episode thirty-one | tony curran

Published 22 January 2020

Miranda Metcalf  Hello print friends, and welcome to the 31st episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend, the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. I release an episode every two weeks, and on the off weeks, I publish an article on the Pine Copper Lime website, which features images and maybe a bit more information about the artist I'm going to interview. First and foremost, thank you everyone, so much, who participated in last month's fundraiser for the Australian bushfires. Together we raised over $2,000 for WIRES Australian Wildlife Rescue Organization. I was so delighted to see the generosity of people from all over the world. I'm going to be sending out those thank you screen prints to Norway, Scotland, Russia, New Zealand, Thailand, Germany, England, Canada, Austria, the US, and across Australia. That is a global community of printmaking people coming together. Printmaking forever, shun the non believers, join the party. My guest this week is Dr. Tony Curran. Curran's interview marks the first ever episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) recorded in person, in Tony's studio, thanks to the new equipment I was able to purchase through the generosity of our Patreon supporters. Supporters like Brandi Diesel, who joined up at the Pine Copper Lovefest level. Brandi, you are amazing. Thank you so very much. Please let me know if you ever need me to dog sit or be emotional support if you ever just cut your bangs. If you want to join Brandi in the party, you can go to patreon.com/helloprintfriend or just follow the link in the show notes. Tony is a lecturer at the Center for Art History and Art Theory at Australian National University. His practice explores humans interaction with technology and their fellow humans in our post-humanist age. Primarily an artist working in painting and drawing, Curran experiences printmaking through the collaborative lens of the various residencies and print studios throughout Australia he attends. Also, in this interview, we do mention the existence of suicide. So if that's not something you or someone you're listening with feels like hearing about today, maybe skip this one for the time being. Tony has a huge brain, and we get deep right quick in this interview. We'll talk about philosophy, psychology, pixels, portraiture, and what it means to live a good life. So sit back, relax, and prepare to get your philosophy on with Tony Curran. Hey Tony, how's it going?

Tony Curran  Really good. Excited to be here.

Miranda Metcalf  Thank you for joining me.

Tony Curran  Thank you for joining me! In my studio!

Miranda Metcalf  I would say this is a red letter day for Pine Copper Lime. This is the first in person interview in the history of this podcast. 

Tony Curran  The first? Holy moly!

Miranda Metcalf  I know!

Tony Curran  Does that mean it's the best?

Miranda Metcalf  That's gonna be up to you.

Tony Curran  If it's the worst podcast, it might have the best sound quality, so it might even out.

Miranda Metcalf  It might even out. Yeah, the sound nerds will really  be into it. So first in person recording, it's been made possible by new equipment I picked up thanks to our incredible Patreon supporters who are putting their money behind what they love and enjoy and what they want to have out in the world. So a big thank you to all you guys for making that happen. You know who you are. I feel like this is also a bit of a watershed moment because you are the first artist that I've ever talked to who works non-figuratively.

Tony Curran  Ah, interesting.

Miranda Metcalf  So you also have a heavy burden to bear to make it a good one for all the non-figurative artists out there.

Tony Curran  First one that works abstractly.

Miranda Metcalf  You are the first one who has a large part of their practice as what I would consider in the non-figurative world. As I'm sure we'll get into, it's a bit more complex than that in your process. So yeah, you are leading the charge, not only for in person interviews, but also for all the non-figurative people out there who might want to come on a podcast someday and talk about it.

Tony Curran  That's a lot of responsibility, and I will do my best.

Miranda Metcalf  And you'll be fine. So I guess we met in Sydney.

Tony Curran  In January or February.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, yeah. Because you were doing a little work at Cicada Press, and I got to see the beautiful etchings that you were working on then, which was quite a treat. And then, since then also, you've been working at Megalo, where of course my partner and Pine Copper Lime editor works as well. So I've gotten to see some of the printmaking side of your work kind of off and on as well. But for those of you who are listening and don't know Tony, I am going to ask you to give us the who you are, where you are, and what you do run down.

Tony Curran  Okay. So I'm an artist. I predominantly, I suppose, will call myself a drawer and a painter. But over the last few years, I've been working very collaboratively with people across psychology, print media, computer science, poetry, and others. And become really interested in the relationship between the individual in a very cybernetic and process oriented society, and print media has become this really interesting way in to understand process and the machine in relation to a practice in drawing and painting, which is usually really free and expressive, et cetera. I also teach at the ANU School of Art and Design. I teach painting, and Foundation Studies, which includes life drawing, also Precise Drawing and Modelmaking. I teach in Art History and Theory in subjects like cyber culture, and lots of theories of the image, various different kinds of subjects around what an image means in today's day and age. And I also teach Into Painting. And I've just finished a subject there called Painting in the Photo Digital Age, which usually includes some kind of relation to print media, whether that's cyanotyping, photography, the screenprint, the digital interface with Photoshop, et cetera. So that's kind of the broad gist of me.

Miranda Metcalf  So not much. So you're saying you're not up to much.

Tony Curran  I'm across a lot. And I've found some really interesting threads between them, which I've been following more and more. So the more I extend myself out, the more I find threads through, which help connect everything together in a concise, and more and more increasingly concise, way.

Miranda Metcalf  Got a few things going on in what you do, but I'd love to dive into your current practice a little bit more a little down the road. I always like to start with sort of how you ended up here. So please let us know where you grew up, and what role art and art consumption or art making had during that time.

