A curator's guide to Light: Works from Tate's Collection

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Transcript

Laura Castagnini
Hi, everyone. Welcome to ACMI.Tis conversation today is about Light: Works from Tate's Collection, the exhibition that we've just opened.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nations, on whose stolen land we are meeting today. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to any First Nations people joining us today. ACMI acknowledges that sovereignty was never ceded.

So, my name's Laura Castagnini. I'm a curator at ACMI and I'm going to be your host today. I worked on this exhibition for ACMI, taking over for my colleague, Serena Bentley. And actually, I only recently moved back to Melbourne after living in the UK for a long time, including four years at Tate.

So, it's my absolute pleasure to introduce my guest today, Matthew Watts, who is Assistant Curator at Tate. He's been working on Light for the last three years in the international partnerships program, as well as co-curating other exhibitions for Tate, including Millais' Ophelia, Op and Kinetic Art, and this year's Turner's Prize.

Previously, Matthew worked at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He studied here in Melbourne actually, an Art Curatorship Masters at the University of Melbourne, and was a board member of the Art Association Australia and New Zealand Executive Committee. So, thank you so much for joining us here today, Matthew.

Matthew Watts
Thanks for having me.

LC
So, I thought we'd just start with some sort of background to Light. You've been working on the show for a few years now.

Can you tell us a bit about the journey of the development of the show, and how it's changed from the initial proposal to the showing at other venues, and now here at ACMI?

MW
We first conceived the show specifically to tour the Indo-Pacific region. So, it was really about making Tate's collection accessible to an audience who might not normally have access to our works back in the UK. By way of an explainer, Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1500 to today, and international modern and contemporary art from 1900 to today.

So, distilling that into one show is a real challenge, and it was a great challenge to take on. The show spans over 200 years, exploring how artists have responded and utilised the ephemeral effects of light, and that fascination really links all the artists together across the show. I'd say it's been a remarkably consistent show across its development. Once the idea of light was chosen as a way into the collection, as an accessible way into the collection, we really stuck with that throughout.

There are always the practicalities of light exposure, and "that's too big to move", and that sort of thing. But I would say it's been a very flexible show as well, adapting for different venues. It expands and contracts slightly. It's been a really great show to work on, and really exciting to bring works that have never been to Australia before.

LC
Just thinking about the show here at ACMI. This is the first time you've actually got to see the show because of COVID. You were stuck in Zoom for three years. Can you just tell us a bit about that? How does that feel?

MW
I actually started my position at Tate specifically to work on this exhibition, and I was in the office for two weeks, and then the first lockdown happened. And at Tate, we still use flat plans. When we start designing an exhibition, we print out a huge a A3, or bigger, floor plan, and little cutouts of the artworks, and you sort of shuffle them around the floor plan. And so, we had to transition to a totally different way of working. And so, I taught myself SketchUp by watching YouTube videos.

LC
Whoa, that's hard.

MW
In about a month, I think we had the first mock up in 3D, using the SketchUp software, of the first venue.

So yeah, it was a very different way of working. It was a really groundbreaking show for Tate; not sending couriers, remote installing. Usually we'd send conservators and registrars, and of course we couldn't do any of that.

And it was really difficult selecting works remotely as well. We weren't able to go into the stores and interact with the pieces. Luckily, I obsessively take photos everywhere I go, every museum I go to. I had seen most of the works up at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, so there weren't any really big shocks.

LC
Even the [Peter] Sedgley? (Colour Cycle III)

MW
Yeah. It had been up at Tate Modern. It was sort of hidden around a little corner.

So, I was pretty familiar, thankfully, with most of the pieces, and I'd seen this one, the [Olafur] Eliasson (Stardust Particle), in the retrospective. I think I got quite lucky, to be honest.

LC
That is so lucky. That's so rare that you've seen everything before actually making a selection. And all those sort of like fine details of how it's going to fit in the room... it's really hard to figure out where things are going to go, and how they're going to speak to each other when you... Especially this show. I feel like it's a very experiential show.

MW
It's very experiential, and it also covers the full range of media, and so creating a thread through the show is a challenge, potentially. But I think it's turned out quite well, hopefully. And we'll talk a bit more about that with Turner as well.

LC
The 18th century painter J.M.W Turner is very important to Tate. He bequeathed his collection to Tate after his death in 1851. And there are over 35,000 works of his in Tate's collection. So, it's really at the heart of Tate's collection, but it's also kind of the heart of this show, because he was a radical... He was called the radical painter of light. The way that he creates these sort of atmospheric events, effects in paint, really pushes paint to do incredible things to capture light.

