Contemplative Cracks and Lo-Fi Tech (DEAN KENNING)

Guest artist DEAN KENNING

joins me to chat about his work via John Maxwell Coetzee's 2013 allegorical novel 'The Childhood of Jesus'. The story revolves around five year old David with his father-by-default Símon, on their quest to find a mother for the boy and a better life for the three of them. 

Winner of this year's prestigious Mark Tanner Sculpture Award, Dean Kenning, and I go on to discuss his clunky sculptures, social body-mind maps and his philosophical mish mash 'Metallurgy of the Subject'. We delve into the cracks between the flatness to explore ideas around satire, proliferation, bad infinity, socialist utopia, universal modes of seeing the world, common language, allegorical imagery, the importance of the father, avoidance of composition, a dislike for kinetic work, redundant technology, history as a bloody struggle and poo in sausages.

 

(This episode is produced by Jillian Knipe with music by Griffin Knipe and image by Joanna Quinn of Beryl Productions)

 

DEAN KENNING

deankenning.com

instagram Dean Kenning notfairbear

'The Origin of Life' 2019

'Psychobotanical' 2019 Matt's Gallery

'Renaissance Man' 2017

'Metallurgy of the Subject' ongoing

 

ARTISTS

Antony Gormley 'Angel of the North' 1998

David Bowie (musician)

Emma Cousin 'Chats in Lockdown' podcast

English Heretic (musicians)

Hieronymus Bosch

Kiki Smith 'Her Memory' Fundació Joan Miró

Leonardo da Vinci 'Vitruvian Man'

Paul McCarthy 'Painter' 1995

 

BOOKS & THEORISTS

Benjamin Markovits (writer)

C L R James 'The Black Jacobins' 1938

Colm Tóibín 'The Testament of Mary' 2012

Franz Schubert (composer)

Immanuel Kant (philosopher)

J M Coetzee 'Disgrace' 1999

J M Coetzee 'Waiting for the Barbarians' 1980

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 'Erlkönig' 1782

Jacques Lacan (psychoanalyist)

Jean Fisher (professor, art critic, writer)

Jean-Luc Nancy 'The Inoperative Community' 1986

John Roberts (philosopher) 'Dean Kenning's Kinetics' 2019

Jorge Luis Borges 'Three Versions of Judas' 1944

Joyce Carol Oates 'My Life as a Rat' 2019

Karl Marx

Kazuo Ishiguro 'The Buried Giant' 2015

Plato 'Republic' 375BC

Russell Hoban 'Riddley Walker' 1980

Susan Buck-Morss (professor, philosopher, historian)

William Burrows (writer)

William Morris 'Useful Work versus Useless Toil' 1885

Walter Benjamin (philosopher)

William Playfair (engineer)

 

TELEVISION

'Day of the Triffids' from 1981 

'Dr Who' from 1963

Kenny Everett