Tony Curran  I grew up in Sydney, in the suburbs of Sydney. Visual art had very little to do with anything I did other than the fact that I was a massive Astroboy fan as a kid. And I was a big cinema head. But I was musically inclined, and my family had a long lineage of musical participants, creators and performers. And at a certain point, I think I chose visual art as a pursuit over music, because I ended up doing the thing that every Australian does, which is to grow up and realize that you haven't seen the world. So I got a credit card, and I went to Iceland and Europe. And as soon as I got to those places, I just got a whole different idea of what culture was and how images play into that. And I found that when I was bored or didn't want to talk to the people I was traveling with, I would be drawing constantly, and I thought that was quite a surprising thing to discover about myself. But then in Austria, I went to an exhibition at the Albertina Museum, which was an Egon Schiele exhibition, which then I found those images quite powerful. They were charged with all kinds of different things like torture and anguish and eroticism and lots of different things.

Miranda Metcalf  All the things that strike a chord in a young man's heart. Yes.

Tony Curran  A 21 year old, 20 year old heart. Also that it would be exhibited in a museum, that gamut of content, but also the sensitivity in which a line could convey so much. As soon as I came home from that trip, I finished my psychology degree, which I was studying at the time, and then enrolled in art school with a little persuasion. So on the last day of that trip in Europe, I lost a cousin to suicide and I built this narrative around the fact that she was someone who couldn't be herself in today's world, because of, I suppose now I come to understand, the cybernetic infrastructures in which we gear society, which means that certain things have to patch in to society in certain ways, and that's individuals too. And so I created this narrative that actually she fell victim to that, partly because she couldn't do what she wanted to do. So I said, 'Screw it, I'm going to do what I want to do.' And I decided just to go to art school, learn how to draw. And I started pursuing some of those psychological interests through drawing, creating, drawing narratives through a master's program, which for some reason, accepted me on the basis just that I had a psychology degree and nothing else. So I was actually quite lucky to get in there. And I thought I was gonna make comic books. But there was one teacher there who liked all the errors of my drawing and sort of pushed me into more interesting new terrains. And then I found that really interesting to explore. And ever since then, I've been finding ways to think about what we imagine or what we feel ourself to be in an age that is post-humanist. So in an age where we don't trust humanist rationality or philosophy or those ways of how a person ought to be. And I've found that there's some really interesting paradoxes around technology. And that idea of the human and the individual in a post-humanist world, they have a lot of interesting hypocrisies and paradoxes and things like that. So I try my best to explore those. And then I moved to Wagga Wagga, basically, because my wife got a job at the ABC there. And I saw it as an adventure. And then it turned out that there was an art school there that was actually quite healthy when I was there. And there was a supervisor that was keen to bring me on into a PhD program exploring those kinds of issues. So I did a PhD there. And that was amazing, because it was just three to four years of just dedicated studio practice.

Miranda Metcalf  So going back to that idea of being interested in the philosophy, being interested in what it is to lead a good life, and exploration that you can do through artwork, you just casually dropped the sentiment that we are in a post-humanist world, because I think when people think of humanism, they often think of those questions. I'd love to hear you expand a little bit more on what you mean by "post-humanist world" and how that kind of squares with this pursuit of the big question.

Tony Curran  Well, I suppose post-humanism, in a sense, is a rejection of humanist values, which were seen in modernism to build to a world that was quite anthropocentric, generating a society in which it only serves humans. And by that I should qualify that to mean white men.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, that's who human was in 1600.

Tony Curran  And you know, 1950, even. And so with all the issues that we face now, ecologically and politically and socially, there's just so much more awareness around the fact that there's so much more of a diversity of what we consider humans to be. But that actually, if we have to think about diversity of the human population, then actually, it behooves us to think of diversity in the non-human situation, which is maybe an ecological sensibility, to throw Tim Morton, a philosopher's, idea out there. But also thinking about how our actions affect the environment, and then how that affects biodiversity, and then how that affects Food and Agriculture, and then comes back, ultimately, to white men. Who remain, too much, I suppose, in the hierarchy of things as it is today. So simultaneously post-humanist and humanist at the same time. Yeah, there's sort of three things you can break it down into. One is what I've been talking about, I suppose, is post-humanism. So everything you know about post-modernism feeds into that, but it's post- a school or post- a paradigm of humanism. That's one way to break that down. Another way to break that down is the post-human, the human is obsolete, the human will give way to the singularity, which is the AI, and so we're post-human. The world is no longer a human sort of thing. And then there's transhumanism, which is, yes, the humans are obsolete, but technology is here to better us, and we'll modify ourselves so that we can become a sort of cyborg cybernetic.

Miranda Metcalf  So where is printmaking gonna fit into that?

Tony Curran  What's really exciting about printmaking for me is that it is a precursor to a lot of technological ideas. When I think about the history of computers, the first thing I think about is sort of the automated loom, which is - was that 1400? I can't remember - but it's the first programmable, computer-y thing. But then also, if you think about reproducibility and storage of data, the printing press was really the first thing that could proliferate information in a very compressed way that could then be transmitted to loads and loads of people to usher in periods, like the reformation of the Catholic Church

Miranda Metcalf  And also was a way to transmit subversive information that could be hidden, documented, but also personal at the same time, is one of the things that I find really fascinating, is that you have something on paper. You can slip it between your straw mattress in the ground should the Inquisition come knocking.

