Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace, 

Speaker 2 (00:00:02):
The more you're willing to fail and make a fool out of yourself, the more you will eventually get better at putting forth stuff that is like, that really worked. I can build on that. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:25):
Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell eig here at the Art Palace. We meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is Kevin Allison from The Risk Podcast. 

Speaker 2 (00:00:51):
My therapist once advised me, he was like, because you're so used to being interviewed on podcasts and because you're so used to turning on, maybe you could the next time you feel socially anxious at a party, imagine you're being interviewed for a podcast. And I was like, well, I don't know. That sounds a little strained, but yeah, it is interesting the way that we have these turning on or off parts of our personality. 

Speaker 1 (00:01:18):
I have a friend who when we would just hang out, sometimes we would talk, we sort of started to realize we were sort of performing for an audience that was not there. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:27):
We 

Speaker 1 (00:01:28):
Both kind of knew we 

Speaker 2 (00:01:28):
Were doing it. Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (00:01:30):
I mean, we were each other's audience, I think, in that way, but we knew it was a very conscious thing of we are performing right now. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:37):
Yeah. And 

Speaker 1 (00:01:38):
We are performing just for an audience of two basically. 

Speaker 2 (00:01:40):
Yes. And improv comedians and comedic writers riff like that with one another in a friendly way where they know it's just us, two or three people in the room joking like this. But a lot of sketches or movie characters or stage characters start to come to life when people play off one another that way in a very improvy way, but it's just habitual joking around amongst friends. I was in a sketch comedy group in my college years when I was at N Y U, and we eventually got our own sketch comedy show on M T V. We were called the State, and I always regretted that I was a little bit shy about diving in and going all the way with a lot of that joking around. I mean, I was good at making jokes, but I didn't know how to start building a character and continue keep the riff going and going and going with a character in the way that some of the other guys got very used to doing in just a playful way with each other. And a lot of the sketches that we ended up using on M T V came out of that. Just guys in the group playing around with each other socially. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:03:06):
Why do you think you felt like you couldn't put yourself out there in that way? 

Speaker 2 (00:03:10):
I was always the kind of person who wanted, I got very used to as a kid, thinking a thing should be written first and written and edited and perfected before you present it to anyone else. And it took me a long time to realize that at least in the performing arts, that's a killer of an attitude to have. So that's why improv, I recommend to young people that they do take improv classes of sorts because one of the things you learn in a class like that is you let things come out of your mouth and you're hoping that they're funny. And a lot of the things that come out of your mouth are going to land flat on the floor. Embarrassingly are not going to be funny. But that is an essential part of the practice of learning to, with failing a lot in order to start to succeed, the more you're willing to fail and make a fool out of 

Speaker 1 (00:04:23):
Yourself, 

Speaker 2 (00:04:24):
The more you will eventually get better at putting forth stuff that is like, oh, well, now that really worked. I can build on that. 

Speaker 1 (00:04:32):
Did you come from a really traditional theater background more than an improv background, or, 

Speaker 2 (00:04:37):
Yes. When I was a kid, I was obsessed, absolutely obsessed with records, and so I used to listen to a lot of Broadway musicals. I grew up, I was born in 1970, and I grew up listening to a lot of records like Jesus Christ's Superstar, for example, and just imagining scenes in my head while listening to records. And eventually I went to St. Xavier High School, 

Speaker 2 (00:05:04):
And at the time that in my freshman year there, Michelle Masri was brand new. She had just been hired to take over the theater department there. And she just happened to be this absolutely driven visionary, just someone who was so gung-ho to make a really dynamic, fabulous theater company there at that high school that I was just really blessed. A lot of wonderful people came out of theater. Xavier, like Andy Blanken. Bueller has won Tony Awards for his work on Hamilton and in The Heights. A lot of the people that I was in high school with have sung on Broadway or have been on TV in various ways. And so it's just very, very exciting. 

Speaker 1 (00:05:54):
They still have a great reputation for that theater program. It's still a part of their legacy. So you just kind of dropped, you are from Cincinnati originally, and when I met you at the door, you mentioned it had been years since you had been in the building. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:08):
Yes. What's interesting is that I became a museum guard. Oh gosh. I would say it was probably between my junior year and senior year in college at N Y U at MoMA. So I was a museum guard who would stand for eight hours a day in one gallery, and then they'd change you to another gallery the next day. And that was an amazing experience. When I was, in my younger years, when I had to take survival jobs, I would often deliberately make them at artistic institutions so I could learn something. So I worked at the Metropolitan Opera for a little while and MoMA, I'm trying to think where else, but the MoMA experience was great. I would stand in a gallery and then when it was lunchtime, I would go to the bookstore and read all about the artists in that gallery that I was looking at all day. And so it was a real education. I look back on that very fondly now as a comedian. Years later, there was a show that some friends of mine created, which I think has since been kicked out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And it was something, it was called something like Fancy to See You Here. 

Speaker 2 (00:07:30):
And the show was five comedians would gather in the lobby at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and invite friends to be their audience. And then without the museum's permission, they would just lead a tour. And it was just each comedian would choose a different wing. So I always chose the Modern Art Wing when I would do that show, because I knew a lot of those artists already from having worked at MoMA, but my jokes were very inappropriate, not the kind of thing that body sorts of humor. And I think the museum was eventually, who are these 

Speaker 1 (00:08:15):
People 

Speaker 2 (00:08:16):
And what are they telling people about our art? 

Speaker 1 (00:08:19):
Yeah. Well, there's this company now called Museum Hack, and they basically have made a business out of doing that, and they run tours. They're probably not quite so inappropriate, but they're definitely more, they're pushing the edge than a traditional museum tour you would sign up for. So 

Speaker 2 (00:08:39):
It's a little bit more entertaining or Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:08:43):
Yeah. Probably a little quicker paced too. So you came here though when you were a kid. I mean, did you get dragged here on field trips or anything? 

