In this episode, Megan Eardley invites listeners to reflect on the way that detective work operates between form and event. She interviews the artist Janice Kerbel about the use of detective work in pieces such as “Bank Job” (1999), “Doug” (2014), and “Sink” (2018). They discuss how detection can be built into form, Kerbel’s experiments using plans to foreclose events, her relationship to language and writing, and how she seeks to reclaim small spaces within which we can act freely.
Download“I also wanted a bank that had a lot of money.”
“It was really important to me to try and find a way to make work that reflected my lived experience and I didn’t want to make work that was about something, I wanted to make work that was something.”
“If you can just come to grips with the rudiments of something, you also have great freedom to use the building blocks of something because you know just enough but you don’t know too much.”
“I think something that has recurred in my work is these kinds of transitional forms that embody a sense of promise and have a kind of visual language of their own that is developed out of a practical need.”
“I also really love working with live now. There’s something so human about it. and so economical.”
“I’m also really interested in the everyday experience of being a displaced body. There’s something so ordinary about that.”
Producers
Ethan Curtis, Arianna Corradi, and Joseph Bedford
Issue Guest Editor
Megan Eardley
Senior Editors
Joseph Bedford and Curt Gambetta
Announcer
Trudy Watt
Interviewee
Janice Kerbel
Interviewer
Megan Eardley