Talk is Cheap
Talk is Cheap is a show by Harry Gassel, Editor of Talk, a magazine about commercial art focused on the politics of style.
Series Titles
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Here Chris shares his music based in iPhone recorded found sounds, and talk about how this might act as testing ground for a his visual practice. -
Sally is a designer, illustrator and design professor with an interest in bootlegs and open source intellectual property. Here we talk about the fine art of restoration. This ones gonna be good!
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Brendan Griffiths is a graphic designer, programmer, and educator living and working in New York City. He is a partner in the design practice Zut Alors!, and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Interaction Design at Parsons School of Design, where he directs the Master of Professional Studies in Communication Design. He holds a BFA in Multimedia Design from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. In this ep we talk about how sound is the new graphic design. Some very radical shit!
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Raf Rennie is a graphic designer and writer. We get into his practice, the neoliberal space race, nihilism, and his forthcoming re-release of his book Modern Nostalgic Fantasies. Raf is fascinating and this is a good one.
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aka @marsmaiers aka @wilsondotfm
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We get into dance, the hidden history of black graphic design and what the hell we’re all trying to do in this crazy field. Great ep. One note, the artist I was thinking about from the Greater New York show at PS1, I got wrong, it was a piece by Glenn Ligon not David Hammonds. Shout out to Vance Wellenstein (https://vancewellenstein.com/) who did a great little book on it too. You can find that book here: https://www.amazon.com/Glenn-Ligon-Housing-History-Greater/dp/0989985962. I know Amazon, not ideal but I think its sold out most first market places. I have a copy that I bought at PS1 ...
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Shira is an interdisciplinary designer with a focus on motion, we talk about her interest in the political implications of mapping, what her childhood in Israel means in the modern context of us both being relatively anti-zionist, her time working with the experimental design team at MTV and the importance of working intuitively and having fun doing it. She also somehow got me into my personal life so this one goes deep. Another good one!
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Getting into it with photographer and Talk fam and collaborator Tim Schutsky. We talk about his transition from pro-skateboarder to film DP to photography, growing up working on cars with his dad and how that informed his current views on contemporary masculinity, and the need to find personal grounding in order to push yourself into a more vulnerable space creatively. We also get into the joys and frustrations in the space between commercial, editorial and personal work. Our longest ep yet! Great way to round out the year, and thanks to Tim to being so open to going deep. A ...
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Ted is a poet and professor in town to give a reading at Artists Space, he also happens to be one of my oldest friends. Here we discuss the relationship between government, fascism and free speech, how to disrupt networks through writing and his time living on trains and in the back of a truck as a physical form of the same network defying protest. He also reads from his new manuscript “The Economy Disappears” and soon to be published book “Thanksgiving” coming out on Golias Books this spring.
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Artist, curator and man about town, Jesse started and ran the iconic 247365 gallery that ran in the donut district alongside Primetime and Know More Games, which if you were around was definitely a moment on the New York scene between 2012-2017. We get into the relationship between his obsession with the malleability and seductive qualities of plastic as sculpture, we avoid the polemic political connotations between the material and the global market and network structure 😉 We also think through the comparison between that and the seduction process and the slippery performance of self that goes into curating and ...
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Chopping it up with designer, creative director and prolific creator Joel Evey.
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In his reletivly short career (so far) Kurt has accomplished a lot and certainly made his mark on culture. As art director of the new Interview Magazine he, along with Richard Turly defined a new and experimental look, one of the freshest of any legacy titles that I know of. He also runs a zine publishing house called TXT Books that continues to innovate graphic language and push everyone’s vocabulary forward. And like several other guests on this show he worked on Turley’s experimental video graphics department that did some of the the most energetic, demented and avant garde television ...
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Here I talk to editor and writer Matthew Shen Goodman. Long time Talk fam, Matt contributed to our first issue for which I will forever be grateful. Matt is an editor at Triple Canopy and frequent contributor to Art in America among a fistful of other cultural and critical platforms. Here we talk about why he dropped out of not one but two prestigious grad programs, circle around the question of the space for idiosyncratic style and interiority in critical writing and why fiction is starting to feel more and more relevant in the early days of 2020. We also ...
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In this episode I chat with the one the legendary DJ SWEATPANTS aka Erik Carter. We get his take on the MTV moment, on what and how designers should focus their time, our back to back editorials on the Walker blog and what it REALLY means to DESIGN HARDER (and who actually coined that, hint: it wasn’t Erik). Great guy, great ep, feel the flow.
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In this weeks episode I talk to the great writer and artist Larissa Pham. Larissa writes for, among others, The Nation and The Paris Review. She’s also written a novella “Fantasian, a New Lovers” published by Paul Chan’s imprint, Badlands Unlimited and is soon coming out with what she calls a mixtape of personal writing and essays, “How to Run Away” to be published by Catapult. Here we get into her thoughts on the rise and need for the personal in writing and when it goes too far, how art helps the artist to both express and disguise personal vulnerability, ...
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In this special pandemic quarantine ep, I talk to graphic designer, art director, overall fascinating creative thinker and friend Mike Tully. We get into a few of his works and how type design can act as a form of film critique and how distribution effects the reading of an artwork. We also briefly relate this to the recent, botched, Jordan Wolfson takedown by Dana Goodyear in the New Yorker and how an artworks funding and circulation can or cannot be read as integral to the understanding of the piece. This all somehow relates to the response (or lack thereof) to ...
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So we’re all social distancing. We’re all wondering whats next. We’re trying to figure out if we are breaking up with America or if America has slowly been breaking up with us. So in lieu of a guest—which is kinda hard when everyone is under quarantine—I’m posting a mix I made in December of 2012. Comprised mostly of low viewcount covers of Taylor Swift tracks, the mix is part torch song, part elegy, post Occupy, pre Sanders and reflects how I was feeling at the time. In listening back now it feels a bit prescient and certainly apt. “Thank You ...
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Brian Lim was a student in my third year communication design class at SVA before—or perhaps while—he became the cult Singaporean R&B icon Slodown. Even back then he had chops, and for our semester long conceptual branding project he developed a full world around a notional high-low porn site called Bodies. So, it’s not surprising that as a performer his work barely even pauses at songwriting and recording. If you look carefully at the liner notes of his releases or the end credits of his videos, aside from a few one-off collaborations with people like Tzekin from Eternal Dragonz, Brian, ...
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To say that Albie is a multidisciplinary artist shows the paucity of art speak itself. He seems to use whatever tactics are at his disposal. Some of them relate, some of them don’t, although throughout our conversation we seem to find more vectors that connect through work than he was willing to admit to. Albie’s practice seems to be about just doing what seems right and feasible at the moment. He works as a graphic designer, he’s done conceptual audio pieces, one we play here, he’s made and shown sculptures and film and until the recent pandemic has split his ...
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In these last several days, I’ve been thinking about what to do on this channel. It persists that I feel like I have a responsibility to say something. It’s been in our mandate to include those unheard, underrepresented, marginalized voices from the beginning—not through some attempt at tokenism but because we felt good work and important voices were being overlooked and are necessary to the overall conversation. I have tried in both what I publish and broadcast to keep these voices in mind, to hold Talk as a platform that continues to boost these signals. Black Lives Matter. So not to ...
