The rise in podcasting over recent years has been astronomical, with estimates of around 630m people listening to the format across the world – nearly double the 2020 figure. Over those five years, topics have diversified away from a core niche of technology, with fertile content found in subjects from true crime to political debate. 2020 was the year Joe Rogan signed with Spotify for over $200m, in the years since spouting ever-more right-wing, hate-fuelling nonsense for clicks, outrage, and advertising dollars.

But not all podcasts follow that path of descent. 2020 was also the year that podcast series A Brush With, presented by Ben Luke and published by The Art Newspaper, an altogether more grounded, thoughtful, and ultimately enriching series that marks its fifth year with a new book, What is art for?, published by Heni and containing edited highlights of conversations with leading artists. In the 111 episodes since the first conversation with Michael Armitage, Luke’s lines of questioning go far deeper than normal interviews to touch not only on the artist’s work, but the broad range of influences and connections that feed into their practice. Over those five years, the format has barely changed, but the discussions remain rich.




While rarely overtly discussing Architecture with a capital A, elements of these conversations frequently touch on the spatial, especially so with artists such as Theaster Gates or Do Ho Suh whose work directly speaks to issues of the built environment, but also obliquely with most artists through their reading, use, and thoughts on spaces from studios to museums.

Within conversations that cover a lot of ground, there are 12 questions Luke asks each guest, always closing with “And lastly, what is art for?” Two of those questions directly lead to conversations discussing the spatial from intimate to public: “What do you have pinned to your studio wall?” invites thoughts on personal spaces of making, while “Which museum or gallery do you visit most frequently?” results in a great selection of institutions, frequently including the V&A, National Gallery, Frick, and Met but also a welcome journey to well- and lesser-known museums around the world – “The Louisiana is the most beautiful museum. It’s uncanny to move through it.” says Arthur Jaffa, whose is currently showing in London (see 00286).




In one of the selected interviews in the book, Roni Horn recalls a 1977 visit to a Robert Irwin show at the Whitney’s Marcel Breur building as an undergraduate. Made specifically for the space and window of the building now owned by Sotheby’s, Irwin’s site-conditioned work shocked Horn, but a study of emptiness that can perhaps be seen in the artist’s own later glass sculptures:

“I walked up onto that fourth floor room and there was fucking nothing in it! It was just empty. And I didn’t really know his work.” the artist told Luke, adding, “That was just an amazing commitment of—I don’t know, what is that? Like 7,000 square feet of empty [space]. Really a beautiful experience, because it made everything about the experience in that moment more acute.”

In the conversations, other artists consider how architecture informs work. Abstract painter Stanley Whitney discusses how being in a certain place illuminates a meaning in an artwork: “my wife, the painter Marina Adams, she wasn’t one for Clyfford Still, but then when she travelled across America, we got to San Francisco and she said, ‘Oh, I get Clyfford Still now.’” He then talks about one his own bodies of work responds to the architecture and urban characteristics of Rome: “It was really about architecture, light, colour—when you’re there, in Rome, if you’re in the sun it’s one temperature and you cross over to the shadow it’s another temperature. You really see that with Caravaggio, how he used that Roman light.”




Perhaps less romantically, Cornelia Parker also reflects on the qualities and history of a specific urban space, though far from Rome: “I wrote my BA dissertation about a piece of wasteland that was next to the college [Wolverhampton Polytechnic] – linking it to T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. The land originally had a community of terraced houses that got knocked down for the Molineux [stadium for Wolverhampton Wanderers] football club to be moved to. Before they could move the club over, a whole lot of Traveller caravans occupied the land. They lived there for a while before they were forcibly moved on. I went and interviewed them, they became part of the history of this territory. It became a very contested piece of ground, and it was once a home to a whole community that was disbanded to go off and live in tower blocks.

Parker also talks about her use of architectural materials, including the creative reuse of Pugin floor tiles from the House of Commons in the creation of a greenhouse for Island (2022): “That’s really where they should go, the opposite to the grandeur and pomp of the Palace of Westminster, somewhere ultra mundane.”