I wondered if you could tell us a bit more about Turner, and the way that he's a thread through the show, and also him being so innovative with the way that he tried to capture light; the way that he has inspired, or relates to some of the more contemporary works in the show.

MW
It's really funny. People will ask about Turner's practice, and the materiality of his pieces, but quite hard to explain how he painted, because we don't really know. He was notoriously reclusive, and he refused to let anybody watch him paint.

What we do know from conservation samples is that he used this bright yellow ground or priming layer underneath his works. And there are some great cartoons from the period of him with a massive vat of yellow paint, just sort of pouring it on a canvas. So, it was a very unusual way of working for the time.

LC
Wait, he poured paint on-

MW
No. They were just sending him up. He obviously used yellow in such great quantities. That was sort of the joke, that that was his one trick. That was their argument, anyway. But it worked, because he's still so loved. I mean, that was very unusual for the time. Usually you would use a brown ground, right? Or white.

LC
Right.

MW
The Pre-Raphaelites used white. So, he was really interested in creating luminosity in his works. We know that he painted in quite thin layers over the ground, and then he would scrub back and remove. And so, that's how we get this piece, Sun Setting over a Lake. You can see that really thick, textured impasto, and that's how he got that really textured effect. But we just don't know enough about the way-

LC
It's really abstract, which is amazing.

MW
Yeah. It's one of his later works.

LC
When I was working at Tate, I worked on Frank Bowling's retrospective, and he was also really fascinated with Turner and the way that light reflects off water. I'll just tell you a quick anecdote about Frank Bowling. He went to his native Guyana with his son Sacha, and he was standing there with his... So, he moved from Guyana to Britain in 1961, and after three decades of making, he was looking at the tropical light over the water, and he said to his son, "Oh, this is what I've been trying to do."

MW
Oh, wow.

LC
"I've been trying to capture this light." And then he made Sacha Jason Guyana Dreaming, which is the work that's in Tate's collection, the one from the early 90s.

So, there was a really interesting synergy between the way that the two artists worked. Like you were saying... the way that they both layer and layer the colour.

MW
I think it's scrubbing and the textural...

LC
And scrubbing at the back and doing so to just really investigate colour and light. So, I suppose there's something interesting about the way that his techniques are still so-

MW
Relevant.

LC
...relevant, with someone like David Batchelor.

MW
Yes.

LC
Do you want to talk a little bit about the difference and the similarities between the way they use colour?

MW
So, David Batchelor's piece, Spectrum of Brick Lane 2 is actually the first piece that you see when you walk into [Light]. It's really exploring temporal light, and the light of the urban landscape. They're beautiful stacked light boxes.

David Batchelor wrote this amazing book called Chromophobia in 2000, and he actually cites Turner as an inspiration, validating his practice, and that he really wanted to question our relationship with colour. Previously, artists in the western canon, in particular, had really considered neutral, quite cool colours, blacks and grays, as being serious masculine colours, and that colour, bright neon colour, like we can see in the stacked light boxes, was considered to be quite Oriental, feminine, Other, and that that had somehow been conflated in the western canon with impurity.

And so, he really wanted to challenge that idea. And so, the piece... It is quite subtle, the glow that it bathes you in, but it's really interesting, seeing these colours interact with one another, and thinking about how a contemporary artist now could look at a Turner and think, I'm going to take something from that. And that's really amazing, that it still speaks to artists today.

LC
And I think that you can really see that walking through the show, when you see the scientific aspects of Turner's work, and the way that he was Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, which I love.

MW
Great title. Amazing title.

LC
And he used those diagrams that you can see in the first room to teach his students about the way that light refracts.

MW
Yeah. So, there's these beautiful spherical perspective studies, essentially, that he's done with gauche and wash on paper – and, as you say, using that to teach his students how light reflects and refracts, and trying to teach them how to depict light and shade.

LC
Yeah. And I love the way that after you've seen those lenses, in a way, you around the corner, and then you see the work by Liliane Lijn from 1967, called Liquid Reflections. Do you want to tell us about how that relates to Turner and Moholy-Nagy as well?

MW
Yeah. So, Liliane Lijn is this amazing kinetic artist who really pioneered innovations in sculpture in the 60s, working with the Signals group in London. The piece that we have, Liquid Reflections, you've worked with at Tate before. So, you're really an expert on it.

LC
I can listen to you, and then I can add.

MW
You can correct me.

