Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this week’s episode I am talking about lines -- the ones that you can see and the invisible ones that you can only feel. It’s a subject that the geographer Maxim Samson discusses in his recently published book, Invisible Lines, which is an exploration of the hidden geographies that affect the way we exist in and move through our physical environments. These are lines that we experience and sense, consciously and subconsciously acting on them.

I talk about these ideas in relation to the work of the New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg, whose film Cosmic Generator (2017) explores ideas about the movement and restriction of goods and people, and the visible and invisible divisions that are constructed to separate us.

And I discuss the charcoal portraits of the British artist Frank Auerbach, whose practice of drawing the faces of his sitters and rubbing them out repeatedly in his quest to represent the truth suggests to me another kind of invisible boundary in space — that separation between two people that we can feel and sense but we can’t see.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the practice of looking closely at things. It started when one of my readers sent me some wonderful writing and drawings that her boys had done in response to an exhibition in London that I reviewed a few weeks ago.

With a brief to write what they thought about the artworks, my young friends spent over an hour deeply engrossed in looking closely at them. The critical thinking and stretching of imagination evident in both boys’ observations made me think once again about how valuable art is for children’s learning. The benefits spill over in every direction, not only in the process of making art but also in thinking about it. Kids learn to identify patterns and structures, think about scale and perspective, describe and question, imagine and analyse. Then there’s the social and emotional learning that goes on.

The practice of looking closely, of slow contemplation, is the opposite of what is going on for the majority of children nowadays, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose new book The Anxious Generation explores what he calls the ‘Great Re-Wiring of Childhood’. One of the compelling arguments he makes is about how current levels of smartphone usage are likely to have a detrimental impact on the development of young brains.

In this week’s episode I talk about all of this, and I discuss the work of two British artists, Tiffany Arntson and Rackstraw Downes, whose practice is all about looking closely.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

I’ve often heard artists talk about how making art for them is not optional, it’s essential. Life-saving, even. In this week's episode I discuss the meaning of the phrase ‘art is life’ by thinking about the work of one of Britain’s leading conceptual artists, Martin Creed.

He has said that for him there is no separating line between what he creates and anything else he does in his day. Other people might call what he does ‘art’ but he’s not sure what ‘art’ actually is. He does what he does to try and grasp on to something solid to help him get through life. Art is something you can rely on, he says. It’s a relief. I know what he means, and it has given me another perspective on his work.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this week's episode I discuss the highly profitable commercial world of human egg freezing, which has seen a dramatic rise in the UK and across the global north.

There are many things about this new phenomenon that I find fascinating: what it says about the strong biological urge to reproduce; the expectations of and on women around career and family; and the industries targeting women with culturally-generated anxieties about their ageing bodies.

But what I find most interesting about it is what doesn’t really get talked about much: who exactly is having these procedures and why. The common assumption is that most women who freeze their eggs are twenty-somethings who want to delay childbirth as they pursue their careers. But in her recent book Motherhood on Ice, the Yale anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn has explored other factors that motivate women to freeze their eggs. What her research has found runs counter to this conventional wisdom about the who and why of egg freezing. Inhorn argues that there is, in her words, a ‘mating gap’ — a shortage of partners for university-educated women.

I discuss all of this, plus the work of the contemporary Chinese-American artist Xin Liu, who explores the extension of women’s fertility through science and technology in her art, inspired by medical innovations in the field of cryogenics and egg freezing.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this week's episode I discuss the Yoko Ono exhibition showing at Tate Modern in London at the moment. It is a huge show spanning a prolific creative life over more than fifty years, and frankly any contemporary artist that has a retrospective of this size in one of London’s biggest public art galleries is surely worthy of serious consideration.

Ono is a much maligned and misunderstood figure in the popular culture of the past half century because of her marriage to the musician John Lennon. She’s the incarnation of the idea of female manipulation: a siren who lured Lennon away from the lads and broke up his band The Beatles. All nonsense of course, but because of this narrative she has been the target of possibly the worst, most vitriolic criticism that any female artist has ever received. The misogyny and racism directed at her over the years has been extreme; it’s the kind of abuse that makes me rage against the machine and the oppressive structures of our capitalist, patriarchal system.

So I was already primed to embrace her career’s work and come away thinking how underrated Ono has been. And I really tried. But the speed at which I walked through the exhibition spoke volumes. It's not that there was nothing of interest, but her really good works are few and far between. And it made me ask once again a question that I don’t have an easy answer to, which is what makes an artist ‘great’?

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this week's episode I consider what it means to have something ‘useful’ to say in a world saturated with visual and textual information, with some words of wisdom from a stranger, the art of Barbara Kruger, and something very lovely that one of you said to me.

Kruger has been making art since the 1970s, and is known for her bold text-based images, which address mechanisms of power, gender, class and capital. Through her provocative slogans and images appropriated from mass media, Kruger challenges viewers to critically examine societal norms and values.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

You know when you’re looking at art and somehow it manages to convey feelings or sensations that are going on for you at that particular moment in time? I had that experience over and over again this week as I walked round the new exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. It’s called When Forms Come Alive and is a show exploring the history of contemporary sculptural forms from the past 60 years that are static and yet have some sort of dynamic tension in them. The different levels of energy emanating from the objects is palpable.

In this week’s episode I’m talking about the concept of ‘form is feeling’, and how sculpture has the power to convey emotions and sensations, and I take a closer look at the work of three artists featured in this exhibition: Olaf Brzeski, Michel Blazy and Senga Nengudi.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this week’s episode I am talking about the new show at the Royal Academy in London. It’s called Entangled Pasts, and it looks at the relationship between Britain’s imperial histories and the visual arts, and how art shapes narratives of empire, slavery and resistance.

Almost every art critic reviewing this show has described it as groundbreaking, extraordinary, or radical. I didn’t think it was any of those things. In fact the subject matter was so tamed and contained, that it made me a little bit annoyed. I kept waiting to see the realities of the violence and cruelty of our colonial history, but it never came.

If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this episode I think about the culture of contemplating art, particularly in the hushed environment of art galleries, and how we approach it with a seriousness that often precludes laughter.

I wonder whether we are so primed to search for deeper meanings and wholesome lessons from visual art that we police ourselves in our responses. Laughing never seems like the ‘correct’ thing to do.

There are plenty of artists who use humour in their work, but laughter is rarely my response. There’s only one artist I can think of who makes me actually chuckle, and that’s Martin Creed.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

To subscribe to the podcast visit www.thegallerycompanion.com.

Shortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.com

In this episode I discuss the issue of homelessness, and the radical approach that Finland has taken to tackle the problem in contrast to what is going on in the UK. And I reflect on an exhibition I saw this week by the American artist Pope L., whose work throughout his career has addressed the subject of homelessness, poverty and social and systemic inequalities head-on.

Pope L. (1955-2023) was a multidisciplinary artist and although he isn’t a household name with audiences, his influence on other artists over the years has been profound. Back in the late 70s he started to make a reputation when he did a performance called Crawl (1978) in which he dressed up in a suit bought from a charity shop and crawled the length of 42nd Street in New York on his hands and knees. It probed assumptions about homelessness and poverty and was uncomfortable to watch. It got right under people’s skin in the way that only the most powerful art can.

The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.

To see the images and watch the videos discussed in the podcast visit www.thegallerycompanion.com. This is where you can subscribe to The Gallery Companion, share your thoughts and join the conversation.