Speaker 2 (00:08:50):
Well, my father is an artist. My father worked mostly in graphic design back in the day they called it a commercial artist. 

Speaker 2 (00:09:00):
And so he tried to build his own business in the mid seventies, and that didn't do so well otherwise, he worked with smaller companies, but did a lot of work for p and g, for example. But his passion when he was younger was more serious art to this day. He still paints a lot of outdoor landscapes or birds. And another thing is that my father loved opera, and he loved two things more than anything else as far as hobbies went. And they were football and opera, and I had two older brothers, and so he clearly saw, okay, the two older ones I can take to the football grade, but this younger one I can take to the opera. So seven, eight years old, I'm going to the opera. I have no idea what's going on on 

Speaker 3 (00:09:58):
Stage, 

Speaker 2 (00:09:59):
Because they didn't even we're talking like 19 76, 19 77, they didn't yet have subtitles 

Speaker 2 (00:10:05):
That they would play at the Cincinnati Opera. So I was just had to guess what the heck was going on, but I was enthralled by it. I was fascinated by it. So between his interest in, so yeah, he also got me interested in visual art. We used to have a lot of art books around the house of the great old paintings. And yeah, I've just always been interested in what has always intrigued me about art that hangs on a wall is to, there's almost a spiritual connection sometimes if an image is really speaking to you that really struck me when I worked at MoMA for all those years was that I would sometimes feel like I had mean, this sounds woo woo, this sounds silly, but I would sometimes feel like I had a little bit of a spiritual or e s P sort of connection or was hearing something from whatever Cezanne or whatever artist it was, if a painting was really speaking to me that day. And when you're there for eight hours in one gallery, you really get to spend some time. You can really meditate on a painting if it's really speaking to you, if you take time like that. So yeah, I've just always, I just think that life with as much art of any kind in it as you can have is a very healing thing for the soul. 

Speaker 1 (00:11:58):
Yeah. Well, that's great. I mean, you've got a better sense of probably the right way to look at art as far as we would like to encourage people, I mean, I don't want to tell people there's a right or wrong way to look at art, but one of the things we try to encourage is to slow down usually. And if you were asked, when I go to a museum and another city, I usually try to just say, okay, I really want to focus on this. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:23):
Oh yeah, 

Speaker 1 (00:12:23):
I'm just going to go to this part of the museum. That's where I really want to see. And then what else we might see on our way there. Great. We'll see what happens. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:30):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 

Speaker 1 (00:12:32):
Often too, when I am leading a tour or something with a group of people and we stop and look at something and you spend a really long time looking at it, almost always, even if it's a painting that people or a work of art that people don't actually like at first, by the time they spend a little more time with it, they almost always like it at least more than they did when they started. 

Speaker 2 (00:12:50):
Oh, well, that was a big lesson when we started doing our show, the state on M T V in the early nineties was we had to keep reminding ourselves that because our sense of humor was based on such intimate relationships. We had been friends for, well, the group was together for eight years, and we were the very best of friends during those years. And our sketches were very much based not on what we thought other people would find funny, but the way we joked around with each other and what we found funny as friends, and when the first reviews of the first few episodes were negative, we really had to remind ourselves, oh, they're just not getting it yet. They need some time to sit with us and start to kind of imbibe our chemistry and feel the vibe that we're putting into this before they start to be able to laugh along with us. And I think that that's very true of a lot of art that, for example, there will be movies by Scorsese or something like that where you'll be like, I remember seeing New York, New York, a movie he made in the seventies, and at the time thinking, this is kind of a mess. And then a few days later, I'm still thinking about 

Speaker 1 (00:14:23):
That movie. You know what I mean? I think that's always a great sign. Yeah. I remember reading something Roger Ebert had written about that sort of effect, and he said something like, when you see a good movie, you often don't know what you've just seen. Yes. But when you see a bad movie, you know exactly what you've seen. Usually 

Speaker 2 (00:14:42):
This is one of the most profound instances of me learning about art in my life was that when I was nine, I can't remember if I was eight years old or nine years old, I must've been nine years old because eight seems too young. But my parents left me alone in the house for the first time just by myself, no babysitter. My brothers and sisters were all elsewhere, and it's a little scary for a kid to be that age and all alone in the house. And so my dad said, oh, there's a great movie on p b s tonight that you really should try to make a point to see. I fell asleep on the couch with the TV on, and then the movie started, and because the movie starts with this horror music that's very startling, I wake up and Citizen Kane was just starting now. 

Speaker 2 (00:15:38):
My dad hadn't told me a single thing about this movie other than that, it's a great movie, you should watch it. At the age of nine, I had only seen really traditional Hollywood entertainment, and all of a sudden I'm watching Citizen Kane, and I was baffled. I didn't know what I was watching and at the end, but I was so intrigued. I was like, this movie is very different. There is a lot going on in here. And at the end of the movie when the camera pulls away and reveals something to you that the storytelling has not otherwise told you so far, because it's told from various perspectives, and then at the end, the camera's like God and gives you another perspective and reveals something very revealing. I was crying. I was weeping at the end of this movie, and I had no idea why I was crying either. I was kind of spooked out 

Speaker 1 (00:16:43):
That 

Speaker 2 (00:16:43):
This was such a confusing but yet beautiful and dynamic thing I had just seen. And I talked to my dad about it the other day or the next day, and he was like, yeah, it's a real work of art. And it had never occurred to me that a movie 

Speaker 1 (00:17:01):
Could 

Speaker 2 (00:17:01):
Be a work of art. And I became obsessed with movies after that. I started buying books like Leonard Morten's Guide to all the movies and everything. And then I started seeing, because my dad was pointing out to me, look at these stills from this AWA movie or something like that, that looks like a painting, doesn't it? And I was like, oh, yeah. So yeah, it's really wonderful, especially when kids kind of see something for the first time, even if they might've passed by it before, there's that experience waking up and Citizen Kane is happening in front of your eyes where, oh, I'm really seeing this now. Yeah, 

Speaker 1 (00:17:40):
Yeah, totally. I mean, I was thinking when you were telling that story about my own experiences watching things probably too young or way over your head. I remember watching Fellini's eight and a half when I was 11 or something. 