LC
Just so that everybody knows what we're talking about. The first show I actually ever curated at Tate was Liliane Lijn's show, and it included this work in it. So, I've installed it before, so it was really fun installing it again in Melbourne.

MW
To see it again in a different perspective. Yeah.

LC
Very different perspective.

MW
And that's what I keep telling people is really interesting about the show, is that we are creating these associations across the collection that you would never normally see together.

LC
I never thought about Liliane in terms of Turner.

MW
Yes. So, it's a really unique experience. And the piece is somehow quite mesmerising. Seeing this perspex drum rotating in space with the light shining on it, which sort of warms up and condenses the liquid that's inside the drum, mixed with paraffin liquid. And so, there are these beautiful... She talks about it almost in this galactic sense of heavenly bodies almost, captured, and she talks about capturing the light and keeping it alive within the work.

Then these two spheres that rotate on top of the perspex interact with one another, and sort of have these collisions and movements across the space. So, like Turner's spheres, looking how light reflects and refracts.

LC
She made that work when she was 27.

MW
So young. And she was back and forth in Greece.

LC
Yeah. She was born in America, and then she studied in Lugano in Switzerland and Italy, I think, as well. Moved to Paris in 1962 when she was 22 or something. She was so young. And then she moved to London, and just really quickly got immersed in the Signals group, and was the only woman really in that group.

MW
The only woman, yeah. And it was really the cutting edge of what was going on in London at the time.

LC
Yeah, and she had a very young son. I think he was two, and she'd moved with him to Greece, and they were living on the top of this mountain in this home that they'd created. She writes about this time in some of her poetry. I just love thinking about her, alone with this child on a mountain-

MW
In a foreign country.

LC
... in a foreign country, trying to figure out how to make light. How to keep it alive within a sculpture.

MW
What life.

LC
She did it for five years, really scientifically trying to figure out how to do this thing.

MW
So, it's part of a series, isn't it? That work.

LC
It's an edition. There's quite a few of them. And they produce, like you say, a really kind of meditative effect, and she was also really influenced by Zen Buddhism. But at the same time, the cosmos, and she's like, "Yeah, that is the cosmos, Laura. It's not representing the cosmos."

LC
Did you want to talk a little bit about Moholy-Nagy as well?

MW
Yeah, we can talk about Moholy. People keep asking me, "What's your favorite work in the show?" And it's so difficult, because if there were just one, I think we'd run into some problems... But I think in terms of the show, a real turning point is the Bauhaus room.

Moholy created this work [K VII]. This beautiful, warm square of light, white light, with these floating recto-linear shapes that have this beautiful transparency to them. They seem to recess into space, and I feel like it really pulls you into the work. And I was looking at it yesterday, actually, and there's some really thick impasto in a horizontal line going directionally opposite to the lines as well. So, the more you look at it, the more it gives you, and it really pulls you in.

This is called K VII, and he created the work in 1922. Shortly thereafter, he was asked by Walter Gropius to start teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau. The Bauhaus, of course, being a really revolutionary school that sought to break down hierarchies between fine art, sculpture and painting, and applied art. So, anything from industrial design, font, to architecture.

They had this amazing curriculum with the most amazing creatives in Europe at the time, and were really invested in democratising art, which I think, as curators, really probably speaks to us. Because that's why we're here, making these things accessible.

Incredibly inspiring that he arrived and really changed the curricular to include photography for the first time. Photography had been considered this kind of form of mimesis. It was like how we would think about an Excel spreadsheet today. It was for capturing data.

LC
Okay.

MW
It wasn't art. And Moholy said, "No, there's so much that we can achieve with this." And so, he did these amazing experiments with photograms, which you knew quite well. You've worked with photograms before, in your practice?

LC

Oh, when I was in high school.

MW

That counts. Tell us how to make them.

LC
Well, you get objects and you put them on the piece of photographic paper, and then you shine the light-

MW
Light sensitive paper.

LC
... through, and it creates an exact copy. But let's go back a step.

There's one thing I want to add here about his time at the Bauhaus. He actually screened Oskar Fischinger's films, which if anyone's being to The Story of the Moving Image [at ACMI], I recommend that you go and have a look. He's amazing. These animations... I can't even describe them. Just go look.

MW
They're overwhelming.

LC
Hand drawn from the 1920s.

MW
Colour experiments.

LC
But [Fischinger and Moholy-Nagy] were friends, and there's an interesting story there.

MW
All these recognisable names, just all coalescing around this one school in Dessau. What a time.

