The Quarantine Tapes 212: Hari Kunzru

I often say that why I love working with fresh flowers is because they are not forever, and to enjoy their full potential and their full beauty, you have to be present.

On this very special live episode of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber speaks with artist EJ Hill. This episode is part of a partnership with OXY ARTS. EJ and Paul are in conversation about EJ’s latest exhibition, Wherever we will to root, on view through April 22nd at OXY ARTS. This episode was recorded live on March 3rd, 2022. EJ and Paul have an incredible, deeply reflective conversation about EJ’s art practice. They discuss his reluctance to speak about his work, how his demanding performance work of previous years has affected him, and the challenges of visibility. EJ tells Paul about teaching, learning to play the piano, and how he is trying to take care of himself in this moment in a moving and fascinating episode. Wherever we will to root: https://oxyarts.oxy.edu/exhibitions/wherever-we-will-root

“The music that [my teachers] would make would always amplify the struggle, but it would also amplify the joy. My teachers did not shy away from these kinds of tough conversations and they laid it into their music. I’ve only been taught by musicians who did that.”

“Suddenly, I couldn’t hear my work. I couldn’t hear all the tiny moves I made or the tiny pushes or reductions in volume. It suddenly became something else.”

“I’ve realized recently that unexpected tears are maybe the highest response that I can hope to elicit from an audience member, because it means that it doesn’t come in a predictable way, it comes in a way that kind of levels you from a side you perhaps haven’t touched in a while or didn’t even know you had.”

"There’s a kind of archaic quality to us, for as much as we might think that we’re these brights new things with these new toys and off we go into the future to sort things out, no. We’re riveted to a past that we do not really even begin to understand."

“How can you be nostalgic when you know too much about the world? It’s not moral, really, to be nostalgic for a time when so many people were not given certain privileges and certain comforts.”

“When I went to New York, I did feel that there might be something wrong with me, that I was in love with a machine.”

"Gonzo reporting is really interesting because it’s allowing you to tell stories that are kind of outside of the mainstream, that fall into the cracks. That are maybe undocumented or under-documented, misunderstood, stories about the freaks and the margins and liminality, which ends up actually not being liminal at all but often the first places where important ideas and discussions hit before they kind of enter the mainstream."

“Bad writing can often make us think that the words themselves are the problem, and it’s not. I think that any word, if used at the right time and in the right context, can create a moment of intense illumination.”