The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.

This week, The Open Call Podcast has the pleasure of sharing with you part of our conversation with Buzz Spector. When we spoke, Buzz had recently moved from St Louis to his new home in the Hudson Valley, His studio was in the final phase of construction. Buzz is an internationally recognized conceptual artist who is perhaps best known for his work with books, but his vast body of work also includes drawings, photographs, collages, and more. He says of his practice, all of the techniques he uses “are techniques of intimacy in action, but our position to recognize them is retrospective - it comes after the fact. So the play of memory he talks about is one) of projecting your own experience and secondarily, of assessing the limited terms that our language gives us to describe what we witness.”

Buzz often uses language as a stand in for something that is missing. He considers all of his work through the lens of drawing and he talks about how “the distance between reader and page, between artist’s eye and artist’s pencil on paper, is an intimate space of noticing, empathizing, and of accepting that makes the experience shift from a reading of structural terms to an epiphany of identification.”

Buzz is also widely recognized for his critical writings about art. He describes his role as not simply providing an opinion, but instead as finding a way of faithfully describing what he has seen that will preserve something of that effect in the imagination of the reader. When he writes he chooses from a huge field of properties to describe one, then another, then another and that description doesn’t lead to a total picture of the artwork, but instead to a premise of the success or failure of the artwork. The structure of his writing is intended to clarify where he is coming from as the person on the other side of that written text.

We enjoyed a rich conversation that meandered through a variety of topics including his practice, critical writing and pedagogy. We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of Buzz's artwork. 

We produce three seasons a year during which we release new episodes every 2 weeks. Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for creating a new version of our podcast music and for sound engineering, and to our wonderful research assistants:  Ally Price,  Nikki Cohen, and Erin Miller  who provide production support, web, and social media design.