Speaker 1 (00:17:56):
I would watch movies incessantly too, and I would just rent them from our local video store, and they would have a lot of weird stuff like that, eight and a half. And I remember being like, oh, this box looks interesting. And it was just literally, it just says eight and a half in very flowery text, I feel like. And I was like, what is this? And I remember sort of not following it at all, but then it gets to that ending when all of the sort of Fellini Standin character brings back all of his family and friends, and they all walk down these stairs and start doing this dance. And it was just so amazing to me, and I was like, I want to watch this again. 

Speaker 2 (00:18:33):
It's 

Speaker 1 (00:18:33):
Sort of when you finish something and you immediately want to just like, I want to turn this back on. And even if you didn't know what you were just watching, 

Speaker 2 (00:18:41):
Yes, yes, yes. I totally agree with that. I didn't read Moby Dick until I was, oh, I dunno, probably around 30. I never encountered it in high school or college, but I picked it up when I was around 30 for some, oh, I remember when I was 30, I said, everyone who comes to my 30th birthday party has to bring me a classic piece of literature. So it was awesome. I got all these great old books. So I started reading Moby Dick, and again, it was one of those things where I was like, what is going on? It was a lot, these two movies we just 

Speaker 1 (00:19:17):
Discussed where it's like, 

Speaker 2 (00:19:19):
This is all over the place. This is the most confusing. I don't know what's going on in this. But I did read it again right after finishing it because I was like, I don't want to be done reading Moby Dick. That was amazing. 

Speaker 1 (00:19:32):
And when you read the first chapter of Moby Dick after reading the whole book, it feels like a totally different book 

Speaker 2 (00:19:37):
Too, right? 

Speaker 1 (00:19:38):
You start that book and you go, oh, this feels like, because at the beginning you're just like, I don't even know what this guy's talking about. 

Speaker 2 (00:19:48):
You just have no clue where this is all going. And 

Speaker 1 (00:19:51):
Yeah, it's such an insane book. I mean, that's one of the things I constantly recommend to people. I feel like a lot of people haven't read it. I'm like, you have to read it. It's so good. And it's truly one of the most bizarre books I've ever read. And it's like, oh, you're reading this novel? No, now you're reading an encyclopedia 

Speaker 2 (00:20:09):
Entry. 

Speaker 1 (00:20:10):
Now you're reading a play. Now you're reading. It just keeps changing formats. It's 

Speaker 2 (00:20:14):
Very postmodern. Totally. I mean, 

Speaker 1 (00:20:16):
Yeah, I actually think about that book a lot when I'm looking at paintings from that time period and just thinking, trying to see it in them, almost like this was the beginnings of modernism, really. And this is where people are starting to pick apart the structure to reveal the underlying source. When you're reading Moby Dick, you're aware, I am reading a book. And so the same thing is kind of happening in the 19th century and painting where people start to go, you were looking at a painting, we're going to show you the paint here, we're going to see the canvas. And that's all sort of going to build on itself until it's hard to actually see it in those early paintings sometimes from our viewpoint where we know where it's gone, we've seen the impressionism, we've seen the post-impressionism, we've seen the expressionism, we've seen all of this stuff happen, and when you, it's hard for our eyes to register that radicalness of it. 

Speaker 2 (00:21:09):
This is the converse side of what we were talking about before. When you're coming to something with such fresh eyes like me and Citizen Kane at the age of nine, it's kind of so different than say, if I were to go to see the Mona Lisa right now, you know what I mean? Where you are stepping into a situation where there has been so much marketing and positioning around what this image is and what it means in society, that it's very hard to come to a painting like that with fresh eyes. 

Speaker 1 (00:21:41):
Yeah, you absolutely can't see it. I mean, it's one of these things that's impossible to divorce from its fame 

Speaker 1 (00:21:48):
And it's idea of a famous image. That is why you go to see it at this point, and that's why people see it. And I mean, I went to the Louvre for the first time last year, and I had the same experience where I kind of like, well, I guess we'll go see it. We have to we to go in the room. I know I'm going to be annoyed, but let's go do this. But just outside in the hallway is another DaVinci painting that is, in my opinion, just as beautiful. Nobody's usually, maybe, there's always a few people who know, and they're always standing around it, but compared to the Mona Lisa where you can't get anywhere close to that, this one you can get right up on top of. And it's interesting to see the comparison of how this one is just about itself. It's just about being famous at this point, 

Speaker 2 (00:22:38):
But you make a great point. The journey to go there and have the experience, you have no idea what might happen all around it. I had a very similar experience. I was just in Bangkok in January and everyone's like, well, you have to go to the Grand Palace of the King of Siam. And I was like, alright. I was a little fearful that that was going to be a messy day of being swamped by tourists, but man, there are nooks and crannies of the palace grounds that are just like, it is just so much grandeur and beauty and just so much that I found it just fascinating to get lost in these tiny little alcoves where no one else was looking and just feel like, wow, the 

Speaker 1 (00:23:33):
History 

Speaker 2 (00:23:34):
And the, it's hard to keep the king and 

Speaker 1 (00:23:40):
Eye out of your head, the songs from the king and eye out of your head when you're 

Speaker 2 (00:23:43):
Walking through there. But just to imagine, oh my gosh, the relationships and the tris and the whatever that were happening in these little outcomes, it's amazing. 