LC
How does Moholy-Nagy relate to Turner for you?

MW
He has this amazing quote where he talks about painting being a frozen phase of kinetic light, and he specifically said that Turner was an admirable predecessor, which I think is a stuffy way of saying he did a great job. He was inspired by Turner's practice in thinking about light and colour experiments, and that inspired his work. Which is really interesting, because I mean, the piece that we can see here, Sun Setting over a Lake, is at the tail end of Turner's practice, where he's moving increasingly towards abstraction. He's become a bit of a recluse, and he's just sort of not really listening to the critics, and going his own way. And Moholy is looking at that, and then also rejecting representational art and moving into abstraction as well.

LC
Interesting. All comes back to abstraction.

LC
Here at ACMI, one of the things that we are obviously really interested in is the links with this show and the moving image.

MW
Yes. People keep saying “why here?”

LC
Yeah. “Why here?”

Something that we're really interested in is the way that cinematographers have looked at the history of painting for inspiration, particularly around lighting. And we're looking now at works by Constable. One of the interesting stories we found while researching the show was the way that filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, in the 1975 film Barry Lyndon, almost directly mimics this work by Constable, which is not in the show, but it's still cool.

The work of Constable was a really big influence on Kubrick's work. And when we were talking about this, you told me that you were a huge fan of Kubrick, and you said that Barry Lyndon was one of your favourite films.

MW
Yes.

LC
So, on the screen here, we have some of the opening scenes of Barry Lyndon.

MW
Yeah. Establishing shots. Even just looking at this, it doesn't directly correlate to a Constable, but it looks incredibly like a Constable. The sort of proto-social realism of just people in the landscape, doing what they do.

And then the candle scene, which is one of the most infamous scenes from Barry Lyndon. The film's from 1975. So, we're talking quite early. And this scene is set entirely and lit entirely by candlelight, which was revolutionary for the period. He used 15mm, ultra high speed, specially developed film that was created for NASA for the moon landing, and it had never been used in a commercial context before.

LC
Oh, to capture the moon landing? I hadn't made that connection. That's really interesting.

MW
Yeah. He's using that technology in a totally different way to capture the candlelight of the scene. But I guess what this shows us is how dedicated Kubrick was to creating not just effects of the era, but the real feeling of the era and the atmosphere.

So, he wasn't interested in sort of cheap gimmicks. He really wanted the actors to be lit by candlelight, and for you to get the same sense of the tonality of colour that you would've experienced at the time. And he got all of those ideas from painting, from looking at painting of the time, like Constable.

LC
You were talking about it as like going into an art exhibition.

MW

Yeah. It's like a moving exhibition, and you can watch shots and be like, "Oh." It will just be an establishing shot of them bringing a horse out of the stables, and it's the Stubbs.

Or the very first scene, his mother walking around the stables, and there's just hay everywhere. But the way that she's moving, and the way that she's holding herself looks exactly like a Gainsborough. And just the detail that's been put into the costuming, the lighting, and the way that the light is used in the film is really revolutionary. But I think he was a bit obsessive, Kubrick.

LC
In what way?

MW
Just the use of light, and he actually had wanted to do a biopic on Napoleon and wasn't able to. He couldn't get funding, and so then he just sort of rehashed the same material to talk about the same period... he clearly had something creatively that he wanted to say about the period.

LC
Maybe we can talk a little bit later about Philippe Parreno in the domestic room in the exhibition, because that's another really good example of the way that we can think about cinematography in relation to painting. But we have another clip for you, because I wanted to talk a little bit about John Martin.

He was a 19th century painter who... He was really renowned for his dramatic scenes of apocalyptic destruction, and the way that he created a sort of feeling of the sublime, and the emotional-

MW
Shock and awe.

LC
... shock and awe of these events. And we've been thinking about John Martin's work as a form of proto-cinema, sort of likened to the contemporary experience of blockbuster entertainment.

And when these works were originally shown in the 1850s and '60s, they were shown dramatically by doused light, and they were shown not only in gallery spaces, but also in music halls and in theatres and in civic spaces. Places that people wouldn't normally see art.

And we were really interested to see, in 2011, when Tate Britain held a solo show of John Martin's, they recreated these viewing conditions, which you can see on the screen here, in a specially designed theatre space that evoked a sense of the drama that these pictures conjured when they were originally exhibited, with accompanying sound and light shows. So, Martin Myrone, who curated the exhibition, he says, "There were occasionally descriptive lectures, so there would be a moustachioed gentleman who would point out the details of the painting and dramatise their content."

