Episode Zero

Transkript Ep. Zero
Hosts: Charlotte Desaga (CD) & Esenija Bannan

CD: Welcome to Art Unquoted. Or, more accurately, welcome to a short intro to the conceptual approach of our podcast. I’m Charlotte Desaga.
EB: And I’m Esenija Bannan. We’re calling this Episode Zero. Before we soon kick off our very first episode, we thought it would be good to unpack our own premise. To turn the analytical lens on ourselves.
CD: A slightly uncomfortable position, but probably a necessary one.
EB: So, Charlotte, let’s start there. This entire podcast is built on a specific choice: to use artists‘ quotes as a kick-off. In a world saturated with images, why begin with words? Words that are so often secondary, even peripheral, to the actual artwork.
CD: I love that you frame it as a choice, because it was a very deliberate one. For me, the quote is a bridge. We stand on the shore of our own experience, our history, our mood, our knowledge. The artwork is the other shore. An artist’s thought, captured in a quote, is a bridge that connects the two. It’s not the entire landscape, of course, but it’s a pathway into it. It’s a wertvoller Begleiter, a valuable companion, that can deepen our understanding, or at the very least, open up a new line of inquiry.
EB: A companion. That´s a good way of describing it. It’s less demanding than a user manual, which is a relief. But it also presents a fundamental problem, doesn’t it? The moment artists speak, they are translating. They are wrestling a visual, material, or experimental language into a verbal one. And language, as everyone knows, has its limits. It’s structured, linear, rational. It often fails spectacularly when trying to contain the very things art excels at expressing: complex emotional states, intuitive knowledge, the… ineffable.
CD: The “unsayable.” Exactly. But isn’t that tension the most fascinating part? The Artikulationsversuch, the attempt at articulation, is what reveals so much. You see artists wrestling with their own creation, trying to pin it down with words. Sometimes the words are elegant and precise. Other times, they’re a beautiful failure.
EB: A quote isn’t a perfect container for the art; it’s the residue of the artist’s own struggle to understand it. We’re not looking for a definitive truth, but for the trace of their reflection.
CD: So we’re for sure not looking for the truth, but for the trace. It saves us from the trap of taking an artist’s statement as the final word, the single source of authority. Which is fortunate, because the artwork itself always has its limits – when you understand “limits” in a rationalistic way. Its meaning is subjective; its grammar isn’t universal. Its reception is dependent on the viewer. Which brings us to the central, almost absurd challenge of this podcast: we are using a non-visual medium to discuss a profoundly visual world.
EB: It forces a different kind of engagement. We have, at least partly, to paint pictures with words, to create a kind of “mental cinema”, Kopfkino. We have to describe the texture of a canvas, the flicker of a video installation, the weight of a sculpture in a room. In a way, it forces us to be better, more attentive viewers ourselves.
CD: And it forces us to trust the listener. We’re not showing any art; we’re inviting them into a conversation about it. We’re acknowledging that while a picture may be worth a thousand words, that doesn’t mean we want to give up the letters, the words, the sentences. The two are in a dynamic relationship. Art can confuse or dissolve the clarity of language, and language can give us a new anchor point for looking at art. But are we not, in a way, privileging the articulate artist? What about those who are silent, or whose words are intentionally misleading? And all those artists not being canonized or published yet…
EB: That’s a fantastic question. And we will try to encounter those artists. The silence of an artist is, in itself, a statement. The misleading quote is probably a provocation. We will have to engage with that, too. We’re not taking these quotes at face value. We’re using them as a catalyst. And we’re not pretending we’ve invented this approach. Artists, critics, historians, and art lovers have been doing this for centuries. We’re just experimenting with formalizing it, trying out a concept we think can reveal maybe not the world formula but something interesting about how we experience art today.
CD: Right. We are not reinventing the wheel. We are simply taking it for a spin. And that brings me to a final, crucial point: the idea of art’s purpose. Or its glorious lack thereof. The German idealists called it Zweckfreiheit—freedom of purpose. Art doesn’t need to do anything. It doesn’t need to be useful. Its power, its very essence, lies in its autonomy.
EB: And by focusing on these quotes, what’s the deal for our podcast? Some might say we are instrumentalizing these fragments of thought.
CD: We are not trying to make the art more useful. We’re simply lingering in its presence, using the artist’s own words as a starting point for our own reflections in the context of the quoted artist work. It’s an excuse to think, to feel, to connect. It’s an invitation to a shared inquiry.
EB: An excuse to think, yes. And we hope our listeners will see it that way as well. A prompt for their own thoughts, not a conclusion.
In our very first episode, we will take a quote and see where it leads us. We’re looking forward to it!
CD: And to close, we turn to Michelangelo, who, even in his eighties, reminded us: Ancora imparo. Still learning. And that is what we do.