Verdurin
Pierre d'Alancaisez
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Top 10 Verdurin Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Verdurin episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Verdurin for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Verdurin episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Alfie Bown: Post-Comedy
Verdurin
02/27/25 • 64 min
Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.
Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore. But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?
This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.
Alfie Bown is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Kings College London. His research focuses on psychoanalysis, digital media and popular culture.
He has also worked as a journalist, writing for The Guardian, Paris Review, New Statesman, Tribune, and others. His books include The Playstation Dreamworld, Post-Memes, and Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships.
He is the founder of Everyday Analysis which publishes pamphlets and essay collections with contemporary social and political issues.
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Alfie Bown: Post-Comedy
Published by Polity, 2024
ISBN 9781509563395
Get the book: https://verdur.in/store/post-comedy-by-alfie-bown/
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Pierre's interviews and writing: https://petitpoi.net/
Events, exhibitions, and more at Verdurin, London: https://verdur.in/
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10/02/21 • 54 min
Between Discipline and a Hard Place
The Value of Contemporary Art
Alana Jelinek
Published by Bloomsbury, 2020
ISBN 9781350100473
Some fields have an easier time describing themselves than others. “History is the study of past events.” “Biology is the study of living organisms.” But art? Is art a discipline? Is it a practice? Who gets to answer this most fundamental of questions, and why do we prefer not to try? Between Discipline and a Hard Place, written from the perspective of a practising artist, proposes that, against a groundswell of historians, museums and commentators claiming to speak on behalf of art, it is artists alone who may define what art really is.
Between Discipline and a Hard Place is a passionate treatise arguing for a new way of understanding art that forefronts the role of the artist and the importance of inclusion within both the concept of art and the art world.
Alana Jelinek speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about a disciplined and disciplinary approach to thinking about art and its value outside the current preoccupation with economic considerations and the great potential of interdisciplinary working.
Alana Jelinek is an artist and a researcher at the University of Hertfordshire.
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07/26/21 • 84 min
The Ends of Art Criticism
Patricia Bickers
Published by Lund Humphries, 2021
ISBN 9781848224261
Crisis? What Crisis? At a time where there are repeated claims of the impending demise of art criticism, The Ends of Art Criticism dispel these myths by arguing that the lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not, as some believe, a weakness, but a strength, allowing previously marginalised voices and new global and political perspectives to come to the fore.
Patricia Bickers speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about her time as the editor of Art Monthly, the changing role of art criticism, the politics of speaking and writing about art, the art school, the relationship between artists and critics, the academicisation of critical discourse, the relationship between art history and criticism, and.. the art of the interview.
Some of the works mentioned in the conversation:
- The Freeze exhibitions
- That Jerry Saltz tweet
- Richard Serra, Weight and Measure
- Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Black Trans Archive
- Pilvi Takala, The Trainee
- Cameron Rowland, 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 73
- The Art Monthly Talking Art anthology of artist interviews: Volume 1, Volume 2
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07/21/21 • 68 min
Art as an Interface of Law and Justice
Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption
Frans-Willem Korsten
Published by Hart, 2021
ISBN 9781509944347
Art as an Interface of Law and Justice looks at the way in which the ‘call for justice’ is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law. Such calls may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it.
Frans-Willem Korsten speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about art that attempts to support – or disturb – law in pursuit of justice. He discusses Milo Rau’s The Congo Tribunal, Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive, the practice of Forensic Architecture, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Only God Forgives. Through art’s interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light.
Frans-Willem Korsten holds the chair in “Literature and Society” at the Erasmus School of Philosophy and works at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society in the Netherlands.
