Hello everyone, welcome to Remaking the Tudors. This is another event in our public event series, Tudors now here at the Paul Mellon Centre and online. So welcome to those of you in the room and to those of you listening in online. The Tudor Century witnessed developments across a huge variety of cultural areas including politics, gender, national identity and race. It was a period when women were seen as inferior to men but when two queens reigned. When black people lived and worked free of systematic racial oppression but which also saw the development of colonial ambitions and the birth of the transatlantic slave trade. The Tudor periods, contradictions and complications combined with its vivid imagery make it an ongoing source of fascination for contemporary artists and in this session artists working across a variety of media and a curator will discuss the inspiration that Tudor art and culture hold for them. So due to family illnesses sadly Chan Hyo Bai and the Sing Twins are unable to join us this evening but we're delighted that Emily Hanham has been able to step in on behalf of the Sing Twins and present their artwork. So joining us tonight are Matt Collishaw, one of the most significant and compelling artists in contemporary British art. Following his training at Goldsmiths College Matt formed part of the legendary movement of young British artists. He was one of 16 young artists who participated in the Seminole Freeze exhibition organised by Damien Hurst in 1988 as well as the provocative sensation show of 1997 at the Royal Academy in London. Throughout his 30 year career he has contemplated the nature of the human subconscious and explored ways to influence it through various media. Through optical illusions, paintings, projections and moving sculptures Matt creates works and scenarios that directly and unconsciously engage their viewers. The works encourage us to think about fundamental questions of psychology, history, sociology and science and behind the richness and visual appeal of each work there is a deep exploration of how we perceive and are influenced by the world today through images and modern technology. Questions regarding behavioural manipulation, programming and temporal reality all linger in the viewing experience. We also have Peter Brathwaite a British opera singer who works across different art forms to excavate and platform suppressed stories and voices. In addition to performing on major international opera stages he divides as his own theatre productions. Peter has been shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award and his collaborative work has won Lawrence Olivier Award. His photographic series has been exhibited by Kings College London and the Wellcome Trust and the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. As a broadcaster for BBC Radio 3 he has authored and presented programmes on black portraiture and the cultural legacy of enslavement in Barbados. He's written for The Guardian and The Independent and as a prominent speaker on performance identity and restorative justice in the arts. The Singh twins are internationally renowned award-winning contemporary British artists whose work which challenges narrow Eurocentric perceptions of art, heritage and identity has been described by Simon Sharma as representing the artistic face of modern Britain. Formal recognition includes an MBE, three honorary doctorates and honorary citizenships of Liverpool for their outstanding contribution to contemporary art. Referring to their art as past modern the twins have had solo exhibitions including contemporary connections. The Singh twins at the National Portrait Gallery in London curated in response to the Tudor collection there and the Singh twins' slaves of fashion which includes references to the Tudors in connection with narratives of empire and colonialism and speaking on their behalf tonight is Emily Hallam, historian and curator of South Asian art. She has held curatorial positions at the Royal Collection and the British Museum and will be joining the Asia department at the V&A later this summer. She commissioned a new work from the Singh twins for an exhibition of South Asian art at the Queens Gallery at Buckingham Palace in the summer of 2018 and more recently worked with the twins on a mural commission for Manchester Museum's South Asia Gallery, a British Museum partnership gallery that opened in February this year. She was also an advisor on the exhibition Beyond the Page, South Asian miniature painting and Britain from 1600 to now at MK Gallery which is curated by the PMC's own Hamad Nassar and that runs from October this year until January 2024 and that will also feature the work of the Singh twins. So welcome, thank you very much for joining us this evening. Each person is now going to speak for about 10 minutes about an artwork and then we will move to a round table discussion. Hi everybody, I'm Michael Ashore, thank you for the introduction. I'm a visual artist, I work with a very wide range of media. I didn't study art history, I studied fine art and everything really picks up on the history of sculpture and paintings is through just looking at books, looking at documentaries and it's things that interest me intuitively so I don't really have any kind of structured background in the history of fine art. I stumble through and I'm drawn to working with various paintings from the past as well as various historical ideas and I try to incorporate them in my arts, usually harnessing them with some kind of modern technology, digital technology and I try to make the artwork like a bridge between ideas and images that have happened in the past and where we're going and where we are currently with the deluge of technology which we live within. And a lot of the artworks that I've taken and incorporated into the works that I make generally come from the Baroque period, not a conscious decision, it's just that that period appeals to me more perhaps because it's more emotive, there's more trauma in there, the lighting is more seductive and atmospheric and I haven't really focused at all on the chewed period and I'm not exactly sure why you thought I should come along here and talk here this evening because I am by no means an expert, probably everybody in the room knows more on the subject than I do and I but I did make this one work a couple of years ago 2018 I think it was where I was invited by the Queen's house down in Greenwich to make an artwork which responded to the renovation of the Armada portrait, probably the most iconic portrait of Elizabeth the First and for several years this painting had been cleaned and it was about to come back out on show in its new vibrant form and I found it very difficult to look at an image which was like on initial impressions so obviously a propaganda portrait with all its majesty, all its pageantry and was also visually very flat, it was not the kind of painting that was normally drawn to which would evoke things within me which I then thought I could go on to use within the artwork. I also tend to gravitate towards artworks which are surrounded by black so it's just like a formal mechanism it makes it a lot easier for me to reframe these things obviously that happens a lot more in the Baroque period than it does in the Tudor period. I didn't really know how I was going to make an inroad on this amazing painting of the Armada portrait or how I would approach any other painting from the from the Tudor canon so I started reading a lot around the subject, I was reading several books on Elizabeth the First and absorbing the whole era and hoping that it might somehow marinate and turn into some kind of an idea that I could use to create an artwork that was like a prism in some way and it reflected all those ideas that I had had when looking at this painting. It was it was very obvious from spending any amount of time in front of it that this very flat looking painting so like all the Jo and Tristina's been flattened out, the light is very even, there's no real consistent shadows coming from one particular direction and the whole surface of the painting is embroidered with this very rich detail of things which are trying to tell you stuff, they're little triggers, they're all designed to indicate certain things about the status of the Queen, about the status of England as a nation, so the little jewel boxes, this heavily starched collar, the scepter and the globe which he has a hand on, the windows at the back behind us showing the Armada out of the back, all of these things are like little triggers and so I'm thinking that this whole propaganda portrait is designed to manipulate us in some way as this this artifies that is there to tell us to think certain things generally about the great Majesty of the Queen, to suggest that she has something immortal about her and now that body politic relates to the health of the nation that we've got this young strong powerful beautiful richly adorned Queen as our figurehead and what happened during the renovation was very interesting in my thought process in trying to make something about it because a lot of the the varnishes and the candle smoke that had accumulated over the years had been cleaned off and the colors were a lot more varied and vibrant than they were in that in the images that we were used to seeing which were a lot a lot more monochromatic and a lot browner suddenly you had a lot more beautiful delicate colors in there but certain things in the painting were left such as these two maritime paintings in the background which were painted like a significant time after the original painting was made and they x-rayed the painting and they could see kind of walls going off on beneath these maritime portraits maritime paintings but they decided to leave them on and this is like adding another layer of deception to this already highly choreographed image so we've got this portrait of Queen Elizabeth I she's 55 years old the painting was made in 1588 the Queen herself was heavily adorned with makeup she's wearing very thick uh like a face powder face cream she had smallpox scarring apparently from quite an early age so she'd want to cover that up this this this powder that she was applying to her face had lead content in it so the lead was like eating into the lead was devouring her face as it was on their function as this kind of mask she was also using various other devices to create this mask like image which she presented to the public in in addition to the way that she was kind of building a mask around her own face to kind of idealize her features the painting had many many different things that were going on which were all telling you to think innocent and respond to the picture in a certain way so for me this picture worked as like a series of layers which were all playing with reality there were all kind of ways of trying to manipulate in manipulators in our understanding of what the truth was so the artwork that I finished up making was this mask of the Queen and it was a portrait of the Queen as she actually would have looked in 1588 if she wasn't covered in this makeup and she wasn't idealized in the way that the painter depicted her in the portrait so I created the artwork by first of all laser scanning this effigy of the Queen which is at the National Portrait gallery this was made in 1603 just after she died so she was a little bit older than she was in 1588 but we could establish some basic geometry of her features like what her nose was like our cheekbones