(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. I'm Tyler Green. This week, Barbara Bosworth. Two art museums are showing Bosworth's work. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston is presenting Barbara Bosworth the meadow through December 1st. The show features photographs of a meadow in Carlisle, Massachusetts, just outside Concord, that Bosworth made over 15 years. Pictures that investigate time, human presence, and nature. The exhibition was curated by Karen Haas. In 2015, radius books published a book of Bosworths, the meadow pictures, accompanied by texts from poet Margot Ann Kelly. That book has been sold out for a heck of a long time. Good luck finding a copy. The Cleveland Museum of Art is showing Barbara Bosworth's sunlight moon shadow through June 30th. The exhibition offers Bosworth's photographs of light, including eclipses, sunrises and sunsets, fireflies too, many of which were made near Bosworth's childhood home in Eastern Ohio. That show is created by Barbara Tan and Bob. On the second segment, the Haas Brothers, at Dallas's Nashor Sculpture Center. If you enjoy the show, please be sure to give us a five-star rating and a review wherever you download it. Thank you very much. Barbara Bosworth, after the break. It disrupts a fraught lineage of exhibition making, says hyperallergic. Now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego through July 28th, forecast form, art in the Caribbean diaspora, 1990s to today, is the first major group exhibition in the United States to envision a new approach to contemporary art in the Caribbean diaspora. Foregrounding forms that reveal new modes of thinking about identity and place. Presenting more than 20 artists who live in the Caribbean or are of Caribbean heritage, forecast form anchors itself in the concept of diaspora. The dispersal of people through migration, both forced and voluntary. Here diaspora is not a longing to return home, but a way of understanding that we are always in movement and that our identities are in constant states of transformation. The presentation, which was originally organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and features artists like Peter Doig, Felix Gonzalez Torres, and Ana Mendeera, among others, is now on view for a limited time in San Diego at MCASD, the show's only West Coast venue. Plan your visit at MCASD.org. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents Surrealism and Us, Caribbean and African diasporic artists since 1940, on view March 10th through July 28th. Organized by curator Maria Elena Ortiz, Surrealism and Us is inspired by the history of Surrealism in the Caribbean with connections to notions of the Afro- Surreal in the United States. Representing a global perspective, this exhibition is the first intergenerational show dedicated to Caribbean and African diasporic art presented at the modern. Inspired by the essay 1943 Surrealism and Us by Suzanne Cesar, the presentation includes over 80 works from the 1940s to the present day in a wide range of media, such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation. Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afro- Surrealism and Afro-Futurism, Surrealism and Us explores how the exhibited artists have interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks framed within a pre-existing history of black resistance and creativity illustrate how Caribbean and black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes. The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas presents Ruth Asawa Through Line at the Menil Drawing Institute through July 21st, 2024. With more than 100 works, the exhibition is the first to explore how Ruth Asawa used drawing to connect with the world around her. The show presents drawings, collages, watercolors, and sketchbooks alongside stamped prints, paper folds, and copper foil works, showing the breadth of Asawa's innovative practice. Find details at menil.org. The Menil Collection is always free. (gentle music) And we're back, Barbara Bosworth. Welcome back to the Modern Art Notes Podcast. - Well, thank you, Tyler, it's great to be here. - Meadows are a particularly New England landscape, at least I think so, and I think of them as a quintessential New England landscape that goes back just about to the instigation of settler colonialism here in the early 17th century. So before I ask you why meadows, what is a meadow? What makes a, I don't know, a patch of grass, or a range of shrubs or whatever else? What makes that a meadow? - Oh my gosh, yes, a very good question, and kind of difficult to really explain, but a meadow is generally thought of it as, yes, a patch of grass, but that it's meant for hang, so it's meant for cutting and to be used as hay. So it was very integral part of forming early on, 'cause then you needed something to feed your cattle. And then a field, I think of is more like a crop, or, well, one could say hay is a crop, but more like a corn field, or even today's jargon of a ball field, football field. So it sort of takes on a different kind of meaning. I think people use those terms interchangeably, perhaps. To me, a meadow is a very poetic reading as well, and not so biological, or not so botanical. It's more of a poet, poetical to me. Like Emily Dickinson's poem, where she referred to them as a prairie. So her poem, and she was in Massachusetts, and she still referred to, I believe she's referring to a meadow, but uses the word prairie. So I just think of that as a meadow, kind of fitting into that same sort of genre. - Word usage changes. - Word usage changes. - Meaning changes. - Of course, you're right, and we're talking really about Western expansion, and so prairie, we think now prairies are at West. But we don't have prairies in Massachusetts, yeah. - Well, so that brings me to why meadows fascinate me. In 1835, at the end of 1835, a young Ralph Waldo Emerson is invited by the town of Concord, in which the meadow in this exhibition and your radius book, the meadow, were originally cited. Emerson is invited to give the 200th anniversary of the town of Concord, like birthday or anniversary address. And Emerson mentions Concord's meadows, I think twice in the first four paragraphs of his talk. It's clearly what he thinks is the thing that motivated settler colonists off of the Atlantic seaboard and into the first American West, which Emerson described as being Concord. I don't think today we think of Concord as being the first American West, but that was Emerson's argument. And so ever since I read that years ago when I was beginning what was going to be a book on Emerson and his relationship with art, I was really fascinated by that, and I'm still fascinated by that. So that's why I like meadows. What attracted you to meadows? - 'Cause I think, you opened up, I think, it's one of the quintessential landmark features in New England. I'm not a researcher on this, but my sense is that they're disappearing. And I think they're so beautiful that as a bottom line for me, as a photographer, I just love looking at them. I love spending time walking through them, walking around them, looking at them. So that's part of it for me, the beauty of them, but it's also that the fact that I think they're disappearing in New England, we don't farm like we used to. So, and I think it's easier to put a house into a former meadow. So housing developments will go up there. It's easier to do that than clear the forest. So I believe they're sort of all disappearing. And perhaps we're not mowing for cattle so much anymore, but you would put corn into the field for example, and that just changes things 'cause the firefly population changes, corn is not their habitat, grasses and meadows are their habitat. So there's probably more in that list of why I like meadows, but I think those are top. - As much as I like meadows, I can imagine that for painters or photographers, they can be pictorially challenging. They don't have, for example, topographical drama. They're not on like the side of a lake or whatever, or some kind of dramatic body of water. And it seems to me, someone who types rather than makes visual things, that meadows would seem to require a lot of like really careful study and consideration before their pictorial potential might reveal itself. What about meadows, and maybe particularly the meadow in