How do artists paint the body nowadays? And why does Jenny Saville produce monumental images of it?
Exhibition Chinwag is the original segment of the podcast where Joana invites professionals from other fields to visit and discuss the work of an artist through their solo exhibition.
Guest: Susie Ridell Co-Producer and co-Host of the Podcast Limited Time Only
The artist: Jenny Saville and her solo exhibition The Anatomy of Painting. National Portrait Gallery - 20 June - 7 September 2025.
+ Susie's candid questions about the art market!
Check out images referred to in the episode here.
→ To dig deeper into the episode's references and receive little gems, notes, and musings that didn't make it into the episode, SIGN UP: https://joanaprneves.substack.com/s/exhibitionistas
→ For our third season, we're working with intern production assistants for the first time. Your donations will contribute to pay for their work: https://exhibitionistaspodcast.com/support-us
Key themes:
Painting; children in art; painting the body; the representation of the body, Jenny Saville
Subscribe to the Newsletter: https://joanaprneves.substack.com/subscribe
If you appreciate my work, why not buy me a coffee? It's a nice way to show your appreciation without having to commit to a membership: https://buymeacoffee.com/exhibitionista
For behind the scenes clips, links to the artists and guests we cover, and visuals of the exhibitions we discuss follow us on Instagram: @exhibitionistas_podcast
Bluesky: @exhibitionistas.bsky.social
exhibitionistaspod@gmail.com
#contemporaryart #immersive #artexhibitions #jennysaville #exhibitionistas #exhibitionistaspodcast #joanaprneves #thenationalportraitgallery #painting #contempirarypainting #londonart #museum #londonmuseum #artpodcast #artconversations #arttalk #ralkart #greatwomenartists
00:00:01
Here we are beginning of season 3 with a banger of an episode.
00:00:07
Welcome back. The season is full of surprises
00:00:12
new episode formats such as art, travelogues and art topics, but
00:00:19
this one changed in name only. The segment exhibition Chinwag
00:00:24
is more or less the same as the whole of the first season where
00:00:29
I was the dusty specialist and my Co host.
00:00:32
The wonderful Emily Harding who is back in the next episode of
00:00:37
this segment was the novice exhibition goer.
00:00:41
My new Art Outsider guest today is Susie Riddell who was a joy
00:00:48
to have over for many many reasons.
00:00:50
It was really fascinating to chat with her because although
00:00:54
we both work in creative fields, the rules are so so different.
00:01:00
You must be wondering in what field exactly Susie works in or
00:01:04
you are recognizing her name because she is no fish out of
00:01:09
water. When it comes to podcasts.
00:01:12
Susie is 1/2 of the award-winning podcast Limited
00:01:16
Time Only, which she Co hosts with Esther Stanford.
00:01:22
I actually watched Susie and Esther receive their award live
00:01:28
at the Independent Women Podcast Awards at the BBC studios a few
00:01:33
months ago and they completely won me over.
00:01:38
Susie jumped up and down like a kid, and Esther had such an air
00:01:44
of utter confusion that they really, really cracked me up.
00:01:49
But don't be fooled by their humble attitudes because since
00:01:53
we've recorded this episode, Limited Time only received a
00:01:56
second award, the Women Who Podcast Awards, in the category
00:02:02
Laughter and cheer. So listen, all I wish for them
00:02:07
is for this streak to continue to the point where they'll do
00:02:10
their best. Doris Lessing when she learned
00:02:14
through a reporter stalking her outside of her home, that she
00:02:17
had won the Nobel Prize and seemed utterly unfazed, even a
00:02:22
bit bored. You've won the Nobel Prize for
00:02:25
Literature. How do you feel it's been going
00:02:31
on now for 30 years. I can't get more excited, right?
00:02:38
Well, I'm sure you'd like some uplifting remarks of some kind.
00:02:41
There are other people here. So any kind of remarks, just
00:02:43
just tell me what this prize means to you.
00:02:47
Well, the beginning, I say. For 30 years, one can get more
00:02:50
excited than one gets, you know. But this is a recognition of
00:02:55
your life's work, yes? This is all I wish for all of
00:03:00
us, all of you out there and for myself to just have the Doris
00:03:05
Lessing level of Norfolk's given.
00:03:07
So back to Susie who is a multi hyphenated professional.
00:03:12
She is the Co director of the theatre company Idiot Child,
00:03:17
which we did not get to talk about it, didn't have time, but
00:03:21
she did share some insights into her voice work.
00:03:25
You'll even learn how to do the best Liverpool accent.
00:03:30
The only question is should you? OK, just kidding.
00:03:36
Another thing I have to mention is that because we talk about a
00:03:40
Cali mucho and if you don't know what that is, we'll you'll soon
00:03:44
find out. Susie mentioned a snake bite in
00:03:47
black, which is I can confirm because we had a few doubts.
00:03:52
And alcoholic beverage made of equal parts lager, cider and
00:03:56
black currant cordial. Yum.
00:04:00
I also mentioned Sight Wombley, and it occurs to me now that I
00:04:05
was so intent on making a point that I didn't get to mention how
00:04:11
some of Jenny Savile's drawings and paintings in the exhibition
00:04:15
bear twombley like scribbles, which add another layer to the
00:04:21
work. And you'll also get to witness
00:04:24
Susie discovering site Wombley. It really is what exhibition
00:04:29
Chinwag is for and I am so here for it.
00:04:32
I'm so grateful that I got to experience that with someone as
00:04:38
special as Susie. So another heads up for those of
00:04:42
you who have been following exhibitionists out there.
00:04:46
In this season, I am more relaxed about the exhibition
00:04:50
visits because the more I invite people who have questions and
00:04:54
who are fascinating and have curious, inquisitive minds, the
00:05:00
more we get to address certain questions that may not have been
00:05:06
obvious to me where I'm not talking to someone outside of my
00:05:10
little art bubble. And so we really wander off
00:05:14
sometimes into very specific areas of the contemporary art
00:05:19
field or even the artist's work. And I want the episodes to make
00:05:24
space for that. I do advise you to follow us on
00:05:26
Instagram or better yet, to sign up to The Exhibitionist as files
00:05:31
through the description notes of the episode because I will have
00:05:36
images of the show there as well as useful links such As for
00:05:41
example, The New Yorker article that I referred to in the
00:05:46
episode written by Rebecca Mead about Jenny Savile.
00:05:50
So all of this said and done, this is Exhibitionist, this I am
00:05:57
your host, Joanna Pianevis, contemporary art writer and
00:06:01
curator. And don't forget, we visit
00:06:05
exhibitions so that you have to. And now on with the episode.
00:06:11
Enjoy. Hi there and thank you for
00:06:19
joining us. Today we are talking about Jenny
00:06:22
Savile exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in
00:06:26
London. The title of the exhibition is
00:06:28
The Anatomy of Painting and you have exactly 2 days to visit it.
00:06:33
If you're in London, rush to the National Portrait Gallery.
00:06:37
I'm really, really chuffed today because I have a new guest Co
00:06:42
host and she is a fellow colleague podcaster.
00:06:46
It's none other than Susie Riddell from the award-winning
00:06:51
podcast Limited Time Only. She is not only a podcaster, but
00:06:57
also an actor, a voice artist, a writer and a presenter.
00:07:02
And you probably will recognize her voice from the world's
00:07:08
longest running drama, The Archers on BBC.
00:07:14
Her character's name is Tracy Horbin.
00:07:17
So it really is an immense pleasure to have you here.
00:07:20
Susie, thank you so much for agreeing to do this, this crazy
00:07:25
experiment. Thank you very much for having
00:07:26
me, Joel. I feel like I kind of foisted
00:07:28
myself upon you. Actually.
00:07:29
I sort of was like, please have me as a guest podcast.
00:07:32
So you didn't really have much choice, did you?
00:07:34
Could all podcasts be a bit like that?
00:07:36
You know, to take take your guests somewhere different and
00:07:39
interesting and spark off other different thoughts and avenues,
00:07:46
especially something creative like that.
00:07:47
I I was delighted to be asked and delighted to go to this
00:07:50
particular exhibition as well. Before we went in, I said
00:07:53
listen, let's take a selfie so that we have a before and after.
00:07:57
We didn't do and after. Did we have?
00:07:58
We were so exhausted by the end of it and we completely forgot.
00:08:02
I was very, very tired yesterday afternoon and and I was
00:08:06
remembering you saying that you get tired at exhibitions and
00:08:09
taking it all in. I think we've done about an hour
00:08:11
and a half and we an hour and 40 or whatever the exhibition and I
00:08:14
said that is that's me done. That's that's my I'm exhibited
00:08:17
out because you said, yes, I get exhausted when I go to
00:08:20
exhibitions. It really made me think when I
00:08:22
got home, God, I am dog tired. I had to sort of, I think I had
00:08:28
a nap. I did, knowing that you were
00:08:31
going to Do the episodes have an impact on that?
00:08:34
Did you visit it differently? Were you more tired than usual
00:08:39
when you see an exhibition? Maybe because I think I, I would
00:08:42
spend a lot longer in there than I probably would have done if
00:08:46
I'd been on my own. Because obviously we were
00:08:49
discussing things, I was able to ask you questions.
00:08:52
So I was taking that in. I suppose I was really trying to
00:08:56
really look, I do often read the little, you know, bits of blurb
00:09:00
by the sides of pictures, which I think is quite exhausting in
00:09:03
itself trying to do the text and then get what you can initially
00:09:08
from the picture, read the text, go back to the bit.
00:09:10
But I probably wouldn't have spent that long in that one with
00:09:15
that one artist, even though it was a special exhibition.