our brow was constructed and those are all basics that wouldn't have changed that much we then scanned every image that we could find paint oil paintings watercolours etc and then did a lot of work with computers trying to establish the biometrics the distance between her eyes the length of her nose and all those all that information that we'd need to rebuild her portrait and at the same time we're taking the effigy scan which is like a three-dimensional virtual scan of the Queen and trying to reverse ages so she's back to the age of about 55 years old and when we done this we 3d print like a little mask and then I started working with an animatronics guy and he was building all the little mechanisms which go behind the masks and which trigger it to move and behave in certain ways in the reading that I'd done around Queen Elizabeth I mean add a little bit of knowledge about before as everybody does but what seemed to be very pertinent about this artwork that I was trying to make here was the fact that she had to present this mask like appearance to the public like literally and metaphorically she was a woman in a man's world there's a lot of people who wanted her out of the way Catholics and a lot of other people so she's extremely vulnerable in her position she had to project this image to the public this image of strength and youth and vigor and autonomy independence and all of those things was this carapace that she had to hide behind so that she could maintain her position and I think there were only five portraits of the Queen that were made at the time that she was alive all the other paintings of which there are many were made from other paintings by her so there's a lot of difficulty establishing what she did look like and she had she introduced a mechanism called the mask of youth which was basically like a template of how she should be depicted and if anybody strayed too far from that template then the images would be destroyed burnt so her image is very carefully controlled and for me she's like the the first great like a pioneer of the propaganda portrait of like that this is this is a way of manipulating an image of me and presenting it as an icon which will live on in people's minds so the mask of youth was the name of the artwork and it's all controlled by these little mechanisms gears and electrical components of motors that are behind her and then the whole thing is installed on like a two-way surveillance mirror the kind of things that you find in airports where the security guys are behind the mirror they can see you very clearly but you on the other side can only see this mirror so there she is and she's kind of floating and marooned on this the surface of the mirror this unreliable manipulator of truth through reflection and her movements are all controlled by these mechanisms that she that she is behind this this mask shape this this mask of youth which although it depicts her face it as a mask hopefully reveals a little bit more about her truth about teeth and the hair a bit of the small box scoring reveals a real queen at that age but in mask format and that the mechanisms behind her are all the things that she had to adopt in order to survive in this very brutal world that she was in it was all going on beneath the surface and I think I've probably done about my 10 minutes now okay so thank you very much hi there it's good to see you all I'm going to start by reading an excerpt from my book the image you can see is in the first part of my book and I'm going to read the caption a drummer painted in around the 1530s by Christoph Weiditz the first a German artist a black drummer playing at the ceremonial 1529 entrance of emperor Charles the fifth it's taken from Weiditz's unpublished costume book reworked with toilet paper grandpaps cuckoo stick granny's quilt and a clothes force the inscription above the drummer says thus ride the army drummers in Spain when the emperor rides into a city Weiditz drew this black drummer when he accompanied Charles the fifth through Aragon and Catalonia the subjects earring and plumage are incredibly expressive accessories that would have made this portrayal a noteworthy and exotic addition to a manuscript of cultural difference by this time African people were visible in cosmopolitan courts across Europe particularly in the Mediterranean region there was also an established tradition of black musicians playing at European courts Charles the fifth's aunt Catherine of Aragon even brought black trumpeters to England in her entourage I chose to sit in the drummer's saddle as part of the Getty challenge during lockdown the Getty Museum in California a museum with one of the largest collections in the world encouraged people to recreate their favorite pieces of art using only what they had to hand at home they had to post the resulting homemade artwork on social media and the challenge caught my attention during Easter week so it was still fairly early in the lockdown experience and by this point I'd already experimented with several ways to fill my enforced free time having seen much of my singing work operas and concerts disappear overnight there was lots of cooking no sourdough but a game attempt to use up all those forgotten tins that were languishing in the back of the kitchen cupboards we had tin pineapple with everything I'd also decided to revisit my family tree research begun the autumn before as a birthday gift for my mum who's from Barbados I was making progress hours of digging had taken me from the plantations of Barbados and across the Atlantic via a slave ship to 18th century Ghana meanwhile my European DNA had taken me from Barbados back to 15th century Lancaster I managed to connect with some distant cousins via an ancestry website and a transatlantic video call with them uncovered even more insights into the lives of my African ancestors who were enslaved in the West Indies ancestors who'd been stripped of their humanity and reduced to status of property chattel memorialized only as stock in the slave registers their sex nationality age and plantation occupation were listed beneath the names of the great men who owned them their labor enabled these great men to produce sugar the white gold that made them the wealthiest humans on the planet so these sugar barons had their portraits painted I've got pdfs of them but I can only imagine my black ancestors from this time the more of their names are uncovered the more this reality troubled and annoyed me I read and read as much as I could trying to piece together visually what they would have been like and this was all in my mind when I first came across the Getty museum challenge and scrolling through Twitter my feed was a wash with people who'd taken up the challenge recreating their favorite artworks it was a whitewash confirmation of how our understanding of art and history has been shaped to favor one reality above all others where were the paintings of black people I knew they existed I'd read Miranda Kaufman's Black Tudors I knew about the image of Tudor musician John Blank I also knew about the painting of Dido Bell the mixed race woman who lived at London's Kenwood house in the 18th century there had to be more I decided to dip my toe into the Getty challenge to prove this and to explore how my understanding of my own past has been shaped through the narratives of colonialism I would use the challenge to rediscover the black portraiture I already knew find new ones and highlight how black people have been depicted over the centuries of western art I'd question how narratives have rewritten subjugated or excluded the history of black people and I'd use everything but the kitchen sink to do it so back to this musician this drummer Viditz's vivid watercolor is more than a book about fashion history for me re-embodying an image like this is an opportunity to physicalize and understand what an eyewitness portrayal from this time was actually meant to achieve this is a holistic portrayal focusing on a musician's body and actions a black musician's body and actions it's an example of how black individuals fit into social structures and aided this period's negotiation of identity and self and when considered within the context of the book it's part of and other depictions included it's difficult to avoid the suggestion that laborer or performer are the only possible roles for black people in european courts of the day fashionable accessories you can almost imagine a true demonic flicking through a book like the one this portrait is from and designing what their entourage should look like and to paraphrase Shakespeare scholar Farah Karim Cooper although academic orthodoxy alleges race didn't exist at this time therefore racism didn't exist this just isn't true the creation of racial identities about human difference has been developing since the middle ages that being said in this depiction I see a skilled black drummer more than capable of executing complex polyrhythms across two instruments while seamlessly negotiating the up and down motion of riding or horse beats I mentioned John Blank briefly the only black tutor for whom we have an attributable image we also know that in the early 16th century black musicians were high status free members of the Scottish royal retinue the so-called Peter the Moor being one my namesake and another known as the african drummer recreating this image was very much a performance for me a jumping off point one that as a british barbarian musician catapulted me from the 1530s to the knotted language of the 1688 slave codes the laws that governed the plantation society of the English colony of Barbados and cemented the notion that a black life was not a human life these laws banned african music specifically the beating of drums for fear that drum signalling could be used in conjunction with revolts in Barbados music that had become social glue for enslaved people was driven underground the complex west african rhythms once described by Europeans as sounding like water dropping over a cliff onto a stone ledge were now hidden behind the mask of European instruments the seemingly English sounding music that developed exists in Barbados to this very day and is known as tuck music my recreation though quite silent pays homage to those rebel sounds my recreation also uses Barbadian cooking pots given to me by my mum i use them as drums here one of my drumsticks is the cuckoo stick my grandfather carved it's used to make the national dish of Barbados i use these objects because that's what i had to hand but also because like the skills of music and drumming foods serve as a touchstone of the experience of human migration like music food gives expression to the ways migrants commemorate the past and shape new identities amid alien cultures as a second generation immigrant this image represents a diasporic fragment a means by which i can connect with and reclaim the parts of my heritage that are intangible the fundamental shapes sounds and rhythms that reverberate through our shared past thank you hello everyone firstly apologies that i am neither an award-winning british artist nor was my sister available for a double-latch this evening but i'm delighted to be standing in here today for the sing twins who i've known for many years and i will endeavor to speak on their behalf for the next 10 minutes or so the artwork that the sing twins chose to contribute to this discussion is titled trade wars elizabeth the first it is a mixed medium artwork combining both hand-painted and