Tank Magazine Podcast

What are the boundaries of mutual understanding and empathy? Marcus Coates’ powerful and poignant Artangel work The Directors offers a profound exploration into this question. In five films, Coates reenacted the experiences of five individuals in recovery from psychosis, each directing him from behind the camera. The work was an attempt to create a reciprocal dialogue between Coates and the directors in order to recognise the other’s shared humanity and help reduce the stigma of psychosis. In conversation with Michael Morris and James Lingwood, Marcus Coates is joined by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who has his own history with Artangel in the exhibition The Concise Dictionary of Dress made in collaboration with fashion curator Judith Clark in 2010. HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023. The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Part theatrical event, part archeological dig, ‘The Vertical Line’ was an Artangel production by the director and actor Simon McBurney and the writer and art historian John Berger. Performed in “the darkness of rock” 30 metres beneath central London, audiences were magically transported 30,000 years back in time from the platforms of the disused Strand station below Aldwych to the Chauvet Caves, site of some of the world’s most ancient forms of human expression. Simon McBurney joins Michael Morris and James Lingwood to discuss the project and his creative partnership with John Berger. HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023. The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

The performance artist, filmmaker, musician, and composer Laurie Anderson has long been one of the most compelling multi-media chroniclers of our time. At heart a storyteller and alchemist, she makes poetry out of technology, using imagery and language in all its forms to reveal something universal out of personal experience. Laurie Anderson has collaborated on several occasions with Artangel and she is joined by Michael Morris and James Lingwood to reflect and to discuss her current hopes, fears and preoccupations. HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023. The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

In 2001, Jeremy Deller restaged the Battle of Orgreave, one of the most notorious conflicts of the 1984 UK miners’ strike. Deller’s first decision was to involve former miners who had experienced the original battle, performing alongside historical reenactors. This was a forensic attempt, in Deller’s words, to “revisit a crime scene, dig up a corpse and give it a proper post-mortem”. His subsequent work ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, featuring actors dressed as World War One soldiers silently deployed across the UK to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, similarly reflected Deller’s call to “re-live” painful moments in British history. Jeremy Deller joins James Lingwood and Michael Morris to discuss the production of ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ and how the artist has repeatedly explored the intersections of memory, public inquiry and masculinity.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Since the 1970s, Roni Horn has been intimately involved with the distinctive geography, geology, culture and climate of Iceland. She talks with James Lingwood and Michael Morris about her longstanding relationship with the island and how her project with Artangel, the installation ‘Vatnasafn/Library of Water’, was realised in a former library building in the coastal town of Stykkishólmur. Housing a collection of glacial water collected across Iceland and weather reports from people in the local community, the Library of Water is emblematic of Horn’s ongoing exploration, in her writing, drawings and sculpture, of weather, water and the shifting nature of identity.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

In 1518, an unusual plague engulfed the city of Strasbourg. Scores of people were “infected”, compelled to dance for weeks on end, beyond exhaustion and sometimes to their deaths. 502 years later, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the globe, in rapid response filmmaker Jonathan Glazer made 'Strasbourg 1518' with Artangel. A vision of confinement, liberation and constraint, featuring some of the world’s leading dancers, moving to a new score by Mica Levi and shot entirely on iPhone. The film’s technical daring marked a continuation of Glazer’s radical experiments in film form, which he discusses here with Michael Morris and James Lingwood.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

“Oftentimes a memory knows that the body cannot handle it, so it protects you and breaks itself into these fragments, and redistributes itself...”In this week's TANK Podcast, Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans discusses her recent collaboration with Miu Miu for their FW24 show, a film exploring the ramifications of a digital storage crisis. Starring Guslagie Malanda, the film continues Evans' inquiry into how emotion interrelates with ideological and societal structures. She discusses memory, nonbinary identity and the practicalities of creating for a fashion show. 