Speaker 1 (00:23:53):
And it's sort of interesting to think of that in the way this is full of all these people too. And even the weird collision of those two things is sort of interesting too. Well, 

Speaker 2 (00:24:01):
You know what I found funny from that perspective was they have the temple where the Buddha is, and it's actually a very small Buddha in this temple, but it's kind of like the Holy of Holies in Bangkok. And that, of course, is the hardest room to get into because everyone wants to go there because of its reputation and everything, but you have to take your shoes off to go in there. And so I found it hilariously funny that once you get into this holiest of places, it could not be stinkier because it's very, 

Speaker 1 (00:24:44):
That's hilarious, humid and muggy in Thailand all the time, and everyone 

Speaker 2 (00:24:47):
Just took their shoes off. 

Speaker 1 (00:24:51):
That's delightful. That's great. Oh, that's perfect. Well, we haven't actually talked anything about risk at all. So how did you start making the podcast and how did you start making risk? 

Speaker 2 (00:25:03):
Well, I realized I was gay when I was a little kid, and it was, that's an unusual experience. Most people begin who are gay, begin to realize it in the high school college roundabout that time. But I was hyper aware of it from the beginning of consciousness, really, which I had by all objective reality, a happy childhood. But I grew up terrified about this thing that I was keeping a secret the whole time. My family was very devoutly Catholic and everything, and so I was afraid I was going to go to hell, and I was afraid that if anyone found out about this part of me, that I'd lose all my friends and family. It was very scary, that aspect of my life when I was a child. So as the years went by, of course I did start coming out to people in high school and college and yada yada, but I grew up very fascinated and obsessed and had a complex around this whole idea of coming out 

Speaker 1 (00:26:14):
Which 

Speaker 2 (00:26:14):
Sides of my personality do I allow people to see? When and when I became a comedian after college, I felt like, oh, I have to have as much control over that as possible. I have to be whatever Hollywood wants me to be. And when my sketch comedy group broke up, that just wasn't working for me. I wasn't able to figure out when I might seem too gay in a character I was, or when I might be coming off as too Midwestern because I am, or when I might seem a little bit too absurdist. I'm such a comedian, et cetera, et cetera. So I was always second guessing myself about the sides of my personality. I was showing to people, and it was really shooting myself in the foot. I got more and more stage fright and more and more social anxiety about this over the years and during the 12 years between the state, my sketch comedy group breaking up, and 2009 when I created risk, I was just a starving artist. I was doing a lot of cater waitering. I was drinking too much. I was just battling with stage fright and just not getting anywhere in my career. Then in 2009, I did a show, a one person show. It was five kooky characters like I was used to doing from my sketch comedy days and all five characters. The theme was that they had screwed up their careers. 

Speaker 4 (00:27:48):
So 

Speaker 2 (00:27:48):
It was obviously trying to be kind of autobiographical, but in a kooky charactery way. And Michael Lee Black, who had been a member of the state, came to see the show and afterwards I said, what'd you think? And he said, I think the whole audience just wishes you would've dropped the mask. Just stop acting like these characters get up on stage and tell your own true stories. And I said, oh, I'm just afraid that I'm too gay sometimes and too Midwestern seeming at sometimes and too absurdist at other times, and it feels too risky to be the real me. And he said, risk. That's the word. Keep that word in mind because if you feel like you're taking a risk, it probably means you're opening up to people and then people will start opening up to you. So the very next week I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:47):
I'm going to tell a true story in front of an audience instead of playing a crazy, kooky character. And I was 39 years old, so it was weird that this was the first time I was doing this in this way, but I did tell a true story at a true storytelling show that week, and I was terrified. I felt like it was so risky. It was sexual story. So it was very revealing, and I was amazed because while I was telling this story to this audience that night, I did come to those places where I was second guessing myself. I did come to the places where I was like, Ooh, that sounded too gay. Or, oh, I sounded like such an Ohio boy then, or whatever it was, but it didn't matter. They kept leaning in closer to me and listening deeper and deeper because I was telling the truth, and I felt this connection with the audience that I hadn't felt on stage in years. 

Speaker 2 (00:29:45):
So I walked away from that show that night, and it all kind of came together after years and years and years of failure. It just all clicked into place. I was like, this is what I should do. I should create a live show and a podcast called Risk where people tell true stories that they never thought they'd dare to share in public. Everyone on the show should be kind of coming out about something or showing some side of their personality that they're not used to sharing in mixed company and exploring these moments in their lives that they would otherwise be talking to a therapist about the most emotional or the most revealing or the most meaningful moments in their lives. Once I started studying storytelling shows, I started looking at this American Life and The Moth, 

Speaker 2 (00:30:40):
Which both had very popular, well, they still do very popular podcasts as well as being on the radio. And so I was listening to a lot of their stuff and realizing, oh, they have to keep stuff very clean and not too emotional and politically correct and all these things. Whereas if I put out a podcast, I can let people speak in a much more unfiltered way where there's nowhere where we have to fear to tread, of course, on risk. We're extremely mindful about being compassionate, about making sure the storytellers aren't being hateful toward anyone. But when it comes to sex or violence or extremely emotional stories or scary stories or whatever, we go a lot of places on risk. So I created this podcast and this live show, we just did it at a space called Ludlow Garage last night here in Cincinnati. The way it works is on the podcast, I'll announce, Hey, Cincinnati, we're coming to town in three months. Pitch us your stories. 