digitally created imagery and it was inspired by this portrait of elizabeth the first sometimes referred to as the pelican portrait which is in the collections of the walker art gallery in liverpool and the liverpool area is of course where the twins grew up and where they still live and work today the context trade wars is part of a wider body of work entitled slaves of fashion this series explores the hidden histories and modern-day legacies of empire and colonialism through the story of the trade of indian textiles this is depicted as a global story of conquest conflict and enslavement connected to the wider history of global trade and luxury goods slaves of fashion is divided into two parts firstly there are series of these life-size allegorical portraits which focus on interconnected historic themes all of which were inspired by objects selected from various museum and gallery collections as well as historical archive material and as well as these allegorical portraits slaves of fashion comprises a number of contemporary perspective artworks which pick up and expand on some of the historic themes depicted in the portraits which as you can see here includes some very witty and satirical works quoting historic paintings and prints and you can see here that these smaller works were displayed in the slaves of fashion exhibition in close proximity to these large allegorical portraits which were um as light boxes and they're displayed to highlight the connections between past and present aimed at revealing this ongoing impact and relevance of empire and colonialism today in the exhibition trade wars Elizabeth the first was displayed next to this allegorical portrait titled calico merchant thieves which explores the material calico and how the east india company came to be rulers of large parts of india trade wars responds to one of the core themes of the calico work which is the relationship between trade and conflict during the time of britain's conquest and colonialism of india and the centuries ever since the tutor portrait of elizabeth the first is one of the twin's favorite historic works and they were keen to make connections between it and their portraits in the slaves of fashion series they said and i quote that elizabeth's sumptuous costume depicted in such fine detail representing expensive fabrics and dripping with pressure stones which were perhaps mined in india made us think about the source of tutor wealth and how that wealth was expressed elsewhere in the material culture of the tutors as symbols and status of power and i'm continuing their quote for us a key source of this wealth lay in the commerce of luxury commodities from the east made possible through elizabeth granting in 1600 a trade monopoly to the east india company we expressed this in our artwork by substituting some of elizabeth's costume decorations and adornments with spices the nutmeg cloves and pepper you see here with cotton textiles and chints with coffee sugar and rum all consumer goods that were the preserve of the nobility in tutor times the fact that these goods were largely secured through the enslavement exploitation and colonization of foreign lands made possible through military force and england's rising supremacy over the seas which is said by some should have begun with elizabeth's victory over the spanish armada is represented by the canon and shackles the east india company ship and a banner denoting british sugar plantation colonies in jamaica english england's establishment in 1612 of a trading base at surat an important centre of commerce and manufacture on the west coast of india which the east india company sees control from their western colonial rivals the portuguese is represented by the imagery just below the banner in this work and the ongoing relationship between trade conflict and conquest connected to india british as well as wider global history during later colonial periods and in more recent times they explored in the four corners of the space immediately surrounding the figure of elizabeth these include references to the opium wars the annexation of pundrab zulu wars the battles of plassi and syringa baton and bengal and mysau the boston tea party and the american war of independence as well as conflicts of the 20th century in the middle east over the control of oil and the suez canal and oh sorry and in 1984 you can just see at the top operation bluestar was the indian army military attack on the golden temple in emmerza which according to leaks leaked secret documents was supported by the british government then keen to protect its lucrative trade and arms to india in the outer borders the theme of trade wars and consumerism has explored further but this time within a modern context here the decoration alludes to the repeated price slashing of certain goods by supermarkets in competition for the consumer's customer business upon which their profits and stock market value ultimately depend particular focus is given to the negative impacts of the price wars both social and ecological symbolized by bananas as top-selling items for supermarkets and for a long time at the center of debates around fair trade and organic produce at the top you see a shopping trolley filled to the brim with cheap bananas which is supported by banner representing the sweet fruit bitter truth campaign this imagery reflects not only the growing calls for more responsible and sustainable consumerism but also how such campaigns highlight the fact that making informed choices about what's put into the shopping basket can help secure better working conditions rights and wages for those at the bottom of the supply chain other details of the artwork reveal how the history of large scale corporate and government control of the banana industry through land grabbing labor exploitation and the abuse of human rights all date back to colonial times now i'm going to end with two examples of how the sing twins have subsequently incorporated their portrait of the queen from trade wars into other artworks from the slaver fashion series so here this is indigo the color of india and you can just see at the very bottom underneath the enslaved figure here she represents the tudor connection to trade along the silk road and lastly in their triptych artwork ruled britannia legacies of empire on the left queen lizabeth represents the tudor origins of the british raj and britain's ongoing relationship with india as a legacy of an empire whose foundations as mentioned at the start owes much to the royal charter which lizabeth first granted the east india company in 1600 thank you so um my first question is what can historical literacy do for artists what are the benefits of a knowledge of art history and are there also pitfalls okay so um i'm going to try and feel my way around the answer but i do use a lot of like contemporary media in the artworks that i make i started working with photography initially because i didn't really know what to do with photography so it was i had to think more about what the content was going to be because i couldn't really control things about like the composition and the lighting and the color and all that anyway so and then the more i work with it the more involved i got and now i work with a lot of stuff with with technology and consequently i go to see quite a few exhibitions that involve artists or collectives that use tech and i always find it a little disappointing and dispiriting when these things are just like techie shows about tech and there's nothing in there that anchors me to the history of art and the history of ideas and that whole huge treasure trove of images and sculptures etc that we have to draw on and it appears to me that somehow it became unfashionable at some point in the 20th century to reference anything pre modernism period there was like a cutoff and that was it and the pictorial inventiveness of the period between 15th century up until the 19th century was incredible and i think it was partially due to the fact that a lot of artists didn't have total freedom when they were making an artwork unlike we did in the 20th century where we could you know create a square and put a kind of a couple of marks on it and say that it was a new form of art artists had a responsibility to whoever was paying them whether it was the church or was a merchant or an emperor or it was a form of political propaganda and in creating artworks that had to be both compelling and convincing to their patron and also function as an image to seduce whoever their patron wanted to intimidate and have power over or seduce they had to deliver on all those levels then also if they were to be a truly great artist like a rubens or a rember and then they would have to put something in of their own as well and they'd often have to sneak it in there because it wasn't going to be the main subject matter because they were making a portrait of a merchant or whatever it was and so all those devices that they had to use along with the fact that they had to use their skills in geometry and composition, lighting and color in order to create something that sold the job in terms of like the the patron that they were trying to deliver for all of those little things that advertising uses nowadays all of those little tricks they had to master those techniques and then slip in their own little message so all of that stuff I think is tragic if we if we lose it and so with the work that I try to do I try to draw on all those things because they are just outstandingly good at the job they do whether they were kind of ethically or morally correct in promoting a certain job or a certain king or a certain emperor is obviously questionable and I'd like to think that I try to deal with those things as well about the power dynamic the manipulation that goes on when you present images to people because they are means of seduction and manipulation and I think art with that involves technology should have those things in it and it gives like a kind of a grounding and a ballast and a gravity to the work one who does reference these these amazing traditions from the past does that go anywhere near the question? Absolutely thank you and I think particularly with your work Matt the the interest in robotics and I mean the idea of the automaton in the 16th century is a really big part of the kind of court artifice that you're talking about I mean Elizabeth the first astrologer John D had a reputation for being a magician and a necromancer partly because he'd made some kind of stage automaton when he was a student at university a scarab beetle that flew across the stage apparently under its own power and although he insisted he'd only done this using mathematics in fact everyone accused him of being sort of somehow harnessing a demon to make it go so I think the kind of although you do show us the the workings of the mask in a way I certainly for me with someone with no real knowledge of how robotics sort of works there's still a mystery and a magic to it that is it's a sort of conscious artifice but it still doesn't quite tell me everything I need to know about how it's moving. They are they are kind of eerie and sinister to see something and there is that thing called the uncanny valley right which is this thing where something is so like human like but you know it's not human it makes you feel kind of nauseous sick because there's something wrong there there's something deeply chilling and I wanted to make a comment about the fact that you know these these