Tony Curran  That's right. And now we can do that with our phones under the pillow. Inquisition, come in. But for me, I suppose, a couple of things have happened for me with print media, one being that I was making works that were engaging technology already, but as a painter and a drawer, you're so free to do whatever you want. And technology is this thing that actually has a myth or a rhetoric around it, that you can do even more with technology. But actually, I don't think technology's like that at all. And I think when you apply technology to a problem, you limit the kinds of possibilities of it. And this became really interesting to me when Ben Rak, who ran Throwdown Press, he looked at my paintings, and he thought that there was a relationship between how I mixed color and went from screen to painting that had a relationship to the print ethos of screenprinting. And what I found as soon as I started working with him was how much all of the ideas that I had couldn't be done, because of the feasibility of setting up a collaborative printmaking process. But then, because of that, there were all these other things that I started to think about learning more about the process that enabled me to say, 'Okay, well, how does this process proliferate, and what happens when you do X, Y, or Zed' - and it turned out, I was more interested in what it did when it did C, M, Y, or K, so getting into those halftones as a way into color language for screenprinting, but then [I] started to exercise this muscle around optical texture through color using the CMYK. And so I found that when you collide a series of processes with another series of processes, you get this really strange set of interference patterns between projects that develop a whole new set of possibilities to uncover. So it's just this thing that's kind of followed me through. And every time I do it, it just creates new ways of seeing my work.

Miranda Metcalf  As someone who moves between painting, which of course, is a more solitary activity, and printmaking, do you think that part of your intuition to almost always collaborate when you engage in print media is partly because of that interest in human interaction that happens with that technology and sort of capitalizing on it while you have it as opposed to the solitary practice?

Tony Curran  When someone wants to work with you collaboratively, and they don't want to charge you money for their services, for me it's, hey, here's someone who wants to invest in the studio. And I get super excited about that. And I want to know why they want to, and I want to do something that can work with them, because I know that I'm gonna learn a hell of a lot with it. With Tim and Claire, for example, I was rosining some plates the other day, and I completely forgot how to do it. And Claire just knows that and was helping me with that. I don't know anything about lithography. So I've made some proofs with Tim already in lithography as a stepping stone to go further. But lithography is so complicated, I have no idea what I'm doing with that. And I didn't know how to screenprint. So part of it was this expertise and the shortcut, if I want to make a series of screenprints, here's an opportunity to feasibly do that. Because there's someone that knows it through and through. And they can do that. I have, even before printmaking, I did set up situations which were participatory drawing scenarios that engaged the public. I was studying this question of, okay, well, what is a portrait in the humanist age, and then what is it in the post-humanist age? And in the humanist age, it's sort of a picture of a person that captures their essence, right? But in a post-humanist age, when we don't believe in the essence of a person, it's got a different kind of currency. And I did so through the idea of participation and relational aesthetics. And I had these projects, probably the one where I really hit my stride was in 2013, at the National Portrait Gallery. I was sat in the Gordon Darling Hall for 33 days straight in a seat, and there was another seat opposite me, and whoever sat in that chair, they knew that they were posing for a portrait because there was signage and whatever. There was enough signals for them to know that if they sat in that chair, I would draw them for as long as they sat, and I would do so until they got up and left. I drew something like 194 portraits over 33 days at the National Portrait Gallery. But it was this way of testing the possibility for portraiture and relational aesthetics. And then, a couple of years later, I did another project where people made appointments to sit. In all these projects, I was interested in them asserting their own ideas about how to present themselves, how they want to present themselves, their agency. It was being drawn so they could get up and walk off whenever they want. And I was drawing these on iPads, and then I was able to email the participants their portrait. And then Wagga Wagga Art Gallery asked me to do another one there. And so I made this one where they book appointments, and then every appointment's double booked. So they got forced to do portrait sittings with a stranger or with someone they weren't expecting to. And they had to figure out how that was going to work. So I was interested in messing with it a little bit, but at the same time offering, I suppose, that bait of the portrait. Which, a portrait, if it's nothing else, it's an opportunity where the subject gets seen. And I think that's part of the appeal of participation in portraiture is having this thing where it's like, someone spent a lot of time looking at me and seeing me.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Hearing you talk about your work before, that idea really interested me, that connection between the person doing the portrait and the person sitting, that kind of rarity in which we give someone full attention in an increasingly chaotic and distracting world. And to have that exchange of energy, we schedule time for it, because everything else is completely competing with it. So we've been talking about your work in kind of an umbrella way, some of the ideas behind it, how you've come to the practice that you have. But I would also like to talk about specifically the practice of non-figurative printmaking, because it is so unusual, as printmaking is such an illustrative, such a narrative form. Many, many reasons behind that that we could go into, maybe, in this part of the discussion as well. But it is really unusual to see non-figurative prints. And it's really unusual for those prints to receive accolades as well. And so I would love to hear you just sort of speak about that as somebody who has a diverse practice, and you've seen both sides.

Tony Curran  Yeah. So when I got involved with print with Ben, through screenprint, one of the things, the first question I thought of, was why would anyone want two of something? Or more of something? 

Miranda Metcalf  This interview is over.