00:09:18
I think I would have probably been an hour tops and and moved
00:09:22
on a bit. But yeah, so I think I, I did
00:09:25
approach it with more of a sense of purpose that that I I needed
00:09:32
to remember. But it, but it wasn't arduous.
00:09:34
It wasn't, it was quite nice actually.
00:09:37
I think in a way it would be great to record a podcast after
00:09:40
every time I went to an art exhibition because I think that
00:09:43
gives it a focus that sometimes I feel I don't have when I go to
00:09:48
an exhibition. When I see a play, your focus is
00:09:50
that is, you know, is the play and you're following the story
00:09:53
from the beginning to end. I still find that exhausting.
00:09:55
And I actually often can't discuss a play straight
00:09:58
afterwards. I I have to go away.
00:10:00
I mean, it's funny when you go see a play with somebody, you
00:10:03
know, you've you've messed up at the theatre, you go, you have a
00:10:06
chat, you go to see the play, chat about the play in the
00:10:08
interval a bit, go to the end, you come out and then you're
00:10:11
like, OK, then yeah, what are you doing next week?
00:10:15
It could have been something really life changing.
00:10:17
But but it's hard to kind of get the words and to, to you need to
00:10:22
process it, don't you? And I think that's what we were
00:10:24
doing as we were going along, which is why it's so exhausting.
00:10:29
And as you say, it's every part of you is involved in in instead
00:10:34
in looking at the picture. I enjoy this idea that I have to
00:10:37
carve my own space and I have to look around and be mindful of
00:10:41
what other people are doing. The the this experience we have
00:10:46
in the 19th century had this idea we must travel.
00:10:48
We must go to the sea to heal and to, you know, encounter the
00:10:53
elements and, and, and be a better person.
00:10:55
But now a century later is like, oh, I'm doing Thailand.
00:10:59
Oh yeah. I'm doing and.
00:11:00
They're like, no, Thailand should do you.
00:11:03
Yeah, no, just have some reverence, have some some sense.
00:11:08
I. Completely agree.
00:11:10
Yeah. And I enjoy that museums, I
00:11:12
loved your description because I love that museums make you feel
00:11:16
first that you have this space where you don't quite know how
00:11:20
to behave. And then you have to measure
00:11:23
your, your, your movement in space and your attention and
00:11:30
your focus and your intention. That was such a lovely
00:11:32
experience to have together as a first 3D encounter.
00:11:36
Yes, it was really. We're not going to forget that.
00:11:38
I felt a little bit like I was a student and you were my tutor.
00:11:42
Oh no, don't say that. Not in a bad way.
00:11:45
There's not a negative at all. To say that it was it was AI
00:11:48
felt like it was a great opportunity to be able to ask
00:11:51
those questions that I thought perhaps were a bit silly, but
00:11:54
you made me feel comfortable enough that I didn't worry about
00:11:56
asking. How big was the paintbrush?
00:11:58
No, there were really good questions.
00:12:00
But before we move on, do you want to talk about your
00:12:04
award-winning podcast, Limited Time Only?
00:12:07
Which I must say is the most endearing podcasts out there
00:12:13
because not only are you colleagues with Esther, but also
00:12:17
great friends. Such a lovely thing to listen to
00:12:21
because it just gives you energy and it makes you believe in
00:12:24
humanity again. But also you do sketches because
00:12:27
you're both wonderful professionals and you also
00:12:30
interview people. And one of the best interviews
00:12:32
out there, a very uncanny experience, is when you
00:12:37
interviewed the person who does the voice of Wallace in Wallace
00:12:42
and Gromit. And that was I.
00:12:47
I I didn't even have a word for it, 'cause I love Wallace and
00:12:50
grown. Do you and?
00:12:52
It was just so funny to see and also to see the work of the
00:12:56
voice. So firstly, I'm gonna ask you to
00:12:59
quickly introduce the podcast and also maybe talk about voice
00:13:03
acting, because I don't think we talk enough about it.
00:13:07
Yes, limits time only award-winning.
00:13:08
We just won an international women's podcast award for comedy
00:13:12
gold. Our little tagline, if I could
00:13:14
sum it up, is it's a pick me up in podcast form.
00:13:17
So our aim is to brighten your day and we do that through a mix
00:13:21
of chat between myself and Esther, who we've known each
00:13:24
other for over 36 years. I know we don't look that old,
00:13:27
but we. Positively.
00:13:31
We were in a youth drama group together from the age of 12 and
00:13:35
are now several decades older. But we, you know, we, we, we
00:13:38
know each other really well and a very similar people.
00:13:42
And we do genuinely love each other so.
00:13:45
And our chemistry is completely natural and it's just a joy.
00:13:47
I really admire what you do, Joanna.
00:13:49
Because I couldn't do a pocket. I wouldn't have the motivation
00:13:51
to do a podcast on my own. I would give up after about two,
00:13:55
but having. I'm just bossy that that's what
00:13:58
it is. You boss.
00:13:59
Yourself around. So we have chats between us, we
00:14:03
have comedy sketches that are all original and to do with the
00:14:06
topic of the episode. And we interview interesting
00:14:09
people like Ben Whitehead, who's the voice of Wallace and Wallace
00:14:13
and Gromit. And we've had pop stars and
00:14:15
broadcasters and sports people and all sorts of and actors,
00:14:21
comedians and artists as well. We had an artist, Nadia Otura
00:14:25
came on. So I mean, I, we believe
00:14:28
everyone is interesting. Everyone's got an interesting
00:14:31
story to tell, that voice work. I mean, yeah, talking to Ben's
00:14:34
really interesting because it doesn't sound remotely like
00:14:38
Wallace in real. Life, that's what was so
00:14:42
peculiar. This is the first time we've had
00:14:44
a bona fide Hollywood superstar on the show.
00:14:48
Who's there? Because who's there?
00:14:50
It's you, Ben, you've just been at the Oscars and the, it's
00:14:54
amazing what the human voice is capable of, isn't it?
00:14:57
What Ben does in the way of changing his voice is, is just
00:15:02
phenomenal. And I loved hearing how he
00:15:04
described getting into the voice.
00:15:06
And that's something that's quite common.
00:15:08
Like people often have a, a phrase or a certain word or
00:15:12
something they have to say to get into a certain accent or
00:15:15
whatever. But we, I think everyone is
00:15:17
capable of doing all these things.
00:15:20
It's like I think everyone's capable of doing most things
00:15:22
really, if we just concentrated. I was recording an audio book
00:15:26
actually. And do you have other
00:15:28
directives? Like do you have to have a
00:15:30
certain speech pattern? Do you have to have a?
00:15:32
Because in England the accents are quite a thing.
00:15:34
There's so many of them. And I always wondered, is there
00:15:38
a sort of ABBC speak that you have to do for audio?
00:15:41
Books, no, I mean what what will happen with an audio book is
00:15:44
they will ask so if they if they wanted me so my my criteria, you
00:15:50
know, my voice would be either RP received pronunciation, which
00:15:54
is kind of no discernible British accent.
00:15:58
It is just quite a play. I'm not.
00:16:02
How can you? It's called RP and it's there.
00:16:06
So for example, suppose it is like ABB in all BBC speak of the
00:16:11
past would have been very much like that.
00:16:14
That would have been the RP accent from the, you know, the
00:16:16
1930s, forties, etcetera. That's how they would speak and
00:16:20
everyone would speak like that and you'd go to drama school and
00:16:22
you'd learn to speak like that. Of course, we don't speak like
00:16:24
that anymore. It's a Judi Dench.
00:16:26
Yes, it's got yes. And I think a lot of actors of
00:16:28
that generation didn't speak like that, went to drama school,
00:16:31
had their accents knocked out of them.
00:16:34
But now, if you want something quite plain, I'm not discernibly
00:16:38
from the north of England. I'm not discernibly, I suppose,
00:16:41
people you would tell from the South of England, I suppose, but
00:16:44
I could be from the north. I just haven't got an accent but
00:16:48
or I or I often get cast As for Scottish narration as well.
00:16:52
I'm born in Scotland, I'm of Scottish heritage and I can do a
00:16:55
very good Scottish accent. So sometimes I have to do that.
00:17:00
But you know, sometimes they want a northern voice or a
00:17:03
specific part of the of the UK. It depends what the book is.
00:17:06
I've done a lot of books for Liverpool.
00:17:08
Believe it or not, I've got no links with Liverpool whatsoever.
00:17:11
I can just do a quite a good Liverpool.
00:17:13
Apologies, my sincerest apology. Do you hate the Liverpool
00:17:18
accent? Horrifying.
00:17:20
What's wrong with it? It's absolutely fine.
00:17:25
That wasn't a great accent. So sorry.
00:17:26
It was great. And if isn't it the accent of
00:17:29
the that that series adolescent? Is it the?
00:17:32
Yeah, Stephen Graham. Yeah.
00:17:34
Yes. It's quite abrasive at times.
00:17:36
It depends which part you're doing.
00:17:38
I quite like it though, because it's really exciting to do.
00:17:41
It's like interesting in your mouth.
00:17:43
If I watch myself on the screen, my mouse going really wide
00:17:47
because they don't, they don't, they're not going down like
00:17:49
that. It's right out to the side.
00:17:51
So that's how I that's how I would get that accent.
00:17:54
And then Scottish is a bit more forward, so I've got a bit more
00:17:57
of a pout. And it also, I mean, obviously
00:17:59
there's so many different accents in the country and
00:18:01
different dialects. So it depends what, which part
00:18:03
of Scotland you're going to do. But that would be my, I suppose
00:18:07
I don't know Aberdeen, Fife side of Scotland, but yes, Potey and
00:18:13
then the Liverpool, like you see, it's much more open like
00:18:15
that. It's I just, I think it's
00:18:17
fascinating. It's fascinating because what
00:18:20
you know, what really fascinates me and I need to find more about
00:18:22
is when people have go into a coma, they have something, they
00:18:26
wake up and they have what's called foreign accent syndrome
00:18:29
and they start speaking with a completely different accent.