these portraits that we make for ourselves are designed as masks and it's something that's prevalent today like back in the 16th century 15th century it was only like kind of very wealthy people who could make portraits of themselves now everybody's got an iPhone and they can add filters and all of those things that were happening in this cosmetification of the image everyone's doing on their phone and they're putting out and they're choreographing their appearance on social media which is kind of great because you can look amazing feel confident feel empowered by it but there's a loneliness and like a sadness that lurks behind the mask as soon as you start presenting that match to the outside world you retreat behind it and that's something that was going on with Elizabeth I think also something that's a huge problem now with young people in social media. Absolutely yeah and if anything perhaps more of a problem now in the sense that most of the people who would have seen the Armada portrait would have known what Elizabeth really looked like whereas now you know many more people can see your photo online than necessarily have ever seen you in real life so they're quite interesting about audience and artifice there. Peter did you have any thoughts about that question? Yeah I suppose my work is wholly dependent on lurching into the past to look for references but actually there isn't much there so I'm often feeling in the dark for reference points and so much of my work is about imagination so it's about trying to create a history where it hasn't been documented so John Blank is our only Black Tudor and I can't just keep recreating John Blank so I had to look elsewhere I had to find other ways to imagine who these people might have been or who they might have become had they not been forced to perform in a Scottish court or be in a parade in in Catalonia so it's a case of creating a narrative that means something to who I am and that the layers of history that mean that I've ended up living in this country today and on Windrush Day of all days it feels apt to be talking about this and those layers of migration and identity building and I suppose that yeah when there are only fragments in in history you have to make something of them and something that is meaningful thank you yeah I mean I just wanted to pick up on what Matt said about it being seen as unfashionable because when the St. Twins were at art school here in the early 90s they were looking at Indian Minnich painting and Tudor art and Victorian illustration like Warwick Beardsley and their tutors told them in no uncertain terms that they were this was backward this was outdated this was irrelevant this is not what you should be doing you need to be looking at the you know great white male artists of the 20th and 21st century for them you know all these different art forms which brought them into looking at new themes new styles new media that they wouldn't have otherwise looked at and I think you know they really used this inherited imagery as shorthand for you know wider themes but and so it can bring this serious critical narrative but also a real sense of playfulness which I think comes across in all the works as well and it's nice to look at I think is the other thing if the elephant in the room is you know I think um it's actually it's a variety you know color all these things are actually quite fun for us as as the viewers as well um so actually that leads on to my my next question which is sort of are there aspects of Tudor art that particularly appeal um to you as artists or perhaps you as a curator who thinks cross periods well I asked the twins this and our first thing was what's not to like we love every aspect of Tudor art the craftsmanship the exquisite detail the symbolism and the social slash political documentation they said for us it's the perfect combination of what defines great art as something that has the power to inspire inform engage and move its audience in different ways I think that's very nice to hear is a Tudor art historian who feels like I'm constantly having to persuade people but you know yes it looks funny but it's still worth studying great I think there are a lot of parallels between like Elizabethan art and in Jim Minich painting in terms of you know the flatness you know all sorts of things absolutely symbolism and yeah I think that's what really appeals cool I suppose looking at the the image that it's by a German artist painted in Spain however the thing about it that I really love is this sense of movement and you see that this musician is in motion and I think that's a key aspect to the to the way the artist has captured this musician and actually looking at the markings the brushstrokes on the drums you see the vibrations which is really exciting for me to feel that the music there in the image and you even get it through a sense of how his his arms are how he's physicalized and so yeah I think although a lot of the images I've recreated this image which on the front of my book and there he is on the back Christopher the Moor an archer in Belgium and that that is quite quite flat in a way but yeah it's it's quite interesting to juxtapose the the two and and see that thank you can I come back with a question to you because of my ignorance of our history so when you talk about Tudor art we're talking about like art that's made in this country from the period that we all understand but obviously it related to arts that was happening in the rest of Europe at the same period but not made in this country right so we're talking about Tudor we're talking about specifically where even though they may be French or Flemish or yes that's a question when studying the art of this period is what counts as Tudor art it's why I haven't said English art of the 16th century because you know a lot of the best artists were not English and I as far as I'm concerned if it was here at some point it counts okay yeah of course although like I said it's not the period that I'd immediately be drawn to I go a little bit later that like they're two kind of like nakedly propaganda portrait pictures for me because they are delivering this information to it whereas I prefer to go to a little bit later to like maybe sort of like Caravaggio and you've got a pauper with no shoes on and you can see his dirty feet but it's still an iconic image but there's something paradoxical about the fact that he's using somebody like I don't know like a kind of a little thief they found on the street and there's a the debased nature which is then exalted by the composition and the lighting that is employed in it so that transcendence that's happening within the image as you look at it but there is the kind of clockwork like intense beauty that these Tudor paintings have the heavily embroidered detail which is exquisite and you know if I go if I go to the National Gallery I could just go and look at one whole bar for quite a long time because there's so much in there and there's such a beautiful banquet but personally for me it's not the kind of image that does it but I'm totally like a huge I mean the Tudors might have agreed if you I think if you took a Tudor person to the say the National Portrait Gallery and you said we've got your best art here they'd say well where are the tapestries you know where's the decorative arts that what we would call the decorative arts you know I think the pattern like surfaces that we see in their paintings are absolutely informed by embroidery and woven materials and craftsmanship exactly great okay so what or maybe better to say how do you feel Tudor art can teach us about our contemporary culture I'll have some notes from the twins which are very kind to give them to you as the twins highlighted in their slaves of fashion series and in which they focus really on the iconography of Tudor art and for them it can really help shed light on the world we live today mainly through ideas of the foundations of both multiculturalism and racism in British society and for them what they really noticed was what how little has changed when it comes to the politics of trade and ethical consumerism when they're looking at these paintings what's depicted in them and the same debates that we're having today absolutely thank you I same as Matt I studied fine art not history of art so a lot of my my journey in writing this can take it has been through encountering a lot of this art for the first time and so from the specific angle of looking for black subjects in the history of western art the ones that I have found have been incredibly uplifting for me to have encountered on this journey of rediscovering black portraiture because I didn't know these people existed and as a musician knowing that black musicians were living and working free as well as unfree in this country is something that I think is incredibly important for underrepresented musicians in this country to know I grew up thinking that I was always the only black person to have trodden this path I was told you're the first black singer in this cathedral choir or you're this you're that and actually knowing that that heritage is there it makes me stand up taller and it's a great source of education for the young people that I work with when I do schools workshops and be able to to talk about these musicians and say that they existed and knowing that John Blank for instance negotiated his pay in in that day and age is is really exciting for those young people to hear because he he has agency all of a sudden he's not just someone who is in the background and I think that's what I get through from it I think possibly one of the things it did was to refine and excel at the business of making a portrait or an emblem of somebody and demonstrating their prowess their ability to transcend the the the regular public and become something that lived on throughout they became an icon uh and like I was talking about before nowadays everybody's doing it but bad though is that they kind of did the amada portraits like the archetypal propaganda portrait they found a way of effecting this business of making an emblem out of a human being and all all of the things that went on it wasn't only the the face and the body and the clothes and the make the jewellery it's all the other little nickmacks that go into making these pictures which are all there as little triggers designed to make you think certain things about the person portrayed in the picture I think that's gone on to be something of you know significant importance and is is certainly an obsession with a lot of people today about manufacturing their image and presenting a particular idealized version of themselves to the public something that I think makes out on the Cheetah period thank you um so my uh next question is about this um interest in re-embodying Cheetah figures I mean Peter obviously particularly um and would have been Chew of Chan Show by as well if you could have been here this evening you should definitely look at his um photographs of himself as Elizabeth the first if you haven't seen them um and also I think an element in your work too Matt but I wondered what the implications of this are for the rate of relatability or perhaps the unrelated ability of these Cheetah figures you know does it does it help to make them more present or does it somehow perhaps also reiterate their strangeness okay I've got it uh yeah I know what I hope you've done both in those to make them more present by making it look vulnerable by putting