00:01
Tal R
I picked an artist called Frede Christoffersen. And I picked a painting called Aften Søborg, which means evening, and a place called Søborg, and it's painted in the end of the '50s.

00:13
Tal R
He simply painted the sun. And the thing is, the sun is quite rejecting. You can't really look into the sun. And if you do it — you can try — when you look away, you will very often see not one sun, but three or four suns because your eyes get burned. Plus you don't see the colors you imagine — very often in colors that are shades of weird green and blue and purple.

00:41
Tal R
And he spent a whole life doing this, staring into the sun, looking away, painting what he couldn't look at. When he didn't do this, or when his eyes were so burned, he would paint nights.

00:54
Tal R
He's really a wonderful painter. This whole idea of just spending your whole life doing one or two things like that, it's something I admire.

01:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Tal R, a Danish-Israeli artist. Welcome, Tal.

01:34
Tal R
Thank you.

01:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are an internationally celebrated artist whose paintings have been exhibited all over the world. I want to ask you how it all started. When you were a child and you started drawing, when did the artist appear?

01:51
Tal R
There is a saying in Danish that every village has a fool. When I was a kid, every class had somebody who was drawing. And in my class, I was the one doing drawings. Recently, I found a drawing from 1972, where I was five years old. And I was drawing the Danish king. He was on a train on the way to his funeral.

02:17
Tal R
As long as I could hold something in my hand, I've been drawing. When you're a child, it has no name. It's just very popular, for two reasons. Your parents like it, because you're quiet. And you can do whatever you want in the world of drawing. And I was mostly occupied with drawing war for some weird reason. I could draw whatever I was afraid of or I was fascinated by. It was a totally alone, home alone world.

02:50
Tal R
I didn't know that there was something called an artist and I had no interest in that. When I was in gymnasium, I needed an escape route because I couldn't really handle school that well. And then I had a friend who went to art school. And I said, okay, maybe I can run there. What happened the moment I stepped into the door of this art school, drawing and making art went out of me. It simply left me.

03:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You went to a Jewish school and you were all drawing swastikas. That's a little backwards in my mind. What else were you drawing at that time and why did you draw those swastikas?

03:30
Tal R
If you understand a kind of diaspora or Jewish context of the early '70s, Jewish history was not so much about Moses on the mountain or the Ten Commands. You could feel the Holocaust was still there. The devil was the swastika. We kids, we couldn't understand it. Even today, it's quite difficult to understand. So, of course, that would enter the world of drawing.

04:02
Tal R
When we were drawing tanks or planes, of course we could draw the American flag, the British flag, the Israeli flag. But to draw the swastika, it was complicated. And I was the craftsman for this. When other kids were drawing tanks or planes, they would come to me for the swastika.

04:25
Tal R
At that time I didn't think of it as I would draw things I was afraid of. That's something you think of as an adult. I would just draw whatever I needed to draw. It was my total free room. It was the place where everything I heard, or didn't hear, but sensed, I could put into this room called drawing. It was not art, but total freedom.

04:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your name is Tal Rosenzweig. When did you become Tal R, and is Tal R separate from Tal Rosenzweig in your mind?

05:02
Tal R
I had to find a way out of school because I'm mildly dyslexic. I felt pity for other people to spell Rosenzweig. I almost couldn't spell it myself. So it was simply just to make it short. But that's also something I thought about later. I don't know if I even thought about that.

05:22
Tal R
Rosenzweig — then whenever people would look at my work, they would always first see some kind of ghetto, Jewish ghetto in Eastern Europe. And I thought maybe that's not the first thing to see. You can see that later, if it's there. "Tal R," especially here in Denmark, is like a puzzle. It doesn't mean anything. It's a non-existing name. It's like something from mathematics.

05:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you like talking about your art or do you think it should speak for itself?

05:54
Tal R
I think it's quite productive for an artist to try to develop some kind of language about your own work. I think it helps you develop your work, which is what artists all the time are trying, doesn't matter if you're 18 or 88, you're still trying to do what you can't imagine. And somehow, language is part of that.

06:18
Tal R
Sometimes you fall over your language and sometimes it actually pulls you forward. It's interesting to try to talk about work, although I hope, it doesn't matter how conceptual artworks are, they should still speak for themselves. You should still sense it, feel it, without all this writing on the wall.

06:46
Tal R
I recently saw an exhibition of Roni Horn at the Louisiana. I didn't understand any of it, but I totally loved it, totally adored it. I felt that I was in a language that I couldn't understand, but I could completely appreciate it. And I think art should be like that.

07:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your painting style is described as kolbojnik, which is a Hebrew word for jack of all trades. Is it something you have said about your art or have others said that about your style?

07:22
Tal R
20 years ago, I used the explanation kolbojnik. Kolbojnik is something that exists in a kibbutz. When you have finished your plate in the dining hall, all the leftovers, you put in the kolbojnik. So it's a trash can, you could call it. At a certain point, I was trying to figure out what to call my work. I'm actually fishing in what's already there, fishing in myself.

07:54
Tal R
At that time, I trusted more the hand that picks up stuff than when my mouth would open, I say, I'm this, I'm that. I was more into my intuitive hand that just picks up stuff because it picks from this kolbojnik. It picks from this collective garbage. And I thought, yeah, maybe that's how I can explain my work. I don't use this expression, but I wouldn't say that it's wrong. I just never think about it anymore.

08:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's interesting. You were educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and you also teach art. Do you find this a task that comes easy to you?

08:36
Tal R
I never had the ambition of teaching art, but something funny happened when I was in my last year of art academy. The phone rang and this professor from Finland was on the phone and I knew him a little bit and he said to me, do you want to come and be a guest professor in Helsinki? And I started laughing so much that I had to hang up the phone because I don't know why, at that point I understood that I had to say yes.

09:08
Tal R
I hadn't been the most easy student myself. I was immature. I would always rebel against the teacher or I would just be unpolite, unfriendly. And when I went up to Finland to teach, I saw the same faces looking at me, same kind of, who are you? And I understood, okay, this is part of my education.

09:32
Tal R
I spent nine years in Düsseldorf teaching paintings. And I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the conversation with the students. I think there was so much to learn from it. At a certain point, you start recognizing your own voice. You start understanding your answers before you're going to give them. And at that point I thought, okay, maybe it's time to leave now. So I don't teach anymore.

09:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did the Finnish professor react to you laughing on the phone? I thought that you would be immediately not considered.

10:07
Tal R
But when you call an art student and ask him to be a guest professor, you can say a lot about people in Scandinavia, but they have darker humor. I think he had the humor for that. He understood, okay, it is a bit funny, a bit odd.

10:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Good. What is the process of painting for you and is the process something that you can teach others?

10:30
Tal R
I think it's quite important when you teach, it's not about teaching your way of painting. You teach certain methods, but those methods shouldn't be too connected to your own narratives. You have a method, a way of doing stuff, a way of building up work, and then of course the student will look at your work, because they are the most precise example of your method.

10:54
Tal R
But you have to somehow cut between method and form. So that you explain different ways, you try to look at what the students are doing, try to make them realize potential in their own work. I don't know if I succeeded in this, but I really tried. The teaching was not about me.

11:15
Tal R
I tried also to play the masochistic game of going into a student's studio and just sitting there until I had something to say and also feeling the embarrassment of actually having no language for that student's work. And most importantly, somebody presents something to you, but there is something in the corner that's even greater, but you can't tell them. They have to figure out themselves. It's very challenging, very inspiring to teach.

11:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where do you find inspiration and who inspires you and teaches you?

11:55
Tal R
The greatest thing that ever happened for painting is when the camera became something everybody could reach for. That's the biggest revolution for a painter, what really raised the bar for being a painter. Suddenly you could see all these in-between places. Suddenly you have to overcome either the photo or the idea of photography.

12:24
Tal R
Something has changed, I would say from my perspective, the last 10 years. Photography has become just another fiction. It's exploded into small pieces. It's actually as reliable or as little reliable as a painted portrait.

12:44
Tal R
We think of something like Cubism. It's something that happened around the First World War. Picasso, Braque, Gris and other people went through this. But every art, every artist in some point, I would even say every writer, goes through something that you could call Cubism. And that means to rethink when you look at somebody, that you actually experience them from many different sides.

13:16
Tal R
Because of photography, we look at the world very flat, which sounds strange. You can take mushrooms. My two brothers, when I turned 55, put mushrooms in my mouth and I was lying outside and suddenly I understood that you can look at a tree, but you sense it not flat, you sense it from all different directions.

13:40
Tal R
Even people, you sense the back of their head when you talk to them, you sense so much. And I think every artist has to go through this process of realizing how much we actually sense what's out there. Cubism is not just a little period in history, something interesting for art historians.