00:18:32
I have seen white English women who wake up and start speaking
00:18:38
with a Jamaican accent or Italian or Chinese.
00:18:43
It's hilarious, but it's like they're not taking the pee and
00:18:47
they're not doing a mock up. They are absolutely.
00:18:50
If you dropped her into Jamaica, she would sound like everybody
00:18:54
around her amazed. And I think there's something,
00:18:58
there's something weird going on there.
00:18:59
There's a cross soul. There's something going on in
00:19:02
the ether. When they've they're out of it,
00:19:04
they've just someone else's voice has got into them.
00:19:07
They collected someone's soul. Yes, that's what I think.
00:19:10
Something because it's too weird.
00:19:12
I know there was somewhere talking to someone else for so
00:19:15
long and they acquired the accent.
00:19:18
Yeah, well, they time travelled back.
00:19:21
Become somebody. It's it's amazing.
00:19:24
I didn't know that. Yeah, it's really weird.
00:19:26
Really weird. Fascinating.
00:19:28
All of this? Yes, but not in a way.
00:19:36
Jenny Saville was born in 1970 in Cambridge.
00:19:39
She moved across the UK quite a bit because her mum was an
00:19:43
elementary school teacher, but her dad was a school
00:19:46
administrator, so she was in the kind of education environment
00:19:51
and she's very well read. She also had an uncle who was a
00:19:55
really important influence in her life, Paul Savile.
00:20:00
He was an artist. He was also an arts teacher in a
00:20:02
private school. And he took her passion for arts
00:20:05
seriously, so seriously that he taught her a lot of techniques.
00:20:12
And apparently it was so obsessive that he made her draw
00:20:15
a hedge every day for a single for a whole year.
00:20:21
And she said it was really interesting because the hedge
00:20:24
changes across the year and it also changes you.
00:20:28
And I'm quoting her here, and it's so interesting that she was
00:20:32
doing the same thing, looking at the same thing in a huge span of
00:20:37
time, especially for a child, because she was a child back
00:20:40
then. But another thing that he did
00:20:42
that was quite interesting is that they travelled a lot.
00:20:46
And they travelled not only to go to museums, but also to visit
00:20:51
the places where Rembrandt painted, like a bridge in
00:20:56
Venice, where Titian painted a certain painting or did a
00:21:01
certain drawing. And so they would go to the
00:21:03
exact places, and they also would go to the studio.
00:21:07
So she went to Rembrandt Studio. And she says that when she went
00:21:11
in, it's not a museum. Actually, I think in the
00:21:14
beginning of the 2000s, it became a museum.
00:21:16
And she says that looking at the lights made her understand the
00:21:20
difference between the light coming through the window and
00:21:23
the fire, you know, in the corner in the fireplace.
00:21:27
And she observed that space so much.
00:21:30
And also then they went out and they would go to the butcher.
00:21:34
And she would imagine he would go to the butcher and buy a
00:21:37
piece of meat and then put it in the studio.
00:21:39
And she says that she became fascinated with artist studios
00:21:44
much more than with artists. And so in some ways, her uncle
00:21:50
didn't romanticize being an artist.
00:21:54
He kind of went through the nitty gritty and the technical
00:21:57
aspects of it. So much so that he even
00:22:00
advocated drinking red wine and Coca-Cola at 9:00 AM in the
00:22:04
morning. Which is.
00:22:06
A bizarre mix, isn't it? No.
00:22:12
Don't, Susie. You don't know what you're
00:22:15
saying. It's delicious, is it?
00:22:18
And it has a name. OK.
00:22:21
It's Spanish and it's called a Cali Mucho.
00:22:23
I'm going. To have to try this.
00:22:25
I mean, I've no, I know. I mean there's there's there's
00:22:29
mixes that we have here like beer and cider.
00:22:32
No bit Pims. No, no, I know I'm talking the
00:22:34
wrong thing. Is it beer and black Current and
00:22:38
cider? I can't remember the snake bite
00:22:40
and black can't remember what it is.
00:22:41
Do you know that one? I don't know diesel.
00:22:43
No, no. Well, diesel sounds.
00:22:46
I mean, it's the same as snake bite and black, but it's the
00:22:48
northern version. The northern.
00:22:50
Oh my God. So, right, OK, so red wine and
00:22:53
well, I'm going to give it a go because I'm.
00:22:55
Well, think of a shandy, Shandy I.
00:22:57
Do love a shandy That's. True lemonade, lemonade and
00:23:00
beer. Fizzy fizzy lemonade and beer
00:23:02
something. About the red wine, well, Cherry
00:23:06
Coke exists. It could, it could.
00:23:08
I'm going to try it. I'm going on holiday on Friday.
00:23:11
I'm going to have a. What's it called again?
00:23:13
Cali Mucho. I'm going to have a Cali mucho.
00:23:16
Yeah, and it's really 9. AM Thanks very much, kids.
00:23:19
Yes, move over. Any who she said she wouldn't
00:23:23
recommend it and but at 9:00 AM at the very least, and and so
00:23:29
she says quote. It made me feel like the things
00:23:32
I was doing making paintings in my room was the way I could
00:23:35
live. So very early on she had this
00:23:38
idea that she could be an artist.
00:23:40
Artists work in studios. They have a space.
00:23:44
So in 1988, she enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art where
00:23:48
quote, everybody had a Freud catalog at their feet when they
00:23:53
were painting. But weirdly, you almost, and I'm
00:23:57
quoting her here. She also said you almost had to
00:23:59
apologize to be a painter at the time because in the art field
00:24:06
and also in art schools at the time, we were coming.
00:24:09
So it was the 80s and we were coming off a moment where there
00:24:13
was a lot of performance, 60s and 70s, there was a lot of
00:24:16
conceptual arts, there was a lot of abstract minimalist art.
00:24:21
And so the teachers at the time were teaching that.
00:24:25
That's what they were bringing into the art school.
00:24:28
And so painting, when you look at Jenny Savile's work, you kind
00:24:32
of drew a Direct Line to Freud, to Lucian Freud.
00:24:35
But when she was at school, it was not a given at all.
00:24:40
But to contextualize this because there's Auk painting
00:24:46
history or art history and then there's the whole of Europe in
00:24:50
1988. So when she goes into school and
00:24:53
starts painting Gerhard Hector, who we did an episode about was
00:24:58
this German really important painting like real reference in
00:25:02
the art world was painting a series called October 8th 18th
00:25:08
1977, which takes as its subject the Bader Meinhof group.
00:25:15
So, you know, this terrorist group in in Germany that he took
00:25:20
on, as you know, a decade later as a subject, as a German artist
00:25:26
who grew up in eastern Germany, had to flee eastern Germany to
00:25:33
West Germany to live in Berlin undercover, hiding out, leaving
00:25:38
his family, not seeing them for many, many years.
00:25:41
And so there was another kind of painting being done.
00:25:44
History is known for copying photography very faithfully, the
00:25:49
glitches, the blurs, and also doing abstract painting, like
00:25:54
having a sort of a very broad take on painting.
00:25:57
So this was what was happening and in the same year, 1988, he
00:26:01
had I think his first exhibition in London and Anthony at Anthony
00:26:06
Duvey's gallery. So there was a presence of
00:26:10
painting, but a very specific kind of painting.
00:26:13
Like Garrett Hister was not picking sides, he was doing
00:26:16
abstract painting as much as realist painting and taking in
00:26:19
technology, so photography in his own painting.
00:26:22
Whereas in the UK we are going to relate Jenny Savile much more
00:26:27
with Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud, you know
00:26:31
what is called the London School.
00:26:33
So in 1991 there's a huge shift for her.
00:26:37
She goes to the University of Cincinnati in the US and she
00:26:43
does something which was not happening in Glasgow at the
00:26:46
time, women's gender and sexuality studies.
00:26:49
And so she reads a lot of Julia Christeva, Ilan Siksu, Luz
00:26:54
Irigaray. So all these feminists, French,
00:26:58
most of them that kind of open up something for her in terms of
00:27:04
painting. So there's this real
00:27:06
relationship with female bodies in painting, right?
00:27:09
Do you talk about the representation of women, for
00:27:12
example, in your own craft and, and, and are you aware of how
00:27:15
it's talked about in in contemporary art?
00:27:18
Drama, it is just it's discussed and, and all the time, you know,
00:27:24
we, we have those moments where I'm in a scene with somebody, a
00:27:29
woman. In fact, it was one of our
00:27:30
guests recently, an actress called Lucy Speed and we had a
00:27:32
scene together in The Archers and she was very conscious that
00:27:37
the scene was these two women sort of being quite bitchy and
00:27:41
arguing. And often that's how, you know,
00:27:45
women get portrayed as these kind of, I don't know, they
00:27:51
don't like other women. It's when other women women
00:27:53
don't like other women. And and that's that is something
00:27:57
we try and avoid in a way, because I don't think it's help.
00:28:00
It's not helpful in the wider context of everything else.
00:28:04
We need to kind of need to stick together.
00:28:06
But but yeah, I mean, there were a lot of there's a lot of female
00:28:09
form in in art, isn't there? From from right from the
00:28:13
beginning, a lot of naked women on the walls of many galleries
00:28:19
around the world. Yeah.
00:28:20
I mean, so many. It's almost not surprising,
00:28:24
isn't it, when you not surprising at all.
00:28:26
We see a boob or whatever. When you walk walk into a
00:28:30
gallery, it was expected expect to see a boob in paint and
00:28:35
sculpture form. Yeah, it's interesting.