the show at the MFA and the radius book, interested you pictorially? - You're right about all those challenges. It was hard for me to sort of come around to thinking that this was a place to photograph, but I fell in love with it as a place. For me, that's kind of where it starts. I fell in love with it as a place 'cause I would spend a lot of time there. It was owned by a friend of mine, and we would do walks, and so that had the start. Then I think the more you, the more I look at something, the more you really see it. I think that's nothing profound. It's just the way it works. Then you begin to see, oh, there's some vertical structure over here, so then if I need to make a compositional, figure out how to put all that chaos into the rectangle of the eight by 10, then you begin to see, oh, there's a vertical here, or maybe it's just all about the ground, so maybe I just don't worry about the horizon. Maybe it's just everything's happening down there on the grasses, or maybe I love the way this lane looks, so let's look at the way the lane. There's a farmland that goes down between what was the two patches of grassland I looked at. So things begin to reveal themselves. Yeah, there's no seashore there, there's no mountain scene. It's just this quiet, very peaceful, ringed with trees, and I just happen to love trees and the flowers, and there's just so, let me just say, there's so much there that I think people miss when they're looking for the grand landscape, so. So it took a while for me to have it reveal itself to me, but I know once I'm looking at something for a long time, then my camera soon follows, and I was looking at this place a lot for its beauty, for the old apple tree has done the lane. A lot of those, oh, and I always had a night sky, the sky is incredible, so it's fairly close to Boston, but away enough so that it had some decent dark skies there. Yeah, so I just found my stuff there. One of the things it occurred to me in going through the book and also on the walls at the MFA is that I presume one of the things you found in the meadow was, and by found I mean, found and were attracted to, was this extraordinary range of greens. There are a kind of ludicrously painterly variety of greens in these pictures in such a way that reminded me of like the foregrounds of Frederick Church paintings, or the American Raphaelite pictures of say Thomas Ferrer, William Trust Richards. I mean, there's so much green here. Were you interested in what the greens offered you? Definitely, I think, so yes, like early on when I was, the Kodak we had available in those days, film Kodak, I never liked the green of that, and I knew I had to deal with that, so one of my very earliest assignments to myself to get into this meadow and make it work was to tackle that green, and so I paid a lot of attention to green in those early days because I just thought, of course I can make a green that I like, and eventually yes, of course you, and now we all, greens are much better now that we can tweak so much in the digital files and we don't have to deal with that chemical green of Kodak anymore, and not picking on Kodak, Fuji also, but anyway, so yeah, no green, and the meadow just shouts green all summer. It's incredible, and the way it changes from that spring green, that young vibrant green in the spring, and it fades into a browner green later in the season and gets bronzy, and oh yeah, no, the green is incredible out there in the meadow, all throughout the season, so yes, that was a big part of starting, and that was to tackle this fear of green I had with the film I should say, not anything else. - There is a picture that brings together this vast range of greenness with compositional challenge. This is a picture that has a distinct, but becoming overgrown piece of dirt, sandy dirt road that comes into the foreground, comes towards the viewer. The view is framed by overhanging trees, shrubs and vines, and for all the greens in this picture, oh my gosh, there's a lot of different green in this picture, at the very middle of the picture is the kind of surprising bits of brown that you just mentioned a moment ago. I hate doing this with photographers, 'cause I wrote a book about a photographer, and I had to teach myself to think in certain ways, but there's nothing inherently pictorial about this view, there's no central character-filled tree or whatnot. Why was this something that made sense to you as being a picture? - A lot of what the meadow was for me was the traces of humans on this site, and it is humans, the intervention of humans, keeping it a meadow, otherwise it would revert to forest. So I'm interested in that interaction with that, and this lane was one of those consistent sort of references to humans being here, who's done this lane. So I have a lot of images of this lane over the course of years and over the course of the season. So first of all, it's about that, where I just sort of list, and I'm directly in the middle of this lane. I didn't even try to get to the side so I have a diagonal line across the foreground. No, I'm just like straight in it, but mostly it's also this season. This, we're in like the full on lush growth, which is Sonu in the land, which I love about the lushness of where I live. And yeah, so it's just, I wanna just, this is that the old apple trees down the lane, it also signifies how overgrown it's gotten, and in a way this is also, I could poke into here and tell you all about the bittersweet in here, or the multiflora roses, and there's so many invasive species that are sort of also just taking over. And so it's a bit of that too, it's a bit about nature just also just climbing into it all. It's not about the invasive species, but I can't ignore the fact that that is full of a problem there. Mowing it keeps them at bay, but on these edges, which I'm also drawn to these edges, that's where they all just sort of just keep going 'cause they're not mowed back. Anyway, but also it's just that passage way that draws as if we're talking compositional things, it draws me into the image. And I like to think that yes, that little bit of brown, and so have you picked up on that 'cause it's subtle, but that's something that draws you in and focuses you in there in that distant space somehow. It's that entry way, this passage. But there's also, you can see it's sort of like the tire marks on the pavement there. It looks like you've got little tractor tire marks there. It's kind of just been, people are here, you know, which my work is not about in order to say something we need to all disappear. You know, I just, I think our being here is part of it. So I like that incorporating our presence here. However, I can feel the question coming, but no, I don't actually make pictures of people in this space so much. So there's one image in the book of an individual doing some brushwork and one image where I have an arm of my friend holding a bird nest. So I represent them in that way, but that's really all of a actual person that I have been here. It's otherwise it's traces of our presence there. - We will come back to that question of man impacted nature, which I think is important in a whole lot of your work. But while we're here on this picture with the flame faintly in the foreground, it's a really good example of how many, many, many pictures in this meadow series are quiet. They're still, they are turned down. They're just really, I don't know, they're almost whispers. It's something that you do in a whole lot of your work. A whole lot of your work has that kind of hush. So I tried to come up with an example that I thought was the most opposite from the meadow pictures I could think of chronologically and otherwise. And so I came up with a picture called Swan frees out Lake Montana from your early 1990s Northwood series. And that's a picture that shows grasses, sitting on the grass or laying on the grass or possibly lying on the grass. Is a dead swan with its wings spread wide and a man's hand holding out one wing of the swan? So the viewer instinctively knows or presumes that the man shot this swan and is retrieving it and that there's an act of violence there somewhere in the recent past. But by the time you're there and making your picture, everything is quiet again. Do you think about whether a picture you're trying to make is going to be quiet or hushed