Tony Curran  Well, yeah, and so I was a painter and a drawer, but also digital as well. And I was struggling with that question of, okay, you make something that's infinitely reproducible, and so why would you sell one? And what does that mean in terms of how you treat people's access to it? Anyway, so lately, I suppose the most recent non-figurative print that I've made was during my residency at Megalo Print Studio and Gallery, which is here in Canberra. And I encourage everyone to apply for residency who has a printmaking background, because it's an amazing program with really great support for international and national and local. That spills over. So I was in the screenprinting studio, and what I proposed that I would do was a perverse twist on what I had done [in] the screenprint with Ben Rak. With him, I really explored the language of CMYK halftones. But one of the things that I kept finding was that if I skipped one step in the CMYK halftone process, I would end up with RGB pixels. And that step is basically just to change the color mode from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop. But the RGB color mode was gorgeous, and it was really luminous and really seductive and really interesting. But you can't print from that, because RGB, red, green, and blue, is an additive color mix, which means you're adding light - so the more color you add, you get white - whereas with subtractive color, which most people are more familiar with, as you add cyan, magenta, and yellow, you get like a dirty brown, and then you add black to get black. So it's perverse to think about making RGB pixel colors in screenprinting ink, because it's going to add up to zero. So then the more I started thinking that, the more I started musing on the idea that actually, the color language that we're most familiar with in the 21st century is an RGB color language. Our screens are built on that, and pixels are built on that. And so I thought, I'll find a way to do RGB color mixing halftones. But then what I ended up doing was just making these really wiggly combinations, like gestural abstractions of red, green, and blue as a way to test optical mixing, which is - if you think about the Impressionists, and all the little dots of color that your eye mixes, rather than you have to mix on the canvas or the palette. And I started finding that actually different ways that you structured which wiggle in the foreground was blue, which wiggle in the foreground was red, or green, and if you switch the foregrounds of each of those works, of each of those color combinations, then actually they aggregated to a different color. And if you zoomed out, then you've got a different color, and you sort of could get more color variants out of working that way than you could if you subtractively mixed color over. So then I also got clued in by one of my computer science colleagues, Ben Swift, who was talking to me about how pixels these days have been completely redesigned. They, once upon a time, were just rectangles of red, green, and blue side by side, and they would equal a pixel. Nowadays, they have different shapes. And sometimes they include just straight white lights. And, you know, there might be a circle of red and a triangle of blue and a bar of green in different proportions to equal one pixel. And the rationale behind that is that screens and applications, you know, manufacturers, are competing with each other to have the most engaging screen. So certain pixel shape handle text really well, whereas other pixel shapes handle other things really well. And so depending on how they're marketing their screen, they can seduce you through their pixel structure. And so I kind of found that really fascinating and interesting, and I wanted to make my own pixels that seduced on their own, but then explored the language of gestural abstraction through the most sort of loud, attention hoarding way possible. So I made these things. And what screenprinting enabled me to do was to make multiple uniques. So going back to that problem of, why would I make two of something? So I've made these like pixels in paintings recently as well, but you wouldn't make two different combinations of the same thing, because they wouldn't look similar enough unless I was to build stencils, but I don't really want to do that. But for screenprinting, the stencil is the genius of the medium in many ways, which is that you have a stencil, and you can put green through it, and then you can wash it out and put red through it, and you can wash it out and put blue through it, or anything. And so, because I had the stencils, I then had the ability to test and change combinations of color with those. And so now I've got these sort of sets of 12 variations on red, green, and blue screen prints from that. And so they're these loud things that I call "Attention Machines."

Miranda Metcalf  Uh huh. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that will seduce on their own, right? And draw people in. 

Tony Curran  Yeah. What I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to make a work that people pay attention to, and then that attention gets sucked up by it. But then the thing gives them more attention for themselves, so they can go in the world and pay more attention. So I'm trying to make an artwork that's a machine that does that. I don't know if it does, and I don't know how I would measure the success of something like that. But it's kind of this aim and this thing that I'm trying to do. And so by working with the screen based culture, which are machines that are devoted to suck your time and not give you as much back, but to just keep taking you, the intention is that you'll walk away and you'll actually be able to pay more attention to the things that you care about afterwards.

Miranda Metcalf  Right. Because I think anyone who has had the temptation of, 'I'm feeling a bit shit today. I'm just gonna look at Instagram.' So it's not a fix. You don't come out the other side of that feeling better. You've just delayed feeling like shit with distraction.

Tony Curran  Yeah. And another way I try to play with that thing of the Instagram rabbit hole is that I try and develop projects where I can do something on Instagram that is, in some way, a hack for the mindless scroller, the feed scroller. So I had this project that was going on for a while on Instagram where I would draw at the four by five, which is Instagram's sweet proportion, it looks better than any other proportion. But if they then click on my profile, they would see that that work, when trimmed to a square, creates a grid throughout the feed that is like another drawing in and of itself. To get people to think about, okay, well, what is the medium? How does it build? And what are the quirks of it? And I think if people can think about Instagram in that way, and they think about it critically, then they can dip out more easily if they want to, or they can dip in more, with that kind of viewpoint.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, no, I think that's a really good, very concrete, way that non-figurative art can function in just a completely different way than figurative art can, because I think that one of the things that people will say about abstract art is that it will be praised for being aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, this sort of thing. But it doesn't often get talked about in non-academic settings, in the ways that it can be critical, and the ways that it can be functional to make you kind of question things or plant seeds in minds, and in its own way, engage with the world that's separate from itself. Whereas, I think a lot of times, people think of abstract art as just being that in and of itself, that it exists for its own purpose.

Tony Curran  There's really rare examples where abstract art just does its job on everyone. And I suppose Bridget Riley's the really obvious example of this, where her works feel like they're machines buzzing and moving when you look at them. And even if you don't like that, even if it makes you feel nauseous, everyone notices that it does something. And I think one of the biggest attacks that abstract art gets is that it's just colors or it's just shapes. You know, what does it do? But yeah, images, someone can get in there and assess something. It looks like it or it doesn't, it's skillful or it's not, I understand it, or I can legibly read something, or I can't. But I suppose one of my interests with abstract art is to make something that someone looks at and says, 'Yes, that's doing something.' Which is why I call them machines.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Because I think a lot of the time, when people engage with abstract art, it is, of course, with its artist statement. And that's how the functionality performs. And it's quite a bold undertaking, I think, to say, what it sounds like what you're saying is, you want something that functions without that as well. And I think people can often say like, 'Well, what are the chances someone is going to pull exactly what you meant out of it?' What are the chances someone is going to pull exactly what you meant out of a figurative piece? 