00:28:38
One of the things that we're becoming really aware of, for
00:28:41
example, is in Greek mythology, there's a lot of sexual
00:28:46
assaults. Yes, yeah, it's constantly women
00:28:48
being dragged or pierced. I think what is very strange
00:28:52
about Jenny Savile and who'll probably talk about it, is that
00:28:55
her upbringing is quite patriarchal.
00:28:57
So you have her uncle and when she talks about what she calls
00:29:02
her team of artists, so her family of artists, she quotes
00:29:07
Velasquez, Rembrandt, Titian, who you but very well noted.
00:29:12
As we were coming in, dear listeners, Susie told me I know
00:29:16
nothing about art. I mean, I do love Artician.
00:29:18
And I was thinking, wow, yeah, the reference for Jenny Savile,
00:29:23
but she nailed it. I couldn't.
00:29:24
Believe that would have saw the first thing on the the chart on
00:29:27
the wall of her sort of yeah, going to see this this piece and
00:29:32
I thought, oh God. Well, you know, there you are
00:29:34
then. I didn't need to do anything
00:29:36
else. I just I know everything.
00:29:40
I know one thing, which is everything, yeah.
00:29:44
And so she quotes. So she's a Picasso.
00:29:48
Exactly. And there's more.
00:29:49
Oh really? The Kooning.
00:29:51
Yes. Michelangelo, Leonardo,
00:29:54
Twombley, Monet, Sutin, and Matisse.
00:29:57
And they're all and CUNY. What era is he?
00:30:01
Oh, he's so alive, is he? No, de Kooning is 20th century,
00:30:06
so he's abstract, beginning of the Abstract Expressionist
00:30:09
movement. Sai, Sai Twombley, she actually
00:30:13
was friends with him for a while.
00:30:14
So Sai Twombley is this painter who has a very strong
00:30:20
relationship with classic literature, Dante.
00:30:25
You know, all of those references like really classical
00:30:28
references as Jenny Savile does. And his paintings on the other
00:30:33
hand, are quite childish in the sense of the line.
00:30:40
They look like scribbles, They look like doodles.
00:30:43
I am going to send you on the chat.
00:30:45
Gosh, yeah, crikey. I mean, this is fascinating
00:30:48
because I look at that and go, I'm sorry, what?
00:30:52
That's just, that is literally squiggles and and I can't, I
00:30:56
can't. Oh, but it's massive.
00:31:02
Is it always massive? They were quite sizable
00:31:05
paintings, a little bit like, you know, 3 by 2 meters for
00:31:09
example, sometimes much bigger. That's that it's fascinating.
00:31:14
I would love to learn, learn more about that.
00:31:15
And there's, there's one further down my my son on the other day.
00:31:19
It's the black, it's black squiggles starting quite small
00:31:24
and they get quite big. It's almost filling the page.
00:31:27
My son, who's 7, the other day, he said the best drawing he's
00:31:31
ever done and he drew, he drawn what he said was a waterfall.
00:31:35
And it was squiggles all the way up up because they really saw
00:31:39
the waterfall in it. But it's literally just him with
00:31:43
a black pen. And he's so, so proud of it.
00:31:46
But it, it kind of reminds me of that.
00:31:48
So yeah, this is this is where I struggle slightly and I expect a
00:31:54
lot of people struggle, but I, but I can see that that's
00:31:56
enormous. So I think the effect of seeing
00:31:58
it on this little page here in a tiny box entirely different to
00:32:02
standing, as I can see. I mean, it's it's twice the
00:32:05
height of a human, that is going to have a different effect.
00:32:10
Yes, I think seeing them in the flesh is really interesting and
00:32:14
quite an impact on you because someone is taking so seriously
00:32:21
the first marks that you're going to do on a page and really
00:32:26
studying how when a child draws, and if you look at children's
00:32:32
drawings, there's no bad drawing.
00:32:34
No, the question of good and bad is absolutely irrelevant.
00:32:40
And that's what he's interested in.
00:32:41
He's interested in that sweet spot where you're just marking
00:32:47
your mark making and you are going beyond what is good, what
00:32:52
is bad, and you're entering a territory where there's no
00:32:57
difference between writing, drawing and painting, which is
00:33:03
the origin of the word graphic comes from graphene and it's in
00:33:07
Greek. It was inscribing and it was as
00:33:11
much writing as it was drawing. It really was this idea of being
00:33:15
and close to mark making and close to a dimension of relation
00:33:21
with reality that is almost unmediated by knowledge.
00:33:24
I enjoy, I enjoy work that is quite immersive, I suppose.
00:33:29
I mean, I'd, I'd really enjoy going to see the side Twombley,
00:33:31
partly because it's what a great name.
00:33:34
I mean, that's one of the best names I've ever heard.
00:33:36
I'd love to be called Susie Twombley, but that that scale,
00:33:41
the scale of a work to what I like feeling is small.
00:33:48
I think it's very healthy. You do.
00:33:51
Yeah, I think it's really healthy experience to feel to,
00:33:55
to have a sense of your own unimportance in a way against
00:34:01
something and and I suppose in the face of the entirety of
00:34:05
humanity or whatever's being depicted.
00:34:10
Why don't you think that it's interesting that he's giving so
00:34:13
much importance to those squiggles?
00:34:16
Yeah, and to that compulsive mark making.
00:34:19
Yes, it's and it's a it's, it's, it's humanness and it's a human,
00:34:23
it's creativity in its purest form, isn't it?
00:34:26
Because it's it's just happening.
00:34:28
I mean, it's not obviously with him because he's thought about
00:34:31
it excessively, but of course, but with.
00:34:33
But it is as well but. Yes.
00:34:35
Well, yeah, because it's inherent.
00:34:36
It's in his inherent gift, I suppose.
00:34:39
And yeah. And that's the thing about
00:34:42
contemporary art. I think in the whole of the 20th
00:34:45
century, there's been this move into a kind of authenticity of
00:34:51
gesture in the performance pieces that you sometimes see on
00:34:56
video and you think, what is going on?
00:34:59
What are they doing? And you know, artists, voice
00:35:03
artists like Meredith Monk, who's a composer, but like a lot
00:35:08
in relation to the minimalist movement, he's just
00:35:11
deconstructing voice. And some of her work is really
00:35:16
like stutterings in in singing form.
00:35:20
And you listen to that and you think, why is she not singing
00:35:24
properly? Is the first instrument and that
00:35:27
it's a direct connection to the deepest level of energies and
00:35:32
feelings for which we don't have words.
00:35:35
So I felt this very strong power of the voice to be a universal
00:35:39
kind of instrument. I just knew that I was on to
00:35:48
something that was had truth. There's just no question about
00:35:52
it and and I felt that I was. Meant in the 20th century there
00:35:55
was this idea of let's get to that creative impulse and let's
00:36:00
also have this appreciation for the glitch, for the error, for
00:36:04
the meandering, for the and for the not good for the this, this
00:36:09
kind of fixation on good painting, on good sculpture, on
00:36:14
technically, why do people listen to podcasts?
00:36:17
Because there's a lot of mistakes and there's this kind
00:36:20
of sense of authenticity. Although we do edit to the bone.
00:36:24
Well, I don't, we don't realise. It I do, but yeah, there is a
00:36:27
lot of editing. But yes, it's more it's because
00:36:29
you're listening to a conversation, isn't it, rather
00:36:31
than something that's, yeah, been been either scripted or
00:36:36
absolutely. And it's safe and self
00:36:38
exploration in podcasting where you, you, you are vulnerable and
00:36:44
you risk an idea that may not be yours at the end of the day now
00:36:49
that you've tested it. Yeah.
00:36:51
So we've got to go back to that, to the embracing the
00:36:54
imperfection. And I think that idea of those
00:36:57
pieces where I go round an an art gallery and I go, Oh my God.
00:37:01
I mean, that is that's, I don't what what is that?
00:37:06
I don't get it. But in a way I'll get something
00:37:08
from it. But so to finish on this, there
00:37:11
is this really strange shift in her work whereby she goes to the
00:37:17
United States, she goes to gender studies, which didn't
00:37:21
exist in Glasgow School of Art. And she later on befriended
00:37:25
Linda Knockling, who in the contemporary art world is quite
00:37:28
an important reference because in 1971 she wrote an article
00:37:33
provocatively titled Why Have there been no Great Women
00:37:38
Artists to? And you can this is the 70s.
00:37:42
So bringing it home that we don't have female artists in
00:37:46
museums and we will never say this enough.
00:37:49
Like when Saville was born a year later, Linda Knocklin was
00:37:54
writing this. So this is a very recent and the
00:37:57
conversations we're having now, you know, in cinema, in
00:38:01
contemporary art, they're all very recent.
00:38:03
Because how could it be? It's it's almost impossible to
00:38:06
address redress in that, you know, you think of the
00:38:08
centuries, centuries of work, It's going to be another, it's
00:38:12
going to have to be another sort of 600 years before.
00:38:15
But then then you've still got those are the extra 600 years of
00:38:18
all the male artists. It's.
00:38:21
Tintoretto had a daughter, he was a painter, and the king of
00:38:25
Spain actually wanted to hire her and he didn't let her.
00:38:29
And the Lord of Women who painted were the daughters of
00:38:34
painters. And so they remained in the
00:38:36
studio. And you can be sure that a lot
00:38:38
of paintings that you see in the National Gallery have some brush
00:38:41
tricks of a lot of women who were just not historicized.
00:38:46
And it's interesting 'cause I heard this expression, I just
00:38:49
did an interview. Well, when this episode comes
00:38:53
out, the interview will have come out with EJ Scott, who is
00:38:57
this trans curator and and trans activist who was talking about,
00:39:03
he created something called the Museum of Transology and he was
00:39:06
talking about how trans people are historically homeless.