the smallpox scarring and the hairs and the number of bad teeth and just like some of the accounts that I made some of the uh material that I use when I was making the picture came from accounts of people who traveled to England and met the Queen and then wrote about the teeth obviously anybody who had like tried it on with an actual depiction of a teeth as they looked damaged by sugar um would have been had their pictures burnt and probably executed so the only knowledge we've got about the state that were the teeth were in come from written accounts and is all incorporated into the art what I made um but yeah that kind of vulnerability of being a human while at the same time projecting this images of like a majestic ruler um of things that I try to combine inside this same thing by having this mask that showed what a real a kind of vulnerable mortal person would have looked like thank you in opera we talk about singing in a score so you pick up a score you read the libretto the text you then start to learn the notes and you you you research the backstory and the same process is at play when I'm recreating the portraits and I don't really feel I I know a portrait interlive embodied it and performed the the sitter um so once you sing in a score you start to feel where the contours are and and what is at play between the different characters and although the for instance the figure that you saw is alone the you you sort of imagine the the wider context who who was side by side with him who was ahead of him who was behind him who he who had he spoken to in the morning before what did he have for breakfast and all of these things um are live in you when you're re-embodying the portrait and I feel for me it it makes them less abstract and more human and and that's what I'm really aiming at all the time trying to humanize the these figures and it's very different to say looking through quite brutal registers of enslaved people for instance from the time or reading accounts that aren't uplifting and derogatory labels that often these images are labeled with terms that I don't want to to see or or hear or have to speak in in my mouth so actually putting these these bodies into my body is a way that I can really connect with them in a way that is more intimate and humane thank you actually that does lead on to my next question um which is um your your reference to the the connections with the singing and it struck me that Tudor artists were not specialists and even someone like Holbein spent a lot of time you know making uh scenery for court events or ephemeral sort of objects things that you know we don't necessarily think of when we now see a lot of Tudor portraiture and that strikes me as having quite a lot in common with the way that contemporary artists see themselves and the the many different media that you are now able to sort of range across um as an artist and I wondered how that relates to your own practices it's still really unusual in classical music and in opera for performance to do something different or as well as so often people say oh you have a portfolio career which is to say what are you doing why are you doing all these different things and I I find that that I need these other things to sort of feed into my opera work and and what I do in opera feeds into the the portraiture into the writing into the broadcasting um and um so I I I'm still a bit of a lone sheep in in my industry doing this but I I really feel in terms of my my aim of raising uh untold stories marginalised voices I I need to spread myself in in all directions to be able to get that message across and actually um do the work of digging and and finding the things that sometimes people haven't bothered or um have forgotten about culture the the cultural memory isn't there um and uh yeah so it's about always trying to be useful and I have this sort of desire that my work should be useful that I'm an artist but it should be useful work and that's what drives me really is I think the same twins are very similar and they definitely see themselves as lone wolves as well in that um you know a lot of their work combines traditional hand painted techniques inspired by engine miniature painting but also they work in digital also they work in film also they you know combine poetry and their work and it all has this very strong narrative elements and as well you know they have um sort of not educational mission but that's part of it and um and so again like going back to when they were at art school they were told this is not what you're supposed to do um and it's still you know it is still rare in the British art scene and the international art scene and you know they do have a unique place in that right thank you great um can continue my education into Tudor there's like a lot of portraiture right I assume one of the reasons is we got rid of the Catholic church there's a degree of iconoclasm going on we certainly didn't want to make a lot of religious subjects out of the art of the level what are we going to do now so better design like a little jewelry box or a handbag or like a little carpet or stuff so they gave them a new freedom did it because we didn't really have the overbearing oppressive church dictating what an artist did there may be an element of that I think also the the multidisciplinary for want of a better word approach of the artist so Nicholas Hillyard for example jewelry designer trained to Goldsmith also painted oil portraits portrait miniatures and that is in the sort of medieval tradition so it actually predates the information I think we do tend to think of portraits as being um more popular as a result of the reformation but that's also partly because we're not thinking about um the many other kinds of art that were available and I think there's also an element of um English patrons wanting something very particular from their art like yet like you said the kind of propaganda element um that they don't necessarily see the point of a kind of fine you know a caravages kind of poor boy as you know they don't what's that going to do for their image if there's no art market so yeah uh yeah I mean for me it is uh just very convenient to have multiple formats to work in and it tends to be that I get an idea that I want to make a work about for example why we're addicted to looking at our phones and then I'll like look into it I didn't want to make a work that's just just such a literal response of screenshotting my Instagram account and printing on some canvas and so I'll do some research about what when what's going on there you know what's the psychology what's the principles that these software designers are using to keep us to maximize our attention and keep us locked in and then I try to find a format that works best for that could be a video projection or an optical illusion or some animatronics or oil painting or charcoal on paper and I've tried to find the medium that sings the idea in its truest sense that means that it engages somebody in the way that when people see it they're they're starting to think in the way that I kind of want to think because of the subject matter that I'm trying to deal with but it's not I'm like I'm making a big charcoal on paper drawing that's what I was doing today and that for the last few days so it could be as rudimentary of that if it kind of fits with it with the way I'm working so for me that's it I'm not sure how it is I guess if a tutor artist had to design somewhere to put the jaw box that jewelry they'd put make a jaw box so it's depends on the job you know if you want to want to make the room a bit warmer you might make a tapestry to hang on the wall yeah yeah absolutely okay so one last question from me and then we'll turn to the floor so I hope you've all had a chance to think of some things to ask but um my final question is about tutor ideas about originality and creativity which are very different from those sort of espoused by more recent art movements such as modernism so for the tutors originality comes from a collage like recombination of previous ideas and that's across not just in visual art but also in in the sort of academia in in religion as being new is not really desirable in any context so how might that relate to contemporary art practice you can have a moment to think well as you said at the beginning that sing twins um describe their work as past modern rather than post modern and so like what you just described is really you know at the core of their work and um but yet they are you know uniquely placed doing that at the moment and you know as a result probably you know haven't had the national international attention you know in a you know they don't um they're not commercial and it it's it's what they're doing is very different to the mainstream commercial contemporary art world today yeah i suppose it's very much in line with what i'm doing i i'm i'm trying to document the intangible and these things that we hold within us the the heirlooms that i've inherited that i i sort of ignored as a young pup i have an interest in the patchwork quote my grandmother made or the cuckoo stick i was like well that's not much is it but but now i'm i'm trying to document those things and hold on to the songs that um my ancestors sung and they they are in a way like portraits for for each individual and and those bits of material culture that i i desperately hold on to now and flood my my portraits with they are characters they are motifs and so yeah that that idea of of collage is is crucial to the work thank you well i think you might have answered the question yourself anyway by saying but by pointing at the multidisciplinary interdisciplinary nature of a lot of these artists which a lot of artists these days stand moving between different practices um but i like like going back to my work they are they are more to portray the idea was that you represented the queen as uh at a certain age you didn't want her to age because a useful queen was a stronger queen on a stronger queen and a stronger country her face equaled the strength of the nation so it's very important that template was established and you could have this useful kind of flat image this emblem of what she was and what the country was and it kind of reminds me of the portraits of andy warhol that i don't think they're that different i don't know if he was i mean i think maybe he like a polish thing is probably the bison time might have been quite big there and i think he went to church with bison time inches of this this flatness and this kind of turning somebody into the image and them uh them becoming an icon and outliving the actual physical like human uh living breathing thing that they were becoming image i think there's a mirror there thank you right it's your turn do you have any questions uh in the floor or online you're welcome to put them in the chat and rachel will read them out hello oh we've already got some questions great sure oh yeah okay sharia will start sure thank you so much for fantastic presentations um i had a question that was formulated really for peter but i think it speaks to everybody and i'm sure emily will have things to say as well on behalf of the sink sink twins um i was curious about process you know just in terms and you've talked about a little bit in response to christina's questions um but process in in the sense all the things that go go on behind the scenes um who helps you take the pictures for instance um and and i was curious also about the the way you go into