Fugue Chat

Matt talks about swearing at inanimate objects.

Matt talks about having ants.

Matt talks about whether it is better to have art as a hobby rather than a career.

Matt talks about biography in art, and how forms are facts.

Matt talks about the relationship between art and the 21st century grift economy.

Matt walks back from the reservoir and talks to Sophie about playing the lottery.

Matt walks to the reservoir and talks about how he might have ‘peasant mindset’.

Matt talks about the time he had to hold a door open for Prince William.

Matt describes a fantasy about winning the lottery being interrupted, but also sustained, by detailed planning around the administration and accounting of such a win.

Matt looks for a VC5 document while he talks about ‘lottery mindset’ or ‘lottery mentality’ which is an attitude predicated on the fantasy of getting a lucky break which somehow fixes your life or resolves all of your problems.

Matt and Dan talk about anecdotes in relation to Dan’s idea of neurotransgression. The article Dan wrote about neurotransgression is here: Daniel Oliver. ‘Live Art and Neurotransgression’. Contemporary Theatre Review 34, no. 3 (2024): 280–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2024.2388027 .

Matt and Rebecca walk, and then drive, while they talk about unfinished artworks of different kinds, including Le Crocrodrome de Zig & Puce by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely from 1977, and Anthony McCall’s failed artwork, Column , from 2012. n.b Matt says McCall received £100,000 of funding, but the true figure was around £535,000.

Matt talks about ants.

Matt talks about the American actor and writer Spalding Gray. Gray deployed the anecdote form across his performances and writing, but for this episode, Matt looks at the piece Gray wrote for the photographer Randal Levenson’s book, In Search of the Monkey Girl from 1982.

Matt and Ross talk about bin collections.

Matt talks about different moments at which he feels more or less able to find the right words.

Matt talks about a weird feeling he had while watching the 2021 Beatles documentary, The Beatles: Get Back . (Matt probably calls it Let it Be in the podcast which is the name of the film from 1970 where lots of the footage comes from.)

Matt and Ross wander around London Liverpool Street station talking about features such as: the underground gym, the ‘Calm Corner’, and Exchange Square, the new development behind the station. n.b Neither Matt or Ross can remember the term ‘Terrazzo’ for the paving stones in Exchange Square.

Matt talks about Sean Cubitt’s article, ‘Anecdotal evidence’ from 2013, and what an anecdotal method to art, research and performance might entail.

Matt talks about how different techniques he uses across two podcasts construct the liveness of thought.

Matt walks through a field and tries to re-perform a previous podcast where he had talked about Maria Fusco and class.

Matt talks about the children’s book Snail Song and then sings his version of the poem from that book. (Correction: Matt gets the author’s name totally wrong. Snail Song is written by Judith Nicholls and illustrated by Lo Cole.)

Matt talks about how he’s probably going to spend less time talking about being a dad.

Matt talks about unreliable narrators, Greta Olsen’s article, ‘Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators’, and the idea of an implied author.

A double bill! Matt talks about getting his own height wrong and about how pleasant it is to lay still for a while while having an ECG.