or something like that? - I don't believe that I think about that, but I think it's clearly there. And I maybe can be bold as to say that it's because a part of my personality is one of quietness too. And I think I do want my photographs to feel of me. And so I think that it makes sense that my pictures are quiet because I am. And in that particular case, yes, I'm spending time around hunters who are killing animals for food. I don't spend time with trophy hunters. But then, and for me in that picture, it's also in a way, it feels like that arm is touching, that arm is reaching in and sort of, it's not literally saying thanks for your life, but it's speaking of that for me 'cause I think the people I would spend time with were very respectful of the life. I think that's more common in other cultures, perhaps in the culture I grew up in. But I chose to spend time with people who were respectful of not just blowing an animal out of the sky. So I think there's that moment of, and I think the birds are so beautiful, and there's that moment of just the whiteness of the wings, and there's this feels very gentle, that reach of that man coming. He's not coming into, I don't know, it just feels a gentle gesture by that man. So I do look for the quieter sense of those, of the time I spent with hunters, which you're right is kind of counter to that whole experience, isn't it? But meaning the experience of you're out to kill something. Reminds me of all of those Swinslow-Homer paintings of ducks, where the violence is almost always with maybe one exception. Just outside the scene, or the moment, that Winslow-Homer paints. You know, we see the ducks falling, or we see the ducks, I don't know, maybe there's a New England thing at work there. One of the other things about the stillness and quiet that isn't so much of your work, is it ends up making your work, or helping your work to be extraordinarily painterly. And so one of the things that I really like in the work is how often I can find either these painterly moments, or these references to paintings like that, that kind of Homer thing I just mentioned. So I wanted to raise one of the pictures that's up now in Cleveland, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in your show there. And it's called "Moon Setting Into Fog Bank Over Cape Cod Bay." Morning of the total lunar eclipse, it's from 2007. It is a photograph that looks just like a painting, both the moon and its reflection in water for all the world, like brushstrokes, is that intentional? - It's not fought against. (laughing) It's, I love, yes, I love when I can blur that point, and maybe in under life I would have been a painter, I like to think, perhaps. But, because I so much love the use of color, and there's a whole series of pictures, during that time that I call elsewhere, and they're just this ethereal, basically water sky, sort of like it's elsewhere, something going on elsewhere. So, anyway, so I don't fight it, and that was a really long exposure, that particular image, the fog, the moon setting into the fog bank. Very long exposure, I would say maybe an hour and a half, maybe up that moon to travel and set into the bay. And by the time I shut the shutter off, I realized that all this, my lens was covered with dew, that I just didn't pay attention to when I was, I mean, there wasn't anything I was gonna do about it, I wanted this picture so that it'd go. But then so that realized that there's all this atmospheric stuff going on on the lens, and which lends that into the photograph. So, I think it's a combination of just the conditions that I was making that picture in, and also my love of just that deep, dark color of those, that was like dawn time. Lend itself to being that. And then plus when you even an eight by 10 negative, enlarge that size, there's a lot of, it's not as detailed sharpness as it would be if I was doing a one-on-one size print, you get every little crispy tail of every single leaf. So, there's a lot of things going on in that to lend to that effect, which maybe if I didn't like that I would have said, oh, we can't go that big, gotta keep it smaller. But I love that sense of letting it sort of be less real than a photograph, I guess. Wait, does that even make sense? What I just said? I don't know. No, it does, it does. I love the comparison to the landscape painting and that look at things. Well, the elsewhere project you mentioned just a moment ago is made up of pictures of the sea, and they are pictures that are probably your most painting referencing series, except for maybe the pictures of the Colocks boat and the New England Trail pictures, leaving those aside. I mean, the pictures in elsewhere remind me of Gustave Dore and Gustave Courbet and Hiroshi Sugimoto. I mean, just 100, either painters or photographers who also have consciously riffed on painting. In those pictures, were you at all informed by that land sea sky painterly tradition going back into the romantic capital R romantic era? Definitely, yeah. I don't think I set out to say, now I'm gonna make a body of pictures that sort of speak to that, 'cause I just love being at the edge of the sea and looking out at it, and I could do that for hours. Thus eight by 10 photographers probably, but so I'm just looking at these things and I just love the sea. So I'm making these series of pictures, and of course, because of I am from that capital R, romantic phase. I love being at it sunset sunrise when the colors are doing incredible things. And I love playing with that, 'cause these days with scanning, wow, can you do some wonderful things with the way it's all rendered in the file? So I just love playing around with that. So I don't think I set out to make a picture that would be about replicating somebody's work that they did somewhere, or you know what I'm saying. I don't think I set out to do that. I just love those places. And the other stuff that was happening was that through, there was a lot of the elsewhere pictures came just as I was losing parents. So for me, it became this sort of, this elsewhere was this reference to where are they? They're elsewhere, and it was this edge where have the nature blur that horizon, which in some of the images you can't even see, there's a horizon, the sky just meld into the ocean, or even vice versa. - Just like a great stuff, all right. I mean, those are the ones, those are the ones that bring Dora to mind. - So there's a lot of things. So things happen in my life, and then pictures come out of that. I'm looking at something forever, so then the pictures have to start. And then something happens, something works. - Speaking of romanticism, romanticism with a capital R, I wanted to ask you about a picture called "Standing on a Hill" from 1999. It's a picture of a person standing on what is a very faint rise in the land and the very foreground, extreme foreground of the picture. It's a person whose presence within the frame is completely dominated by sky. Is that you doing a Casper David Friedrich? - Sure, that was not in my mind when I'm making that picture though. But making includes printing. Let's make you not just lining up with the eye. - Right, and I think in a sense, I don't want to presume I know what he was actually thinking about when you made this, although I know I've read it multiple times. But my imagination of what he's thinking about again is that the gays are onto the vastness, the infinite, which I do a lot when I just love to look, and I'm gazing off. And this was, I don't know if I should reveal this or not, pardon me, doesn't reveal this, but that's me in that picture. Because I was the easiest person to go stand there. And because I just wanted to represent this whole sort of staring off at the vastness of, in this case, the sky. So, but at the time, I don't know what prompted me to make that picture, 'cause I don't do portraits of myself much at all. Okay, I'm in a few pictures I make, 'cause I'm often by myself on these places. If I wanna figure in the landscape, it's gotta be me. But it's meant to be an anonymous soul. They're not really portraits. Just so I'm not consciously thinking that, oh, I want a picture of myself gazing off into infinite space. I just see this beautiful little rise and it's looking at, I say, oh, what would happen if I walk up to the top of this hill and somehow that figure would