00:39:11
And I love that expression. You don't have a home and as a a
00:39:15
person who identifies as a woman, you go into a museum and
00:39:20
you don't see authorship associated with the gender you
00:39:25
feel that you are, that you identify with.
00:39:28
And that is that has a massive impact.
00:39:30
Absolutely. And it's so big that you can't
00:39:32
see it. And well, it's, it's, it's the
00:39:33
question of representation across, across, yeah, gender and
00:39:39
sexuality and race within all everything, isn't it?
00:39:45
It's a, it's a huge, huge issue and that you can see steps being
00:39:52
taken, but it's, and it's something you're not even, I
00:39:56
don't know, aware when you're not even aware of it in a way.
00:40:01
Certainly as a, as a young person and I look back at the
00:40:04
things I liked and the wimp, it's like, well, there's not
00:40:06
very many women there. But I didn't, I never, I sort of
00:40:09
identified with the male. Characters or whatever people
00:40:14
that I'd like to be but and then you think back well, actually,
00:40:16
but that's not quite that's not quite good.
00:40:18
It's not quite it is it Because there's no, there's not there's
00:40:21
not a me. And obviously when you you you
00:40:24
funnel, you funnel it gets to narrower and narrower when you
00:40:28
get to, you know, trans people that is.
00:40:32
Yeah. Like I think that the idea of
00:40:35
homelessness is is it's an awful thought, but it's completely,
00:40:42
completely true. And I hope.
00:40:45
That the museum as a home. Yeah.
00:40:46
You know the museum is a home. And it's and it's for, for
00:40:49
everybody, for. Everybody but it's should.
00:40:51
Be, you know, when they, when they aren't, when there isn't a
00:40:54
representation there, it's not because you because you used to.
00:40:58
And it's like that with theatre and it's, you know, and
00:41:01
classical music, an opera and but they, but I know that
00:41:05
institutions are trying to trying to change that.
00:41:08
But if you, if you can't see yourself, you're not going to
00:41:11
want to do that as a for a living.
00:41:13
And then it's just perpetuates, isn't it?
00:41:18
Time for a short break to let you into the exhibitionist
00:41:23
studio. Look around you.
00:41:26
There is a computer, a good mic, the software in the computer,
00:41:32
which is a sort of virtual space through which you and I meet
00:41:38
with a time and space delay. Then there are my books and two
00:41:43
perfectly round Flintstones. All the magic happens here.
00:41:49
I've been talking to a university whose students need
00:41:52
placements and I could use some assistance with production and
00:41:57
research while also mentoring the future professionals of the
00:42:03
field. But for that, I have to pay
00:42:06
them. And that's where you come in.
00:42:10
Do you know how much a membership costs?
00:42:13
A mere £25 a year. Which means that you pay £2 a
00:42:20
month. 25 lbs for a whole year. When you'd buy a catalog, that's
00:42:27
the average price for one single book with two texts.
00:42:32
If you become a member of exhibition esters through a
00:42:36
platform called Sub Stack, you not only get to support
00:42:41
exhibition esters, but you also receive on average about 18 more
00:42:46
texts minimum that I will have written about many, many, many
00:42:52
fascinating topics of contemporary arts, philosophy of
00:42:56
art, and many other subjects. There's a little bonus that I
00:43:02
added, which is getting to ask me questions.
00:43:05
If you have a question about contemporary art, about the
00:43:08
field, about the market, about studies in contemporary art, I'm
00:43:13
very, very happy to do the research for you or to dig into
00:43:18
my little well of knowledge and put the information out there
00:43:22
for you. I can name you or you can be
00:43:24
anonymous, so you get to put me to work as long as the questions
00:43:30
and the prompts you give me are within my abilities and the
00:43:36
research material available to me.
00:43:39
Otherwise, you can go to donor books in the description notes.
00:43:43
If you have 1 LB to spare, you can just donate one time.
00:43:48
It's very very small amount. That's what I do with Wikipedia
00:43:52
once in a while. I put some money in there
00:43:55
because I use it almost daily and I want to reward people who
00:44:01
nourish me. Thank you for spending some time
00:44:03
with me here in my studio. Thank you for considering this
00:44:07
decent proposal. On with the episode.
00:44:16
So she comes back 1992. OK, so she's 22 years old,
00:44:20
right? Putting that into perspective
00:44:23
and talking about the strong willed character of Jenny
00:44:26
Savile, she makes these paint this painting called Propt 1992.
00:44:32
It's 7 by 6 foot. It's so about 180 by 210 meters
00:44:39
and she writes on it. It's quite a massive presence,
00:44:45
let's say in in the exhibition. Yeah, there's a huge portrait of
00:44:51
a naked woman with from an angle, we're already looking up
00:44:58
at it, but it's painted from an angle where the, the the
00:45:01
foreground is very much her, the, the, the woman's legs, her
00:45:06
thighs. And it kind of gets gets smaller
00:45:10
up to her head, which is is actually slightly off the top of
00:45:13
the the picture and sort of raised, but you can't see her
00:45:16
face totally clearly. But she's definitely gazing up
00:45:20
at this person. But she's sitting on a very
00:45:22
uncomfortable stool. I mean, I thought it looked like
00:45:24
it's digging into her legs. It was almost tree like.
00:45:28
I thought like, which might be relevant, I suppose, but that
00:45:34
that's sticking into her, her, her calf, and then and also very
00:45:40
uncomfortably. You're very polite.
00:45:42
Because I think for me, she's being impaled to be awfully,
00:45:47
awfully polite. Yeah, impaled.
00:45:49
Looks like she it's basically making her.
00:45:52
Well, that's yes, but there's another bit that looks like the
00:45:54
the bit that looked more uncomfortable to me was the bit
00:45:56
digging into a leg. But then yes, the the central
00:45:59
post. A straight.
00:46:01
No, it's a. It's not a straight leg.
00:46:03
It's like a kind of a an old classical.
00:46:06
Stool or a bit of trunk or something.
00:46:09
But yes, it looks like it's impaling her vaginally, which is
00:46:14
not very comfortable. And yeah, but kind of a lot of
00:46:20
flesh a lot. It looks, it's sort of spilling
00:46:25
over really on on on this stool and her and her her knuckles are
00:46:30
digging into fingers digging into her thighs and very
00:46:35
uncomfortable. It looks very it's it there's a
00:46:39
great amount of discomfort. It it's not it doesn't look like
00:46:44
pain in a way it's more. It's a bit pre pain.
00:46:50
Pre pain maybe? It's, it's, yeah.
00:46:52
It's she's. I don't know she's.
00:46:54
Interesting. She's it's like a almost I
00:47:02
almost hurting herself that gripping the digging your nails
00:47:06
into yourself is is almost a self preservation.
00:47:11
I think when you're you're hurting yourself to avoid
00:47:16
feeling the rest of it, I think something there, but yeah.
00:47:21
And then this back this, this text, which is as if you're
00:47:26
looking through, yeah, as if it's in front of you.
00:47:29
You're looking through a a window that it's written on on
00:47:32
the other side. So it's kind of backwards, which
00:47:37
is. And it's kind of like a Zen,
00:47:40
like as a as if she had taken her finger and written yeah,
00:47:43
with the paint, like putting a finger into the paint.
00:47:47
Yes, 'cause it reflects exactly the same colours as the as the
00:47:50
image in front. So yes, it's.
00:47:52
It's an indentation. Yeah.
00:47:53
Exactly. And the text says if we continue
00:47:57
to speak in the sameness speakers, men have spoken for
00:48:01
centuries, we will fail each other.
00:48:04
And it's this idea that failing each other speaks of the
00:48:07
sisterhood like the community. And then, you know, it's it's a
00:48:12
sentence by Luce Uruguay, who's Irigaray, who's this feminist
00:48:17
philosopher. And she does talk about
00:48:20
community. So it props is a self-portrait.
00:48:23
I mean, she doesn't like to talk about portraits, but she did use
00:48:26
her own image. She did use her own body and she
00:48:29
talks about and so it's described as being this kind of
00:48:32
fat BLOB of a woman, of an ugly woman and also an affiliation
00:48:38
very specifically to Lucian Freud's painting.
00:48:41
And Lucian Freud was known and and almost kind of like infamous
00:48:47
for working with models that he kind of took extracted the truth
00:48:54
from, right. He was rather this truth teller
00:48:57
about people. And there's this painting that's
00:49:00
quite famous of his with this very, very plump woman on this
00:49:06
on the couch, lying down on the couch.
00:49:09
And this definitely is her quoting that operation of
00:49:15
looking at someone else, but she's reverting the situation.
00:49:18
So the reverted text kind of tells you that here is the woman
00:49:23
painting herself. So looking at herself, and she
00:49:27
said I liked painting a nude body, which was very frowned on
00:49:30
in feminist studies. Where's the gaze or that kind of
00:49:33
debate? That conflict is what made that
00:49:36
painting work. So of of course she's
00:49:39
conflicted. So her reference is a male.
00:49:42
She is going straight into body and soul, into the most
00:49:50
patriarchal tradition of portraiture, painting huge
00:49:54
dimensions. So her paintings are all very,
00:49:57
very big S large scale paintings and she is very upfront about
00:50:01
it. And she said I went to Venice, I
00:50:04
went to Florence, I went everywhere.
00:50:07
The paintings were huge and I wanted to do that.
00:50:11
I saw myself making that. I saw myself in that pleasure of
00:50:16
expanding on that big surface. So you could say echoing like
00:50:21
much later feminism saying like you want to take space.