Tony Curran  Yeah, that's right. 

Miranda Metcalf  The same criticism - it's not even a criticism, it's more of an observation - can be leveled against figurative art as well. So yeah, I think the non-figurative print world, or print media being used in a non-figurative way, it's just scratching the surface of it. Outside of a few of those modernist humanists that really, a lot of them were printing, for instance, with Ken Tyler, who was interested in all of that, and of course the [Ken Tyler] collection is here in Canberra and everything, which is interesting. But in terms of contemporary print artists who were working in non-figurative ways, it'd be interesting to see if that's going to have maybe a bit more of a renaissance as well. And work that's not just... because I think if you look at something like Motherwell, who was making beautiful non-figurative prints, it's also a reflection, in a concrete way, against the beautiful non-figurative paintings, right? So it's almost just doing something really similar in a different medium. But working with the philosophical and technological realities of printmaking to create non-figurative work in and of itself, that's not just a reflection of a very successful style of painting at a more accessible price point, would be really interesting. And that's part of the reason why I think that particular aspect of your practice is really fascinating. 

Tony Curran  Yeah. And I think in a way, print - maybe, correct me if I'm wrong - I've sort of made some assumptions around print and the relationship to the art world. Where you kind of needed someone like Ken Tyler to come and say, 'Hey, come and do something and I'll do whatever you want,' which I think is out of the scope for almost any other print media studio, bar a few that have popped up. But if you look at places like Crownpoint Press or Paste Prints, it seems like they're going for the most marketable artists, and as it happens, the most marketable artists turn out to be painters, because paintings are the most easily photo reproducible, easy to build a brand around a painter, and historically, painters have been at the top of any kind of hierarchy of any art structure. Which then kind of means that if you look at, say, who Crownpoint Press seem to be targeting, and who they show videos of, they all seem to be painters or sculptors. Which is a funny thing, and probably explains a little bit of why print has a strange relationship to abstraction, I suspect.

Miranda Metcalf  I think that's really spot on, and you know, print has that relationship to painting because in a lot of ways I think a major gallery is just going to invest in a painter because they can get more. They can get more money for an oil painting than you can - by making an investment in a new artist without an established market, you can set that price point over an oil painting higher. So you can pay that Chelsea rent easier. It really comes down to a lot of that. Dollars and cents.

Tony Curran  And at the same time, as an artist, I'm kind of hesitant around making something that I would make as a painting as a print. Because I don't want to make a cheaper price point thing. You know, it's a funny thing, because value with printers has been a thing since the invention of lithography, I suspect, or even etchings.

Miranda Metcalf  Woodcut. I mean, yeah, it's been a more accessible way to get an image of the Virgin Mary in your house in 1555. I mean, yeah, it's there. It's part of it.

Tony Curran  And so then someone can come to a print and not see what its value is if they're thinking, which I suppose is why galleries don't like to put prices on works, because they want you to think about the work, they don't want you to think about it in relation to a dollar value. When you put two artworks together, you create a comparison. When you put a price tag next to an artwork, you create a comparison. Would I rather have $4,000, or would I rather have this rectangle? Whereas print is more accessible. So it does sell more readily. If you aren't hanging out with the super rich all the time.

Miranda Metcalf  Right. I try to only hang out with the super rich, but you know, sometimes...

Tony Curran  Yeah. I try. But they pull me back in, this middle class.

Miranda Metcalf  Ah, the proletariat! It's so hard to break away. So I would also like to talk about your current body of work that you're working on. When you say children holding screens, not to be confused with screens in screenprinting, which is where we've just come from as well, you mean screens as in tablets, iPhones, that kind of thing. Can you first sort of just describe physically what these these look like? And then we can get a little bit into the background of what their function is? 

Tony Curran  Yes. What they do.

Miranda Metcalf  What they do. Exactly.

Tony Curran  So the kids with screens is, basically the way to think about it is it's a series of images that I'm making that are titled "Growth Potential 1-3." And "Growth Potential 1" has been printed. Tim Pauszek and Claire Jackson at Megalo worked with me on these first edition of 16. And it's a print that's about 30 by 40 centimeters. It's an image of a baby, maybe about the age of 11 months or so, holding, but at the same time, kind of ignoring, an iPad or iPhone. It's hard to tell via the image. But basically, it came about because I mentioned before about these participatory portrait drawing projects that I made. And with one of them that was done at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, it was called "Stay," and it was part of another exhibition that I was doing. I invited people to book an appointment and then they would come and they'd sit for a portrait and maybe they'd bring their friends and they'd all sit together or whatever, for an hour at a time, and then they could rebook if they wanted. But like all of these projects I've done, occasionally it's an opportunity for a parent to come with a kid that, they actually just need some time not holding a kid. And one of the surefire ways that we're able to do that with children these days is to give them a screen. And that can keep them entertained and occupied.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I would see that all the time at the art gallery. That's just like, 'Hold this, go watch your show. I need to be an adult right now.'

Tony Curran  And it's very, like, the galleries try, but there's not much there at their level. It's all sort of above them. And it's not "for them," in quotation marks.

