you up the thing like the node that connects all of it oh yeah I was just curious about put that phrase and kind of when you think to putting together a retrospective how you think about the relationships between the different artworks themselves well that's a really forced project in a way like you you are these different individuals through cut through when you're in college or when you're in graduate school or when you're you know whatever as you move through life in the world and and there are really erratic changes that happen and how you reinvent yourself and think of yourself and understand yourself and negotiate that and I think that I think those kinds of things happen in the invention of these images and the invention of making paintings and so I think when you ask a novelist how are you going to tie together ten books like if you talk to Philip Roth there are certain investigations that Philip or Toni Morrison was really committed to and those are essential like there but you can't boil all her books down to to use your language all her work down to just that because each of those books or Colson whitehead they're so different Jasmine Ward they're like these amazing they're individual experiences that become that are really you know when you think about the intuitionist and you think about let's just remember oh yeah the underground even his newest book the Nichol boys like those are such hugely different works and investment but there's this there's this you know so I don't know like it's hard for me to give such clear language to that because then you give put these intense limits on what's possible in terms of what can what really is underneath that you know thank you for the wonderful images in this presentation the marks seem like you've put them down and you knew that mark was gonna stay or they're know is that every mark that stays there's about 40 that disappear so are you sketching or working now painting or is there any pre no no it happens in real time that's the performative side right like so but when I'm put a mark down if that mark looks too self-conscious to whatever to were derivative whatever like there's this constant editing constantly happening so I can put any mark down with anything airbrush spray paint paint my hand a towel and I can take it away pretty quickly and that happens for most of the marks that go down thank you maybe one or now also by the way not when I was younger every mark stayed yeah do we I see one hand there thank you so much um I just had a question as it relates to intuition so much of intuition has to do with feeling feeling one's way through the process and I was wondering we should you talked a lot about uncertainty and sort of dislocation but are there do you what are some of the spectrums of feelings that you experience as you're making how would you describe your your your feelings but I don't think of intuition as feeling like only like I think that's an aspect or a part of it but it's if that I think of intuition as a sense so if you think of taste as a sense you can say a lemon tastes sour and to somebody else you know they're these different levels of what that taste can be in these different resonances so I don't think of it I think intuition is a way of understanding and processing and under negotiating or researching and processing language and sampling and I think of as many of operating on many different levels but what I think happens intuitively is that you you there's a there's an aspect of knowledge and and understanding that that we don't have that doesn't work in the front of our of our minds where we're really interesting connections and interesting dynamics occur and I think that that's something that we don't really have a full understanding of but it's it's like super valuable and crucial and important into making and thinking and writing and researching and science and everything like I just think it's not really spoken about I mean I think it is actually but it's not I mean it's kind of categorized we have this very limited understanding of what that is but when I speak about working intuitively it's a very informative way of working but it's about accessing a space Maria Montessori called it the zone athletes call it something else when they're in the space where the tennis ball really slows down or whatever or whatever it's called it becomes really big or whatever it is different different people engage in that very differently musicians and how their fingers move there's a way that there's a sensibility and knowledge of how to do something that is not something that you can actually that we can quantify and speak about rationally in the same way that we can many other things and I think that's what I'm talking about working intuitively I'm talking about that sense maybe one more question if there is one or not okay one more I have a hand here first of all thank you for your work and the ways in which you're putting language to intuition and abstraction I think I really appreciate just in terms of ID here it seems so a lot of people are getting this sonic experience or relationship to music and you said you are like to listen to stuff while you work and I was just curious if you had any sort of like formalities about what you listen to or if you like listen do something continuously if that's like producing a kind of like energy or environment for you or yeah if you're ever find any boundaries around that sometimes I think like I have to say I listen to things so differently now with with like title or with you know being able to stream music and it very and I still have a record player in the studio and that came back into the studio more recently I only usually had that at home but I and then it depends like if I'm if other people are working in my studio then I'm then I use my headphones and I'm not listening to things in an ambient atmosphere it's very different where I would listen to music really loud on speakers and then when you happen when you like put headphones on you move into this other space so it really really depends there's really no rule about how it usually the one thing is I start with the news in the morning and I'm usually in that space if I'm really lost in a book I might go into that it really depends on the day and what I'm doing there are times where I need to find where I'm becoming too self-conscious or something and then I do look for ways to like break that and it's usually by trying to find something else to listen to and that's when I usually try to find a new form of sound or I go back to particular music that I know kind of takes me out to where thank you all for coming and thank you especially to Julie for coming all the way from installing [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 79min 18sec (4758 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019