00:50:25
And then in 9394, she's going to make, she's going to produce
00:50:29
another painting, which is called Trace, which is also in
00:50:32
the exhibition, which are is a a body seen from the back with the
00:50:36
lines of a Bruin, knickers drawn, indenting on onto the
00:50:41
flesh. And the flesh is painted in a
00:50:43
way that pretty much emulates Lucien Freud's painting of the
00:50:48
skin in its grey, green, pinkish, yellowish tones, very
00:50:53
white skin. There was something a bit.
00:50:57
That paint painting gave me a bit of a idea of the Mortuary
00:51:02
slab, to be honest. That that image of the trace
00:51:07
that because it was so pale and tinged and with the with those
00:51:14
the lines and I think because the arms are not visible really,
00:51:18
it just gave me a sense of it just being a almost lifeless,
00:51:22
although it's not, it's not horizontal.
00:51:25
But yeah, there was something, the idea that we're, you know,
00:51:29
constricted and contained by these.
00:51:32
Yeah. That kind of, I don't know, the
00:51:36
trappings of being a woman, you know, And yeah, and also they
00:51:43
have those, those parts are so sexualized and, and viewed how
00:51:49
they're viewed. Yes, it was I I found that one
00:51:55
very, very striking for that. Charles Saatchi bought propped
00:52:01
spots her, supports her for a year and a half, gives her money
00:52:07
to prepare an exhibition in 1994.
00:52:11
She's part of the exhibition Young British Artists Three at
00:52:15
Charles Saatchi Gallery, where he has invested in a lot of
00:52:20
very, very young artists who are going to be shown in the famous
00:52:25
or infamous exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Art in
00:52:29
1997. And this is really interesting
00:52:32
because Jenny Savile is doing her little what she's going, you
00:52:36
know, she's journeying into the contemporary art world because
00:52:41
she also has an exhibition in 96 at Pace McGill in New York with
00:52:44
a huge gallery. In 99, she will have an
00:52:48
exhibition at Gagosian. At 29 years old, Gagosian is a
00:52:51
huge gallery. Now Gagosian has galleries all
00:52:55
over the world. It's huge.
00:52:59
The the, the gallery represents her, still does.
00:53:02
So she's set for life selling her work and in 97 sensation
00:53:08
happens the UK loses its mind along with the Turner Prize and
00:53:15
discovers contemporaries Tracey Yemen's tent with all the lovers
00:53:19
names that she's had sex with embroidered on a tent on the
00:53:23
tent's sides and and and there's this activity of people who seem
00:53:29
to do nothing skilled really and call it art and sell it for
00:53:33
millions in the BBC your home Susie the most incredible.
00:53:40
It's on YouTube. I've I've talked about this in
00:53:43
Tracy Yemen episode and it's the most astonishing program ever
00:53:49
ever made. The title is is Painting Dead.
00:53:53
And I think in Jenny's Jenny Savile's context is really
00:53:56
interesting because they invite a bunch of people, curators,
00:54:02
David Sylvester, like this revered critic Norman Rosenthal,
00:54:07
Lots of people. Tracy Yemen, drunk as a skunk.
00:54:13
She leaves the show midway, saying they're real people
00:54:19
watching this. And she leaves and they're
00:54:23
debating in the most horrifically jargony terms if
00:54:28
painting, whether painting's dead or not.
00:54:30
And it it's really fascinating to see how Jenny Savile was a
00:54:36
painter, was in the show. There were other painters.
00:54:40
And there's this question that is being asked.
00:54:43
Meanwhile, people keep on painting.
00:54:46
And what's also really funny is that in 1994, Jenny Savile
00:54:53
produces her first cover for manic St.
00:54:56
Preachers album Holy Bible, which is one of those paintings
00:55:00
of these massive bodies seen from the left, from the right
00:55:05
and centred. She becomes a mum at some point
00:55:09
in already in the 21st century. Motherhood shifts her
00:55:13
perspective. She has a magnificent,
00:55:16
magnificent quote about it, saying giving birth is like
00:55:19
being in a Francis Bacon painting, which I thought that's
00:55:25
so. Funny, isn't it?
00:55:26
Yeah, That's so, Yeah. So that's lovely.
00:55:29
That link with. Yeah, I, I'd probably, if I had
00:55:34
to describe it, probably would end up being something, you
00:55:36
know, theatrical in some way. But yes, that, that, that's
00:55:40
wonderful. Yeah.
00:55:42
I wonder if she's experienced it at the time.
00:55:44
I sort of saw that at the time, you know, while.
00:55:48
It's while it's going on, I don't know about you, but it was
00:55:52
not my I didn't have that kind of awareness.
00:55:55
No, but sometimes I do have things where I'm in a situation
00:55:59
I'm like this is like a this is like I'm in line of duty or or
00:56:02
I'm in EastEnders or something and I'll I'll sort of be seeing
00:56:05
myself and this and I'm like, this is just weird.
00:56:08
Is that are there cameras? She started looking at the
00:56:12
figures of the Virgin Mary and how they're depicted in
00:56:16
painting. And so she really is drawing
00:56:19
from motherhood and from her own physical experience of
00:56:23
motherhood. And she even says something
00:56:25
really interesting about the umbilical cord.
00:56:27
She says that she saw that as a kind of a rope that connected
00:56:31
her to ancient worlds, and that's why she's going to go
00:56:35
into the ancient history. She loves epic poetry.
00:56:38
She really is a very classical referenced person and I think
00:56:42
you see that in her work. And so later on, I mean, and
00:56:46
this is like at the end of the 90s, there's there's a a
00:56:50
question of Speaking of representation that I wanted to
00:56:52
bring up about her career, which is the fact that she is very
00:56:57
moved by the body. So the body really is the focus
00:57:02
of her art and she and, and very she's very aware and, and she
00:57:06
claims it for herself. And at a certain point she's
00:57:09
going to look into types of bodies and into, she moves away
00:57:14
from that Lucien Freud like skin.
00:57:16
And she, this idea of going into a plastic surgeon's office and,
00:57:21
and going into the archives and even witnessing some operations
00:57:26
is very much what she's going to go in in search for besides
00:57:31
looking at paintings so precisely and in such detail.
00:57:36
And so she does a painting of Della Gray's volcano, who's a
00:57:41
queer intersex visual artist. And the painting's called
00:57:46
Matrix. And it's the composition is like
00:57:50
Gustav Corbis painting the origin of the world Laurie Jean
00:57:54
du Monde, who's it was a very famous painting that is
00:58:00
permanently at the Muse dos in Paris.
00:58:03
And it's to open legs and in the center of the painting you have
00:58:08
the vulva and you have the pubic area and and it's cut at at mid
00:58:17
level, at waist level. So you only see the legs open
00:58:22
wide, You see the vulva and then you see the torso in sort of you
00:58:27
are almost that's vagina level, if I might say so.
00:58:30
And you don't see the rest of the body.
00:58:33
It was the realist movement in France, and it was also this
00:58:38
idea that OK, realism. So let's really paint women.
00:58:42
Let's really paint what we see and what we desire.
00:58:45
And the male gaze here is really interesting because in feminists
00:58:51
rereadings of contemporary art and also of our own relationship
00:58:54
to our own body, there's this discourse about how we don't
00:58:58
know our own bodies, how we're not taught to look at our own
00:59:01
bodies. And here you have painting of a
00:59:03
man who is painting a vulva. And of course, it was a huge
00:59:10
scandal at the time. And she was looking at this
00:59:14
painting and she was looking again at quoting this painting
00:59:19
visually, but also looking at other types of bodies.
00:59:22
And she talks about being fascinated by the fact that
00:59:25
there was there were breasts. And so she continues the body up
00:59:29
to the face. There were breasts and there was
00:59:31
a penis as well. There's an article about Jenny
00:59:34
Savile, a recent article in The New Yorker, who also talks about
00:59:38
the other side of things and touches upon this idea of wire
00:59:42
ISM of the painter. And so they contacted the.
00:59:48
Person who was. In the painting there's there's
00:59:51
a quote of the the model saying that it reproduces the intersex
00:59:58
body as a public spectacle and thereby reinforces the status
01:00:03
quo. So there's this difficult
01:00:05
relationship with from the models perspective, which
01:00:09
weirdly enough is what she was trying to subvert in the
01:00:13
beginning of her career. And here she's going into kind
01:00:17
of the exception. What are the visual exceptions
01:00:23
to the regularity or the average visual condition of the body?
01:00:31
I copy pasted it. Oh yes, OK, so yes.
01:00:46
And so there's there's a quote of the the model saying that it
01:00:52
reproduces the intersex body as a public spectacle and thereby
01:00:57
reinforces the status quo. So there's this difficult
01:01:01
relationship with from the models perspective, which
01:01:06
weirdly enough is what she was trying to subvert in the
01:01:09
beginning of her career. And he is she's going into kind
01:01:13
of the exception. What are the visual exceptions
01:01:19
to the regularity or the average visual condition of the body and
01:01:28
here of gender? I'll leave it at that because I
01:01:30
think we'll and and in we'll talk about it in regards to the
01:01:34
exhibition, but just referencing in 2009.
01:01:37
So she does another manic St. St.
01:01:41
Preachers album called Jennifer Play Lovers, where there's this
01:01:47
painting of a boy. It seems to be a boy with a sort
01:01:53
of bloodied face that is in the exhibition or a version of which
01:01:58
is in the exhibition. And the CD at the time was
01:02:03
considered inappropriate. And so this is a direct quote
01:02:08
from Sainsbury's representatives who decided not to show the
01:02:15
cover of the CD on sale and then and so kind of stocked it in, in
01:02:19
plain slip cases. So again, this idea and, and we,
01:02:24
we know the story of this of this kid.
01:02:27
So Speaking of the market context as well.
01:02:29
So her London galleries, so Gagosian says of her, she's
01:02:35
incredibly says of her, so her London galleries says of her,
01:02:39
she's incredibly precise about her process.