be isolated against this whole sky? It's later than I'm looking at this picture, and I probably didn't print it for years, 'cause I didn't, but then it just sort of struck me as very appropriate to the work that I was doing for that in that body of work that I was doing at that time. I also wanna say it's in that show because the Cleveland Museum of Art has a sculpture that's like this tall, it's very small. - Like six or eight inches. - Yeah, unassuming, it's called the Stargazer. And I just thought that that was too, not quinter, but too sound-dipitous perhaps that I had had this picture of a woman staring off into the eyes upward, if you will, and that the Stargazer was generally thought to be a female and also eyes turned upward. And I just, I don't know, I wanted them to put that sculpture into my show, to have it in the same room with the show, and it just couldn't be approved by people who make those decisions. But having that picture in there may have done a similar thing for me. - The Stargazer is a statuette of a woman dated to about 3000 BCE, believed to have been made in marble in Western Anatolia, which is to say, it's early Bronze Age. And it's only been at the Cleveland Museum since about 1993. So it's a relatively recent acquisition, and of course, the Stargazer title was a later edition. We don't know what the artist in 3000 BCE. - Correct. - Hold this thing. (laughing) - It appears to be a sculpture of a woman eyes turned towards upwards. That's, we should say that's clear to it. It appears to be okay. - Yeah, thank you. We began to talk a little bit earlier about your interest in the built environment, but not the built environment of, say, the new topographic photographers whose built environment included, you know, light industrial buildings where you couldn't tell if they were making pantyhose or mega-death, the pictures of human constructed, or at least human impacted nature. Almost all of your photographic series and many of your books are about such spaces, New England Trail, Natural Histories, the National Champion Tree Series, almost always includes within the pictures, signs of human constructed environment, whether that's a road or a building or a fence or whatnot. How do you define your own interests in human impacted space? It's obviously different than, say, Louis Boltz, but it's not that different. - I don't believe I seek out a building to go photograph. The buildings are there if they're in the place that I'm photographing, I guess I could say. So like the new, so like the champion tree pictures, which is different than any other way I make pictures, actually, by the way, the tree, the site of the tree is chosen for me. Like, I have to get there and figure out how to make a picture of that tree. - Oh, we're gonna talk about trees in a minute. Let me tell you, we're gonna talk about trees in a minute. (laughing) - So buildings might be the same way for me at that. If there's a building in one of my photographs, it might be because it's kind of a sideline to something else I'm photographing. Most of the buildings that I talk about, yeah, it would be like a reference. There might be a fence running through the landscape or like that farmland down the meadow or the New England Trail that I love the idea of passing through a landscape, the idea of moving through a landscape, which is why I love doing that trail work 'cause it's moving through a landscape, which I just love to do. - There are a whole lot of meadow pictures about just that, about people moving through the landscape, about a path through the meadow. There's an almost surprising number of meadow photographs about passing through. - Yeah, because I think that's so important with that concept of a meadow. I mean, the other parts for me with the meadow that I'm interested in is botany and I loved all the apple trees along there and the night sky I think I was listening, but I loved all the other stuff about the meadow too, but somehow about the human presence was kind of always present for me. - Speaking of the apple trees, I wanna ask you about two different kind of tree pictures you've made. The first while we're in the meadow is the apple trees. The apple trees in the meadow pictures have all the character of like Jane Marple in an Agatha Christie book. You know, they just kind of feel like they've always been there even though we know they haven't been. How did you think through capturing these apple trees quite often in winter and somehow imbuing them with character? - I don't know if that has anything to do with me. It's that they're so amazing. Those old apple trees take on their own character. It's light, it's composition. I mean, there are lots of decisions there. - Yeah, no, exactly. So I think for me, it's just I've decided that today for some reason I had some time and I'm gonna go make some pictures and maybe there's some snow in the ground. And so then I'm just with my camera of trying to figure out how to make a picture. So, and that tree is a vertical element and so it might just come down to something as simple as that. Where to put that tree in here? Like the lane going down the middle of it maybe one day. I think I'd have a picture of the apple tree and the snow and there's the dog tracks running across the foreground. So, whatever elements are in there and I just sort of come to it that day and see what you make of it. That's sort of, I think about the way I work is I just, I say, okay, today I'm gonna make some pictures and you go out and see what you make. So, but I go to a place that I love, right? And I love the all the apple trees down that lane and they were constantly in my, they were frequently in my photographs of the meadow 'cause I've found them to be so full of character. And the era when I was photographing them, there was a lot of overgrowth on them. So, they're also sort of just a chaos of form out there that I needed to figure out how to make a picture of. So, you gotta give the trees credit for what they provide and then I just go out to it with this, the challenge maybe or the mental assignment to make something with this. And I put myself in that place. Yeah, I choose the day, what's the light doing, what's the weather doing, what time of day and so on. Choose that. And then you just make what you make when you're out there. I also think that I think it's important for me to challenge myself to try and make a picture at any time. Like I shouldn't have to wait for a certain kind of light. Like I should be able to go out there and make something no matter what kind of light is out there. But yes, but I would choose all those factors. You're right as a photographer. There's a lot of decisions that go into these things but then it becomes, I'm not thinking about it really. I'm just making pictures. I just would always have to tell my students. The students would get hung up with, I think they get fearful that they're gonna, someone's not gonna like their picture. So they edit themselves too much and they try to make a picture, they think that, I don't know, I tell them what you're supposed to go out and don't think when you're making the pictures. You have to be smart about your work but that can happen when you come back in. When you're out there making the pictures, respond to the place, make pictures from your heart. Don't think it but you have to be smart about them. It's not like we didn't critically analyze what they were doing but I think, anyways, I think that's a lot about what I do. I don't try not to think when I'm with the camera but respond. So then I probably overthink later when I'm in an editing stage or something. So, but making the pictures I like to just respond to what I've got there. I love the light, I just loved whatever colors going on. I don't know, the subject matter in front of me. One of the things about your pictures of trees that jumps out at me over and over again, whether it's in these meadow pictures or whether it's in the National Champion Tree Pictures or New England Trail or whatever, is how kind of remarkably you resist pictorial cliches about trees. Carlton Watkins and George O'Keefe, both shot or painted redwood trees the same way, like looking up from just below them and that feeling of skyward grandeur, even Robert Adams has flirted with that on occasion, right? So I wanted to ask about that by way of