Miranda Metcalf  There's not a lot of touch. There's not a lot they can see. 

Tony Curran  Yeah, so they need it. They need something. And if their parents are looking elsewhere, then that's crap for them for other reasons. So there were a few where I just had these sittings where it was my task for an hour to draw a kid with a screen. And I would do that. And there's another one that I did in that same series where a mother sat her five year old in front of me with an electric guitar, and basically the whole drawing is just a red wiggle, because he was just running around constantly, it was really hard to chase him. But with screens, they could captivate a little bit more. So what it is, it's a three color separation of an etching aquatint. So I spoke to Claire. Claire at Megalo mentioned that we could do something, we could do some etchings together. And then I kind of showed her, 'What about an image like this?' And she was totally up for it, but said, 'Maybe like two or three color separation would be really good.' And she suggested a blue, maybe a brown, maybe a yellow I think, or a green or something. And I thought, okay, she's almost at RGB. And I've been doing all this other stuff with red, green, and blue color separations, like the prints that I made with Michael Kempson were red, green and blue aquatint color separations and etching on zinc. And the screenprints that we were talking about, the red, green, and blue attention machines. So I thought, let's run with this. And we'll do this and that, and then it would kind of rhyme with this idea that I'm making something that's red, green, and blue. And what that does is activate as the kind of color language of the pixel. But at the same time, it also antiques the image a little bit, makes it a little nostalgic, in a sense, because things [blend] to brown when you use red, green, and blue subtractively and not additively. So it's this weird thing where when you actually get a red showing through, it's quite a vibrant red, or it's quite a vibrant green. So there are these really luminous sort of pops around the image. But at the same time, it sort of skirts around this idea of nostalgia and a past archaeological thing. But why I'm interested in the kids with screens is that there's so much around the way that screen culture seduces us to pay attention. And personally, I was moved quite profoundly by the rise of Donald Trump. And that whole time where, at a certain point in my history, social media was there and the internet was there and these beautifully rounded Apple products were there to make us better people. But then what we found is that while technology gives us the chance to be better people, it also gives other people the chance to have power over us. And it's a new kind of colonial project. If you look at how social media and app development is working in the developing countries at the moment, it's increasingly catering towards illiterate users with predatory capitalism and subscription services. The whole thing is really interesting to me. I love that... there's this thing that just comes to mind about predatory capitalism, which is, get them young.

Miranda Metcalf  McDonald's Happy Meals. It's capitalism bread and butter. Yeah.

Tony Curran  I'm at an age where I've got nephews and nieces and I've done these projects where I've seen how parents engage with kids, and you go to restaurants and sometimes there are kids with screens and sometimes there's not, but usually, everyone has a belief about it. And I don't know what my belief is. Because I think kids can be exhausting. They have so much energy, and they can be really cranky, and then if they've got a screen and you take it away, they can be a nightmare because that must feel really unjust to them. Like, 'The colors gone! Where's my colory moving thing?'

Miranda Metcalf  Well, and of course, as a kid you have such little control over anything in life that the formation of personhood comes so much from the outrage you feel from being told no.

Tony Curran  Yeah. And I think internet culture as well is one of call out. So I'm sort of anticipating that people would have ethical feelings about a picture of a kid with a screen against that. Maybe they see an image like that as being quite judgmental. Or maybe they see an image like that as reflecting something quite ugly about the world, I don't know. And so that's what I kind of want them to do, I want them to see it in the context of the Attention Machines, and this whole overarching mission that I have to make work that creates attention as much as it absorbs it or pays interest in attention. And so I think these works have the opportunity to do so in a figurative language, using the source material of portraits that I've made as data, as we all are now, as individuals, these bits of digital detritus, the things that we've done, come back down the track in other targeted ways. And so I'm kind of curious about what happens when I just take little portions of these portrait projects that I've done, where I've got portraits of probably over about 500 people doing different things. And if you put those together in different kinds of combinations, they tell very different stories, depending on how you choose to network them.

Miranda Metcalf  Absolutely, yeah. I'm just kind of thinking of my niece who, her parents, my brother and my sister-in-law, are both philosophy professors, they are big thinkers. And I think she's not going to get screens until she's three, or something like that. I can't remember, it was two or three, or maybe even four. But they have done their research and decided that, in terms of the way the brain develops, there's an age where it's sort of like, 'Okay, then you can have screens sort of limited.' And so then when we were there visiting, they were using their TV to play music. Which I think a lot of people do, you know, turn it to the Amazon jazz channel or something, and a little cover photo of whatever album's playing kind of bounces around the screen, and they put something over it, so she couldn't even see that. And she wanted to so bad. She wasn't crawling quite yet when I would see her, but if anything that was in front of it kind of had slipped or moved, she would try and arrange herself in a way where she could get just this little sliver of the glowing box. Yeah. And when I think about it in terms of people who are our age, and really as the last bastion of people who grew up without handheld screens, obviously we had TV, but TV was shit in 1990s with very few exceptions, and goodness knows we didn't have HBO in my house. 

Tony Curran  You wouldn't have been allowed to watch HBO in the '90s, though.

Miranda Metcalf  No. But you know, parents went to bed. We would have found a way. But yeah, so that intimacy of your personal screen, maybe that's like a big distinction. The TV's shared, you have to fight with your brother for what you're watching. The computer is shared. But these are children who are getting that completely personal experience of, it's just you and your little screen.