01:02:43
And there's handsome demand with limited supply.
01:02:47
Oh. Interesting, In 2018 propped was
01:02:53
sold in auction at Sotheby's in London and it sold for the
01:02:57
equivalent of $12.4 million. So I saw this in The New Yorker
01:03:03
article and was too lazy to convert it back to pounds.
01:03:06
But you can. I mean, it gives you an idea of
01:03:09
how expensive it was. And it made her, at the time,
01:03:13
the record price in auction for a work by a living female
01:03:19
artist, now surpassed by Cecily. Brown So when you sell a piece
01:03:23
of work, I don't know this. So does she own that work
01:03:27
initially to then sell it or was it already because Tachi had
01:03:35
presented it? Is that right initially?
01:03:38
And and and and bought it. He bought it.
01:03:40
It was the first. Painting.
01:03:43
What did he buy? He bought.
01:03:46
I don't know is the answer. I don't know how much it was at
01:03:50
the time, couldn't find the price, but it certainly wasn't
01:03:53
12 million, I can tell you that. And what happens and that's a a
01:03:57
very good question and a a thing that makes it incredibly
01:04:01
difficult to evaluate the market.
01:04:03
So if you are represented by a commercial gallery, as Jenny
01:04:07
Savile is by Gagosian, they list your work, they have a price
01:04:14
list, and when you're a collector, you go there and they
01:04:17
present you the prices. And so it is a sort of
01:04:20
management as well that you get when you're represented by a
01:04:23
commercial gallery. That said, there's a lot of
01:04:26
secrecy around prices. And so the only perception you
01:04:30
have of prices is when you have auctions.
01:04:34
And so as you very rightly asked, what happens is that
01:04:39
Saatchi sold his collection, someone bought it.
01:04:43
What happens when you're a living artist, which is you're
01:04:46
represented by a gallery gallery, so sells your work and
01:04:50
then it's in a collection. Now it's in an auction house, so
01:04:54
completely disconnected, unaffiliated with both the
01:04:59
gallery that represents the artist and the artist.
01:05:03
So when an artwork and I worked in commercial galleries goes
01:05:08
into auction of one of the artists you represent as a
01:05:11
commercial gallery, panic mode. Huge panic.
01:05:16
Because what can happen? There's 2 possibilities. 3
01:05:21
there's a possibility of magically it's selling for the
01:05:25
exact price that you have. It's priced in your own gallery,
01:05:29
or horrifyingly, it sells for less.
01:05:33
Or befuddlingly, it sells fur a shit load of money 100 times
01:05:42
more expensive than what you're selling it for in your gallery,
01:05:45
which is not great either. And this is completely
01:05:50
disconnected from both the artist and the person who
01:05:53
represents them. Right to the to the artist.
01:05:56
This is what I I've never actually thought about before.
01:05:59
So Jenny Savile's painting sells for $12 million.
01:06:04
Does she, she doesn't. That's terrible.
01:06:07
That goes to the owner because it's a question of ownership.
01:06:09
You own something. So thus the speculative markets.
01:06:13
I think it's kind of. Scrabble if it feels very dirty
01:06:17
to me, this whole thing. It you heard it here first.
01:06:23
And I'm then I'm then assuming that, you know, if, if this
01:06:27
painting first sold for 12 million, then her stock goes up.
01:06:31
Like she, you know, if, if you want a Jenny Savile painting,
01:06:35
you're going to have to pay a lot for it.
01:06:37
Does she then get commissions? And how does she make money?
01:06:42
I mean, I've never ever thought about this before and it's
01:06:46
really interesting. Question the value increases
01:06:48
because you think, oh, I want to buy a new one because then it's
01:06:51
going to go up. It's going to take her five
01:06:54
years to paint it. And she's like, shit, it takes
01:06:59
me two years to make painting you.
01:07:01
Know better? Do.
01:07:02
Some small ones going on and there's another angle for it
01:07:05
which is auction prices. Also tells you where we are in
01:07:10
terms of the gender gap. So you will notice that I said
01:07:17
at the time record price paid at auction for work by a living
01:07:20
female artists. To give you an idea, in 2018 the
01:07:26
painting Portrait of an Artist's Pool with two figures from 1972
01:07:32
by David Hockney was sold by approximately $90 as
01:07:41
opposed to the 12 million of her own work.
01:07:44
And in 2008, Mian Hearst's Golden calf of also 2008.
01:07:51
No, that can't be right. Same year production sold in
01:07:56
auction for 16. About 16. 10 years
01:08:01
before. So more than 10 years before
01:08:04
Jenny Savile. I suppose you see props in the
01:08:07
distance, but the first picture that was the the very first one
01:08:13
as you go in was the I don't know what it was called
01:08:15
unfortunately, but the two the 2 girls faces very close together,
01:08:20
1 peeking over the other shoulder.
01:08:23
Huge, huge canvas, massive paint.
01:08:31
I was really taken by the the texture of it and being that
01:08:35
close. How kind of close to the this
01:08:38
huge amount of paint and the flesh and these these bright
01:08:43
faces, girls faces that her work is very well, not all of it
01:08:47
actually, but those certainly this first room, the fleshiness
01:08:51
of it. I really and the really got a
01:08:56
sense of the texture of of the paint, but also of the of the
01:09:00
feeling of flesh and and and I love under her eyes.
01:09:06
I I'm really struck by the all the eyes, huge eyes.
01:09:10
They're very realistic as opposed to all the other
01:09:13
impressionistic or gestural like real big brush strokes like she
01:09:19
uses these big brushes blobs like very.
01:09:22
Big that are that are sort of part of the picture, obviously,
01:09:25
but they're just huge chunks of paint kind of globs globs of
01:09:30
them. But yes, the eyes are really,
01:09:33
and I and I, I do, I love, I love looking at what I was
01:09:37
saying to you that I like looking at portraits of people's
01:09:39
faces because I do like looking at people's eyes.
01:09:42
And we actually had a discussion about looking into people's
01:09:44
eyes, didn't we, before we even went into the exhibition about
01:09:46
how that's the only way you can, that's how you humanise
01:09:50
somebody. If you, if you're going to have
01:09:52
an argument with someone, swear at someone in the in the car,
01:09:55
you actually look them in the eyes.
01:09:57
It really it stopped it kind of, you know, you can see a cyclist
01:10:02
as just as a thing on a piece of metal.
01:10:04
But if you see that, if you look them in the eye, then they
01:10:06
become real. And I think that that's what's
01:10:09
so wonderful about these huge oversized pieces of art that are
01:10:13
quite clearly not they're not realistic.
01:10:16
They're far too big, but they're but they but yet they are
01:10:19
because the eyes are feel real. You know, you can see into
01:10:24
their, into them. And I, yeah.
01:10:29
And I, I mean, I immediately thought of my daughter, I
01:10:31
suppose. And that's the youthfulness,
01:10:33
the, the fleshiness of, of youth and the connection between the
01:10:39
two, the 2 heads. It's all, well, it's completely
01:10:43
indiscernible in a way. It's almost like a 2 headed A2
01:10:47
headed creature. It's almost like a 2 headed I
01:10:48
was. For a moment I thought it what I
01:10:50
really had to look quite closely to see that she was actually had
01:10:54
a had a the one behind had her chin on the other's shoulder.
01:10:59
Yeah. That that close, that connection
01:11:02
the between two young people and that you can be so close and and
01:11:10
so physical with another person that's either a sister possibly
01:11:15
or a friend that you might not necessarily have as a.
01:11:19
Grown up, skin to skin connection.
01:11:23
And then in the other room, there's what we talked about
01:11:26
before, which is these 90s paintings where you have again,
01:11:30
an indentation on the painting. You have a body of a, a naked
01:11:34
woman. And in this case, it was the
01:11:36
painter's finger that touched the image and made these lines
01:11:43
around inside the body that's kind of outlined the shape of
01:11:47
the body. And she explained that that some
01:11:50
friends of her, so this is the 90s diet culture.
01:11:53
And so she explains that some friends actually drew the drew
01:11:57
these lines that as the the the place where they, their bodies,
01:12:03
where they wanted their bodies to lose weight into or to be
01:12:07
reduced to because they were obsessed with being skinny,
01:12:12
because that was kind of the 90s sort of culture.
01:12:17
And she talks about not being really touched by that culture
01:12:21
and but but being very aware of it.
01:12:24
And the Manic St. Preaches album, a lot of the
01:12:28
songs talk about anorexia and she was really interested in
01:12:31
being part of it because of that.
01:12:33
Yeah, it's yeah. And the the the lines she draws
01:12:38
are quite as circular. I mean, there's no way you
01:12:40
could, I suppose, shrink down to what the but but in a way
01:12:46
that's, that's what it was like, you know, you can't, you can't,
01:12:50
you can't lop in lop off limbs to become as thin as some as
01:12:54
people wanted to be, I suppose. Yeah, something something about
01:12:58
mapping the body as well. And that, that just being
01:13:03
unhappy with everything about your own physicality, it's, it's
01:13:10
very sad. She's in the paintings quite a
01:13:13
bit. She wants to be in that
01:13:16
tradition. I had a hard time understanding
01:13:21
the flipping of the narrative, like Full disclosure and I and
01:13:25
I, I was interested in seeing where she was going to take
01:13:27
this. And I, I, I propose that we go
01:13:30
to the Manic St. Preachers image which which is
01:13:34
worth painting, which is not that far away.
01:13:37
So you cross that corridor, you have the one with the knickers
01:13:40
and the bra that we described earlier.
01:13:43
And then we have it was. On its own, wasn't it?
01:13:45
It's on its own in that space. Yes.
01:13:49
And so you, I and I remember you being really captured by that
01:13:52
image. Yeah, I think because of the
01:13:54
because partly because there was colour.