raising your redwood picture, a picture called National Champion Coast Redwood from about 1994. It's in many collections, the Sony and American Art Museum, Cleveland, others. And it's an ideal example of resisting cliches about trees and especially large trees. - Do you have any memory of how you encountered this really huge redwood and found ways around making the same picture that so many other painters and photographers had made? - Yes, and there's several, many examples of these champion trees that fall into the same that everybody described now. So for me, the tree pictures are always about, also where these trees are in the landscape or how they live in this landscape. It's not so much that I needed to see bottom to top. That wasn't necessarily critical for me, but I could get across the sense of the massiness of this tree by showing how it sits in the landscape, how it is in comparison to things next to it, or even a person next to it for scale, which is what I often like throwing figures in these pictures for a sense of scale. So a lot of those tree pictures, in fact, most of the tree pictures are panoramic style, one could say with, which is multiple negatives to make up one, to make up the image. So that allowed me to stay close to the tree and to show how it sat in the landscape. So in that case, the coast redwood is nothing, there's no built environment around it. You have a sense of forest, up ferns growing at the bottom. So you get a sense of scale from the ferns, and it's my hope is by juxtapose with the rest of the stuff in the forest, you get a sense of how massive that tree is without having to show the whole thing. I think, and also in photography, if I were just to point my camera up to the top to get the top of something where you still lose control, you lose a sense of how tall it is. You have no sense of scale that way either. Just so you know what I'm saying? - Oh, I do, but it's still photographers have done it and a lot. - The photographers still do it, yeah. So for me, it was really, and I like to think of the whole of that tree series as a champion tree work, as not so much about the trees, as a cross section of the American landscape. So there's the largest green ash, the largest in the country green ash, it's at a crossroads in Michigan, nothing else at this crossroads, but it's just a crossroads, and there's this beautiful green ash. There's a beautiful valley oak tree in California that towers over the barn, next to it, and the barn, you get a sense of the farm implement around, that this barn is a further large barn. And then there's that valley oak that's just, so those things can give you the sense of the grandeur of these trees without showing them all except that valley oak. I guess I do show the top and the bottom of it. Anyway, back to the red wood. I think that's basically, especially the why I don't feel compelled to show the top of these trees so much. I want it to be how they sit in the landscape. - I wanna begin to move toward wrapping up by asking about some things that, you shoot in series after series. One of them we've talked about previously, and that is how often you photographed hands. We talked about that when you were on the show four or five years ago, so I'm gonna leave that one alone. But another one is you very often take pictures of handwritten texts, more handwritten or hand-drawn signs. So we see that in the meadow with Henry Bose Greeno's lists of birds he'd seen at certain times. Lists kept, I think, in pencil on doors. New England Trail, for example, has a wonderful vernacular. I guess if it's vernacular, it's obviously homemade and hand-drawn, it's a map, tack to a tree. Also in those pictures, we see lots of trail signs. I could keep going. There are practically every series, not every, but darn near every series you've ever made. Why is it important to include handwritten texts or handwritten or drawn signs within your series? - I think it's another way of showing a presence, a human presence here. I mean, the bird doors were a perfect example of that. That was a 30-year presence that he left on his doors, but it was a human sign of bird watching. You know, just, and it sort of talked about two things then, that might, the interest of birds in this meadow, but also that it was a person, individual, keeping these notes for 30 years on the door. And those handmade trail signs, I just love those. And it turned out it was one man, who was kind of a volunteer on the trail, and he sort of just did those, painted them, lettered them and put them up at various parts along the, when it would cross a road and you'd see it. And there was just, I love that personal sort of sense of a presence, a human presence here. I also love the one, another one from the New England Trailwork that was just a simple blue arrow. It wasn't a language at all, but it was just as simply, and it was blue because that's the blaze color of the trail, and you follow this trail by following the blue blazes. But this one was a blue arrow, like, go that way. Just let someone put that there. I just think as part of it for me, my interest in that. - You very often photograph bird's nests. Is that a, I don't know, metaphor is not the word, maybe a symbol or an allegory or is it just you like the nests? - And just like the bird nests. But yes, of course, one could talk about the nest as like, you know, a symbol of home. I have one tree picture that maybe I kind of do talk about a metaphor in that. I don't know if it's, I don't know where to point people to it, but it's just a, you know, picture of the leaves are off the tree, and it's just kind of up the top of the tree and you just see this little clump, the nest sitting in this tree. So that to me feels vulnerable, but it's home, it feels like a safe, but yet very vulnerable. So there are of course sometimes metaphors like that, but I also just love the time of year when the leaves are off the trees and I'm walking around the meadow of perhaps, and you can see these nests have been revealed and you can just see you in where, oh, that's where, oh, something lived in there all summer and never even knew it. So it's that kind of joy of discovering these little tucked away hidden places in a tree or the brush along the side of the trail. It's like magic. And something made those things, right? Something, oh, they're incredibly elaborate construction and every bird makes a different kind. - You often, not always, but often show a nest, say in the hand of a human, which isn't exactly anthropomorphizing, but it is a way, I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it does point to how birds very often live happily in nature spaces that humans have constructed. - If I can think of the one that you're probably thinking of is in the meadow book. And that was the case of her daughter was at the age when they're so exploring the world too. And so she'd found this nest and brought it to her mom. And so when I'm over, she just wanted to show this to me and thinking I'd like to photograph her and I said, oh, hold that. And so it was that spontaneous kind of connection. But yeah, but no, it always is surprising you hear stories of people will tell me, we know I have a Phoebe nesting above my porch lamp or they love to tuck in somewhere around the front door. I've always surprised me if a bird, birds are around us. And I don't, I mean, I think that we all need to be better aware of that and sensitive to that. And if they are going to build a nest over the porch light then don't use that dwarf while they're trying to raise their kids. I don't think it's something I seek out to photograph nests in someone's hand. That was very spontaneous and a way to get Deann into this series of pictures. Mostly I love finding the surprises of them in situ, like when the brush is revealed and you see a gnome nest poking in there. But just as a reminder that, yeah, they live here with us. They're around us and they make their lives here too. And I just think, I wish we could do that better with all sorts of creatures that live around us. It might be easy for us to say New England 'cause we don't have, we've wiped out the rattlesnake populate, I don't have to worry about a rattlesnake when I go out to my garden. So maybe it's easy for me to say that in New England and when they're not trying to reintroduce grizzlies