14:03
Tal R
It's actually something you have to keep going through to understand when you look at the sun, when you look at clouds, people, a horse, everything out there. And the thing is, I'm not making an advertisement for mushrooms. To really go into drawing and painting and really get deep into this is much more crazy than any mushroom.

14:27
Tal R
The thing of sitting down at a lake and sitting there drawing and getting into it and disappearing into what you can see and what you can sense and try to find room for all this in this weird cultivated place called flat painting or drawing. This is something really interesting and something that you can probably study your whole life.

14:50
Tal R
How much do we sense? You look at other people and we have to cut out most of what we sense about other people. Otherwise, it just becomes complicated. Too complicated. But as an artist, just open up the gate. Look at the mad, interesting world out there. Take a pencil in your hand.

15:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The Danish painter Per Kirkeby sent you to Greenland. How did this happen, and how did the trip influence you? And how could he just send you off like that?

15:22
Tal R
First of all, I really miss Per. I knew him a little bit. We were friends, this kind when what is between you is art. It's not about birthdays or how are you. It's simply this stupid drawing thing between you. I think he wanted to kill me. That's why he sent me to Greenland. I'm gonna kill that young, annoying man.

15:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That sounds macabre.

15:47
Tal R
He organized his journey for scientists and artists. And one week before, I really panicked. I said, I'm not going to go there. But I promised another artist friend to go, the German painter Daniel Richter, and a photographer called Per Bak Jensen. So I felt obliged. I couldn't say no.

16:07
Tal R
I didn't really plan to do anything on the boat, but being on a boat for 17 days, in the middle of nowhere, I simply went back to what I did as a kid, you know, you and a family with all the madness that exists in most families. And then you sit in a corner and you draw. I did the same on the ship. I sat down in the same place every day.

16:32
Tal R
And I start looking, you know, at the mountains, the mountain reflecting in water, clouds, clouds reflecting in water. And the first thing you do is what artists have always been trying — you have to catch it. Because soon it's not there, clouds disappear. The boat is moving, so it's like catching the bird in the middle of the air.

16:52
Tal R
Either this and somehow you are doomed if you try this way. The other way is to say, okay, now the cloud is gone and I'm not finished. So I take from the next cloud. There's always a new cloud and the mountain is also over there, but I just take from the next. Of course, you draw clouds and mountains, plus the amazing thing of the reflection in water, which is just another level of abstraction, the reflection, and the water, the curves in the water that even destroys it.

17:24
Tal R
You're asking for trouble in that setting. But you give in. You say, okay, if I'm not going to write the word mountain, I'm not going to write the word cloud or reflection. If you don't do this, you can of course just write the words on a piece of paper. If you don't choose this option, you will draw. And your drawing will be whatever you can do in this situation.

17:51
Tal R
I learned a lot from those 17 days. I also remember at the end of the journey we went into this bay, and for the first time, there came a lot of cold weather from the North Pole. And there was this fog. You couldn't see anything. And then I thought, okay, what is the education now? I can't see anything. So I just went downstairs in my room. I just drew the landscape as I imagined them. For 17 days, I learned a whole circle.

18:23
Tal R
And I think a lot of the work I've done the last 10 years is built on this kind of circle, this kind of question. You look at somebody's face. You can just write a face, glasses, a mouth, this kind of nose, this kind of haircut. Why don't you just write it? The most normal thing is to write it. Just say it out loud what you see. If you don't do this, what can you draw? And just walk from there, into it.

18:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Are you very active in your studio all the time? Are you ever off?

18:59
Tal R
I'm so lucky that I have beautiful kids and a beautiful wife. I have a family life, so I live kind of an ordinary life, you know. Most of the time I'm with them, and when I'm not with them, I'm in the studio. Before I would be in the studio day and night. I don't do this anymore. I usually go here in the morning after I've delivered the kids. And then I stay here for five, six hours.

19:27
Tal R
Also after a few hours, I go from being an artist to being a craftsman. Which is not a bad thing, and it's also an interesting thing, because it points to the difference between craftsman and artist. And if you start saying that there's no difference in hierarchy, then it's not saying that it's better than the other.

19:48
Tal R
The artist is what I described before. You play. You really play. You're totally open to all kinds of possibilities. Craftsman, it means you start using what you learned yesterday and the day before and the day before. You start pulling those old tricks, which is also fine to a certain degree. If you start pulling too many old tricks, you get a little bit locked and at least you get really bored as well.

20:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are in your studio right now. Maybe you would describe to the listeners where you are and what it looks like around you.

