Month: February 2014

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Podcast: The Realm of the Possible

Bean Gilsdorf talks art on The Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 6 – The Realm of the Possible

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“Being an artist and talking about being an artist is a lot about trying to suss out your audience: how much do they know about art, how much do they care, is a casual question, or are they deeply invested in the answer?”

How did Bean Gilsdorf go from studying linguistics to becoming an artist, critic and curator? While in NYC for the opening of her three-person show, Dead Ringer, Bean joined us to talk about making the decision to be an artist, building a career without mass-marketing her art, escaping the tautology of process, the value of getting an MFA, the most asked question at her Help Desk column at the Daily Serving, the difference between the fictional and the imaginary, and more!

“I want to be the kind of artist who amuses myself. . . . I reserve the right to have the last laugh.”

We also talk about her current work — including her Borgesian Exhibition That Might Exist (in Portland), and the Bean Gilsdorf Living History Museum (in San Francisco), which has transformed her apartment into the world’s smallest living history museum — as well as her process of understanding her audience(s), her discovery that sometimes the problem is you and not your materials, and how she reconciles all of her past selves and muses over her future ones.

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

Bean Gilsdorf is an artist and writer. Her recent art projects compare systems of history that appear as both individual accounts and as unified public narratives. Her performances explore history through appropriation and improvisation, while more material works — objects, videos, and installations — investigate archived historical records by manipulating images from mass-market history books. Her projects have been supported by grants from the Puffin Foundation and the NW Film Center of the Portland Art Museum, and included in exhibitions at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, the American Textile History Museum, and the Holter Museum of Art, as well as exhibition spaces in Poland, England, Italy, China, and South Africa. She is the Managing Editor of Daily Serving, an international publication for the contemporary fine arts, and her critical writing and interviews have also been published in online and print magazines such as Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture, Fiberarts Magazine (2007-2011), and Art Practical. Bean received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2011 and was a 2011-2012 Fellowship Resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she operates the Bean Gilsdorf Living History Museum.

Credits: This episode’s music is Blues for Art by Chick Corea. The conversation was recorded at the home of friends of Bean in Brooklyn on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Bean Gilsdorf by A. Discenza.

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No better time

Today’s the 11th anniversary of the first post of Virtual Memories. I usually forget my blogiversary, because my life’s gotten way too hectic. In recent years, it’s been a matter of work, reading, podcasting, and being a good husband and dogfather. Not much time to write, and not a lot of time to think.

Last night, I confirmed a podcast session with D.G. Myers, a professor, writer and critic who will be dead within 18 months from prostate cancer. We’re planning to get together in late March or early April, to talk about books, the academy, and mortality. I’ve interviewed guests in their mid-80s, but never someone who clearly sees the terminus up ahead. I don’t know why he’s consenting to do this; if I was in his boat, I’d be a gibbering wreck or I’d be bungee-jumping in New Zealand (again).

Of course, we’re all in his boat. I’m sure he’s making the best of the time he has left. (Myers just tweeted, “I don’t understand why people are so afraid of death. The day after, they won’t remember a thing.”)

I’m in the middle of trying to change my life. I’m about to leave the job I’ve had for almost 15 years — and the company where I’ve worked for nearly 17 years — so I can start a related business. I might be the only knucklehead who’s quitting a secure job for the great unknown in this job market, but there it is. This new gig might mean I spend a lot more time in D.C., so perhaps I’ll get to writing on train rides, even if I’m a lot older than David Gates was when he wrote Jernigan in legal pads on the LIRR.

When the “farewell to Gil” issue of my magazine comes out next month, I imagine I’ll hear from readers who enjoyed my work, my editorials, our conversations at conferences over the years. E-mails to that effect have already trickled in as the news of my departure has started to spread.

As gratifying as those notes are, it’s here at Virtual Memories that I’ve been trying to build something — in text and in my podcasts — that’ll outlast me. Thanks for sticking around.

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Podcast: Feeling Gravett’s Pull

Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 5 – Feeling Gravett’s Pull

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“Comics is a medium that isn’t going to go away. It may just now finally be coming into its own in the 21st century. In this internet era, there’s something very special about what comics do, no matter how much they get warped and changed by technology.”

More than 30 years after taking on the role of British comics’ Man at the Crossroads, Paul Gravett remains at the center of the global comics scene. We had an in-depth conversation about the growth of comics as an art form, the surprise of seeing local manga in Algeria, why he considers himself less of a comics historian or curator than a comics activist, how it feels to have been the first publisher of some of the finest cartoonists of our time, and why he should be called Paul “Mission To Explain” Gravett. Give it a listen!

“I’m probably slightly insane for wanting to go on looking and searching and questioning and provoking myself, trying to find stuff that doesn’t give me what I know already.”

Along the way, Paul and I also talk about his new book, Comics Art (Yale University Press), the new exhibition he’s curating for the British Library, Comics Unmasked: Art & Anarchy in the UK, the history of comics and his history within it, and the way virtually every lifelong comics reader’s home winds up resembling an episode of Hoarders. Paul Gravett is  one of comics’ finest ambassadors, and it was a pleasure to talk with him during my recent UK trip. (Oh, and here’s a link to that Richard McGuire comic we effuse about!)

Paul Gravett Talks Comics Art on The Virtual Memories Show

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

Paul Gravett is a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing and promotion since 1981. Under the Escape Publishing imprint, he co-published Violent Cases in 1987, the first collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, three volumes of Eddie Campbell’s Alec between 1984 and 1986, and London’s Dark in 1988 by James Robinson and Paul Johnson. Since 2003, Paul has been the director of Comica, the London International Comics Festival. His very extensive bio can be found at his website.

Credits: This episode’s music is The Boy With the Jigsaw Puzzle Fingers by Karl Hyde. The conversation was recorded at the Hilton London Euston on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Paul Gravett by me.