researching your sort of subjects in this case and then also for matt um thinking about you know the armada portrayed as one example but also for other works as curious about whether you know what kinds of research goes into um you talk about written accounts of uh faces and encounters uh so maybe if you could talk a little bit more about um how you make the pieces as well as um just take us behind the scenes yeah sure uh well during lockdown the the process evolved and i i started because it was wholly something for myself i i wanted to feel better um and i very quickly realized that people wanted more of it so from start to finish the the process is a perform it's finding the image that i want to recreate and then i i started to develop this um this process of using the the search terms that i was using in my family history research uh the the terms that i was finding to describe certain ancestors to search for certain images and so these images end up being loaded with metadata that they're full of tags that i've encountered on my own research into my own past but also the research into the specific portraits as well so all of that work goes on either for a few days or weeks and then i decide to find the props that i'd like to use which props speak to each other in a certain way what happens when you put a patchwork quilt next to a union jack window blind and what does it say to the audience by doing that and and then once i've assembled the the props i if there's a costume to make i'll i'll think about that and whether there's something significant in my past or heritage that i can use to say something about the original image and then it's a case of setting up and all of this is a deep dive it feels like um singing in a way and when i when i practice i i'm in a completely different space um because i'm i'm breathing in a way that is not like the way i breathe when i i'm speaking or just sitting watching tv it's a a whole body um all the way round experience um and this is replicated in the portrait recreations um and in the early days i'd often appear behind a door and my husband would be working remotely at home and i'd ask him to take the photograph with with my iphone 7 so this this would then be the next step in the the the process and uh we'd set up um often argue because uh i i'd be in in charge of the art direction obviously um and um but that that was a crucial part of the process because something that i was lacking uh was that dialogue that you have in the rehearsal room and i i rely on that and i rely on my colleagues in opera and and in this process i i need that as well that you need a sanding board um we take various images and i like to think of them as all moving that they're still but uh they have this momentum that is brought about by the fact that i think of them as operatic vignettes they're opera scenes they they're the the the little in between moments that happen on stage um and then i'd end up with this whole array of of shots that then i'd choose the one that i was going to post to social media along with the captions uh based on the research that i'd undertaken anything that resonated with my own family history um and then wait for the the audience to respond and and obviously as a performer i get a bit of a thrill when the comments are coming in and i'm having to respond and the questions are coming in and uh so that that's a sort of potted um uh yeah idea of the process yeah i can speak to the trans process um you know they work together on everything they don't have a wider studio it's just the two of them um most of the work start with a huge amount of historic archive and collections research um and then often because there's so much involved in each of the works they'll either divide a series up or you know divide parts of a work up and um you know so one will be working one part the other and the other and you know if someone finds something but oh have you looked at this maybe you could add this to the border um and they start with a lot of hand-painted imagery and they scan some archive and other material into the computer to create these sort of mixed and with digitally created plus scanned imagery plus the scanned painted imagery um and they add different effects on the computers and uh that's for some of the digital works which are then sometimes printed as light boxes and the paints that we saw you know some were just pure paintings there's nothing digital in them um but yeah it's just the two of them in their studio working together um yeah it varies quite a lot on whatever project that i'm working on uh but it's a way of me learning about the world which is great because like if i try and read a book on something pick it up maybe one in a war don't know but it's very difficult for me to get any traction with it to get any interest but if i'm on a particular subject matter then everything within that realm is fascinating to me and it's like you are just like a uh detective looking for little clues that you can potentially use in the work or like a like a thief like a burglar just like sneaking around just looking for little things little ideas that you can steal and possibly incorporate into it and suddenly everything that i'm reading is just alive it's so vivid because i'm just looking for stuff there that i can that can work for me in some capacity uh so there's a lot of reading that goes on on the subject matter but as every project is different it depends where i'm reading it and like a work so an example of the work that i made recently which was a life size animatronic stag but like the kind of the skeleton of a stag a silver chrome skeleton of a stag which was like a robot and that was controlled by a live twitter feed and we were uh finding the most trolled person on twitter so the person was abused most negatively and then we're analyzing their tweets then rating the amount the intensity of the abuse and then feeding that signal to the stag which would respond in a distress manner depending on the intensity of the incoming abuse and there's a lot of reading that happened there which was online i mean you don't buy i did actually buy a couple of books on twitter and social media but you know they're out of date four months later particularly in the last six to eight months so all the stuff there is online and then i have to learn about whole new things like uh what sentiment analysis what's that i didn't know what it was like a year ago and there's these teams of people and their job is to basically understand how well a company is doing on social media you know where where what people are liking about the business what people are hating about it what people are talking about etc and their job is just to get just to be able to understand the level of emotion that's being generated by a particular product or a service etc and so then i have to find these sentiment analysts and to get them to do the job and then to understand what's happening with twitter at the time and this was just at the point when i started it when elon musk bought the company suddenly like half the staff left and suddenly something we needed which was called the api which is basically getting under the bonnet of twitter to get access to a huge volume of tweets which we can then analyze suddenly all of that was shut down people can pay for access to it or you can get academic access for study purposes that was all gone and then like a week before the exhibition opened which was two months ago they changed all their policy again and we found this work around it kind of was functioning and then they changed everything again a week before and suddenly we didn't have anything like we had seven days to go before the show and so you're learning about all that and how it all works and the group learning to like navigate all these kind of strange like data analysts that do this job for a living and at the same time building this robot so looking at how stacks move so looking at stacks in the wild and looking at videos of them looking at their skeleton and how it can break it down how it can simplify in some points how to introduce certain supporting rods and gears of motors etc to make the whole thing move in a way that worked with the project that i was making and then designing an interface between those two things how the sentiment analysts are going to talk to the stack there's a lot of different things going on but it's you know it's a privilege to to have that so you can engage in stuff i'm not that interested in twitter generally but but because we've got a project that relies quite heavily on it you engage great any other questions from the floor or online great great okay i saw someone live yeah i'm on the swing i'm saying trends are they engaged in any digital art like nfts or creations oh i don't know not what i'm not that i'm aware of but i can follow up with things great i do and the question for pia um those portraits of like the black europeans interesting question to see like where their history is and where did they disappear i mean they weren't all expelled i mean there must have been in 75th anniversary of winrush you know there must have been some form of integration within that area and is that sort of an area where you might like to explore further because we see all these images of art in europe mainly black madonna's and always like religious artifacts but it's very rare you see actual people in professions and stuff like it's all just religious art and you know yeah well by my book yeah yeah that's what i've been trying to show through the book that yeah it's not just enslaved people it's people from all walks of life um high status low status in between um and there's the incredible image from the doomsday book of the the black man hanging on to the letter i and he was there and and i yeah i want people to see these images and um yeah i i that you don't see them because they they've been sidelined they're they're marginalised there they're not deemed to be important enough to to be included in the canon but um yeah but my whole project is dragging them back from the margins into the the conversation so um yeah thank you thanks very much i i so much enjoyed all your presentations and the discussion thank you it's all been fascinating in my brain is kind of pinging in lots of ways i think about lots of things but um i have a some interest in art history i was i was a speaker at an early event in this series but i'm really someone with a background in literary history and i'm just thinking about analogies between the kind of uh processes and practices that you've all been talking about and things that have gone on in literary history because when i started out um in the 80s and 90s you know there was a lot of questioning of the status of Shakespeare and other canonical authors of their kind of cultural predominance i was someone very involved in the project kind of look beyond the established canon and rediscover uh female writers from the 16th and 17th centuries and you know a lot of really good work has gone on to do that uh i think things have sort of changed over the last sort of 10 or 20 years where now that good work is still going on to rediscover neglected women writers to understand more of the kind of what pete is doing about the presence of uh black people in Tudor England in Tudor culture you know it's great that we're understanding a lot of those things that were where we look beyond the things we already knew but i think we've also returned to the things we