into my backyard. You know, so we need to be more accepting of their living amongst us and that we live amongst them. So maybe that's the way to think about birds when they wanna build next to us. Allow that to happen and be more open to that. Where this is leading me in lots of places like milkweed. Don't cut your milkweed down. Let the monarchs lay their eggs there or whatever it is we can do to encourage things to live here with us more instead of wanting to let your clover grow in your yards for heaven's sake, don't worry about a little clover in the grass, to be the love it. I don't know, it's all sorts of things like this we could. However, I am all for trying to get rid of some of these invasive species coming in. The last recurrence in much of the work that I wanted to raise is humidity. Very often you photograph a little bit of fog, a little bit of cloud, a little bit of mist hanging above a meadow or a forest. It's another one of those things in your work that is or feels super Friedrich descended. Is that something you're conscious of doing and photographing a lot? Is there a reason for it other than that it's kind of pictorially very cool? I do love that kind of weather. It does lend a sense of atmosphere that I do love. So do I seek it out? No, I think I try to be equal in my days I go out photograph in the bright sunlight as much but I have to say I'm quite fond of that weather. And it might be, I like to think maybe I have no proof of this but I like to think it's connected to my English genes and that English wetness and gray, rainy stuff. I just love that kind of weather. I do better and when it's cool and damp like that then it's opposite. So there's probably something about the fact that I just love being out in that weather. The pouring rain is hard with the 8x10 camera but the misty cloudy overcast gray days love it. It does, the mist does serve the pictorial purpose of extending greens and depending on the sun a little bit of gold throughout the picture kind of infusing a scene with extra color. Yes, here we have, I mean, that is the great thing about this overcast, that soft light from an overcast day is the colors are incredible and that smooth lighting we can just see into everything and the detail is wonderful. Yes, no, there's a benefit just photographically having that soft even light love it. And it connects with me loving to go out the early morning just at sunrise and staying out till sunset and after for those same sort of things is just incredible what the light does, it does ours, yeah. Barbara Bosworth, thank you. - Thank you Tyler, it's been great. (gentle music) - Modern Art Notes is supported by Getty. On view through July 7th, 2024 at the Getty Center, 19th century photography now explores early photographs through the work of 21 contemporary artists. Organized around five themes dating back to the mediums beginnings, the exhibition considers how many of the conventions established during photography's earliest years persist today. Featuring works by Anmi Lee, Carry Me Weems, Paul and Pagi Sepoya and Wendy Redstar among others, the exhibition invites us to re-imagine these early pictures while drawing connections between photography then and now. Learn more and make free advanced reservations today at Getty.edu. For more than three decades Arthur Jafa has crisscrossed the worlds of art, film and music, taking viewers on a powerful journey through black expression. With a selection of works you won't wanna miss, Jafa's newest survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago underscores his unique approach to art making where the lines between popular and high culture blur and the personal collides with the political. Plan your visit at mcachicago.org. The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents Raquib Shaw, Ballads of East and West. In his luminous paintings, Shaw masterfully blends Eastern and Western influences, weaving together fable, history and autobiography. His works unite Western art and history with Asian ornamental aesthetics and philosophical traditions. The artist paints with porcupine quills and fine needles to render precise details of delicate flowers or distant mountains. Opulent scenes adorned with jewels and semi-precious stones captivate viewers with iridescent shimmer. This exhibition is on view through September 2nd. Learn more at mphh.org/requibshaw. Welcome back. Next up, the Haas Brothers, Nikolay and Simon at the Nashier Sculpture Center in Dallas. The Museum is showing Haas Brothers Moonlight through August 25th. The exhibition, which highlights the fusion of art, design and technology in the Brothers' practice, shows work both inside the museum and outside in the sculpture garden. The Haas Brothers have previously had solo exhibitions at the Catona Museum of Art in New York, the Skad Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, and at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. Nikki and Simon Haas, welcome to the Modern Art Notes podcast. Your work is often rooted in the real but familiar and then often kind of wanders off into ways that are unlikely and fantastical. It's never exactly surreal. It's just unlikely and fantastical, right? So with the work of yours that's up at the Nashier, and I mean the primary large indoor work, it's called the strawberry tree. Strawberries are familiar. Trees are familiar. But everything else here is kind of broken beyond and unusual. So why did you make the strawberry a tree-born fruit? I would say that a general, this is Nikki by the way, a general theme of the way that we express ourselves inside of our work, or at least a big thing that we always dive into is fantasy. And I think it was a mechanism that we use since childhood. We're twin brothers. We can look at each other or say very few words and dive into something that other people don't understand, except for the two of us. And I think that fantasy for us, I don't want to say it was an escape, but it was a way to like sue ourselves or find a different experience for ourselves inside of the real world that we were engaging with. So our work is very much like a physical manifestation of that attitude, creating fantasy around our normal lives, still engaging in actual reality, but making it more suited to our own perspective. And we'll do that a lot with what we're making. We'll take something familiar and twist it just enough that it can't be real, and then spend a lot of time, especially in the making of it or the build, trying to make it so precise that it almost feels like, wait a second, is it real? And I think it's like we like to enhance things around us. It's almost like a lot of really important experiences in life, I would say like say therapy, for instance, you're not changing somebody completely by putting them in therapy or by engaging in it. You're just changing the perspective to 3%, creating a slightly different view and giving more empathy or vision onto a familiar subject. I think we really think of our artwork in a similar way, experiencing our shifts your perspective. And our way of shifting that perspective is by diving into some level of fantasy. - Yeah, and when something is familiar but unreal, I think you're able to project onto it more and kind of have, you're able to create your own experience with an object more. I always think about, I read about electrical sockets that humans can't help but like see a face on them. And that is such a cool idea to me that we have this projecting, where like always projecting. And you don't want it to be too so unfamiliar that it's uncomfortable. But when you give too much information, you're telling somebody exactly what testing is. And if you let them have to sort of imagine it or say why is the strawberry hanging off of the tree, you've already sort of started, you've started a thought process in them that is more engaging than if they saw just a natural looking tree. - Trees were what I wanted to ask about next. Trees live large in fantasy literature, fantastical trees live large in art. Max Ernst are probably my favorite. Nobody in the 20th century did a tree quite like Max or a forest of trees really like Max Ernst. Why did you want to do a tree? What kind of history, whether sculptural or painting or whatever else did you hope to tap into mind, build upon by doing a tree? - This is Simon and Max