I think I made the mistake of listening to Dia’s 2025 Steve McQueen Bass Symposium while driving, instead of watching it. Now as I scrub back through to find various salient points again, I realize how integral so many of the images and video clips are. And above almost all, it’s just wild that the symposium was held in the Dia Beacon gallery surrounded by Warhol’s Shadows.
There’s so much to flag here in all three speakers’ talks:
Solveig Nelson talks about Bass as a work of cinema—light and sound—and in the context of McQueen’s other artworks. This brings in Exodus (1992/97), one of McQueen’s instantly sublime films, but also some generative discussion of Derek Jarman’s Blue. I know I was driving, but when I say I was seated…
Then Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa goes deep on the interrelation between Bass and the works of Black artists in the galleries above, particularly Cameron Rowland—with shoutouts to Melvin Edwards and Senga Nengudi—and to the aggro video of Bruce Nauman.
And then Michael Veal zooms out, deciphering the linguistics of bass and African talking drums. I’m two hours in—I was not going to sit in the car for the 35-minute audience q&a, but I didn’t want to wait to post.
Previous, related: OG Steve McQueen at Dia Chelsea