Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology · Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology

Tomoko Hojo with Andrea Giolai

·45 min·4 clips

Tomoko Hojo found Yoko Ono's voice erased in a recording, sparking her piece 'I'm listening to you'.

Andrea Giolai begins with Tomoko Hojo's practice, then lets the conversation find its pace. He places her work across sound, music, performance, composition, score-based and improvised performance, installation, and academic research, with archives nearby as charged places for women's voices. Hojo talks about the pressure to add more: more visible creativity, more finish, more proof that a piece has been fully made. She pushes against that. A work, for her, can gain force by showing only the core concept and giving listeners, viewers, or participants enough room to meet it. Andrea picks up on the space in that answer. He wonders whether taking the artist partly out of the picture lets space enter the work itself. Hojo follows that thread into Unfinished Description. The title comes from Yoko Ono's 1966 exhibition Unfinished Paintings and Objects, and the idea of completion shifts away from the artist alone. The audience is not a polite afterthought here. The work stays unfinished until someone joins it, reads it, hears it, or responds to it. Description carries the other charge. Hojo ties the piece to her research into articles about Ono and to the way mass media described her work. So the artwork has an archival edge, asking how titles, accounts, descriptions, and received language can shape what an artist is allowed to seem to have made. Andrea keeps the questions open, which suits the material. Hojo can move between Ono, audience interpretation, restraint, and authorship without forcing a tidy verdict. By the end, the conversation asks whether contemporary art that uses performance, public space, participation, and mixed forms really needs one maker at the center.

As heard by us

A thoughtful conversation about unfinished work, authorship, and the space art leaves open.

The conversation between Tomoko Hojo and Andrea Giolai works best when it treats authorship as an open question rather than a line on a label.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want an art conversation that treats restraint, authorship, and unfinished work as serious creative choices.

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