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05/31/21 • 62 min
A Restless Art
How participation won, and why it matters
François Matarasso
Published by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (open access), 2019
ISBN 9781903080207
It is almost twenty years since contemporary art took a ‘participation turn’. Now, just about every museum or theatre company has a participation or engagement department. It is nothing short of orthodoxy that one of art’s core roles is to reach out to audiences beyond art institutions – and paradoxically it is often art institutions that mandate this function. How can we reconcile the somewhat forgotten history – and ongoing practice – of the community arts with the recent rise of participatory art, social practice, or outreach and engagement?
François Matarasso speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about his long-term engagement in community art practice, the meanings of participation and cultural democracy, and his proposals for thinking about cultural and artistic participation as a fundamental human right. We talk about the history of the community arts movement in the UK, his influential 1997 paper Use or Ornament, ways of supporting cultural democracy through projects like Fun Palaces, and reaching peak culture.
François Matarasso is a community artist, writer, and researcher, and one of the co-creators of the 2020 Rome Charter.
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01/23/21 • 62 min
Propaganda Art in the 21st Century
Jonas Staal
Published by MIT Press, 2019
ISBN 9780262042802
How to understand propaganda art in the post-truth era — and how to create a new kind of emancipatory propaganda art. Propaganda art—whether a depiction of joyous workers in the style of socialist realism or a film directed by Steve Bannon — delivers a message. But, as Jonas Staal argues, propaganda does not merely make a political point; it aims to construct reality itself. Political regimes have shaped our world according to their interests and ideology; today, popular mass movements push back by constructing other worlds with their own propaganda.
Jonas Staal speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about his proposal for a new model of emancipatory propaganda art — one that acknowledges the relationship between art and power and takes both an aesthetic and a political position in the practice of world-making.
Jonas Staal is a scholar of propaganda and a self-described propaganda artist. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016–ongoing). With BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, he cofounded the New World Academy (2013–16). His most recent project Collectivize Facebook exploring legal ways to return the ownership of data in its many forms to the collective ownership of the users of software platforms.
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01/19/21 • 58 min
Wages Against Artwork
Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art
Leigh Claire La Berge
Published by Duke University Press, 2019
ISBN 9781478004233
The last twenty years have seen a rise in the production, circulation, and criticism of new forms of socially engaged art aimed at achieving social justice and economic equality.
Leigh Claire La Berge, author of Wages Against Artwork, speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about what she calls decommodified labour — the slow diminishment of wages alongside an increase in the demands of work. Outlining the ways in which artists relate to work, La Berge examines how artists and organizers create institutions to address their own precarity and why the increasing presence of animals and children in contemporary art points to the turn away from paid labour.
Leigh Claire La Berge is Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She’s the author of Scandals and Abstraction (about which she spoke on an earlier episode), and co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism. She’s currently working on expanding her project Marx for Cats, initiated with Caroline Woolard and Or Zubalsky.
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11/29/24 • 46 min
A recording of the "What We May Also Do" written by Oliver Bennett in response to Anna Sebastian's exhibition of the same title. Staged at Verdurin in July 2024.
A woman approaches the gate of a walled city. Her admission depends on the depth of her moral liberation and embrace of boundless self-determination. A border guard assesses her character for its fit with the city’s society. In a series of interrogations, a charged relationship develops between the supplicant and her assessor. The process ultimately tests their belief in the system.
Bennett’s play develops a theatrical language that responds to Sebastian’s work and engages with the psychoanalytic ‘Gloria’ films which also inspire the paintings. It challenges contemporary attitudes to sex, religion, and power by exposing liberal values upheld by flawed individuals.
Written and directed by Oliver Bennett
Performed by Oliver Bennett and Kristin Milward
Verdurin - exhibitions, events, store
Information about the play and cast
Anna Sebastian's exhibition at Verdurin
Recording: Cameron Lee and Aimee Armstrong
07/25/23 • 64 min
American democracy is in crisis. The economic system is slowly subjecting Americans of nearly all income levels and backgrounds to enormous amounts of stress. The United States lacks the state capacity required to alleviate this stress, and politicians increasingly find that if they promise to solve economic problems, they are likely to disappoint voters. Instead, they encourage voters to blame each other.