Tony Curran  Yeah, yeah. And it's shiny, and it's luminous. And materials find it very hard to compete with that in a lot of ways because they reflect light. Most objects in the world reflect light, and those that produce light don't last very long. Including animals, you know, they don't live for long. They're not archival. Like fluorescent paints and inks, they fade really quickly. And so it's funny, things that are shiny, they get scratched, and they degrade so quickly. But they feel great while they're there. And I think, you know, they're there, and these things are gonna be obsolete, but there's so many more waiting to replace them.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I mean, just seeing the cell phones that I have had since I got my first one at I think 17.

Tony Curran  Yeah. Was it a Nokia?

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. It was a Nokia, and you know, you text by -

Tony Curran  31?

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah.

Tony Curran  Nice.

Miranda Metcalf  And the autonomy that just having my own little communication device gave me, it was completely life changing. I think if I had been more popular, it probably could have done some serious damage. But luckily there were only about two people who wanted to message me. When we're trying to comprehend the change that this is going to have on us as humans, in our post-humanist world, it's a staggering undertaking that I don't think we're prepared for, but we still have to try. Because it is so different from anything that has come before.

Tony Curran  Yeah, definitely. The sort of targeting that... I got onto the Facebook analytics the other day as a way to explore another way to sort of hack the feed a little bit, to provide a little oasis if I could, into there. But that's scary. You can learn a lot about a city in there. And, you know, it doesn't give you much about people, but you can target different types of people, different kind of age ranges. I think you can only target 18+, which is lucky. For now. But you can target and that's, I think that's where it becomes a really powerful colonial tool, because there are geographically disparate, you know, there's wealth disparity in geography and there's wealth disparity in job titles, which you can also search for, and there's wealth disparity in all those kinds of different things. Yeah, that level of it's scary to me.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. I've recently started to get emails from a service that compiles everything that rates podcasts, how successful a podcast is.

Tony Curran  Mm. I found one for the art world.

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, I want to talk about that in one second. I didn't sign up for it, I didn't ever know about it until they just started sending me emails. Because up until this point, as far as I can tell, it actually is difficult, and would be very time consuming, to figure out exactly how many people are listening to your podcast. Because it's not easy to do through... iTunes kind of has like a beta thing, and I don't even know where to find it in Spotify. 

Tony Curran  So it's not like YouTube where you've just got that many views. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. SoundCloud is the easiest, because it'll tell you individually how many listens it's had, but that's kind of it. And then it really would take a lot of time to go through and find, compile it all together, and then try and figure out where is it overlapping, since it's hosted on SoundCloud, is that actually already counting this? In a way, it's just, it would take so much effort to do it, this company is providing the service. And -

Tony Curran  Not yet a sponsor.

Miranda Metcalf  Not yet a sponsor. I'm not naming them. But I've been kind of consciously avoiding looking at it. Because I don't want to chase listens. I don't want that to be a motivation of who I speak with about what. And I think it'd be really strange if I was to look at it and say, 'Oh, it looks like this person got twice as many listens as this person. I'm never going to talk to someone doing abstract art -' No, no, no. 

Tony Curran  Yeah, the abstract ones are gone! 

Miranda Metcalf  No, I was like, however I would try and... because it doesn't tell you why. It doesn't tell you why it gets more listens. All you have is the raw data. And anyway, so I've kind of consciously not been chasing that. Because I just think it would just completely fuck me up in terms of how I go about making this undertaking. But like every other creative output that we put out into the world gets judged now, you get immediate feedback on it. Immediate and somewhat anonymous feedback on it from the internet. Which is a completely bizarre, brave new world.

Tony Curran  And, you know, audiences, they can use words better than the algorithms, I think, can target a qualitative analysis on something. Like, I'm sure you get comments, and that's like, 'Oh, cool. I know what someone liked about it. I know what someone didn't like about it.'

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, totally. I don't know what this tells you about audiences, but I only get comments that could be perceived as negative, or let's say non-affirming, on Facebook. 

Tony Curran  Oh. That's so true!

Miranda Metcalf  Instagram is just like, 'This is amazing! You're amazing! You keep going!' And then on Facebook, you might get like, 'Just another woman complaining that she can't make it in a man's world,' or something like that.

Tony Curran  Aw, what?

Miranda Metcalf  It tells you something about the demographics of or the culture of the two social media platforms, but yeah, there's... yeah.

Tony Curran  That's so interesting. And Facebook is the one under fire for so much of that ugly, scary part of democracy, because it seems to just be this space of, well, like, if someone's upset about something, they've shared an article that validates their point of view. It's never like a positive article. It's always a sort of piece of investigative journalism where someone's done something wrong. Or an opinion analysis about the state of the tertiary education sector in a bad way. You know, like, yeah, you're right. Whereas Instagram, it's like, be you today! Remember to breathe! Feel positive! Or an image of food or something delicious.

Miranda Metcalf  Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's definitely interesting. Just today on Facebook, at some point in my Facebooking, I must have liked a page that just is called, like, "I support my local farmers' market," like I'm sure 10 years ago or something, I liked it. And it came on my feed that was just a link to a story that's like, "Another Teen Girl Dies After HPV Vaccination." I'm just like, 'Alright, that's enough of that.'

Tony Curran  Whoa! Why did my local farmers' markets get politically active in that way?

Miranda Metcalf  Like, what is going on? And I feel like that just feels like such a little snapshot of the algorithms and the rabbit holes and the kind of radicalization that can happen to people because of these just sort of adjoining views and adjoining subcultures. It's like, something sounds so innocent. Who doesn't want to support their local farmers' market?

