One episode begins with sputtering phonemes. Another plays back organized cries of dissent from the 2019 Hong Kong protests. In a third, virtuosic jazz guitarist Pat Metheny plays a few bars from a sweet, nylon-string track before the music fades and becomes a soundbed over which Ross Simonini, artist, writer, and host of the podcast, begins an aural investigation into the musician’s lifelong engagement with sound. Episode after episode, Simonini chases a similar depth with a sly and often behind-the-curtain approach, splicing interviews and disparate worlds of sound together to create 

A sonic studio visit is one way to describe the show. There’s a studied consideration on each episode of the relationships that form between an artist, art, and life—or in the show’s parlance: the subject, object, and verb. The three-pronged approach means there’s no fluff or canned answers. We learn about writer Sheila Heti’s 

, why so many monks pass through the same door with the same foot at the same time of day. Artist Jacolby Satterwhite 

 dance music he made from his mother’s posthumous singing. Pat Metheny 

 an earnest, spiritual engagement with the act of attention.

There is, as with any art, the question of presentation. I once heard an employee at a well-known narrative reporting podcast say that his mandate was to keep listeners oriented at all times. Within a few seconds, he had to tag who was speaking and locate them with acute clarity in the space-time continuum. Ideally this allows a person to switch on the radio in their car or kitchenette and grok what’s happening. Since most podcasts will never play on the radio, it’s worth asking why most have adopted the same formal structure, and what other options there could be.

Simonini not only asks but answers. A self-described generalist whose work encompasses music, painting, and writing, his closest radio relative might be the late-night storyteller Joe Frank. Where Frank slipped in and out of fiction, telling imaginative stories grounded in something real without ever definitively explaining what, Simonini slips from one moment and space to another, collaging a typical continuum into its own totally coherent world. Simonini might describe the impulse best himself, when introducing a track by U.K.-based multidisciplinary artist Klein: “When I heard it, I had no sense of genre, no grounding or context to attach to it. I was disoriented, which is a rare, wonderful feeling in art.”

 is a case study for the show’s potential. The musician digitally manipulates her own interview and makes an artwork out of it, giving us something chopped and screwed, pitch-shifted, and juxtaposed by way of Simonini’s production alongside Nollywood songs that influenced her as a child, jingles for candy, and 

The strange portrait of Klein is more than lingual, more than aural: It’s interstitial and artful. As her influences are offered up, the disorientation calms. Strange new fish float to the surface. The ear picks up on sounds that are not only new, but carry a sympathetic resonance. It’s a new sonic world with which it’s hard not to empathize.

Simonini’s search for depth and collage-heavy presentation sets Subject, Object, Verb apart. The sympathetic resonance might be exactly what’s inside each episode: another person, another life, another way to see the world. Here, disparate sounds from an artist’s world mix together to give us a portrait that, one gets the sense, couldn’t exist in any other way.

ArtReview’s Podcast Collages Audio Out of Artists’ Life and Work

 about how to live in the anthropocene, arguing that humans should approach nature with more subjectivity and empathy. Instead of cold taxonomy and thoughtless industry, Le Guin reflected on what it would mean to collapse distance between person and plant, and classify flora, fauna, and fungi as “kinfolk.”

Where fungi’s concerned, the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, has the bases covered. Located in a well-landscaped park, inside a fern-covered villa with a red tile roof, you’ll find an exhibition titled “

,” (on view through December 31) that features the work of 20 mushroom-curious artists from around the world. Francesca Gavin, who’s curated the show before, has developed the exhibition into something at once playful and poetic, forward-looking and world-building.

The show is arranged around three primary concerns. The first is about facts.

Mushrooms grow from rotted material. They clean up toxicity. They were the first new life to appear at Chernobyl, documented in Takashi Homma’s giclée prints of fungi foraged from near the blast zone. Sofia Arez’s illustrative watercolors would fit right into a handsome field guide. Carsten Höller, who trained as an agricultural scientist, has created a polyester “Giant Triple Mushroom:” a three-species conglomerate tall enough to ride most roller coasters. That Höller made something human-sized is significant. In all of these works there’s the hint of the loving, ever-present hand of the documentarian.

The second focus concerns the mind. Psychedelics have a place here, as with Jeremy Shaw’s Kirlian aura photographs of Psilocybe, but Gavin’s reticence to tie this part of the show exclusively to the preexisting culture of mushrooms as

“far out, man” is canny. The show is more interested in world-building. In Seana Gavin’s collages, for example, wide-eyed mushrooms hug under a rainbow, lakeside homes are made of fungi, and mushrooms sprout minarets. Species collapse here. Mushrooms become a vocabulary for new, imagined realms.

Last comes a synthesis of mushrooms in society, with a focus on materiality. One could imagine a future wearing Kristel Peters’s mycelium shoes to walk down a pathway of Mae Ling Lokko’s mushroom bricks. Doors are opened onto possibilities and more questions are raised than answers given, but one thing is made abundantly clear: Mushrooms are here, ready for us to embrace them.

Le Guin, at the end of her talk, said that while we can’t speak the same language as nature, that might be a reason for even deeper admiration. It’s well-known that mushrooms communicate to one another. Just because we can’t understand them directly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strain our ears to listen.

At Portugal’s Serralves Museum, Mushrooms Are Works of Art

Hayden is a writer, artist, and musician living in Southern California. His work and criticism have appeared in 

Hayden Bennett

Hayden Bennett’s Articles

ArtReview’s Podcast Collages Audio Out of Artists’ Life and Work

At Portugal’s Serralves Museum, Mushrooms Are Works of Art