Speaker 2 (00:31:45):
And it's fascinating because we'll get like 20 pitches or so, and we'll kind of weeded through them and say, well, does this sound like something we haven't heard before? And we'll start interviewing some of these folks and we'll start narrow it down to about eight and then to finally to four and start really working with those people. And it's interesting because in helping a person prepare a story, a lot of what you do is a little bit more like a therapist than an editor. You have to poke and prod people like, wait, how do you really feel about your mother? Or, wait, wait, wait. Did you have ulterior motives when you said that? Those are the kinds of questions that really get great stuff out of people. So yeah, risk is now almost 10 years old. The podcast gets over a million downloads month, and we just put a book out this past summer as well, as well as a little series that we just put out on Amazon of some stories we put out on Amazon called This Can't Be Happening that You Can Listen to or Download on your Kindle. So we're staying super, super busy. And then I also have this school that I created called The Story Studio. So we teach people how to do storytelling, not just for the creative purpose of doing it on stage, like on risk, but also we do a lot of corporate workshops. Some people will hear risk and they'll realize, whoa, these are not the kind of 

Speaker 1 (00:33:21):
Stories you could share in the 

Speaker 2 (00:33:22):
Office because they're very uncensored. But they also understand, oh, the basic principles of storytelling can be applied to other contexts, and especially in business situations, a lot of people need some help humanizing the things that they want to communicate, learning to speak instead about processes and data and the history of projects to make it about the people and the emotional impact of this or that on what the team is doing. At the age of 39, I created risk, and it completely transformed my life because so many people heard the show and were so moved by it that it developed this very passionate fan base, and it became a way I could make a living finally. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:24):
Well, a happy ending to at least the beginning of the story, which was that you were sort of lost in your career. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:29):
Absolutely. 

Speaker 1 (00:34:30):
Yeah. So at least it worked itself out that way. Well, I thought we could go look at some art in the galleries right now that I felt has a sort of confessional edge. I'm stretching a bit, but we're going to look at that and then, because we're open right now, and actually the piece has sound, we won't be able to record there. So we're just going to come right back here and just talk about this work. Fabulous. Awesome. 

Speaker 5 (00:34:58):
At times, I have fits of laughing and crying that I cannot control. I am troubled by attacks of nausea and vomiting. No one seems to understand me. Evil spirits possess me at times. 

Speaker 1 (00:35:20):
So we just looked at a piece in the galleries. It's kind of hard to, I usually tell people what gallery it's in, it's like in the stairwell. Yeah, I love 

Speaker 2 (00:35:28):
That. I love that. It's the kind of thing where you turn around the corner and you're like, wait, is this supposed to be here? 

Speaker 1 (00:35:35):
Right. Yeah. So it's on the stairs leading up to the third floor, which is sometimes very tricky for people to find in the building, but that's where it's located. It's on the little landing, and this was a piece called M M P I, in parentheses, daydreamer by an artist named Tony Osler, who is an American artist. So maybe just since we are not there until This is audio only, it's the challenge we have of doing audio about art is let's try to describe this piece for people if they haven't seen it. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:10):
Well, the first thing is there's kind of an empty house dress, a house dress that is just being held into place by a tripod so that it's kind of just floating in air, and then there's this sort of, I guess it looks like kind of a pillow or whatever, where the head of a person might be, and then the actual face of a woman is being projected onto that big head pillow popping up above this floating house dress. 

Speaker 1 (00:36:41):
Yeah, it's a really odd piece because it immediately is figurative. You look at it and you go, well, there's a person. It's got a head. It's got a body, but then the body is flat and there's no effort to mask that fact. Like you said, it's clearly just hanging on a tripod. I think today I was looking at it and realized, you can see a coat hanger or something in there. I don't know if it's really a coat hanger or some other structure, but it reads like a code hanger. So yeah, I mean, it just feels like this outfit that's just hung up. It's the bare minimum of things required to make a person it feels like. 

Speaker 2 (00:37:21):
Right. Almost like if you were to draw, to just draw a stick figure. Yeah. One of the things, it's interesting, oftentimes your first impressions about something will be corrected as you look closer, 

Speaker 1 (00:37:35):
Because 

Speaker 2 (00:37:35):
As I came up the stairs, I assumed that this dress was a kimono or something, and so I was like, oh, this is a piece of Asian art. This is supposed to be an Asian woman. And then I got distracted by her voice speaking and her face. So it wasn't until later that I took a closer look and was like, oh, no, that's just a pretty ordinary kind of house dress and more nondescript and could be from any country really. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:38:06):
I get where you're coming though from with the kimono. I think it's maybe from a distance that red color and the pattern, which has these flowers on it that read are those birds of paradise maybe. And a kimono is a very square shape too. So I think when you just see it from a distance, it probably makes sense to have that read. I feel like I've had that read before maybe when I first saw it too. I kind of understand. But yeah, I think when you get closer to it, you realize it is a lot more western looking kind of house wifey sort of vibe to it. That is definitely not a kimono. Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:45):
I mean, I get this odd sensation from it that I had from the very beginning, though it definitely feels like a woman. You know what I mean? It is a dress and it is a woman's face and voice, but this person feels a little bit trapped to me. So the first thing I hear her saying was something like, I like to read mechanics magazines or something like that, and at the point we happened to happen in on her eyes, were doing a lot of darting back and forth the way when you're trying to read something or follow what's coming next that you're supposed to be looking at. So it had the feel of, oh, she's making extraordinarily personal and revealing I statements, and yet she's pretty clearly reading them so that it almost feels like she's got a gun to her head to admit to you that this terrorist organization has told me to tell you that I like mechanics magazines. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:00):
There is a nervousness about her that I think that it's a weird performance. It's very flat, and I think that's by design that, yeah, she's not saying a lot of these things with a lot of passion, but they feel very revealing. Some of them do, and then some of them feel very mundane, but she's kind of delivering them all with about the same passion. 