So, just thinking about the way that we go to the cinema now and line up down the road to see Blade Runner or whatever... It was the way that people in the 1850s and '60s were looking at John Martin, which I think is really interesting.

And then the second part of that is the way that John Martin had huge influence on Hollywood special effects. He was known to have inspired Ray Harryhausen, for example, who credits him as one of the first art directors of motion pitchers. And Harryhausen was the director who made Jason and the Argonauts, with that really famous stop animation scene with the skeletons fighting, which really inspired a lot of other filmmakers like Peter Jackson, who said that Lord of the Rings would never have been made without Harryhausen.

So, it's just interesting to think about. And also The Evil Dead...

MW
There's these threads through the show of these artists responding to the same ideas, but using totally different media, and pushing their practice forward, and therefore innovating further. And then it just keeps building one on the other. So, it's really exciting to see that development across the show.

But it is interesting talking about Martin, that we'd talked about Constable before, and Constable was very unkind about John Martin's practice.

LC

Really?

MW
He said he was sort of like this hawker of pantomimes, and because to someone like Constable, who was a very well respected artist and at the Royal Academy, and John Martin, I don't think was ever accepted to the Royal Academy as a member. And making art available to the public at the time, maybe wasn't what they were always all about. And so, this was seen as like really populist entertainment.

And whereas they thought that art should be this thing that was very dignified, and had this perhaps what we would now consider slightly patronising, moralising message to it. Whereas John Martin was really just interested in ensuring that people had access to his pieces.

Yeah. But so, John Ruskin and Constable, very negative about these pieces. But then other really famous names like Edward Bulwer-Lytton or Charles Dickens found this amazing and were really inspired by it. So, it's just interesting how there's this conversation around proto-cinematic displays like this going on in the 1850s, 1860s, and really preparing the way for moving image culture.

LC
Yeah. And that sort of idea of democratising, I guess, leads us very nicely into thinking about the first moving image work in the whole show. Doesn't happen until the third room.

We come across László Moholy-Nagy, who you were talking about earlier. And I just thought it'd be a nice moment to show this film.

MW
Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiss-Grau.

LC
It's essentially an abstracted film, which documents a sculpture that László Moholy-Nagy made, called The Light Space Modulator, which was a rotating sculpture of glass spirals and perforated metal sheets, illuminated by 140 different light sources.

MW
Amazing.

LC
And he saw this sculpture as very much an extension of the ideas underpinning cinema. Magnified light projected on a surface in dynamic configurations. And yeah, he was really interested in creating this sense of floating. But it's interesting watching the film, and then thinking how he's made a film of a sculpture, which is about a film.

MW
Yeah. He had an amazing practice. He started as a drawer. He wanted to be a writer, and then he starts moving into painting, which we saw before with K VII, in 1922. And then he starts working in sculpture, which was inspired by his time in the theatre. So, he was very passionate about the theatre.

And so, he starts talking about how he's inspired by light in motion; he wants to bring the two dimensional, make it three dimensional. And I mean, it's one of the first moving kinetic works in the western canon. And so, again, it's interesting that we could see Turner before, and Moholy-Nagy is inspired by Turner, but here we are talking about a kinetic moving, electrically powered light prop.

LC
And also the spherical, moving elements relating to someone like Liliane Lijn, and also Tacita Dean, which makes me feel like we should talk about some women, because we've talked mostly about men today.

MW
We have talked mostly about men.

LC
Do we want to talk a bit more about Lis Rhodes?

MW
Yeah.

LC
Which is the free component of the exhibitions, in what we call Gallery 3. You walk in, and it's a very dark space-

MW
It's overwhelming.

LC
... and you've got this projector in your eyes. And the two projectors are facing each other, and what you are hearing is mirrored by what you're seeing. And from what I've understood, she's a really important figure in the movement known as expanded cinema.

MW
Yeah. So, she took a electro set strip, and then started on the soundtrack that mirrors the image on the film. She started drawing over it, and so it connects what you're hearing and what you're seeing at the same time, so creating this really interesting relationship. She was really inspired by what she was... She was concerned by the lack of attention given to female composers in the western canon, musically speaking.

And we had a talk about what to take away from this the other day. And I mean, the great thing about abstract works is it's up to you, what you take away from it. But I feel, a piece like this, you're seeing yourself reflected in the work. You're implicated as a projection plane for the piece, and it's really asking you to question how you are bodily moving through a space, and how much space you're taking up, and who might not be taking up quite so much space. So, it's really about positioning yourself in the world around are you, and it's not just what you're perceiving and what you're hearing. To me, anyway. That's what I take away.