20:28
Tal R
I know it's morning where you're sitting and it's early evening here. I'm in the middle of Copenhagen, a street called Nansensgade. It's an old house on the back. I've heard rumors there used to be cows. They used to store the circus here in the winter. And now it's a studio.

20:45
Tal R
At the moment, I just started again playing around with figurative sculptures, which is so much fun. Sculpture is very much less culture than painting. Painting is very much a specific culture. It's like a certain game between me and the viewer, or any painter and a viewer. We agree without saying, there's a certain thing we agree about — perspective, colors, what this means, what that means.

21:14
Tal R
But sculpture, that's pre this, and therefore it's much more free also to do it. You walk around them, they fall on the ground, it's a physical thing. It's closer to some kind of dancing. At the moment there are these new sculptures standing there, and I've turned all the paintings around.

21:34
Tal R
I'm in this middle period that I just do whatever I want. In the spring, I had a very intense work period where I worked on certain exhibitions, certain topics. Now I have a period where I wander around, which I think is very important for any person, any artist that you have periods where you're not working towards a deadline.

21:59
Tal R
I think it's a killer not to have a deadline, but it's also a killer if you always have deadlines. You need to have some time where you get just lost in this way and that way and you just follow whatever you want.

22:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You had a major fiasco or failure in 1996. Maybe explain a little what this was. But my real question is, when you're a success as an artist, in your mind, what does this mean, being a successful artist?

22:32
Tal R
Okay, you said two different things. You talked about a fiasco and you talked about success. Yeah, interesting questions. I think to start with the most interesting one is the fiasco. Failure. I think the shadow of any artist is always failure. And not in a bad way. I think that's something you have to quite early change in your mind, that failure is the good shadow.

23:02
Tal R
It's somebody that educates you much more than success. So I hope that I didn't only have failures in 1996. I think I have failure quite often. I think failure is what puts you in the middle of the air where you can take steps that are quite unpredictable. Because if you don't have failure, you usually walk a path that you know already. So I think for most artists failure is a great friend, great professor for yourself.

23:38
Tal R
Success, I think the only thing that is really interesting to talk about is when works succeed for yourself and they can succeed in many different ways. Sometimes a work succeeds because your idea is standing there in front of you and you say, wow, this happened.

23:58
Tal R
Other times, even more interesting success is when you're looking at something in front of you, a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, and it looks back at you and you are totally alienated in a very specific way. You understand the work arose in front of you and it became something you don't really recognize completely, and you're not sure if it's actually failure or success. That's even greater.

24:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You were born in Tel Aviv, you moved to Copenhagen when you were one, and have lived in the Danish capital ever since, I believe, with a few detours in Helsinki and Germany. So geographically you've had distance to Israel. Does what's happening in the country now influence your work or affect your work in any way today?

24:48
Tal R
The terrible thing is, the more disaster that is happening in Israel, the more connected I am. And weirdly, also more disconnected. It's always moving forward and backward. I think at the moment I feel sadly more disconnected, which is really a bad feeling. I think you always have to make a distinction between country and people. I don't feel disconnected from the people, but I feel disconnected from the politics there. I feel very sad about it. It's difficult times.

25:29
Tal R
You said in the beginning I'm a Danish Israeli artist. If you should even use those kinds of terms, I'm a Danish artist. But I was born in Israel and I'm also deeply connected to that place. If I want it or not, I'm totally, deeply connected. I have family there that I love and I feel home in the streets and in the places there. Therefore, it's so much more painful to feel disconnected towards, you could say, the more official Israel.

26:05
Tal R
I think it's happened for many people. I think as an American, Hungarian, Brazilian, whatever. At a certain point you will say, I love the people, but I feel more disconnected because of the politics, because of many of the decision makers.

26:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You use a lot of colors in your paintings. Maybe explain a little bit about your fearless choice of colors and where this comes from.

26:36
Tal R
I'm so lucky that I remember when I didn't understand colors at all. Of course I understood blue and I understood red or yellow. I would even say at that time, we're talking 35 years ago. I could have emotions, but it was more about what T shirt I would wear or what kind of shoes I would wear, what color they should have.

27:02
Tal R
So when I escaped high school and went into this art school, I had no understanding of color. I didn't understand what that was about. And I had one experience that changed all this. At a certain point I simply could see colors. I could see that colors is very rarely about just one color. I could simply understand and see colors and how they work on each other. But I would say it took me ten years to be able to really use this knowledge.

