In the first half of the show, writer and critic Melissa Anderson joins Kate Wolf to discuss her first book, Inland Empire, another volume in the very excellent Fireflies Press Decadent Editions, which revisit seminal films from the 2000s. A story of a “woman in trouble” Inland Empire, directed by David Lynch and released in 2006, is a bold selection since, as Anderson points out, to try and make sense of its plot “would be to replicate the tediousness and pointlessness of narrating a dream.” Instead the book concerns itself most with the film’s star, Laura Dern, an electrifyingly expressive performer who has worked in the industry since she was a child. Using the whole of Dern’s career and her many collaborations with Lynch, Anderson explores Inland Empire as the work not so much of an auteur but of an actor, reading the film through Dern and finding many poignant things to say along the way about disintegration and desperation, victimization and agency, the possibilities of the female gaze, and the dark side of Hollywood.
In part two of this week's show, artist and inventor Pippa Garner joins Kate to reflect upon an artistic career that spans six-decades. Garner's work is known to satirize American consumer culture with a range of drawings and ideas for outlandish and yet—with this country's zeal for novelty-- completely plausible products, custom furniture, and things like the world’s most fuel efficient car, which is actually a bicycle set inside the frame of a miniature Honda. In the 1970s, she collaborated with the media collective Ant Farm, and in the 1980s, as Phillip Garner, she published books such as Better Living Catalog: 62 Absolute Necessities for Contemporary Survival, and Utopia—or Bust! Products for the Perfect World. She also made regular appearances on the talk show circuit, in character as a small town inventor, presenting some of her many gadgets—like a crop-top business suit and an umbrella whose canopy is constructed of palm fronds—to the audience.
In recent years, her work has found wider appreciation after being mostly ignored by the art world. She joins us on the occasion of her exhibition Immaculate Misconception, a retrospective currently on view at Joan in Los Angeles, which brings together dozens of newly realized pieces alongside older work, such as the Chevrolounge, the trunk of a classic car has been converted into a couch.
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