In this episode of The Way I See It, our radio collaboration with BBC, we’ve captured composer Steve Reich’s audible awe as he sees his friend Richard Serra’s monumental 2015 sculpture Equal for the first time. As Reich puts it, he and Serra are “in tune to the same frequencies,” so their meeting in Manhattan in the 1960s and subsequent friendship was both important and inevitable.
Working in sound and steel respectively, both Reich and Serra rejected traditional compositional structures—one of harmony and the other of form—to give shape to their work. Reich is the recipient of countless awards, including two Grammys, a Pulitzer, and, recently, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. His works are performed in concert halls all over the world, and recently at Glastonbury Festival. Find “The Way I See It” on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000…
In this episode of “The Way I See It,” Janna Levin brings her celestial expertise to Vincent van Gogh’s star-filled vision, in conversation with senior curator of Drawing and Prints Jodi Hauptman. Levin helps us see how certain
features of the night sky, including “turbulent air,” the light from a star, and the planet Venus, are rendered visible by Van Gogh’s brush. She also points out that her approach is not so different from Van Gogh’s: “People who observe the world, whether they are artists or scientists, are always on the cusp of what they see and then what is internal.”