Ernst is my favorite. I love Max Ernst so much. And he's actually a great touch point right now for me to talk about all this stuff. This process is decalchemania figures into what we do a lot. The circle motif that he used, that was like a psychological, it was a psychological thing kind of connected to Jung a little bit. If you dive into his work, it starts to get very complex. But when you're looking at it, it's just kind of awe-inspiring and has an immediate impact on you emotionally. But as far as trees go, we grew up in Austin. There was a tree there called Treaty Oak that was, it was a meeting place for, I don't know what tribe it was, but it was like a tribal meeting place before settlers came there. And it was a special kind of like holy tree. When we were kids, people were trying to poison it for some reason. So there was a string of like Treaty Oak tree poisonings. - It was like an anti-hippie backlash. - Yeah. - Like conservative, you know, Texas being like, "Fuck you and your tree." We're gonna poison it, you know? - So we felt this, like everyone in Austin felt this urgent need to protect this tree. So we actually grew up with a single tree being sort of personified. And it's been in our heads for a long time. And then there's, we also watched a movie called "Fergali" a lot as kids that was sort of a precursor to Avatar. And there's just a, there's a sort of a spiritual, neither of us is religious, but I would say that if we have some kind of spiritual reverence to something, I think a tree would probably figure into that pretty well. - I just, I also wanna bring up the practical aspect of why we chose a tree, which is that, you know, Simon has this beating system. We work a lot in glass beads and Simon created an amazing alphabet where he can combine different letters together in order to create all types of unique shapes. Since our practice is founded in design, we love to solve design problems. And Simon created this algorithm because the social part of our practice is really focused in bringing fabrication work to places with work vacuums, right? So to make an impact with the money that we spend on making our work rather than just taking it to like a general art fabricator. And a lot of the people that we work with are usually in smaller towns. They're usually pretty busy working on a lot of other things and living their lives. And so in order to do that, Simon created the algorithm so that we could deliver something really simple, that somebody could carry with them and say, like a satchel bag around with them and going to school or taking care of kids or working another job and be able to create assemblages or be able to create small parts that we could then assemble in studio and make much larger work. So a tree was just practical. We go, how can we put as many small objects that get made among a community onto something really large and how can we fill a space like the nasher and make it as impactful as we possibly can? And then finally, how can we make an object like a single work, a sculpture that also transports you as deeply as it possibly can into this fantasy that we're talking about again, right? Like, is that tree, when you experience it, it becomes nearly architectural in a way. It's space creating, you're underneath it and you could argue that if the lights are off and just the tree is lit, you become enveloped and you enter a completely different world. And I think those would be the practical reasons we chose a tree. - I mean, plants are ideal for piece work. I mean, I would say there aren't many things besides plants that are gonna be really great for the system. I think feathers might work or scales or something. I should probably describe the system a tiny bit so that you know what we're talking about, but actually to go back to Max Ernst, I've been fascinated with things that just happen because they happen. I guess physics is really what that is, but-- - Emergence, right? - Emergence, yeah. So to Calcomania has always been something that I think about, when you smash paint between two pieces of two surfaces and then peel one of them off, it's gonna make a pattern. - You see that all over Max Ernst's work. - Yeah, he just explains it. - Yeah, so his glass, he's using glass with paint. - Yeah, exactly. So that, to Calcomania, is a great starting point for the kind of stuff that I like to think about, but I get obsessed with any sort of natural process. I love, for example, when I go to an old church and you can tell that people have been walking up and down the stairs for a thousand years because they're dipped any iterative thing like that that just creates something. So Nicky and I had the good fortune to go to South Africa and I'm gonna condense this story, but we wound up working with a group of women there that makes beaded sculptures. And they taught us how to bead. I'm a process-obsessed person. I'm kind of an amateur computer coder. So I started to, in the process of beading, I was thinking about that beads are a unit. I also know about self-packing. So to Calcomania is a self-packing mechanism. If you put a bunch of marbles into a cup and shake it, they're gonna self-pack into basically a crystal. So I started to think how do I use these units of beads and assign programs to them, give them rules so that they will self-pack into tensile structures. It's a really complicated thing to explain all the way through, but I'll give one of the programs. We'll give you a sense of how the whole thing works. I start by, if you're stringing through beads, you can tug on the string and you ask what color is it coming out of. And then I have a written rule. If it's coming out of a black bead, string on one white bead. If it's coming out of a white bead, string on a white bead and a black bead, that will create a shape. That specific one actually makes the Fibonacci sequence and it makes sort of a roughly, what expanding hyperbolic or parabolic surface. - Right. - And that's one out of 26 programs, the rules that I have and you can combine them endlessly to make all kinds of mathematical shapes. - So for the strawberry tree, a leaf, a vine, yeah, right? And in different scales. - Exactly. - And what's great about that system is the results of those programs are all scalable. So if you make a leaf at one size, you could just have beaded it for a couple hours longer and it would be the exact same shape, but a little bigger. It's really well suited to making leaves specifically. And it's just something that kind of came about, we've been working on that for eight years, right? Eight, 10. - So long time. This program has been maturing for like 10 years and this is the first time where it really came to fruition in a way that like we've done it, we understand how to do it. And we're finally able to express with it. So this is like a very expressive tree that is using that pretty rigid system. - The tree solves a lot of problems. - Yes. - It does a lot of things we want it to do. So that's a long answer for why we chose a tree. - Trees would solve a lot of problems for a lot of us if we left them alone. - Yeah. - Speaking of computerized processes, one of the works in the back of the Nashor, which is to say outdoors, is called Emergent Zoidberg. It's one of a series of works that you make that as I understand it are digitally created in simulations, including by putting a digital object on essentially a turntable and rotating it at high speed and seeing what happens and then picking one of the things you like that happens. - Yeah. - How do you take an initial idea about form, about the three dimensional form you want an object to have and then marry that idea to a digital process? - So, and this is Nicky, by the way, in this particular case, we chose a form that we felt was one of the more iconic or recognizable forms inside of our studio practice called the Zoidberg, which is a shape that originally was like a lamp that we created that did very well inside of like the design world. Rihanna commissioned us to make a bunch of work around a book that she'd released with the Zoidberg, this big book stand. We'd done jewelry using the shape. We made an award for the Academy, speaking of Renzo Piano. And that we're all based in the shape. So we just sort of felt, okay, the shape is exposed to the point that it might be the most recognizable thing out