LC
That's so interesting. I took it very much as a sense of nothing.

MW
A void.

LC
Yeah. She's responding to the lack of women by creating a kind of emptiness or a nothing.

MW
A memorialisation of the nothing.

LC
Yeah. I love that.

MW
Yeah. I mean, I don't want to put words in her mouth. Maybe she has a different perspective on it.

LC
I'm sure she does.

MW
Yeah. But that's what I took from it, and it's a very inspiring piece. But it's interesting how it's totally overwhelming when you walk in, and it's like this full body, auditory experience, and then you slightly adjust. And I think the work asks a lot of you. You have to work for the work, and I really like that, that she's like, "I'm not going to make this easy for you.".

LC
And I should probably spruik that ACMI are organising with Liquid Architecture a performance program in response to Lis Rhodes's work, featuring new audio-visual performances by artists, women and non-binary artists, like Sally Golding, Bonnie Mercer, amby downs and Carmen-Sibha Keiso, alongside two screenings of two early films by Lis Rhodes. And that will be on the 15th of October.

MW
Fantastic.

LC
So, if you're interested in Lis Rhodes, and the way that she's inspired contemporary artists, have a look at that. Not necessarily inspired. More like a sort of conversation between.

MW
Well, it's interesting that she talks about people interpreting the space differently. She speaks actually in a great Tate film on YouTube about people in Greece dancing in the space, and people in Japan sat in very stately, serene, meditative state, and then people in Germany sort of walked around very seriously looking at it.

LC
And at ACMI, people take selfies.

MW
Yeah. People interact with it, and they make puppetry on the screen. And so, it's interesting seeing different people interacting with it and yeah, that's great.

LC
I'm going to move us to our last question now, which is... It's not even a question. It's just like a note.

One of my favourite stories of the exhibition, actually. So, we're looking here at James Turrell's Raemar, Blue, which is one of his earliest shallow space constructions.

He's become the subject of quite a lot of attention in the last five, 10 years, notably because Drake is quite interested in James Turrell.

MW
It's an interesting point in the show, where there's this intersection of pop culture and fine art, if you like. Turrell talks about not wanting to depict light or represent light. He wants light to be the material itself, and to be the artwork itself. And yeah, Drake saw a retrospective of his work at LACMA in 2014, and then produce this video in 2015. It's been seen by 1.8 billion people.

LC
It's a great film clip.

MW
It's insane. This staircase is actually taken from... Turrell has a long, ongoing project called Roden Crater, which is a dormant volcano in Arizona.

LC
Which Kanye West put a lot of money into.

MW
Yes. So, there's all these relationships. And essentially he's hollowing out this crater, and creating these amazing seeing spaces, observatories to the open sky.

But yeah, it's just a really interesting example of a contemporary music artist appropriating something from fine art, in order to demonstrate their cultural capital, perhaps. And I mean, there are lots of examples of it, like Beyonce using Pipilotti Rist's smashing in the windscreen [Ever Is Over All, 1997].

LC
Oh yeah, yeah.

MW
So, it's not unusual. It's just, this is a very brazen example of someone just totally ripping off someone else's practice, and not acknowledging them.

LC
And I loved the sort of controversy that occurred with Turrell putting out a statement on his lawyer's blog, which was... He claims that any connections were accidental, and I'll read his quote. "While I am truly flattered to learn that Drake Fs with me, I nevertheless wish to make very clear that neither I, nor any of my woes, was involved in any way in the making of the 'Hotline Bling' video."

MW
So, there you go.

LC
It'd be interesting to see what they do together in the future.

MW
Exactly. You never know. Raemar, Blue is a great example, obviously, of something... Turrell talks about his work being non vicarious art – you can only experience it properly disintermediated, in person – which I really love.

Seeing it through a camera lens, seeing it through a Drake video is not really how you experience it. And the meaningful effects is achieved by... He studied perceptive psychology, Turrell, and there's this amazing gestalt effect, where if you look at an undifferentiated field of color for long enough, your eyes... It's sort of a trick of the brain, and some people have hallucinatory effects.

LC
There's also a lot of fresh paint in that room…

MW
It smells great. I love the smell of paint. But yeah, it's just a good example of how important it is to have artwork physically here, and it's been an amazing experience to actually see the show in person after three years.

LC
After looking at SketchUp for three years.

MW
Yes.