27:33
Tal R
The wrong way to paint is when you think about colors like, Oh, I like to use this color now and I would like to put this blue and I love this red. I want to use this in a, let's say, just purely aesthetic or design way. You have to think of colors a little bit more like, what I'm trying to say, what I saw, what I experienced, what color did they carry?

28:00
Tal R
The original experience that you work from, did it have any colors? Maybe they only had a little bit of color, just a few colors. Maybe you were painting a boy with a yellow balloon in front of his face. You were obsessed with this image and you saw it was a yellow balloon. And you also remember he had this weird colored t-shirt on and those are important. But then you understand there are bad choices aesthetic-wise, but for the reason of integrity, you have to use the colors where you saw it.

28:36
Tal R
So you make the yellow balloon and you take this kind of weird strawberry colored t-shirt and it looks off. Then you maybe start picking some colors that would make it possible for those two colors. So you don't work from purely aesthetics. You work from some kind of necessity. You think, I have to pay some kind homage to what I saw. It sounds stupid, but then you try to mix things that have nothing to do with each other.

29:05
Tal R
Experience and art, they don't mix. It's much more easy to organize colors after a system or aesthetic or theory. To push in colors that you have experienced is clumsy. It's a clumsy beginning, but at least it has some kind of weird integrity. And I think that's much more important than following a system. You might end up with something impressive, but also slightly empty.

29:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You said before that you consider yourself a Danish artist. Is there anything particularly Danish about your art or is that a completely off question?

29:48
Tal R
It is a good question and also slightly off. I totally respect you and I also understand the context. I think for a lot of artists, you break down these borders. You simply just look at everything that is interesting and everything that you can use. I also never read biographies. I can't remember when certain artists were born and passed away. I somehow know if it's before or after some famous war.

30:17
Tal R
I can call myself a Danish artist. But it's for the viewers, if they need that. Otherwise, I don't know for what purpose. I still studied everything that goes on here, mostly. I'm not so fast with new art, but everything that happened, I keep looking at it. When you're younger, you look for superstars, you look for this artist who made a brilliant body of work.

30:42
Tal R
But sometimes you also fall upon artists, maybe they're not these super artists, but they had this one summer where they did this body of work, and you are totally into it. And you can learn from it, you love it, you get so much out of it.

31:00
Tal R
There are certain artists that are even really bad artists later in life. They somehow lost it. But then you look around, and between 52 and 58 they were absolutely amazing. Maybe they became lazy. Or maybe they became just craftsmen and they just repeated in blue over and over again. It worked for them. But for that I look at everything. Everything.

31:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've painted many locations around Copenhagen. Sometimes you capture just a detail from a street. What is your relationship to the Danish capital as an artist? How inspiring is it and does it continue to inspire you?

31:40
Tal R
If you're so lucky that you grew up in a city and you didn't have to run away from that city at a certain point, or you moved, like for instance what you did, you moved away. I've been here, I've walked the same streets, I've seen shops come and go and there is a whole landscape of possibilities.

32:00
Tal R
There's only a bad word, but nostalgia, it's like a knife that is sharp on two sides. You can cut your fingers totally off in nostalgia. But also nostalgia gives you a certain way of, I don't know what to say, to feel the breadth of time. Sounds very terrible, but I don't know how to explain it.

32:21
Tal R
Nostalgia is really a great thing. And walking through a city that has changed several times already. You remember yourself as a young boy running down these streets and looking into windows. All the knowledge you have of the people living there who are gone, who are now just walking around on the street as ghosts. It's endless possibilities. But again, it's a knife sharp on both sides. You can cut your fingers or you can create something out of it. I think that's common knowledge for artists.

32:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You did a project called Sex Shops. What exactly was this about and how did the idea arise? I believe you also painted a sex shop in Los Angeles. Did you see it and paint it here in LA?

33:09
Tal R
I have to explain to you what happens inside my brain. So Sex Shops was about the surface of a sex shop. Or you could also say strip clubs, gay bars, swinger clubs, everything where you go in, and in one way or another you take off your clothes. I like these kinds of surfaces. I like these kinds of storefronts.

33:33
Tal R
They remind me so much of painting. They're flat, and they promise you something inside. Even a painting always promises you something that is not there, or at least it's something that is outside the painting. There's disappointment involved. So I thought there was a parallel between Sex Shop and painting in general.