“What we see at DeSmog is people using a playbook, and that's the same as the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry before them...” Hazel Healy, environmental journalist and UK editor of DeSmog, a platform investigating climate change misinformation, speaks to TANK on the spin tactics used by the agricultural industry. Speaking at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, Healy dishes the dirt on how major agricultural corporations obscure the environmental impact of their practices. 

“Love is impossible as long as it is attached to physical, emotional and economic safety...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Caroline Issa decodes Simone de Beauvoir's classic of feminist philosophy, The Second Sex. Assessing anthropology, history and biology, de Beauvoir illustrates the mechanisms of female oppression over two millennia. 

“It's possible to be a feminist and a Freudian...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Holly Stevenson and Rosie Gibbens discuss Hans Richter's seminal surrealist masterpiece Dreams that Money Can Buy, a dreamy and deeply strange dadaist romp directed by some of the luminaries of the 1940s avant garde.

“The East, in need of 'civilising', became a fertile ground for colonial ventures...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Caroline Issa assesses Edward Said's enduring 1978 book Orientalism, a treatise into the imperialist attitudes underpinning Western conceptions of the East.

“What Not to Wear presented the bleak truth of fashion as something eternally wedged as somewhere between self-hate and self-worship...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Dal Chodha reads from 'You gotta keep your head straight about clothes', a consideration of 'Cheap Chic', one of the first consumer guides to thrift shopping. Written in the 1970s, the acerbic advice given in the guide sees contemporary manifestations in the camp absurdity of 'What Not to Wear'.

“I lost my virginity to Hastings beach...” In this week's TANK Podcast, director Andrew Kotting and flaneur John Rogers discuss Kotting's foundational film 'Gallivant', a psychogeographic romp across this strange island we call home. Made on a shoestring budget, 'Gallivant' follows Kotting, his grandmother Gladys and his disabled daughter Eden on a unique road trip across the coasts of Britain, meeting farmers, fishermen and folklore along the way.

“International law has become the exception rather than the rule in defining the actions of states today...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Faisal Devji discusses the new geopolitical paradigm emerging in the wake of the Gaza conflict. This podcast was recorded in November 2023.

“Critical art is not the adversary of art financialisation; it is its essential alibi. The more radical the art, the better the alibi. Win-win.” In this week's TANK podcast, Benjamin Bratton reads from his article “Not Right Now”, a critique on the art-making paradigm of subjectivity-as-format and the bloated art speak he christens “International Art English”.

“I am filled with a deep sense of well-being as I watch a hillside stone tumble down the slope and think of the other people or small animals who have watched the same stones over incalculable seasons.” In this week's TANK Podcast, Jan-Peter Westad reads “Above the Clouds of Endagin”, taken from the Winter 2023 issue of TANK. In the piece, Westad pays a visit to the Kulm hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, high in the Alps and where Friedrich Nietzsche arrived at his theory of eternal recurrence.

“These are the ways I like mustard: scraped onto bread to save a boring sandwich; slapped onto salt beef; a scoop on the side of my plate, to be swiped at with a sausage; as the basis for a hearty, wine-filled sauce.” In this week's TANK Podcast, Hester van Hensbergen reads from her piece “Spice up your life”, a paean to the joys of mustard and its storied history in the city of Dijon.

“Oh well, he thinks, at least I drank and laughed. Oh well, he thinks, at least I did a little bit of fucking, and it was good.” In this week's TANK podcast, A.K. Blakemore reads from “The Glutton”, her vivid, disquieting depiction of Tarrare, a French peasant famed for his insatiable hunger.

“People should not be deterred or afraid, because their rights are heavily protected by legislation...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Giovanni Fassina, executive director of the European Legal Support Centre, discusses how to ensure your rights are being protected while protesting.

“As far as wealth is inextricable with social organisation, it will infuse the individual on the very essential level on his sense of self...” In this week's TANK podcast, Caroline Issa reads and decodes Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, a treatise on consumerism and the emergent concept of conspicuous consumption.