Tony Curran  Yeah, exactly. Now, all of a sudden, they know that you have this political thing. Yeah. But you know, it was always there, just less powerful, I suppose. There were always inferences that could be made from census data, and all these various things that people could use to model their political ambitions or their business ambitions. But yeah, now it's pretty wild.

Miranda Metcalf  And it's more accessible to more people. So the chances that it's going to be used for evil is just higher because of that.

Tony Curran  So yeah, I mean, that's my printmaking practice.

Miranda Metcalf  And scene! Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna kind of reel in our conspiracy theorying here. What I really like what you were saying about this new body of work you're doing with the kids with the screens is that innate within it is your curiosity about their reception. Which, of course, could only exist in a world of our personal screens. Because without the sharing it on Instagram that you're going to do, the sharing that I'm going to do on my platforms, of your work when the podcast comes out, kind of how would you really know what a reaction would be beyond the people who came to the exhibition? And while we all have our horror stories, for the most part, people don't come up to an artist in an exhibition in a -

Tony Curran  There's one at every show that says something unreasonably bad.

Miranda Metcalf  There's one at every show that says something just completely out of this world, "Okay, boomer" kind of sentiment. But it is a bit of the snake eating its own tail in that way of, it's the work that's about the consumption that is curious about the consumption of itself.

Tony Curran  I mean, I suppose that thing about, you never do know what reaction the work is getting from other people. But there's this famous American art critic, Michael Fried, who talks about 'The artist is the first beholder.' So while I may not be the representative of all the beholders, I'm the first one that then notices something and then goes, 'Ooh, this is something that's got potential to do X, Y, or Zed.' So I won't know if it does the thing that it does for other people, but semiotically, you can read it and you can go, 'Cool, there's not enough content for it to be read only this way, there's not enough content for it to be only read this way.' There's enough little bits to anchor that the things have these relationships so that they talk to each other in a linguistic pictorial system. So as a setup, that's sort of like, 'Cool, there's something there.' But you're right, at an opening, everyone, bar that one person, is gonna say, 'Fantastic. What a great job.' And I'll make inferences based on not getting another invitation by that gallery, or by getting another invitation by that gallery, or whatever. And you do your best for that. But yeah, it's this thing where I think every artwork does something, and then trying to make the rectangle do... like trying to steer that something that a work does to a particular activity. You know, every rectangle has an inertia, you know... recently you've been sharing prints that aren't rectangles, actually. The plates are shaped. They're insane, very, really interesting. But they end up on a piece of paper, so they're rectangles.

Miranda Metcalf  I was gonna say, or they're on Instagram, so they're still a rectangle.

Tony Curran  And sometimes, you know, basically, what Robert Ryman is to a white canvas and then blank canvas and page, whatever, there's just these various, like every rectangle does something. So I suppose I'm trying to just see if I can make rectangles do this thing. 

Miranda Metcalf  I love it. I feel like that's a really great little place to kind of wrap up, because it speaks to, I think, something that's really at the heart of what I've seen from what I know of your practice, is just as you say, you're looking for it to do something. Because you do work figuratively and non-figuratively and collaboratively and across many media, but you're searching for that rectangle to be that little functionality, that little machine. And it's a big undertaking, and you have to go into it with a certain amount of fearlessness. Because in almost all instances, art rectangles, they will fall short. But you just have to know that. And I love that you seem undaunted by that, and that you just see it as part of the process. And the exploration is really great.

Tony Curran  Cool. And that whole machine thing, I stole it from a guy called Levi Bryant, who wrote a paper called Machine Oriented Aesthetics. It's really cool. Check it out.

Miranda Metcalf  Okay, link in the show notes. Beautiful. Well, Tony, would you tell people where they can follow your rectangles?

Tony Curran  My rectangles are on Instagram @tonygcurran. My website is tonycurran.net. Twitter @tonycurran, facebook.com/tonycurranart.

Miranda Metcalf  Okay. I'll put a link to all of that. What does the G stand for? 

Tony Curran  Gerrod.

Miranda Metcalf  Gerrod. Okay. Alright.

Tony Curran  I have a rivalry with a Scottish actor who coincidentally has the same birthday as me. 

Miranda Metcalf  Same year too?

Tony Curran  No, he was born in 1969. So if you want to follow him, follow @tonycurran69, and a lot of his fans follow me by accident. So I get retweeted in a lot of TV show sort of tabloid news.

Miranda Metcalf  I love it. I love it. I will tag him.

Tony Curran  Shoutout to Tony Curran of Scotland.

Miranda Metcalf  I will tag him when I share your interview. So he gets to be like, 'Why all these printmakers following me?'

Tony Curran  He played Vincent van Gogh in a Doctor Who episode, so some people actually think that I might be him because I have art stuff going on.

Miranda Metcalf  This is getting very confusing.

Tony Curran  It's gonna be very confusing. Link in the show notes. 

Miranda Metcalf  Link in the show notes to that episode of Doctor Who. 

Tony Curran  Absolutely. 

Miranda Metcalf  Well, thank you again, and thank you for being my first in person interview.

Tony Curran  Thank you for letting me be.

Miranda Metcalf  And let's do it again. Thanks, Tony. Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again in two weeks' time when my guest will be Bob Blanton of BrandX Editions in New York City. Over the past 40 years, Bob and his team have produced editions of screenprints with everyone from Helen Frankenthaler to Jeff Koons. He's an incredible and humble storyteller, and I'm honored to help share Brand X's legacy with you fine folks. Be sure to tune in. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing help by Timothy Pauszek and music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you in two weeks.