33:53
Tal R
So I started just photographing sex shops. Whenever I went to a city, I would go to this neighborhood, usually behind the train station, at least in Europe. After a while, I would just ask friends, please send me images. I remember in LA, I would be in a car and I would photograph out of a window when I saw a place. But friends, they knew about my obsession, so they would send me all these images.

34:19
Tal R
The more I got into them, the more flat they became, the more it was only the word that connected them to the sex shop. The feeling of disappointment was more and more there. I think they looked more and more slightly like Rothko paintings. Just color fields. And it was only because they had a name that came from the world of sex shops, they would be connected to them.

34:41
Tal R
I would never really be interested in going into these places, it was simply only the outside. I was only interested in what I could see in the windows, what you could see on the door, all the objects they were put outside to seduce you to go in there. And again, that's very much like painting. You put objects on a painting to get people to reach out for the painting or to step into the painting.

35:10
Tal R
Sometimes you put stuff that you think, oh, it's just to get people on the dance floor. It's just to get them to go in there, to move into the painting. Many shops are like this, but sex shops especially. And especially because you want people to take off their clothes. When they look at paintings, they should also strip down. They should get off their clothes. Then you have succeeded.

35:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is your relationship to this country?

35:36
Tal R
I always think of America as the other place. America is not one thing. It's many different things. I think when you go to places like New York or LA or even Chicago, you still have one foot in Europe in a weird way.

35:53
Tal R
One of the most amazing journeys I did in America was to go to Detroit. I went there twice and I rented a car and every morning, me and a friend called Jens, we went around to all these abandoned industrial areas. I think I love that place so much, this Detroit is, and it's in a way, in a sad way, because at that time it was a city that was broken down.

36:20
Tal R
We have talked about countries and cities and sometimes they break down. Cities, they break down, and I think it's rude to say that it's beautiful, but it is really beautiful to see this abandoned place. And you understand a city is a possibility that you can't take for granted.

36:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is the US an exciting place for an artist?

36:44
Tal R
I think it's an absolutely exciting place. The art that interests me, it's really mostly from the last 150 years. And all this art had lived in America in this second way. And although we connect pop art to something that happened in the '50s and '60s, in a way, pop art has existed much earlier in America.

37:09
Tal R
It's always been another version of something that happened in Europe. And the feeling of industry is obvious so early in American painting that I think pop art existed 30 years before it had a name. It was always the other possibility.

37:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is your relationship to galleries and art museums? And from an artist's perspective, how could they improve?

37:38
Tal R
Wow, that's a big question. I made an exhibition some years ago in Hastings, in Britain, and I called it Eventually All Museums Will Be Ships. I'm not the best to ask about these things. I think there are people who are much more clever about the direction of museums and galleries, especially the people who create museums and galleries, or who work there.

38:05
Tal R
But why eventually all museums or galleries will be ships is the idea that the artist moves constantly. The structure of any institution should be a very flexible structure, something that can move around and follow where the art goes.

38:23
Tal R
I think that there is interesting development happening at the moment. You could on one hand say a collapse. An old world is collapsing at the moment. There's not one movement. Very progressive forces are coming forward, but also very regressive at the same time, which is a weird thing.

38:46
Tal R
It would be much more easy if just one thing was happening. But so many contradicting things are happening. And any institution who wants to follow this has to be like a ship, or a very good swimmer.

39:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My final question to you is, what is left on your bucket list?

39:06
Tal R
Sounds like you take for granted that I feel I've done everything. There's no complaints. But actually, I feel more failure at the moment. You're talking to me like this successful man, but I don't feel this. I have been walking around now for weeks with the feeling of failure. We pile up all these things in our life. I did this, I did that. I have all this money in my pocket. But you can still feel failure.

39:34
Tal R
It's not a vain thing that I'm saying. And I don't feel unlucky. Maybe sometimes you are on this train and you feel failure. I'm totally excited with work and I feel fine. All the years of trying to figure out this about art, it's not the end of the world. You always think when people have achieved this and that, that the feeling of failure disappears out of their life. No, everything is fine, but I feel failure.

40:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you said before that that's actually a good thing, because that means you develop, right?

40:11
Tal R
It might be. I'm on the train of failure.

40:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh my goodness. Are we gonna end it on that note? It doesn't seem right. I started out saying you're a celebrated artist.

40:23
Tal R
That's why we're going to end like this.

40:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay, that's your decision. Thank you so much, Tal, for participating in Danish Originals. We really appreciate it.

40:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Tal R chose Frede Christoffersen's Aften, Søborg or Evening, Søborg from 1958 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.