there that's strict form. And this gives us the opportunity to digitize it, still make it recognizable as something that we've created. And we were talking briefly about the concept of projection and from the viewer, looking at a work. And so, first of all, we got to explore emergence by creating a digital simulation that's basically accessed like an animation that you can watch, Simon created in the computer. We run these two Zoidberg shapes against each other. They're smashing and spinning and going up and down. - So let me interrupt for a quick sec. So if I against each other, you mean physically, but you mean they're smashing them into each other. - Mashing them each other. - Yeah, this is Simon. So basically, we took this and made a physics simulation that's like a blank expressionless Zoidberg. If you think about, you know, those wooden snakes that are sort of sliced up and you can... - Yeah. - So it's based on that. Essentially, it is a kinetic sculpture that's built inside of a computer. I use a program called Blender. That's an amazing three 3D program. And it allows physics simulations. So this sculpture is a stack of disks each with a tiny marble in between them. And then the disks are all attached. Each disk has a ring of springs all around it. And all of the springs are attached to each other to make kind of a fat, blobby skin. So this thing stands upright in the computer. If you turn physics on, it starts to flop. And what we ended up doing is making the bottoms movable. So we would kind of choreograph how the bottoms of the objects would move. And we had them spin around each other and then smash into each other. And they flop all over the place and become like, it's a physically accurate simulation. But what we're more interested in is the impression you get from it. - So the simulation gets created from a set of complicated but strict physical rules. Then the animation emerges, it's an experiment. We don't know what's gonna happen, how they're gonna move. Then we, along with the curators, look at the animation and choose the moment that to us feels like the most poignant. So there's moments inside of the animation where you go, that looks like they're fighting or that looks like they're dancing or that looks like they're dying or embracing each other. And it actually depends on which person you're talking to. Different people have different points of view and what's happening, right? And it from an emotional standpoint. So we are then projecting what we feel it's representing. We take the animation, we freeze it, and then we produce that exact frozen moment in bronze and glass. And we chose this moment because it's particularly ambiguous and particularly active and polarizing into what people think is happening in this particular moment. So, which was great for us because then we go, we're allowing the viewer to come and look at this work, project themselves upon it. And then they're gonna take that experience, go into the future and tell people about what they experience and then they're filtering that work for the rest of the world. So, that's another form of emergence, right? So we're playing with the idea of emergence, projection, filtration, all throughout the show. And the idea of the experience of the viewer, the idea of the viewer owning the fantasy, making it their own. We were trying to create a platform that creates this openness of mind in the sort of plasticity inside of the brain that allows someone to kind of re-see the world around them. - Again, it goes back to that electrical socket thing where something that has a purely functional, there's just function when you're thinking about the electrical socket, but someone's gonna put their intention on it. And this is a really amped up version of that where the making of the sculpture is all about this sort of rigid functional thing. And then the emotion comes out of it. We didn't put the emotion into it. We intentionally made this for the viewer to decide what is happening. - I also wanted to talk about your surfaces, which are vastly different from work to work. I mean, sometimes there's a patina, sometimes there's lambskin, sometimes there's glass. All kinds of different materials that do all kinds of things with light or a sense of tactility or whatever. But across pretty much all the work, surface is obviously really, really important to you. What do you want surfaces to do? How do you want a viewer to consider, react, fill in the blank to the surface of the work? - We grew up as makers and always have been, always will be, we're obsessed with material. And I think we feel a real responsibility to make our work beautiful. I know there's a lot of, just the way that we express inside of our practice, it's a huge function of what we do. We think that beauty, cuteness, humor, it's a lot of different tools at our disposal to sort of bring somebody in. And I guess soften them up, make them start to feel empathy towards the objects and surface, if you make a very, very fine surface, and you choose a surface carefully in order to engage the viewer, it's like an ambrosia, it's like you're romanticizing the viewer through a surface to an extent. - We grew up carving stone, and it's a really brutal material to work with. But it's also a, because it's a brutal and you have spent so much time on it, you become intimately familiar with all of its properties. And the slow pace that you have to work out with it makes you kind of fall in love with each stage of it. And we, I think our first real experience with a surface being special is that there's a step on the way to polish when you're working with stone, that's called hound, that's like a midway point from it being rough, that feels kind of like skin, and it becomes a very sensuous, soft object out of something that is heavy and hard and difficult to work with, you suddenly have this very touchable surface. And that's a, that's a kind of, you suddenly have a human interaction with this stone, the stone becomes a little bit personified, and you have a sensual experience with something inanimate. And that's something we really like to draw out of everything that we're working with. So if it's glass, maybe we want to make it so that, like with the strawberries, we want it to look a little bit like candy or maybe you want to eat it. If it's stone, we'll usually make it feel like skin. And it's just a, it's very much like an intuitive thing between the two, two of us, but the surface is a very important part of a sculpture. Materials just gives you so much opportunity to even do all sorts of things from a human. And to ignore that part of a practice would be completely out of the question for us. It's the way we approach everything is through material. That's a deep way of putting it, that you like have this precise moment along the spectrum of finishing a piece of stone. It can start very alive, but very like brutal, rough edge, tough. It's abusing you while you're working with it. And then that's that perfect, beautiful moment of true intimacy inside of it. And then if you take it too far inside of a polish, all of a sudden it becomes this like, like I don't know, you would see it inside of like a, like a Dior store or something where it's like super honed and like not personal at all. And like almost untouchable. It's, it's, it's such an emotional spectrum that you can, so the other way to put it so I understand. - I mean, it's like, it's even, but I just thought about when you're on your phone, I don't know iPhone and there's haptic feedback. There, there's something about like, if your, if your watch taps you lightly and it feels like a person is doing it to you, you suddenly have more intimacy with that, with the watch. Like it doesn't feel like this weird robot thing. It feels like something that you get along with. And that's, that's something that we're always playing with when it comes to an object. - I love it. That's great. - Nikki and Simon Haas. Thanks very much. - Thank you. - Thanks. - Right on. Thanks, dude. (gentle music) - That's all for this week's show. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is edited by Wilson Butterworth. Special thanks to Steve Roden who created the sound for the program. The Modern Art Notes Podcast is released under a Creative Commons license. Please visit Modern Art Notes for more information.