The crisis cannot be solved, the economy cannot be set right, and democracy cannot be saved. But American democracy cannot be killed, either. Americans can’t imagine any compelling alternative political systems. And so, American democracy continues on, in a deeply unsatisfying way. Americans invent ever-more elaborate coping mechanisms in a desperate bid to go on. But it becomes increasingly clear that the way is shut. The American political system was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.
Benjamin Studebaker speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the runaway effects of globalisation, the false hope industry, cultural non-politics, and the very unlikely get-out scenarios.
Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist whose work focuses on notions of legitimacy. He hosts the podcasts Political Theory 101.
- The equality/equity meme
- The 1619 Project
- No Labels, the ‘commonsense majority’ party
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The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy
Benjamin StudebakerThe Way is Shut
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
ISBN 9783031282096
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12/28/22 • 78 min
In the 1990s, a network of twenty Soros Centres for Contemporary Art sprung up across Eastern Europe: Almaty, Belgrade, Budapest, Kiev, Ljubljana, Prague, Riga, Sarajevo, Tallinn, Warsaw, and Zagreb among them. These centres, funded as their name suggests by Geroge Soros’ Open Society Foundation, had as their mission the cataloguing of dissident pre-1989 art and the introduction of new forms of artistic practice to the art scenes of post-Eastern Block states. Within a decade, the centres wound up their operation and their histories have been forgotten but not because they made a mark on Eastern European art and societies.
The Influencing Machine, Aaron Moulton’s exhibition and book traces the network’s history and evaluates its outsized impact on its host societies. Through the use of template annual exhibitions and synchronised open calls, the Centres pioneered forms of socially engaged practice that preceded the form’s development in Western art capitals and gave artists access to unprecedented production budgets, international networking opportunities, and access to new media technologies.
Moulton proposes that the Centres played an underappreciated role in orienting artists ideologically in pro-Western and pro-neoliberal directions, a that the extent of their influence has been underappreciated. In societies making the transition from socialism to free-reign capitalism, the actions of a single NGO which habitually outspent all other funders appear to have been glossed over if not outright expunged from memory.
The book invites a conversation about the global art world, the role of activism in art, and the power of institutional critique. Its proposals should be a warning to anyone attempting to understand the role of capital in forming cultural consciousness today. If a single NGO could be credited with creating the cultural values of a whole region without once being called to account, what other ideologies is contemporary art producing and on whose orders?
Aaron Moulton speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the legacy of the Soros Centers of Contemporary Art Network, gonzo anthropology and conspiratorial theorising as methods for writing art history from neglected vantage points, and the antisemitic, bogeyman tropes which appear along the way.
Aaron Multon trained at the RCA, London and was the editor of Flash Art International and a curator at Gagosian Gallery. He founded the Berlin exhibition space Feinkost.
- The Influencing Machine exhibition at CCA Ujazdowski Castle
- My interview with Geert Lovink
The Influencing Machine
Aaron Moulton
ISBN 9788367203050
Published by CCA Ujazdowski, 2022
Episode info: https://petitpoi.net/aaron-moulton-the-influencing-machine-soros-centers-for-contemporary-art/
GET THE BOOK: https://verdur.in/store/the-influencing-machine-by-aaron-moulton/
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Support my work: https://petitpoi.net/support/
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FAQ
How many episodes does Verdurin have?
Verdurin currently has 58 episodes available.
What topics does Verdurin cover?
The podcast is about Podcasts and Arts.
What is the most popular episode on Verdurin?
The episode title 'Robert R. Janes: Museums and Societal Collapse' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Verdurin?
The average episode length on Verdurin is 63 minutes.
How often are episodes of Verdurin released?
Episodes of Verdurin are typically released every 15 days.
When was the first episode of Verdurin?
The first episode of Verdurin was released on Jan 4, 2021.
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