already knew you know we've returned to Shakespeare so with Shakespeare and other canonical authors i think we're thinking a lot about how we can use them in conversations about race about gender i was at a symposium this morning on Shakespeare and violence against women which was very much about not just how Shakespeare depicts violence against women where he stands on that but how that can energize conversations we're having now about the the rise in violence against women how can we kind of you know by using Shakespeare how can we look at what's happening now and how can it kind of feed into our thoughts about that so it seems to me we've got a kind of in in literary studies there's a kind of dual thing going on of looking beyond things we were so familiar with to find things we didn't know about before or had forgotten about and need to know about again things we've neglected things we've obscured but also we've gone back to the things that we're very familiar with perhaps over familiar with and we're looking at them in new ways and we're thinking you know it seems to me you're all doing this you know the same twins you're speaking on their behalf i understand you know that this is what all the artworks we've thought about today are doing reengaging with things that we thought we knew so well we almost weren't able to look at them anymore we couldn't really see them we couldn't really get anything out of them and now we're thinking again about what can we get out of them by looking through today's eyes and thinking about that dialogue between then and now because they're like a sort of you know we can't abandon Shakespeare or portraits of Elizabeth the first because they're like you know they're like a kind of embedded language in us or they're like a kind of you know water that our culture swims in so we have to do something with them and really active exciting new things are now going on and i just wonder if you if any of you have a sort of similar sense that there's almost a kind of dual process going on of looking beyond the traditional the canonical the authoritative but also looking at those central hegemonic traditional things again with new eyes and that actually re-energizing how we think about now so it's not this a very long rambling question i'm sorry i don't know if this is answer but it's reminded me of one of my favorite novels of the last 10 years which i don't know if you've read Viper Wine by Hermione which i think relates to what we're talking about and especially your work because it's a sort of a retelling of you know Van Dyke and The Baroque Foot and it's really parable about today's beauty industry as well so like Viper Wine of the title is like Botox and it's made of like ground vipers with mare's urine and opium and i think and it's like a really wacky amazing novel that references Naomi Campbell and like David Bowie lyrics but it's doing the same thing it's like postmodern recreation of you know Baroque England with so many historic like very historic references but making this like contemporary parallel and that doesn't answer your question but it's like just thinking of like parallels in fiction as well but you know personally i think sometimes like we have done there is a lot of revisionist going on but i think certainly more still needs to be done i keep thinking of them you know Hampton Court Palace and using Henry VIII as the poster boy of Hampton Court Palace and i think i'm not you know um yeah are we okay with that uh you're right Woolsey should get a look in i i immediately go back to opera and um what opera companies directors are doing with Othello Verdi's opera but also The Magic Flute which is something that uh there's a black character in The Magic Flute an enslaved man but often uh he isn't recognized as being a black man in modern productions it's seen to be easier to avoid this and present him as being a naughty man or or evil and i think Mozart's decision to to put this character in the opera is such a crucial one to understanding what was happening at the time Vienna was a place where there was a black presence there were human zoos black people were being stuffed that had worked at the court and being displayed around the city and he was responding to this and i think there are ways we can approach these canonical works that that frame this history and allow us to have a dialogue that is meaningful today rather than completely cleansing these works of the references and i so i'm all for reframing and really ripping these canonical works apart alongside doing the work that that looks for the the voices and the stories that haven't been told so i i find it a really exciting kind of tune for a throw that is yeah i think is really necessary and yeah i think i was very well said i can really like improve on that i mean there's like a whole different debate in these questions right and there's like another part of it is it's like if we if we learn in retrospect that a particular artist or writer or whoever happened to have been a bad person do we then have to acknowledge that his work or do we have to decide that his work isn't worth looking at or reading and does that have a have a role to play i mean i don't think i'm going to go into that particular thorny issue but it is going on in the visual arts now massively revisionism but Picasso will still be rolled out for a big show but i mean Picasso did make some you know he he plowed a furrow and he didn't he did make some you know very significant artwork so i don't think he should be banished just because he had to be a bit of a rogue and a man um but it yeah it's going on and it's good and i think reframing rather than destroying iconic works is more interesting as well as more fruitful way to go great i think we have time for one quick question online yes okay um this is a question specifically for peter and the answer may well be you by my book um but someone online and was asking if you've seen cnm van dyke's portraits of black subjects um if you had any insight into their lives or if it was something you'd examined it's not actually yeah the next book oh on that my friend Siddhartha has written a really good article about the black or more and he starts with van dyke so great okay thank you very much everyone and that's terrific i think we've had a really interesting discussion and thank you very much the contributions from the floor as well you may now join us next door if you're in the room sadly not if you're online for um wine and nibbles obviously if you're online you may go to your kitchen now um thank you very much everyone um and a round of applause again


What if I told you for the first time in the music business the artist has more control over blowing up their own song than ever in the history and to be honest it may not last long. All my life I've heard from musicians that if only the music was what mattered most then they would be huge. And let's be honest it's rare we have good news in the music business today but I have it. If you always hoped you could do only a few hours of promotion and if your music was really great it'd actually get to people who are likely to love it. Well I have great news because I'm convinced we're closer to that than we've ever been and we're now in what I am calling the earworm era of music promotion where if you play a hook of your song enough even if you have zero fans if that hook is infectious it could blow up and we're seeing it every day.   You seem real cool. So let's first say this an earworm is another word for an infectious hook or a part of the song that gets in your head really easily and won't leave hence worm into the ear. Some of you may remember be talking about song susceptibility in a past video which is the more scientific term for the measure of an earworm which is the concept that when a listener hears a song every song has a measurable likelihood that if someone hears it how easily they'll be converted into wanting to listen to it again by whatever that weird force inside of us that urges us to listen to a song and it's obvious to everyone who's not a brain dead moron that thinks the whole music business is rigged that some songs are more immediately likable than others so they get more popular. For example right now we are living in the era of Miley Cyrus's song flowers which is one of the fastest growing songs in the history of music and I get it I heard the song once and I could have sung it back to you accurately after one listen and yeah I know no one's asking for this voice to sing something I got that clue a long time ago something about flowers melody was perfectly predictable without being pathetically cliche while also being infectious earworm that burrows in and you can't get it out of your head anyway so here's the thing most of us don't make music that's for everyone like Miley we make music that's for a specific set of people so we don't need to worry about writing the most infectious song of all time but susceptibility matters in that let's say the average person who likes your style of music hears a song 10 times in 10 ticktocks if that song isn't very susceptible well they'll never jump to Spotify to hear it more no matter how many times they hear it but if the hook is highly susceptible to them they will run over to hear more or watch the ticktock a second time after a listener this matters since if your song is in a certain level of susceptible no matter how much you push it it'll do nothing but the more susceptible it is the easier your promotions go and yes song susceptibility matters even in genres you don't think of as pop since susceptibility is purely about the people who enjoy a genre and whether they're apt to like a song or not for example the same goes for an experience many of you have on Spotify when you get on a playlist you're so excited to be on the playlist but then you watch your song either go up or even off the Spotify playlist or sometimes down on the playlist and the fact is Spotify is removing the songs that don't get rinsed aka the ones that are less susceptible and they're moving them up and down depending on how susceptible people are to engage with those songs and the ones that are most susceptible stay high on the playlist since they want people to keep listening to that playlist what matters is is if people who like the type of music you're making will love this song or not so what you really want to do is you want to get it to those people who will be susceptible to it and what I mean by that when I say we're in the earworm era is that through algorithms we're finally at a place where if your song is a great earworm you can target your microgenre with hashtags on tiktok and reels and get to exactly the people who are most susceptible to your music with the help of the algorithm no longer do you need some loser playlist gatekeeper label or radio DJ to get it there the fact is if your song is highly susceptible and you make some moderately compelling tiktoks and have a susceptible song in it if you repeat your susceptible songs hook enough in those videos repeatedly well your song could blow up and your dreams could start to come true but some of you are like I knew Jesse sure sounds like the tiktok era to me not chief this was the promise of the tiktok era but not the main trait of the tiktok era the songs that got popular in that era were largely popularized by UGC which is not some kpop artist you haven't heard of who has members with impossibly good skin tone for lack of plastic surgery but instead