01:13:56
And I think her work, it's apart from the end, the final images
01:14:01
and the the the most recent images in the the final room
01:14:06
which are very colourful. There isn't a lot of colour.
01:14:11
There's, there was a moment when there's, there's two, there were
01:14:14
two images in, in another room of, of female.
01:14:19
There was 2 females possibly or female and a male entwined with
01:14:22
lines across them. One of them was quite dark and
01:14:27
used darker colour, I think maybe a darker red and, and, and
01:14:30
the other one has pink, pinkish lines because of coral coloured
01:14:35
lines, a little bit of a little bit of blue, not a lot of colour
01:14:38
on either. But I was more drawn to the, the
01:14:40
brighter colour. It made me feel more positive
01:14:43
about it and I thought that's really interesting.
01:14:45
This kind of I, the, the, the, what you use completely affect
01:14:49
how you feel about, about the image.
01:14:52
And I, and I was drawn to this very large portrait.
01:14:56
I, I felt it was a young girl, but but it's a boy.
01:15:00
I'm not sure I think. Well, I, I did, I've googled
01:15:03
the, googled the, you know, talk about the Mannix pitch and how
01:15:08
it was, how that was covered over in shops because it was
01:15:12
deemed offensive in some way, because it could be seen as
01:15:15
blood, you know, blood and pain and lips that have been
01:15:20
bloodied. But in fact, it's, it's an image
01:15:23
she took of a, of a, a boy, or presumably it's a boy, but with
01:15:27
a port. Port wine stains a very large
01:15:30
birthmark across their face, which I, which I remarked when
01:15:36
you, when you look, I took a picture of it and I could see
01:15:39
that more clearly through my camera.
01:15:43
I could, it was very clearly a port wine mark.
01:15:45
Whereas if you're looking at it with the naked eye, it could be
01:15:49
there's multiple. Yes.
01:15:51
Multiple different ways of reading it, but it's a beautiful
01:15:54
blue behind the image and very it's a.
01:15:58
Sort of electric. Blue and the Blues reflected in
01:16:01
here is it Yeah, it's a it's a very well we sort of talked
01:16:04
about it being quite anime and that kind of graphic novel type
01:16:10
image because it was so it's the image is so strong.
01:16:14
The face is so strong against this very deep colour, which was
01:16:19
reflected in the hair. It's very, I, I really loved, I
01:16:23
loved all the lines of it and the, the, there's so much going
01:16:29
on and, and it's and also so many that idea of different
01:16:33
interpretations of the, what's the expression?
01:16:38
The the eyes are very so it's interesting 'cause the colours.
01:16:41
So she collects a lot of imagery.
01:16:44
She says it's a pain to travel with her 'cause she takes
01:16:46
pictures of everything and she loves taking pictures of
01:16:49
graffiti in countries, in foreign countries, because it
01:16:53
takes out the political message. And she's only looking at the
01:16:57
colour and the writing. A little bit like the site
01:17:00
Wombley's, as it were. Because now, you know, site
01:17:03
Wombley so you can say a little bit like Saitombley, don't you?
01:17:06
Like Yes, very. Erudite.
01:17:08
Yes, absolutely and. You're referencing them at all
01:17:12
times. No, we don't know what I'm
01:17:13
talking about. And Esther will be like, what
01:17:16
the hell are you talking about, Susie?
01:17:18
I've got good knowledge now. And so she's so and so she's got
01:17:23
inspired by those spray colours, but also when she had children,
01:17:27
she started looking at the colours that children wear and
01:17:31
that children are drawn to, like these neon colours and these
01:17:35
fluorescent colours. And so she changed her palette
01:17:38
quite a bit, which is the case of all the portraits at the end.
01:17:41
So the that looked like graffiti or?
01:17:44
Street Art. A little bit.
01:17:46
So she went from this fleshy colour to these kinds of
01:17:49
paintings and in this case particularly there's a whole
01:17:53
bunch. So it's the case of the intersex
01:17:56
sex worker and there's the case of her looking fur bodies that
01:18:02
are that that are different, but which are also uttered because
01:18:09
of their difference. And she's focusing on them and
01:18:12
reducing them to that otherness. So there's this, this criticism,
01:18:18
which is I, for me, the limits of the exercise of flipping the
01:18:21
narrative and not really interrogating the language that
01:18:25
you're absorbing from centuries and centuries of paint, of
01:18:29
patriarchal painting with enormous qualities, but also a
01:18:33
very specific point of view and a specific role in history.
01:18:40
Because paintings historicized before TV, before photography, I
01:18:43
did not have this impression of motherhood, of physicality, of
01:18:49
the skin. For me, it was all about
01:18:52
painting and this endless research for the masterpiece,
01:18:58
for that, for, for that image that finally strikes you and
01:19:04
situates or deconstructs enough. Like you were saying, quite
01:19:09
rightly so. You don't see the port wine
01:19:11
stain, you see blood. You see a hero of an anime
01:19:18
character. You see so many things, and she
01:19:21
does that really well. But there's also this kind of
01:19:24
stigmatization. Well, yes.
01:19:27
And I, I also because I was like, well, who is this person?
01:19:29
And it was a picture she found in a book.
01:19:31
And I thought, I don't know if I, if, if I saw, if I, you know,
01:19:36
that was me and I saw myself. I recognise myself.
01:19:40
And of course, having a port wine stain is something people
01:19:44
are going to look at and stare and point at and, and to have it
01:19:51
to have, you know, to put it on front of a of an album that then
01:19:55
has to be covered up because it's kind of offensive.
01:19:58
I was like, oh God, it's. That's a sad.
01:20:00
Story for that. Poor.
01:20:02
Child. It looks like a child.
01:20:04
Yeah, it. Does It's definitely a young
01:20:05
person. Yeah.
01:20:08
There is something slightly uncomfortable about that, I
01:20:12
think. The motherhood thing.
01:20:17
Just wondering about my own. I, I felt like the, the, the
01:20:26
bitches of her holding the babies and they're saying, yeah,
01:20:31
you know, you do get those the, the, the flashes of the, the
01:20:34
virgin holding baby Jesus and these kind of podgy figures.
01:20:41
Baby Jesus is always quite well, quite well behaved, doesn't
01:20:44
really wriggle around very much. I, I got, I did get the sense of
01:20:48
having to grapple with a sort of this kind of, oh wait, a
01:20:53
creature. I think they are at that stage
01:20:56
of these creatures and that of of having to step, be still and
01:21:02
be the solid. So just to explain, these are
01:21:05
these drawings that you were describing that were in graphite
01:21:09
and then these red crayons and or, or blue.
01:21:13
And it was this woman sitting a little bit like the Virgin Mary
01:21:19
holding the baby. And she said she did.
01:21:21
She said that she did a research and the only painting or drawing
01:21:25
I think she found was a Rembrandt of a Virgin Mary
01:21:29
holding or even not even a Virgin Mary mother trying to
01:21:32
hold the child. And there's a kind of like a
01:21:35
shoe. Flying off.
01:21:36
From the child's foot and because it's it's, it's hard to
01:21:39
contain the child, but all the other children in classic
01:21:42
painting, they're just because they're Jesus's, they have the
01:21:47
wisdom. So I don't know.
01:21:50
So she was really trying to revisit that iconography from
01:21:54
the motherhood perspective. So the Virgin Mary's perspective
01:21:57
whereby they're trying to hold the child for a family photo and
01:22:02
the children are naked. And there's even one where
01:22:04
there's a kind of this little, this small little penis sticking
01:22:08
out kind of like almost towards you.
01:22:11
It's such a weird Yes, it's. Very it's it's really is is in
01:22:17
your face literally, isn't it? It's.
01:22:20
Yeah, that's the only time where I was thinking, oh, that brings
01:22:24
memories of nappies. I mean, yes, especially the
01:22:28
penis is kind of the little is that it's always the danger when
01:22:32
you're changing a little. Boy's nappy.
01:22:33
Is it going to? Is it going to pee in my face?
01:22:37
Basically, if you've never changed a little boy's nappy,
01:22:40
this is what it's like. You have to be really super
01:22:42
careful. We have to wrap it up because
01:22:44
you have to pick up your children, and I think that's the
01:22:46
perfect way to finish it because that's motherhood and that's
01:22:50
what parenting is and contemporary life.
01:22:52
I very much, I felt like I've learned.
01:22:55
I've learned things. And I think that's if I go to
01:22:58
see an exhibit, I always want to be able to learn something about
01:23:03
another perspective or about my own interpretation of something
01:23:07
in my own experience, other people's experience.
01:23:10
And actually, I've learnt about art.
01:23:13
I've I have learnt about painting and of course about
01:23:16
Jenny Savile, but other thing, other painters as well.
01:23:19
And I've, it's so enriching. What an enriching experience to
01:23:22
to have been, to be on your podcast.
01:23:24
It's been really fantastic. Thank you so much for inviting
01:23:29
me. Thank you and likewise likewise.
01:23:32
It was such a pleasure to have you over and I hope you come.
01:23:35
Back. I will definitely come back.
01:23:37
I'd love to go to another exhibition with you.
01:23:38
Thanks, Joanne. Take.
01:23:41
Care bye bye. Exhibition This is is an
01:23:46
independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre
01:23:50
Nevers. We have episodes every two weeks
01:23:53
and this season, season 3 is a bit of a turning point.
01:23:57
We have 5 new episode types, from more experimental art
01:24:02
travel logs or art stories to conversational formats about
01:24:07
solo exhibitions with people who are not part of the industry.
01:24:12
Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life.
01:24:17
If you're new here, you have a whole catalog of episodes to
01:24:21
enjoy. Discover them at your own pace.


