Listening to Art

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Listening to Art, by William Denton.

Volume one, number eight: The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes by Samara Golden.

Hello, and welcome to Listening to Art. I’m William Denton.

Samara Golden, who was born in 1973, is an American installation artist. This is a new work, recorded at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes is a very large installation—roughly the size of a bus—which the viewer sees from a walkway along the middle. It is a very complex work, with many different places and things to look at, sometimes reflected in a mirror. The viewer is unsure of what is where and it takes time to puzzle out how the piece works, after which it becomes even more interesting.

The approach was described in a 2013 Interview interview, where Samara Golden talked about the “sixth dimension.” She said:

I like the idea of the sixth dimension to try to explain what I’m thinking about. We all accept the fourth dimension as being linear time, and the fifth dimension is sometimes described as being time travel—i.e., you can visit the past or the future. But to me, the sixth dimension is the idea that there are a million possible pasts, presents, and futures all happening simultaneously in one location—i.e., that one physical location can be the top of a skyscraper, a campfire in the forest, a swimming pool in the rain, and an infinite number of other places, all at the same time and all in the same physical place.

This is an installation, made of insulation foamboard, extruded polystyrene, epoxy resin, carpet, vinyl, fabric, acrylic paint, spray paint, nail polish, plastic, altered found objects and mirror, 1021 cm wide by 426.7 cm I think high, and about four or five meters deep.

Now let’s listen to The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes by Samara Golden, recorded at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, on 15 May 2017.

That was The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes by Samara Golden. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did.

For more information and links to things I’ve mentioned, please visit listeningtoart.org.

Listening to Art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Bibliography

All web sites accessed as of date of publication.