user generated content which is nerd for content that was made by users of the platform not the artists and what I mean by that is that the songs that were broken by tiktok that got huge were largely done by other users making videos around them that got popular rather than the artists making the content themselves let's take licky lee having a song get millions of streams or even my friends of the lo-fi pop band teen suicide when they got tens of millions of plays from tiktok too it wasn't that they bought tiktok influencers content to make videos of their song it was that users of the platform made videos that started a trend and then caused their song to get rinsed which admittedly is way better than the way many eras of music got music popular since at least it was people powered instead of gig capped but then you probably are wondering what about that era last summer where those pop songs like heat waves from glass animals and Bastille's Pompeii that was nine years old got popular well that was also UGC since it was a bunch of nerds in offices seeing a trend that was starting and then paying influencers to make more of that trend happen and then unpaid influencers and users made more of it and propelled the songs but the distinction i want to make with this era is that whatever's changed with the algorithm or creators awareness of how to use the app is that now when musicians keep pushing their hook over and over it's working and this is weird since tiktok was notoriously bad for self-promotion like really bad especially if you try to promote like tour dates right now well that's gonna bomb like there's no tomorrow but oddly enough if you put some low rent video of you lip syncing your video and you have some charisma and doing it a compelling way that sells the song and maybe put a story on top of it and keep finding ways to do that over and over again over a bunch of days well it seems to be working now some of you could argue that this is no different than what Lil Nas X did with Old Town Road and i would say that you're actually not wrong but i'd put a giant asterisk on it we have to remember with trends that there's often a trend that starts to kick in to where it's actually a trend meaning a lot of people are doing the thing and it's working and Lil Nas X was actually an anomaly where it didn't happen and it wasn't repeated often but now this is a trend but to make this crystal clear the previous era of music promotion known as the tiktok era was much more about other users spreading you and while that's still a big piece of the puzzle in the last era artists weren't usually the ones igniting that but now they are which i love because it gives you agency over your own career like never before to have you be the one who holds you back by whether or not your hook is actually great or if you're choosing to promote it and really give it your all since all you have to do now is make some compelling content choose the right hashtags to reach people that target your micro genre and if you're making some simple eight to sixty second videos that have a lot of motion some storytelling and a few other ingredients to them instead of whether you can get some 16 year old influencer named Madison Hawthorne or even worse the era before tiktok where Spotify playlists were nearly your sole chance was you'd have to hope to god some nameless faceless playlist or took a liking to you well i prefer this a lot more so i find this era to be promising if it continues and lasts which i don't know how long that's gonna be so you better get moving but you're probably like how does this work for you who has no tiktok followers and how does that end up building up since i'm always talking about going from zero to millions of fans what happens here so i'm sure you've heard tons of songs are breaking as musicians are posting 30 to 60 tiktoks per song over 30 to like let's call it 100 days at max and let's remember this trend is still emerging and we're riding the wave of this technique pretty early so the formula isn't quite there but that seems to be the quantity that we're seeing that works right now so let's say an artist has a hundred followers but is making some content probably hashtagging their videos any who so you make a video and it only gets 104 views but then you make another and all of a sudden your hook was a little more familiar to the user who got it served last time and after one of those users watches it all the way through the algorithm knows to connect it to another user similar to them and then you get 208 views and then eight more people then like the song and listen through and then they start to stream it and become fans eventually this keeps adding up and then some people start to make their own videos to your song helping you out since your hook is susceptible they watch the video to hear it again or they like it or bookmark it then eventually this turns the hundreds tens of thousands and well you can do the math i should say this ramp is logarithmic and for those of you who have paid as little attention to math class as i did well that means it builds slow but eventually starts to build way faster and it's much like that thing i always talk about where the beginning really sucks and that you're in the pain point at first but then things start to get better and like everything the chances you have to grow only increases the more you're consistent in sustaining this and grow with each song you do this with and the other thing to remember here is every song you release that does decently in the algorithm sets the next one up for success but i do want to explain a little more since it's important that you get this since the earworm isn't solely just doing these 30 to 60 ticktocks but how an ecosystem works together and more proof of why it's not the tiktok era since it's so much bigger than tiktok let's take monty pk whose song prism i funnily enough heard on the hyper pop playlist on spotify which is a sick playlist but it didn't really hit me when i heard it there and i know we've all had plenty of songs on our favorite playlist not hit us and i've had that happen hundreds of times since i've listened to this playlist weekly for years but the song got another chance to make me a fan when i heard it a few more times on tiktok and now while i rinse it because it converted me there and i went to spotify to listen to it and clearly if you look at his profile he's making tons of tiktoks of this hook so i got one of those tiktoks and then another and then i started listening to it on spotify and for all of you who think they're too busy to make tiktoks you could clearly see here that he's sneaking them in at work and then just doing some cool editing later but this is illustrative of what i want to drive home here when you post your tiktoks to reels and then put your song in stories and you drive fans to share your songs and then influencers make videos to your songs whether you pay them or not you're increasing the chance the earworm gets into their head and they start a fan relationship with you and to make it even more complicated a thing i experience pretty regularly is that the earworm infiltrates my community you know the concept i'm always talking about so i obviously follow a ton of my favorite producers and artists as well as people who i've met who have music tastes like me who are sharing songs they liked on instagram stories or twitter i mean most avid music fans do this but oftentimes i'll hear a song on tiktok first and then i'll hear that from them and the hook will really hit me this time especially since i saw an endorsement from somebody i trust and that takes me past the susceptibility point and makes me a fan this is why your community matters since the same people who get served the hashtags for your music on tiktok follow the playlists on spotify that are playing and when you're making all these tiktoks and you get served them it gives the chance for this song to actually break with the people who like that genre earliest on which is how you get your early fans and how this works from the bottom on up but there's so many ways that this all works together hell it can even be a music nerd in charge of putting on a playlist between acts at a club or what the hip dj plays that you enjoyed a song but now you go on tiktok and you're like oh that's the song i heard the other night or you go on youtube and you're watching shorts and then you hear a song that you heard previously on tiktok and i should say spotify's new feed that they just announced is no different that the idea is that they will play small earworms and drive up the songs that are most infectious and keep you in the app listening rather than going back to tiktok and watching some really attractive girl explain well you know what she's explaining here but it's not just that music discovery happens in so many ways it's sometimes this is the reminder someone needs to check you out as it's been stated so many times in marketing it takes seven impressions of seeing a name before someone becomes curious to look up an artist and listen but in the earworm era you're getting reminders of what you already liked but maybe something happened let's take the musician ryan hall who immediately struck me because he had a good-looking guitar and a sound that was similar to one of my favorite artists break-ins but at his own twist on the sound so i immediately wanted more this song slapped and i wanted to listen on spotify and then sure enough i discovered when i saw my previous searches on spotify come up i had already searched for him and remembered i got distracted the other day when i saw another one of his tiktoks because i was sending someone a meme or something dumb i know me and memes who to thank but once i did listen and actually got there to his songs i added a few of his songs to my main listening playlist and have been driving up his streams ever since and this perfectly illustrates why you need to make so many posts since if someone didn't quite get to listen to you you may convert them the next time we've all had it take a few times before a song really sells you when you've heard it not every song is our favorite song the first third or fifth time we've heard it but we've all had our favorite song be converted after later listens but the earworm era really makes it so that every bit of promotion you're doing increases the chance that you can get your song heard so syndicating your tiktoks to reels and youtube shorts increases the chance that it crosses the point where someone finds your song susceptible and becomes a fan since if the hook gets in from any platform even a little the first time then a little the next time depending on how susceptible it is as long as it crosses the listeners threshold of susceptibility you have the opportunity to make a fan with less effort and money than you've ever had in music history take advantage of this era by posting your hook as much as possible within reason this era makes it so that any way you make content where your song gets heard if the hook really is infectious and highly susceptible is the chance to get you new fans and blow up your fan base but i know a lot of you are wondering what to post for those 30 to 60 videos i have great news in the video on the screen now i detailed that and this promotion method so click on that now or it's in the description but you should really subscribe and have notifications on since next week's video goes even deeper on this technique thanks for watching