Speaker 2 (00:40:24):
Then we happened to catch the very beginning of this lube, so this goes on for a long time. 

Speaker 1 (00:40:33):
So I don't know if we've actually set up what this is we're talking about. So the piece, what I said, the title is M M P I, which is stands for Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, 

Speaker 2 (00:40:46):
And 

Speaker 1 (00:40:46):
This is still a test that is still used today to assess personality disorders. So what we caught when it looped was the very beginning where she says, please indicate whether the following statements are true or false. 

Speaker 2 (00:41:03):
Yes. 

Speaker 1 (00:41:03):
So she only says that once out of a hundred questions. So I was happy we kind of did catch that, but also that we didn't catch it at first because I was telling you while we were looking at it, I feel like the majority of people who see it never hear that. 

Speaker 2 (00:41:15):
Right. Once you hear her read the instructions for the test to indicate whether these are true or false, you realize immediately, oh, okay. This is kind of a standard psychological test she's taking, 

Speaker 1 (00:41:29):
And then it kind of flips it because it becomes somebody who seems they're confessing something to you to where then suddenly now you are being asked to reveal something about yourself actually too, 

Speaker 2 (00:41:42):
Which I think happens all the time in art. That part of the point of people revealing things about themselves in art is the extent to which you can either empathize or even start to identify. You know what I mean? That's why I think in stories that are told on risk, people will talk about having done horrible things like attempted murder or just strange things like kinky adventures or whatever. You'll hear a person talk about something where you're like, I would never do that. 

Speaker 1 (00:42:27):
That 

Speaker 2 (00:42:27):
Is so not my thing. But the emotions that they start to describe will start to resonate with you, and you'll think, oh, well, I've actually felt that way before, and so you start to be able to follow this person along on their journey going to a place you would never want to go, and I think that that's very powerful for us. I think we get a lot of vicarious experience that way and a lot of knowledge about the world in our lives by listening to other people that way. 

Speaker 1 (00:43:03):
Have you ever seen any of this artist's other work or that you know of? 

Speaker 2 (00:43:06):
No. No. Now, is the artist a woman? 

Speaker 1 (00:43:10):
No. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:11):
Oh, 

Speaker 1 (00:43:11):
Okay. His name is Tony Osler, and he is, I would say, most famous for pieces that are similar to this. I mean, he does a lot of different things, but he uses projection a lot, and he's still working today, and some of his most famous pieces are these characters. These, they're always like a little grotesque. I feel like there's something off. They're always a little unsettling. 

Speaker 2 (00:43:35):
Yes, yes. This kind of disembodied sort of dress person with a big head feels like something from a nightmare or a hallucination, you know what I mean? There's definitely a kind of surrealistic way of encountering the human form, 

Speaker 1 (00:43:58):
And he plays with that a lot, and this actually piece is maybe one of the least disturbing things I've seen him do. I know that he's used the same actress in several pieces, and one of them, it's like this body, and again, it's very loose. It's just a big head, and she's almost, her head is being squashed by under a mattress, I think, and she's sort of just insulting the viewer, don't look at me. She's being really aggressive to 

Speaker 2 (00:44:25):
You, 

Speaker 1 (00:44:27):
And so again, it's this weird thing of you want to be sympathetic with this character, but then they're insulting you. There's a lot of them that are insulting to the viewer. I was watching some videos online of some of his other piece, and he does these ones that he's made these sort of shapes that maybe almost look frog where he is got just two eyes that are two separate circles that are sewn into this big mouth shape, and then that's it. It's like a video that's just two eyes that were clearly recorded separately because the eyes don't line up. The eyes will blink at different times, which is upsetting to look at, and then the mouth is just going like, Hey, fatty, things like that, just sort of saying these insulting things, but then he's got other ones where these heads are trapped in jars or that are moving or talking. There's one I think in a fish tank that's underwater that looks like it's kind of struggling, and so you get sympathetic also for these things. They can elicit kind of amazing responses, and it's a really simple trick, and he's showing us the trick. He's not hiding the trick. 

Speaker 2 (00:45:34):
Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:45:35):
But just by projecting onto a surface instead of a screen, we can kind of identify with it as a person in a way, I think more than we could if it had that frame. 

Speaker 2 (00:45:47):
Yeah. You're absolutely right. The fact that the head thing is a three-dimensional pillow sort of thing that her face is being projected onto does make it feel much more almost like there's a person there rather than just we're watching a movie. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:05):
Yeah. 

Speaker 2 (00:46:07):
I did notice that there was a father and two little girls that came up the stairs too, and the little girls looked a little disturbed. 

Speaker 1 (00:46:19):
I would say this is maybe the least popular piece in the museum, maybe. True. I know that's hard to, I mean, there's no way of judging that, but it is. I feel like I've watched so many people walk by this and they always say something about like, oh, that's creepy. I mean, I think it gets the response it's designed for, but it does get a lot of that from people who kind of walk by it quickly. I've heard a lot of people just like, oh, I hate that thing, or a lot of guards really hate it just, but they hate anything that has sound. 

Speaker 2 (00:46:50):
Yes, 

Speaker 1 (00:46:51):
Because they have to hear it all day. 