Similarly, Do Ho Suh – who we recently interviewed HERE – reflects on how his own practice relates to architecture, and how it could have taken a different turn. He recalls plans to cast an abandoned studio space in his art school as a student, when “a friend of mine, who’s an architect major, just dropped this black and white picture on the table and said, ‘Hey bro, you’ve gotta check this out.’” The photo was of a cast of a Rachel Whiteread’s cast of a room, who’s process had led to a similar place a few months earlier. “So I didn’t cast the room, and I’m glad that I didn’t. It allowed me to explore the notion of space or personal space in a more loose way. I could have easily gone in Rachel’s direction. I mean, this is a very crude way to say it, but her work really represents the Western thought process and mine represents more the Eastern thought process of dealing with space.”




Sarah Sze, who creates room-sized paintings and assemblages, also reflects on different approaches to space across geographies. She selects the Ryōan-ji Zen temple in Kyoto as a place that changed her view of the world: “I learned so much about negative space, about the idiosyncratic nature of landscape and how do you create that? How do you create negative space? How do you create ritual? How do you frame a landscape?”

Sze also mentions Kinkaku-ji golden temple, also in Kyoto, speaking to how the architecture and landscape encourages a sculptural walking route which demands engagement with both the close-up and distant – describing the place as a “composition of wandering” that had been “knotted into [an] experience of discovery” choreographed as a film. Then, adding to her list of architectural inspiration that also touches on the use of water in Mughal Palaces and Venice, Sze mentions the “upside down pyramids” of India’s stepwells, describing them as “beautiful social ideas” and “mind-bogglingly beautiful.”




Tacita Dean spoke about her own journey of discovery searching for Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty (1970) in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. “It was before it became a place of pilgrimage. Now it has a car park and signposts, but then, I had phoned up the Utah arts council and they gave me Smithson’s directions.”

Dean didn’t find it, but the journey became her artwork Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1998), triggering an interest in the land art project that led her to contact JG Ballard, who had written on the American artist – eventually making a work considering connections between the two men, JG (2013): “[Smithson] was very interested in the archaeology and the sedimentation beneath the Great Salt Lake—whereas Ballard was much more into the galaxy. So they spiralled in different directions, but the connective thread is all about time.”




While none of Ben Luke’s interviews are with architects, and very few architects are namechecked (though there is a fun Charline von Heyl diversion about Le Corbusier’s paintings, which she considers “insane compositions, the line is so perfect, there is a great strange humour in them … just so unbelievably funny, and he made tons of them) Michael Craig-Martin speaks directly about the making of a building.

Craig-Martin, who emerged from 1970s conceptual art into 1980s pop, studied at Yale when architectural historian Vincent Scully was professor. “His course was the most popular course in the university … he always had two projectors going at once, he sometimes got so excited he fell off the stage.” The artist had always been interested in architecture, but here he learnt he could look at the built world in the way other artists consider cinema, learning hugely from Scully.

In the 1990s Craig-Martin was invited to become a Trustee of Tate, and he found these lectures became valuable when the instution began to work with Herzog & de Meuron on the transformation of Tate Modern. “Suddenly all the things that I’d learned on that course became useful. And so I was able to be, hopefully, useful. … The most amazing thing that Herzog & de Meuron did was the creation of the Turbine Hall. And the whole idea of sinking the ground level down so the building is taller inside than it is outside, and the bridge going over, everything about that space is magical really. So, it was an incredible privilege to be part of that, to be a trustee at that time, and to find that I had, in my own experience, something that was useful to bring to it.”



 
What is art for? features 25 interviews between Ben Luke and leading artists (leaving plenty more from the podcast’s archive for a follow-up), offering a fascinating vantage across different disciplines, influences, and approaches to making. The approach Luke takes is simple, but effective, and while over the last five years podcasts have changed, become clickbaity, and pushed to become punchier and quicker to respond to a short-attention TikTok economy, A Brush With has wonderfully stayed the same: a deep, considered conversation that allows the space for artists to think through the function and process of art. The book acts as a marker of its first five years, with hopefully many more to come.