Speaker 2 (00:46:52):
Yes. Having worked as a museum guard, if you got on the bad side of the woman who assigned everyone the galleries every day, then she would put you in the dadada room for a whole 

Speaker 1 (00:47:07):
Week 

Speaker 2 (00:47:08):
Just to drive you crazy. 

Speaker 1 (00:47:13):
But 

Speaker 2 (00:47:14):
Yeah. Another thing that occurred to me watching it is, and this is totally random, but my thinking, oh, I love 

Speaker 1 (00:47:21):
Psychological tests. You know what I 

Speaker 2 (00:47:24):
Mean? It's so funny 

Speaker 2 (00:47:25):
When you take a test like this, whether it's the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram, or even if you have to actually go to a psychiatrist and they want to make sure you're not schizophrenic, you're supposed to usually answer these questions as quickly as possible so that they have that sort of Jungian word association effect with you. But I always get trapped up in, I like mechanics magazines. Now, of course, I wouldn't ordinarily say that, but what are they looking for from me here? You know what? I like Mechanics magazine. I really, I want to spend time with every question and start unpacking it. 

Speaker 1 (00:48:04):
I was doing some research trying to figure out how this test even works, and so much of it is actually meant to assess how you're taking the test and how much you are trying to lie or be dishonest about your own response to it. It's meant to sort of reveal contradictions from one question to another, so you maybe would be honest about this way, but you're hiding it in another way, and I think it's really 

Speaker 2 (00:48:32):
Strange. I absolutely get that because I have found that whenever taking a test like this, if I begin to, while taking the test, see a pattern, then I feel like my answers start to become slanted toward what I want it to. The Jesuits, when I went to St X, some of them were into the Enneagram at that time, which I think it's older than astrology, but it's a theory about nine personality types, and some jungians still play around with these nine personality types, but once you have, I always got the impression, oh, I'm a four. I'm the 

Speaker 1 (00:49:16):
Artist, so 

Speaker 2 (00:49:18):
Whenever I've taken Enneagram test every five years to see if I still score a certain way, but when I take the test nowadays, I'm like, I know the kinds of questions they ask, so if I sense anything that screams for, I'm going to be, oh, I'm the artist. I have to say yes to that. I, 

Speaker 1 (00:49:37):
So 

Speaker 2 (00:49:38):
I think you're right. I think that this test seems to be designed to keep people off their moorings of, wait, what the heck? Why would you be asking? I would love to be a librarian, and then the next question is, I've never committed a crime or whatever. 

Speaker 1 (00:49:56):
Yeah, they jump all over the place. The other thing I was thinking about today while watching it is it just made me think of the Voit comp test and Blade Runner too, and this sort of detecting a human, and then because we're looking at this weird non person, it became this strange, what is human? It just brought up this whole other issue to me of humanity. She became this strange cyber artificial 

Speaker 2 (00:50:22):
Intelligence. 

Speaker 1 (00:50:23):
Wow. 

Speaker 2 (00:50:24):
Yeah. That's fascinating. I'm not a fan of the show Westworld, but I do think that the premise of the show is incredibly profound and something that we really have to grapple with, and that is that as robots become more human seeming, we're going to have to learn to treat them well, or it will make monsters of us. If you treat a robot, if you kill a robot or rape a robot or something like that, it's making you more of a monster. Whether or not you're like, well, who caress because it's a machine? No. You feel like you are doing those things to a person. 

Speaker 1 (00:51:10):
Yeah. It's just related to maybe the same kind of automatic way. We sort of treat this as a person, and the way I think people kind of either are creeped out by it or hurry past it is the way that it does convey a bit of personhood 

Speaker 2 (00:51:26):
In it 

Speaker 1 (00:51:27):
In a way that is unsettling in the same way we find AI unsettling. Well, any other thoughts about this piece? I know it's definitely one of the odder pieces of the museum, but I'm glad to have somebody to talk about it because I haven't ever talked about a piece quite like this before on the 

Speaker 2 (00:51:42):
Show. Oh, I would say that I like being thrown off by things, and especially when I feel like, okay, this is not just bizarre for the sake of being bizarre or this is not just confusing for the sake of being confusing, but there's stuff to unpack here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Speaker 1 (00:52:03):
Totally. I think that's a great thing to bring up. I do think a lot of people assume a lot of work that they maybe don't get right off the bat is that like, oh, it's just artists being weird for the sake of being weird, and I feel like if that was this artist's goal, he could have made it so much weirder. Right. It's 

Speaker 2 (00:52:22):
True. It's true. 

Speaker 1 (00:52:22):
I mean, I feel like it's so specific that to me that feels like, no, this is what he wanted to make, and he was going for something really specific here that's not just totally wacky. It's pretty restrained in a lot of ways. 

Speaker 2 (00:52:38):
There's 

Speaker 1 (00:52:39):
Actually quite a lot of restraint in this piece, and its weirdness is I feel like calibrated to be just weird enough to be unsettling. 

Speaker 2 (00:52:50):
One thing I didn't mention though, another thing about the person seeming a little bit trapped is that she's lit from below and she's looking up, which gives it almost like she's under interrogation. She's been sat down and told to read these things, is kind of how it feels. 

Speaker 1 (00:53:12):
Yeah, that's true. That's interesting. About the lit from below, it's something I don't know if I've ever really thought about, but it's also, it's a really unflattering light too. It just gives it this very weird vibe and maybe even contributes to the creepiness by almost having the spooky story, a flashlight under the chain kind of effect, 

Speaker 2 (00:53:33):
Which 

Speaker 1 (00:53:33):
Maybe is something people also pick up on when they walk by it. The guy, I dunno about this, but yeah, that's true. I was looking up that he had what he was working on recently, and he's been doing a lot of big projects out in public spaces. He did one, I think just this past Halloween where he had this sort of installation where it was sort of multi-part with projections in the Hudson River and then other parts projected on buildings nearby and 

Speaker 2 (00:54:05):
Interesting using the whole 

Speaker 1 (00:54:05):
Space, projecting on trees out in public, or he uses smoke machines to create a surface that's always changing, that he's projecting on too, so that these pieces can never sort of be replicated. They are sort of a moment that somebody can only experience at that one time, and then they'll always be a little different because even the tree part is always going to be a little different. The trees are moving and with the wind and things like that, so 

Speaker 2 (00:54:32):
Yeah. I also, I do want to look him up now, and I'm also curious about this test. It feels to me like it's probably the sort of thing that you can only take at the psychiatrist office and they have the key to give you the results of your test, but if there was a way to take it online and say, oh, well, you revealed that you have an eating disorder or something, 

Speaker 1 (00:55:01):
Right. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Well, and I've heard, and just to bring this back too, this is something else I thought of that I've heard. He's brought up the idea of personality disorders a lot in his work and the idea that he almost thinks of the way we consume television and media as being a sort of type of personality disorder of the sort of channel surfing mentality, and I think that's only gotten stronger with the way we consume things through online now. 

Speaker 2 (00:55:30):
Absolutely. 

Speaker 1 (00:55:31):
That it's like that turned up to a million basically of just things coming at you from every angle. So I think he also, the way he's engaging with video and using sort of the language of media, that's another sort of side of it that I've heard him bring up before. 

Speaker 2 (00:55:50):
It was funny because when I was say in college or so, and I saw some technology start to change, like D V D players and stuff like that, I was looking at my parents and my grandparents and thinking, oh my gosh, it must be so surreal 

Speaker 2 (00:56:10):
To feel like, oh, a man walked on the moon and to get used to that, and then now this new technology. Well, now I feel like technology with the internet has taken such a leap forward that I think even young people are disconcerted and feeling like, whoa, wait a minute. Especially social media taps into parts of our brain in an addictive way and in a very social, the way that we feel like, oh, we're getting affirmation or not, and all that kind of stuff. I really feel like I'm quite addicted, for example, to Twitter, and I feel like I should really get a handle on that because it's beginning to warp. I think my worldview or my view of, I don't know how people interact with each other, so I think that we're all kind of at this place in history with technology where we're like, wait a minute. We got to start thinking about our individuality and our personal health as to how we're using this stuff and being affected by this stuff. 

Speaker 1 (00:57:24):
The complexity of people, of talking about how we can have both sides of us a lot of stuff. What I see online is that it doesn't allow room for that 

Speaker 2 (00:57:34):
For the nuance. Exactly. In a risk story, what I like about letting a person tell a story for 15 or 20 minutes or sometimes even an hour and a half, is they can share a lot of mixed feelings. They can talk about, well, I said this, but what I was really thinking was that, or I did this, but oh my gosh, I wish I had done that, and there's just a lot of nuance that comes out when a person can really unpack things like that, whereas I totally agree with you on Twitter, sometimes we feel like we're just making statements. I like mechanics magazines or whatever, and it is very definitive, and you read something, you read a statement that someone makes on Twitter, and then it taps into an archetype of what you think that person is in your brain. Even if you don't know who they are, they'll say something and you'll assume that they're of the political party opposite yours and say, oh, well, oh, you people thank yada, yada, yada, just based on something you're taking out of one sentence they wrote. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:58:47):
A recent example of that that's actually kind of amazing is, and I'm sure everybody was following it in bringing it back to even local issues, is the Covington Catholic kids, right? 

Speaker 2 (00:58:57):
Yeah. Yeah. 

Speaker 1 (00:58:58):
There's an issue where people had one story in mind. They saw the story, and then it kept getting weirder the story. The more you unpacked it, it was like, ah, well, it's not exactly what I thought, but I don't still think it's great, and I don't know. It became a lot more complicated than the original story, and you're still like, well, I still think that kid looked real smug. Of course, but it does change things. It does change everything, and it also, even when we talk about frames and art and the way images are framed, I mean, there was a perfect example of how we saw multiple angles on the same situation, and depending on who was taking a video, it changed the perspective and it changed what was being shown, and it changed the whole story. 

Speaker 2 (00:59:47):
Another interesting part of that story was to see how people with ideological frame can take almost any story and then start to reframe it in order to, because that initial story, the way it looked was the left jumped on it as Look at this terrible behavior by MAGA people, and I think the right was downright excited. I felt like it felt like, Ooh, here is a shining example for us to take the ball out of your side of the court, reframe this, and then give the media a hard time for having, so it's like this sports event that starts happening of, no, we're going to keep it in our framing. You know what I mean? 

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Yeah. No, I think you're right. There was a definite glee that was being 

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Taken in that 

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
Event. Everybody has said enough about that story. Probably at this point, we don't really need to retread it, but Well, did you have anything else you wanted to talk about today? 

Speaker 2 (01:00:51):
I don't think so. This was a total pleasure. It was so fun to talk about various angles on art. 

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Well, great. Well, thank you so much for being my guest today, Kevin, 

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Thank you. 

Speaker 1 (01:01:09):
Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have your own conversations about the art. General. Admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking. The special exhibition on view right now is Art Academy of Cincinnati at 150, a celebration in drawings and prints opening February 15th is Lakia and opening March 1st is Paris 1900. Join us on Sunday, February 17th at 3:00 PM for a free gallery experience with me and artist Gary Gaffney as we discuss our time at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and some of the work in the new Art Academy exhibition. For program reservations and more information, visit cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and also join our Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Music by Balal, and as always, please rate and review us. It really helps other people find the show. I'm Russell Leig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.